Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With the era of cheap fossil fuels coming to a close, what’s left as low-cost fuel is wood and that had to be the target of the next wave of exploitation. Naively, I was thinking that the rush to wood would have taken the form of desperate people moving to the woods with hand-held axes, but no, in Italy it is coming in a much more destructive way.
“Can the airlines be run on biofuels?” As it often happens, this simple question doesn’t have a simple answer. First of all, it is a question that makes sense only in terms of a “sustainable” plane, that is one that doesn’t run on fossil fuels. That’s a major technological problem.
Energy transitions take time, a lot of time–far too much time to be shrunk down into a television special, a few talking points, or the next big energy idea. If, as Vaclav Smil contends, we are in for a long, slow slog on the path to a renewable energy economy, then the course with the least risk and probably the greatest return would be to reduce our energy use.
What is the best way to utilize sunlight: grow food or to produce fuel?
Haven’t we been hearing from the oil industry and from government and international agencies that worldwide oil production has been increasing in the last several years? The answer, of course, is yes. But, the deeper question is whether this assertion is actually correct.
Net pay is what you have to pay your bills today. And, net energy is what society has in order to conduct its business (and its fun) on any given day. Is net energy still increasing?
Mark Twain once said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." And, there are many, many things that the public and policymakers know for sure about energy that just ain’t so.
Palm oil is now one of the leading causes of rainforest destruction worldwide, and the single biggest threat driving orangutans toward extinction; the best estimates place their population at just 60,600, and it’s shrinking quickly
The Associated Press released a scathing new report on environmental degradation driven by American biofuel policy on Tuesday — which promptly got it into an online brawl with Fuels America, a group representing much of the U.S. biofuel industry.
Globalization has largely been seen in the context of the outsourcing of information technologies. But the larger outsourcing that globalization is leading to is the outsourcing of pollution and the energy-intensive production of goods.
A new, global rush to embrace biofuels—for transport,heat, and electricity—is a growing threat to ecosystems, wildlife, human health, and the climate. The trend poses the danger of increased commodification of forests, greater competition between food and energy markets, and even more pressure on the world’s rural poor that depend upon local biomass for their energy needs.
What does renewable energy mean? This question isn’t as simple as it sounds.
