I am gearing up for moderating the VERGE conference in Shanghai next week, so integration is on my mind. Always keeping an eye out for the next big thing, the crack team at the GreenBiz Group noticed the increasing convergence between trends in energy, information, buildings and vehicles.

Over the last few decades, we've gotten much better about making each of these areas more efficient per unit of output. However, in order to get the absolute reductions in resource consumption to deliver energy services, productivity and mobility/access, we will need to fully integrate these components.

Indeed, about a year ago, I wrote a piece about a new mantra for the 21st century -- "turn off, tune up, zero out" -- that included the following statement: "While the 20th century was about taking things apart and understanding how the parts work, this new century is about putting things back together and understanding how the whole thing works so that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts."  The reference was to the integration necessary to make our buildings what they could be; VERGE takes this concept to the next level. Eventually, we may actually learn how to integrate human existence more elegantly into the earth's web of life.

As GreenBiz Group Founder Joel Makower notes in his blog "Why VERGE Changes Everything," the convergence of energy, information, buildings and vehicles is happening organically because there is an intrinsic advantage from the integration. Natural systems are perfectly integrated, in balance, and not wasteful. I believe that human systems also could trend toward integration more rapidly if the advantages of this integration could be quickly recognized, disseminated and continually improved upon.

Cynics might feel that the entropic parts of human nature -- selfishness, greed, shortsightedness -- will derail, or certainly delay, the full potential of fractally integrated human technical, social and economic systems. But what could be more radically confident than tilting against the second law of thermodynamics, in which order tends toward entropy. Last week, at the IBM Smarter Buildings launch we saw the power of the convergence of buildings, energy and information, see Casey Talon's take on the event here.

It is the concept of convergence of buildings, energy and information that is behind the Obama Administration's Better Buildings Initiative. And, according to a new study by the Political Economy Research Institute commissioned by the Real Estate Roundtable, the U.S. Green Building Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the power of this convergence could create over 110,000 new jobs, while reducing consumer energy bills by $1.4 billion.

Given that it costs half as much to save a unit of energy as it does to produce it from new resources, this is probably twice the number of jobs that could be created in pretty much any other sector using a similar kind of programmatic or incentive structure. President Obama visited the Cree lighting facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where 750 new jobs had been created in the last two years, some of which were the result of Recovery Act advanced energy manufacturing tax credits.