terrapinsanity.com

It was now many months ago when for the first time we heard President Dan Mote promote study abroad as a way for students to prepare for following the jobs they don’t see domestically after graduation. In this case it was at a DoD conference when he answered a public question (from a recently graduated Terp who was unhappy with employability here) by suggesting that future graduates will be better able to emigrate to China for work because of the grand preparation they will receive in College Park.

That certainly squares with his promotion of the Chinese tech park in College Park. We’re giving away our technology, so it wouldn’t be surprising that someone intent on working at the cutting edge would have to transfer along with it.

Straight up, that exchange was unsettling to us. Maryland taxpayers funding transfer of cutting edge technology out of the country, with an expectation that our kids must go to elsewhere for the best jobs? Leave only service jobs in-state, controlled by off-shore enterprises? Nope. Don’t like it.

But the depth of this problem only really started to dawn on us today. Here is how it came out:

We were listening to some young scientists lament the limits on America’s ability to make energy production both clean and sustainable. It isn’t a technology issue, they say, but policy, and we tend to agree. You see, domestic coal plants are pretty old for the most part, and get maybe 20 percent of the energy that is theoretically available in coal. The rest is loss, and turns up as pollution too. More modern technology reasonably gets that up to maybe 38 percent – after that, getting the rest of the energy out is not cost effective. Still a near factor of two is a big difference.

With us so far? Good. The energy producing industry would love to upgrade its old facilities to get more of this effiency. They don’t care about the environment so much as they would like twice the energy production at the same steady state operating cost. That’s profit, and in this case, everyone is a winner.

OOPS. Except we can’t do that. While companies would cheerfully invest in the new technology, the feds won’t let them upgrade in place that simply. They require the entire plant operation to get recertified to meet all modern standards, whether or not the change was directly tied to energy production. And that would be expensive as hell. So we’ve been at an impasse. The best any energy company can do is push efficiency (and hence boost environmental protections) a percentage point or two around the edges.

That’s the policy issue which our students say is really really stupid, and they’re right. Unfortunately for Maryland these same students also believe the stuff we teach in classes about saving the planet, not the state or country.

They’ve figured out that lots of polluting countries elsewhere in the world are far less self-flagellating than the US of A, and they’re off to make a real difference there. Instead of investing lots of effort into pushing the US to make a 1 percent difference on energy, they are off to places whose physical plants are just as outdated, and where the same effort can help them go from 20 to almost 40 percent efficiency. They can make a difference!

And the number one place to do this? China! Our students think they can make serious inroads to stopping global pollution and improving world energy efficiency. They can do this because China is far less prone to regulate its own behavior.

We’ve taught our kids new technology, convinced them to save the world, and with Dan Mote’s help taught them where the rest of the world is too. They’re now intent on giving plenty of clean – and cheap – energy to China, and never mind that it will help that country compete even more effectively against the USA in world markets.

Terps are leading the way — and just too bad for the Maryland economy.