Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time…Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise.
Monday night I was having drinks in downtown San Francisco with some seriously smart people—top-level IBM scientists and strategists involved in Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative. Given the room’s collective interest in creating smart electrical grids, smart water systems, advanced electric car batteries and other green technologies, the talk naturally turned to how to create sustainable cities.
All those earnest health policy analysts laboring over the pros and cons of a Public Option have made an unacknowledged ethical decision about how to allocate resources –distribute medical care and, in fact, life chances. They intellectually/ethically are constrained from asking Mitroff and Silvers’ question.
The history of modern humankind has undergone two major energy transitions, marked by the invention and development of agriculture and the discovery and exploitation of oil. The two energy transitions partition human history into three phases: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial. Faber et al. (1996) refer to these phases as “Paradigmatic Images of the World,” because they describe the common structure of societies throughout the world. The most important question is “what is the next paradigmatic image of the world?”
I recently received an e-mail from the normally level-headed National Academy of Sciences alerting me to the great potential of methane hydrates in fixing the climate and meeting our future energy needs.
Prof. Al Bartlett offers useful approximations for understanding exponential growth and its alarming consequences. He gives two rules of thumb for quick calculations about exponential growth but it’s worth noting that these are approximations, quite accurate for small percentage growth values, but not correct for large rates of growth.
Virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Second Life) and the avatars that exist in them use energy. Often more than the average person in many countries of the world. Many IT pundits forget or ignore that computers are physical objects that require resources for their construction and maintenance and that they thus have an (under-explored) ecological footprint.
On 10 February 2010 at the Royal Society, six UK companies – Arup, Foster + Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury, Stagecoach Group and Virgin – joined together to launch the second report of the UK Industry Task-Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES).
-What’s Missing from the New Clean Energy Agenda?
-Soaring cost of healthcare sets a record
-America Is Not Yet Lost
-Seven States of Energy Debt
-Does peak demand = peak supply?
-Branson warns that oil crunch is coming within five years
-Tony Hayward: BP’s straight-talking chief on evolution not revolution
-Endless Oil: Peak Production vs. Oil Price
It is simply impossible to assign a clear, calculable probability to any scenario for climate change or future oil supplies. The best we can do is to characterize the incalculable. But, by knowing the range of presumed outcomes, we can start to characterize the effects and therefore gauge the probable severity of any particular outcome.
One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.
