Cornucopian Renewable-Energy Claims Leave Poor Nations in the Dark
By Stan Cox, Resilence.org
Billions of people around the world need more energy than they can afford, while billions of others can buy far more energy than is required to meet their needs. Global 100-percent renewable scenarios are based on these distortions...
Is Greenhouse Warming a Good Pretext for Selling Driverless Cars?
By Stan Cox, Resilience.org
The automakers and IT giants are predicting that autonomous vehicles (AVs or “driverless cars”) will play a big role in reducing America’s currently extravagant emissions of greenhouse gases. In this claim (as in the assertion that flying cars will be more energy efficient than helicopters), climate mitigation is serving not as a goal but as a selling point for a lucrative new technology that society doesn’t need.
100 Percent Wishful Thinking: The Green-Energy Cornucopia
By Stan Cox, Resilience.org
The 100-percent dream has become dogma among liberals and mainstream climate activists. Serious energy scholars who publish analyses that expose the idea’s serious weaknesses risk being condemned as stooges of the petroleum industry or even as climate deniers.
Waking up from the air-conditioned dream
By Stan Cox, Common Dreams
To suggest that we start reducing our dependence on air-conditioning is to invite dire forecasts of malaise, poor health, social turmoil, and economic collapse. But that need not be the case. Several lines of research indicate that reducing our dependence on chilled air could improve our quality of life.
Get ready for the post-SUV world!
By Stan Cox, Energy Bulletin
SUVs and big pickups are waddling off into the sunset, leaving Americans with no more excuses for the nation's profligate oil use.
It will take a lot more than gardening to fix our food system
By Stan Cox, Common Dreams
Only rice, wheat, corn, beans, and other grain crops are productive and durable enough to provide the dietary foundation of calories and protein. Grains made up about the same portion of the ancient Greek diet as they do of ours. We’ve been stuck with grains for 10,000 years, and our dependence won’t be broken any time soon.
Cooling the mall, heating the planet
By Stan Cox, Common Dreams
For 99 percent of recorded history, humanity managed to stay cool by finding some shade, getting some air moving, and slowing down when it gets too hot. Starting this summer, let's show the world that a mere few decades of air conditioning have not turned Americans into wimps. Turn the thermostat to OFF, throw the windows open, and head for the park instead of the mall.
Goodbye To All That Oil
By Stan Cox, Alternet
The peak oil idea – which says that world oil production will go into irreversible decline sometime in the next decade or two – is quickly morphing into conventional wisdom.