Consumption & Demand

Tetsunari Iida on the renewable future of Japan

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It is clear that moving towards renewables is about more than simply adding more wind turbines and solar panels, but rather it is about a significant system re-think. For instance, one important measure would be to make the national power grid independent from the ten major electricity supply companies. That way anyone can set up their own electricity supply company and the current monopolistic structures would give way to a more diverse system.

Midday with Dan Rodricks Power Ahead: Oil

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Day two of Midday’s special series Power Ahead focuses on fossil fuels. During the first hour we look at coal with Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry: The Myths of Green Energy and The Real Fuels of the Future, Bill McKibben, leading environmentalist and award-winning author of The End of Nature and Richard Heinberg, peak-oil expert, author and senior fellow, Post Carbon Institute.

Human intelligence and the environment

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With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether biologist Ernst Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

The self-inflicted injury of emotional callousness

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It’s not resource depletion, peak oil, climate change, rising population, corporatocracy or environmental devastation that will be the cause of our demise. Nor is the problem a political stalemate or the stranded costs of our investments in useless, outmoded or destructive technology. These are the not the problems, really: they are the symptoms. Our callousness plays a causal role here, empowering all of these immanent threats to humanity. Change that and we start to change everything.

The peak oil crisis: peak oil elasticity

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Most of us can recall from Economics 101 the concept of elasticity of price demand which says that in most cases as the price of something goes up, the demand for the product or service goes down. Studying the elasticity of gasoline prices has been very popular recently and that in the last 20 years there have been well over 100 papers written on the elasticity of gasoline prices.

The general conclusion of these efforts is that gasoline demand in motorized societies such as the U.S. falls slowly. In the very short run, motorists have no choice but to spend whatever it costs to keep their automobiles and trucks running for their livelihoods depend on it.

The downside of dependence

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Last week’s post suggested that any serious response to the predicament of industrial society has to start with using a good deal less energy and resources. The conventional wisdom in response to that suggestion is to insist that if person A doesn’t use a given resource, person B will, so person A might as well get his snout in the trough with everyone else. Plausible though this sounds, it misses one of the core issues at stake: what happens to those who are dependent on the trough when the trough runs dry?

The context of Hubbert’s Peak in world oil forecast

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Hubbert’s Curve still remains important because it provides something close to an upper limit to the amount of oil that can be produced. The reason I say “close to” an upper limit because there is still the possibility of technological advances, making new types of production economic. Experience to date shows that the role of these advances is likely to be fairly small, though.

The ghost of ASPO-9: climate change

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The first morning of the 9th ASPO conference in Brussels had a good presentation of what we know today about climate change. But the IPCC vision is not the same as that of ASPO and the contrast flared during the panel discussion, when Kjell Aleklett, president of ASPO, accused van Ypersele and IPCC of following a “business as usual” approach. Having neglected peak oil (and peak fuels) in their scenarios, Aleklett said, the IPCC was presenting unrealistic and excessively pessimistic predictions of global warming.