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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Why Energy Efficiency Won’t Matter Without Energy Caps
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
Energy efficiency advocates will continue to do the equivalent of running up the down escalator unless they embrace limits on total energy use.
With the possible exception of some fossil fuel producers everyone thinks that energy efficiency is a good thing. Governments embrace it with energy efficiency standards for automobiles and consumer products. Businesses embrace it as simply a cost-saving measure. Consumers embrace it when they buy gas-sipping cars or install energy-efficient furnaces.
But in the perverse world of market economics all this good behavior is for naught.
… Many people are aware of this issue which was first articulated by William Stanley Jevons in the middle of the 19th century and which is referred to as The Jevons Paradox. Jevons noticed that James Watt’s redesigned steam engine had made it much easier to produce more coal. This led to a reduction in its price and a subsequent increase in demand as more and more businesses and individuals could afford to use coal as an energy source. Greater efficiency had resulted in a boom in coal consumption.
(25 March 2008)
Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything talk at Findhorn conference
Mattie Porte, Findhorn
Richard Heinberg is one of the world’s foremost peak oil educators. He is a Research Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, a member of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and a core faculty member of New College of California where he teaches a programme on Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community. He is the author of seven books including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.
Richard was met with ripples of laugher when he announced, “This next hour is a compacted version of my 30-hour university lecture material on human ecology, so fasten your seat belts.”
There are nearly 7 billion of us on planet earth currently, Richard noted. Now, how were we able to accomplish so much in our history?
With our ability to capture energy, that is, second-hand sunlight, we were able to run a net energy profit in the range of 10 – 1.
… Limits to growth collapse has already begun. The future is already here – it’s just that it hasn’t spread out yet. Civilisations have collapsed in the past, with resource depletion as a common cause.
… We’re still pushing the same strategies that got us into trouble in the first place. We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns so that we will experience a contraction. The question is, ‘Will it be a controlled contraction or a chaotic one?’
… The model in the twenty-first century will be re-ruralisation and more human labour in agriculture. The twenty-first century farmer will have 5 acres, lots of friends, and an intensive knowledge of ecology. Now relocation is virtually inevitable due to rising sea levels.
… With economic relocalisation, agriculture will be transformed again and we may even go back to horticulture. Anthropologists draw a clear distinction between the two. All flowed from a particular relationship with the natural world. We need to produce more responsibly in a way that is knowledge-intensive and labour-intensive – interesting to think about.
We need to emphasise to each other what’s not at peak:
- community
- satisfaction from honest work
- happiness
- wellbeing
- co-operation
- free time
- ingenuity
- artistry
- intergenerational solidarity
- beauty of the built environment.
(28 March 2008)
From a Positive Energy conference now underway in at the Findhorn community in Scotland. Reports to other talks are available at the original article
Rob Hopkins and others have been blogging about it at Transition Culture. Another familiar face is Megan Quinn from Community Solutions. -BA
Slavery’s staying power
E. Benjamin Skinner, Los Angeles Times
… Many people are surprised to learn that there are still slaves. Many imagined that slavery died along with the 360,000 Union soldiers whose blood fertilized the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Many thought that slavery was brought to an end around the world when most countries outlawed it in the 19th century.
But, in fact, there are more slaves today than at any point in history. Although a precise census is impossible, as most masters keep their slaves hidden, baseline estimates from United Nations and other international researchers range from 12 million to 27 million slaves worldwide. The U.S. State Department estimates that from 600,000 to 800,000 people — primarily women and children — are trafficked across national borders each year, and that doesn’t count the millions of slaves who are held in bondage within their own countries.
Let me be clear: By “slaves” I mean, very simply, those who are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. That is the nice, neat, horrible definition I have used since I began studying the subject in 2001.
… In its first term, the Bush administration spoke out strongly against human trafficking, laying out the most aggressive anti-slavery agenda since Reconstruction. But politics hamstrung its implementation. Pressed by a coalition of academic feminists and evangelical conservatives, American officials focused mainly on eliminating prostitution, despite overwhelming evidence that, worldwide, more than 90% of modern-day slaves are not held in commercial sexual slavery.
Before his reelection, President Bush spoke frequently about slavery, including two rousing speeches he gave before the U.N. General Assembly. But in each case, the president only detailed his concern for those in the commercial sex industry, never mentioning debt bondage (in which a person is forced into slavery in order to pay off an initial debt) or labor trafficking.
… Even though there are more slaves in the world today than ever, as a percentage of world population, there are fewer than ever. In a generation, bondage could be eradicated. But for this to happen, the U.S. must lead the way.
E. Benjamin Skinner is the author of “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.”
(23 March 2008)
One possible reaction to energy scarcity – slavery. The article gives a glimpse of what it would look like. -BA
