Deep Thought – Dec 30

December 30, 2008

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletinhomepage


What if Climate Change is Not an Energy Problem?

Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
… What if, contrary to conventional wisdom, climate change is not actually primarily an energy problem, and by thinking of it as an energy problem, we risk making huge mistakes in the coming years?

What do I mean by energy problem? A problem caused by our choice of energy sources.

Given that a large percentage of greenhouse gasses comes from the burning of fossil fuels, it seems odd to contend that climate change is not a problem created by our energy choices. Certainly, no one with any credibility denies that coal, oil and gas use is changing the climate, and I don’t mean to suggest that at all (though it is also worth not losing sight of the considerable emissions that come from farming, forestry, the chemical industries and other sources).

What I mean is that when we look to address the central challenge presented by climate change — creating widespread prosperity while lowering, and then eliminating, emissions — changing energy sources might play a much less important role than we’ve been trained to think. The kind of energy we use, in other words, while important, may not be anywhere near as important as three other considerations: whether we use the energy we create at all; how we use it; and how we live.

… How we use energy — what I’ve heard described as energy efficiency at end use — is equally important. Amory Lovins has consistently pointed out the myriad ways in which our current uses of energy are extremely inefficient. We all know about the energy savings of a compact fluorescent lightbulb over an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb. Well, on a metaphorical level, our society (especially here in the U.S.) is nothing but old-fashioned light bulbs, nothing but opportunities for improvement. As has been pointed out again and again, not only are large energy savings immediately possible, but many of these energy savings pay for themselves or already profitable, while many others would become profitable with even moderate carbon pricing and/or green tax shifting.

How we live may be the biggest nut to crack. As we’ve discussed before, where we live has more to do with the amount of energy we use — and the amount of energy we could save — than almost any other factor.

… In fact, if what we’re committed to is prosperity, rather than a particular suburban SUV-and-McMansion vision of wealth (I, at least, am convinced that vision is a doomed project over the medium-term no matter what path we take), then a big shift towards bright green living might be possible even with only modest shifts in the sources of energy — if the shifts in the uses of energy were large enough. A radically more-efficient society of compact communities with a variety of transportation choices, green buildings and smart infrastructure, run off an only slightly-improved mix of energy sources might be more sustainable than a society that continues on our current path of increasing sprawl and waste but uses twice the proportion of clean energy that it does today.
(29 December 2008)


Thinking About Wendell Berry’s “In Distrust of Movements”

Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Radar
I’m just reading a Wendell Berry essay from 2000, entitled In Distrust of Movements, reprinted on a blog with the inspired name The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles. I was going to just tweet the link, but realized that more people need to read this, and I ought to quote more extensively. (I hope that fans of Michael Pollan’s books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food will rediscover his great predecessor in thinking about food and its proper role in human society.)

The essence of Berry’s argument is that we as a culture need to get away from single-issue movements to fix this or that, and instead embrace holistic thinking about how society as a whole should be organized to achieve our goals. As a farmer, essayist and poet, Berry’s focus, is, of course, not on political organization, or industry, but on the more fundamental issue of where our food comes from and how best to produce it. In this time when the broader public is becoming aware, through a variety of economic shocks, that ” the way we live now” is unsustainable, Berry’s thinking, once perhaps regarded as a relic of the idealistic back-to-the-land movement of the seventies, is finding new relevance in an era in which comparisons between the collapse of the Soviet economy in the 80’s and today’s collapse in the American economy become a topic of discussion on high tech mailing lists. (I take particular note of the fact that Dmitri Orlov’s piece, which provoked that discussion, makes the case that Russia’s economy was in many respects more resilient than ours, with one callout being that most Russians still had some ability to grow their own food.) Even the BBC is noting that Food needs ‘fundamental rethink’.

What I like best about Berry is his insistence on a holistic approach.
(28 December 2008)


Greed is not good, says God

Andrew Brown, Guardian
Bishops denouncing the government are nothing new. But people are now listening to sermons on the evil of debt

… when ringing around the bishops of the Church of England now produces five who attack the government’s policies, this isn’t evidence of a concerted or official attack. It is something that ought to worry the government much more: a widespread, incohate fear of the future and a huge loss of faith in the economic orthodoxies of the last 30 years. In this the bishops are only reflecting the anxieties of everyone else. If Christmas sermons were full of economic woe, it is because the news headlines are.

… now the bishops are worried about debt at home.

This started when the Archbishop of Canterbury questioned in the autumn whether the cure for the credit crunch was really for everyone to borrow more. It has continued with a renewed interest in the medieval prohibition on usury. Again, the idea that charging excessive interest is immoral has been reinvigorated by the apparent discovery that it’s worse than a crime; it’s a folly that doesn’t even make people rich: the Financial Times reports that the best performing mutual fund on Wall Street last year was an Islamic one (managed by an Anglican), which only lost 26% of its value when the average fund lost 44% by eschewing financial investments (and pork).

Catholic social teaching has long been ambivalent about capitalism.
(29 December 2008)


Tags: Activism, Culture & Behavior, Politics