Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
The 11th Hour – DiCaprio film takes on environmental crises
11th Hour Action (film website)
Leonardo DiCaprio’s “The 11th Hour” is a feature length documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and their impact on the planet. “The 11th Hour” documents the cumulative impact of these actions upon the planet’s life systems and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity. With the help of over fifty of the world’s most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, “The 11thHour” documents the grave problems facing the planet’s life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans’ habitats are all addressed, and their causes rooted in human activity. The combination of these crises call into question the very future not of the planet, but of humanity.
However, the most powerful element of “The 11th Hour” is not a portrait of a planet in crisis, but the offering of hope and solutions. Scientists and environmental advocates such as David Orr and Gloria Flora (note: these names can be interchanged for any of the experts) paint a portrait for a radically new and exciting future in which humanity seeks not to dominate the earth’s life systems, but to mimic them and coexist. “The 11th Hour” calls for a future now within our grasp that is both sustainable and healthier.
(August 2007)
Film opens August 17 in Los Angeles and New York. Richard Heinberg is one of the speakers, so I assume peak oil is mentioned. -BA
Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy
Arjun Makhijani, Japan Focus
…Makhijani explains his program for transforming US energy use, sets the issues in international context, and discusses what it will take to halt global warming
… Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research www.ieer.org/, an organization dedicated to increasing public involvement in and control over environmental problems through the democratization of science. A specialist on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, waste and testing, and energy conservation, he holds a Ph.D. in engineering (specialization: nuclear fusion) from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the principal author of the first study ever done (completed in 1971) on energy efficiency potential in the U.S. economy, the principal editor of Nuclear Wastelands, and the principal author of Mending the Ozone Hole. His forthcoming book, Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, is a joint project of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
Mark Selden conducted this Japan Focus interview with Arjun Makhijani on August 10, 2007. Mark Selden is a research associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University and a Japan Focus coordinator.
Read the executive summary of Arjun Makhijani’s forthcoming book here. (23-page PDF). An excerpt from the summary:
The 12 most critical policies that need to be enacted as urgently as possible for achieving a zero-CO2 economy without nuclear power are as follows.
1) Enact a physical limit of CO2 emissions for all large users of fossil fuels (a “hard cap”) that steadily declines to zero prior to 2060, with the time schedule being assessed periodically for tightening according to climate, technological, and economic developments. The cap should be set at the level of some year prior to 2007, so that early implementers of CO2 reductions benefit from the setting of the cap. Emission allowances would be sold by the U.S. government for use in the United States only. There would be no free allowances, no offsets and no international sale or purchase of CO2 allowances. The estimated revenues – approximately $30 to $50 billion per year – would be used for demonstration plants, research and development, and worker and community transition.
2) Eliminate all subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuels and nuclear power (including guarantees for nuclear waste disposal from new power plants, loan guarantees, and subsidized insurance).
3) Eliminate subsidies for biofuels from food crops.
4) Build demonstration plants for key supply technologies, including central station solar thermal with heat storage, large- and intermediate-scale solar photovoltaics, and CO2 capture in microalgae for liquid fuel production
5) Leverage federal, state and local purchasing power to create markets for critical advanced technologies, including plug-in hybrids.
6) Ban new coal-fired power plants that do not have carbon storage.
7) Enact at the federal level high efficiency standards for appliances.
8) Enact stringent building efficiency standards at the state and local levels, with federal incentives to adopt them.
9) Enact stringent efficiency standards for vehicles and make plug-in hybrids the standard U.S. government vehicle by 2015. 10) Put in place federal contracting procedures to reward early adopters of CO2 reductions.
11) Adopt vigorous research, development, and pilot plant construction programs for technologies that could accelerate the elimination of CO2, such as direct solar hydrogen production (photosynthetic, photoelectrochemical, and other approaches), hot rock geothermal power, and integrated gasification combined cycle plants using biomass with a capacity to sequester the CO2.
12) Establish a standing committee on Energy and Climate under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.
(10 August 2007)
Curing our “Global Fever”: An Interview with William H. Calvin
David Houle, Scientific Blogging
In this fourth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview William H. Calvin, PhD.
Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first three interviews, you can see the entire list in my profile.
William H.Calvin is a theoretical neurobiologist, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. I had the good fortune to meet Bill at the Future of Energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future several months ago. I have also had the pleasure to read excerpts of his upcoming book “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”, a book that could well become a classic as it frames the conversation and offers up a strategy and vision to effectively deal with Climate Change
(14 August 2007)
Recommended by JMG at Gristmill.
