What do Japanese school children, avis rental cars, luggage traveling through an airport, and a palate of Wal-Mart goods have in common? These seemingly disparate people, places, and things all have electronic radio-frequency identification tags to indicate who or what they are. Better known as RFID, this technology is an evolutionary update to the venerable bar code. It broadcasts information about an item continuously instead of waiting for it to be scanned manually.

At their simplest, these tags are basic one-way information devices. By combining a short-range radio with the bare minimum of electronics, RFID tags can do everything from identifying an item in a store for pricing and inventory purposes to spotting luggage on its way through an airport to recording the journey of a shipping container halfway around the world. No bigger than a fingernail, the most common RFID tags hold only rudimentary information, often just a model designation or a serial number.

When a nearby scanner’s transmission hits the chip, the tags electronics are activated and the chip broadcasts its data.” These tags are like the electronic toll readers that now are used on many of our expressways” explains Robert Turk, national director for supply chain at Siemens and the company’s point man on RFID technology. “The scanning is automatic, and it can handle several tags at once.

Energy is too precious a resource to take lightly. It is essential to our way of life. Essential to economic progress. Essential to living standards for over five billion people in the developing world. And, because we take energy seriously too. In how we look it. How we retrieve it. How we transport it. How we process it. And how we use it. As global energy demand grows (and it will, by much as 50% in the next 25 years), we will inevitably create. It’s a huge challenge. On one hand, the world demands more and more energy. On the other, it demands less and less environmental impact. Meeting this challenge-on a global scale-will take all the technology and human ingenuity we can muster.

That’s why, for decades, we have consistently led the industry in research and technology. And why we’re now making the largest ever investment in independent climate and energy research that is specifically designed to look for new breakthrough technologies. The world faces enormous energy challenges. There are no easy answers. It will take straightforward, honest dialogue about the hard truths that confront us all. Wishful thinking must not cloud real thinking. New energy initiatives, however appealing they may sound, must also be practical, viable, and economical-worldwide. However tough the issues, our answers must reflect the real world. Energy is simply too important to treat in any other way.