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Here’s Good News About Your Net Worth
Jay Walljasper, San Francisco Chronicle
Let me offer some good news about the state of your wealth. Sure, the 401(k) tanked, the house lost a big chunk of value, and things are looking shaky at work. Indeed, the Federal Reserve recently reported that Americans all together lost $5.1 trillion during the last three months of 2008 alone.
But what you possess individually accounts for only part of your true net worth. Each of us also owns a stake in some extremely valuable assets: clean air, fresh water, national forests, the Internet, public universities, blood banks, rich cultural traditions and more.
All these things are part of what is now being called “the commons,” and they are more important than ever.
The things we share enhance our lives in countless ways – the roads we travel, parks where we gather, publicly funded medical and scientific breakthroughs we take advantage of, the accumulated human knowledge we use for free many times each day. In fact, without these commonly held resources, our modern society and market economy would never have gotten off the ground.
When the economy appeared to be booming, many of us didn’t care about the commons; it hardly seemed to matter that the local recreation center was in disrepair and Social Security on the ropes. Private health clubs and IRAs would meet those needs. But in today’s downturn, Americans are increasingly grateful for services and opportunities provided for us outside the for-profit economy.
(26 May 2009)
Also at Common Dreams.
Energy: The Achilles Heel of the Resource Pyramid
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
When economists say that we have far larger mineral resources today than ever before, they are usually referring to a model known as the resource pyramid. What they often fail to mention is that cheap, abundant energy is the key input into this model and that without it much of our presumed abundance would vanish.
In the classic 1954 book “The Challenge of Man’s Future” famed geochemist Harrison Brown posited a future in which there would no longer be mines, only processing facilities. With all the concentrated deposits of metallic and nonmetallic ores and helium (which is found in natural gas reservoirs) depleted, the only minable resources left for society’s needs would be rock, air and seawater. But, together they contain everything we need other than land-based food and fiber for modern civilization.
(22 May 2009)
The Renewables Hump 2: Digging Out of a Hole
Jeff Vail, blog
In the first post in this series, I introduced the general notion that renewable energy requires an up-front investment of energy, and that this may dramatically impact our ability to transition to a renewable-energy economy because the transition effort will initially exacerbate the very energy scarcity that is its impetus. Beyond this general notion that the transition to renewables first requires exacerbating our current energy scarcity, the time that it takes a renewable source of energy to return the up-front energy invested in it becomes especially critical. Here’s a quick example (for the simplicity of these examples, I’m assuming that 100% of energy requirement is up-front with no maintenance requirement):
Let’s say you want to transition 1 million Barrels of Oil Equivalent per year (mBOE/y) of current global energy to a renewable source this year. If this renewable source (a concentrating solar power plant, for example), has an EROEI of 20:1, and will generate for the full-power equivalent of 40 years, then it will take roughly 2 years for the solar plant to return the energy invested in it. Over the course of 40 years it will generate 40 mBOE, and it will take the equivalent of 2 mBOE of energy invested up-front to enter operation. While this return-on-investment seems excellent, this up front investment of 2 mBOE is still very significant—it is an increase in global energy consumption roughly equal to the decrease caused by the current economic crisis—but the reward of a mBOE of renewable generation capacity every year for the next 40 years seem well worth the price. With this kind of EROEI, a transition to a renewable energy economy seems feasible, and it may be possible to affect such a transition quite quickly.
What happens if the EROEI of that renewable is actually only 4:1?
(18 May 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav of Peak Energy.
