Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Energy, Climate Change, and Complexity in Healthcare
Dan Bednarz, PhD, Health after Oil
Abstract:
Modern healthcare systems are intensive users of fossil fuel produced energy and therefore significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. This suggests a moral imperative to lower energy consumption for reasons of ecological sustainability.
A second, and less articulated, practical reason to lowering energy consumption is that it is no longer inexpensive; rising costs, which derive from a geological peaking of worldwide oil extraction rates, are creating a strong economic incentive to reduce energy consumption.
The implications of these twin driving forces -which have a common root in our reliance upon fossil fuels- for healthcare are complex and if misconstrued can lead to public policies placing them in opposition.
In other words, assigning differing weights to these driving forces leads to divergent decision trees which, on the one hand, could exacerbate climate change, as in a scenario where coal is turned to as a substitute for declining supplies of oil and natural gas.
On the other hand, an alternative decision tree weighting each driving force equally has healthcare setting a leadership example for energy conservation and ecological sustainability. This latter decision path, however, will –in all likelihood- introduce revisions of extant health theories and models of practice. How sweeping these changes will be is an unknown and therefore should be conceptualized with a full spectrum of scenarios that take account of the interplay between varying degrees of climate change mitigation done under varying conditions of energy constraint.
(9 December 2008)
Formal paper with references. Dr. Bednarz is an Energy Bulletin contributor. -BA
A Resilient Suburbia 4: Accounting for the Value of Decentralization
Jeff Vail, blog
This series has been considering the role of suburbia in a post-peak future. One necessary, though generally ignored, element of any analysis of suburbia is a consideration of the value of decentralization per se. The decentralized mode of suburbia presents problems (greater energy requirements for transportation), and advantages (greater potential for individual self-sufficiency), but what about the economics and politics of decentralization itself?
This post will argue that, when measured from the perspective of the median participant, decentralization offers a superior structure for both economic and political organization, a structure that may prove far more sustainable in a post-peak world than our current, centralized, hierarchal patterns of organization. Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation—a Resilient Suburbia.
(8 December 2008)
Parts 1, 2, and 3 can be found on the Oil Drum and Jeff’s blog. KS
The Final Garnaut Report; A Radical Critique of its Energy Assumptions
Ted Trainer, website
Summary: The report’s two crucial conclusions are that the greenhouse problem can be solved by adoption of alternative technologies, and that this can be done at negligible cost to GDP. The glaring fault in the Report is its failure to discuss the energy assumptions underlying these conclusions, which I argue are invalid. The core assumption is that alternative energy technologies can be scaled up by the huge magnitudes required to replace fossil fuels.
There has been almost no study of this issue, i.e., the limits to renewable energy sources. The paper looks at the quantities of wind, solar, geosequestration etc. that would have to be provided if Garnaut’s conclusions were to be achievable, and indicates why these quantities are not likely to be achieved.
If these arguments are valid then it will not be possible to provide the amount of energy consumer capitalist society demands while achieving acceptable greenhouse targets. lt is argued that the greenhouse and energy problems must be seen as elements within the general limits to growth predicament, and that these and other alarming global problems cannot be solved without transition to some kind of Simpler Way.
(13 November 2008)
Submitted by Michael Lardelli who explains: “Garnaut is the economist making recommendations to the Australian government on climate change policy.”
Ted Trainer is a long-time writer on sustainabilty. He is Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of New South Wales(Australia). Online writings. BA
