"How about a fun post relating the price of gas to online shopping?" Its an interesting question, but I cannot promise the answer to be much fun.
Rising gas prices have been a source of some concern for people here in the US. When I first moved to the US in 1995 the price of gas was under $1 a gallon. Today it is close to $4. While that is still much less than I was paying 20 odd years ago in the UK it is a significant rise and even if the recent supply restrictions or weakness of the dollar were to reverse there is little reason to believe that the long term trend will follow.
As the Western lifestyle spreads, so do Western patterns of consumption. That means greater demand for energy, in particular oil and greater demand for resource intensive food, in particular meat and high water demand crops such as wheat. As Gandhi once observed, it took the resources of half the world to support the British Empire at its peak, how many worlds would India require to achieve the same standard of living?
To date the Web has quite definitely been a contributing factor in the energy crisis. In addition to the significant quantities of energy require to run the Internet infrastructure itself, Web content is evangelizing the adoption of the high consumption Western lifestyle at breakneck pace. And just as the short term impact of the electronic office was to cause an increase in demand for paper as more documents were produced and printed out, remote collaboration technologies such as the Web, email and voice conferencing appear to be driving increased demand for long distance travel rather than reducing it.
But before we get too desperate, there is also reason for optimism. Although the electronic office did increase demand for paper short term, my friend who analyzes such things tells me that the demand for paper has been sharply reducing in recent years. In particular demand for newsprint is plummeting. This is certainly consistent with my own experience, I used to buy at least one newspaper paper a day, today I only ever buy a paper at an airport to read on a plane.
I expect the longer term effect of the Web will be similar. In the short term online shopping probably increases net energy consumption per product delivered. But as scale increases and the efficiency of the entire supply chain is improved over time the energy input per unit delivered should begin to drop. Five years ago very few people were talking about energy cost or availability in building large data centers. Today it ranks ahead of staffing. It is easier (and cheaper) to take the employees to the cost efficient energy supply than vice-versa.
It seems to be a law of nature that things have to get worse to get better. Eventually we will have high quality electronic books that are better than paper and high quality teleconferencing that is better than meeting in person. We are not quite there today, but there is no reason we cannotget there in the very near future.
