Global environmental pressures and competition for scarce resources challenge industry and the engineering profession far more than most issues. Nowadays, new technologies and techniques that promote sustainability in future markets are central to building communities, advancing knowledge and setting standards.
As an impartial convener of innovative technical communities, ASME’s capacity for collaboration and partnerships helps us to move forward on sustainability initiatives that have broad impact across many disciplines, many borders, and many interests. Ultimately, ASME can help address some of the barriers, such as improving the public’s understanding of engineering, by ensuring accuracy and transparency in what engineers do to improve quality of life.
ASME calls for a balanced portfolio of energy resources and the Society encourages a culture of innovation needed to produce the kind of breakthrough thinking that delivers to the world clean, accessible, and affordable energy, while meeting increased demands for electric power generation, conservation and efficiency.
Having recently returned from the 2009 Pressure Vessel and Piping Conference held in Prague, and the International Conference on Nuclear Engineering in Brussels, I see that ASME clearly continues to be recognized as a respected engineering voice throughout the world. Through venues such as these, industry leaders, government representatives and researchers are getting a better understanding of ASME’s interest in nurturing breakthrough thinking necessary to meet energy grand challenges.
In a recently prepared environmental-scanning report by the ASME Strategic Issues Committee, 1.5 billion people worldwide still live without electricity and some 4 billion, or nearly half the world’s population, live in acute poverty, earning less that $4 per day.
These are the kinds of critical issues for which the innovation of engineering can and must find solutions. As I said in my letter to you last month, ASME’s voice remains vital because the Society works hard at listening, responding, and focusing its resources in directions that benefit humanity.
One key initial step for developing a vision for ASME’s role in energy and to set its objectives was the Energy Grand Challenge Roadmap Workshop held last March. Consensus held that energy is not just an engineering problem, but a complex technical, societal, and political challenge that requires a diversity of approaches and people to address it. I know that to realize these opportunities, we need to set high standards for our industries, and we must do so in ways that foster sustainability and long-term commitment to new technology development with active participation across many disciplines and interests. We confront a need for balance.
I like this quote from Albert Einstein that emphasizes this point. He said that “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” Essentially, energy industries and their affiliates must move forward with a global perspective and also with a strong sense of transparency and integrity, to gain both public acceptance and to manage expectations. To move forward, energy industries depend on the development of a capable workforce, understanding key competences and best practices, and maintaining good supply chain management.
Many people in the world today have no access to clean water, reliable electrical power, and affordable transportation. Many people in the world today fear that their dreams for the world have changed forever, now that resources seem scarcer and the need to heal the Earth more urgent. But we are engineers who must work toward the solutions, with improved materials, optimized designs, and better integrated systems that not only operate well within their respective applications, but also within the broader context of addressing and meeting the critical issues of our world.
—Amos E. Holt, ASME President