View source for Earth Treasury Plan

(Comments and volunteers welcome. Originally posted to BytesForAll mailing list.)

I propose that we create a network of networks encompassing a billion
children and their teachers, families and friends--nearly all of the
poor people in the world, and most of the rich. They can network for
educational, social, business, and other purposes. I leave those
choices to them.

In order to accomplish this, we clearly have to get computers and
Internet connections to every poor village in the world, along with
the cities and towns. We are told that the XO-2 computer from One
Laptop Per Child will cost $75 in 2010. That may or may not be, but
let us use the numbers we are given for our first rough calculations.
Let us also suppose that the political will and the money can be found
for all of this, so that when we discuss installing Internet
connections, we can assume the existence of a program to install a
local electricity supply, and so forth. We can come back to these
assumptions after we run the first set of numbers.

Renewable energy comes in many forms: solar photovoltaic, solar
thermal, wind, hydro, biofuels, animal power, and child power. The
prototype OLPC XO had a hand crank, which was removed on further
consideration. (And after former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan broke
one off in a demo.) Now it can be run on anything close to 12 V, which
is to say anything that can charge an automobile battery. XOs run at
an average of about 5 W. Say that children need 10 hr/day, a generous
allowance. That comes to 50 w/hr/child/day, or 50 × 1E9 × 365
Whr/year. 18 TWhr per year. At 10 cents/kWhr, which is low today but
evidently doable in the future, that would be $1.8 billion annually.
We have to do a bit of engineering to determine the most
cost-effective systems for every inhabited terrain and climate, but
the installation and running costs would be well within current aid
flows, if we can train people locally to install and maintain the
equipment. This is an education project, so I am going to assume that
also.

The following table from Wikipedia gives a sense of where we are on
renewable electrical generation technologies.

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! 
! align="center"| 2001 
! align="center"| Potential future
|-
! 
! align="center"| energy cost
! align="center"| energy cost
|-
| Wind
|align="right"| 4–8 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 3–10 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Solar photovoltaic&nbsp;&nbsp;
|align="right"| 25–160 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 5–25 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Solar thermal
|align="right"| 12–34 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 4–20 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Large hydropower
|align="right"| 2–10 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 2–10 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Small hydropower
|align="right"| 2–12 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 2–10 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Geothermal
|align="right"| 2–10 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 1–8 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Biomass
|align="right"| 3–12 ¢/kWh
|align="right"| 4–10 ¢/kWh&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
|-
| Coal (comparison)
|align="right"| 4 ¢/kWh
| 
|}

WiMax broadband wireless costs about $10 per person to install, and is
then good for decades with modest operational and maintenance costs.
The computers, switches, routers, etc. to run the network will cost
rather more, but can be upgraded as demand increases We need about $40
billion worth, overall. Some of this will come from commercial
developers, such as Sprint in the US, which has been engaged in trials
on small but growing scales. Some will come from governments such as
Pakistan, which has a contract in place. Some will require aid.

Electricity, Internet--Yes. Now we are ready for computers with Free
Software and Free Digital Textbooks. Let us say that children get an
XO in first and fourth grades, and put secondary education aside for
the moment. That's $25 annually per child, less than printed textbooks
in most countries. So the $12 billion or so for computers each year
for elementary schools will be offset with an unknown but quite
significant amount of savings at some point. It would be in the
interests of governments, NGOs, and aid agencies to fund textbook
development so that point comes sooner rather than later.

Now we are ready for education, except for teacher training. There are
courses to train teachers to use one-to-one computing, which I would
encourage all schools of education to adopt. Several countries have
created in-service training programs for teachers, which need to be
more widely used, but can fit into the existing training systems. I
will leave the debate on Constructionism to the side for now, and
simply note that we are talking about education for _every_ child with
resources that were until quite recently unthinkable. This will have
large economic consequences. To the extent that Constructionism works,
we can expect larger consequences. But that is not all.

Now stir international microfinance into the brew. Not just loans for
purely local businesses, or artists and makers of other products
selling on the Web. Let us talk about mountains full of coffee-growing
communities that can partner with someone in the business to get
roasting equipment, packaging equipment, processing equipment, and
with someone in major language and culture areas to manage branding
and distribution. Not just $1.50 a pound (Fair Trade price) for green
coffee beans, but a share in $10-$15 a pound for premium coffee
products. Taking fruit, kola nuts, and other agricultural products
that rot on the ground for lack of modest capital and skills, and
making significant businesses out of them at home and in other
countries nearby. (For example, Nigeria grows lots of kola nuts, but
has no local brand of cola drink. It imports all of its cola syrup.)
At the other end of the global economic spectrum, let us talk about
teaching children IT skills, and creating outsourcing in ever more
countries. I cannot run through all of the possibilities, but I can
assure you that they exist everywhere, except for the interference of
governments and would-be governments: corruption, civil war, absurd
economic policies, international trade barriers, and other factors. I
have hopes that a network of citizens can do something about many of
these issues, but it will take time.

[Added later: Use microfinance to put in the electricity and Internet as local businesses, and repay the costs by charging other local businesses a reasonable rate for using them.]

What we are looking for here is some tens of trillions of dollars
annually in sustainable new economic activity over a generation, on
the part of four billion or so poor people. Eventually, a hundred
trillion dollars or more. So we have to make renewable power cheaper
than coal, and go into cradle to cradle design in manufacturing, and
into information businesses rather than cutting down major forests for
agriculture or chopsticks. We have to let fish stocks and other
wildlife regenerate. And so on. We have to come to a more reasonable
way of allocating water, instead of the hodgepodge of historical rules
and customs.

There are a number of questions to be raised about this plan. Note
that whether the world can afford it is no longer one of them. There 
are many millions of points where we cannot assume
that we know the answers, but must test our knowledge and at the same
time ask the locals whether they know of a better way.

Now we can come back to the network of a billion children plus
everybody else. This is Web 2.0 to the max. Maybe Web 3. If we (that
is all of Us and all of Them, for any given values of Us and Them) get
this right, it will improve education, politics, economics, and the
arts of sustainability in a manner that we cannot well foresee.

But it won't make anybody happy. Comfortable, certainly, for the great
majority. Happiness, you must understand, necessarily means happiness
with what you have. Not resignation to having only that, but
willingness to work with it gladly to improve things further for the
benefit of everybody else. Meaning that we get to tackle the '''hard'''
problems next.