Energy Policy

What is to be done? – May 9

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– Military thinkers: for a bright American future, look to sustainability and liberalism
– Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC Study
– Taboo Economics
– ‘The Ecological Rift’: a radical response to capitalism’s war on the planet (book review)
– Poet Wendell Berry on Mankind’s Ecological Imprint

Germany’s unlikely champion of a radical green energy path

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The disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan convinced German Chancellor Angela Merkel that nuclear power would never again be a viable option for her country. Now Merkel has embarked on the world’s most ambitious plan to power an industrial economy on renewable sources of energy.

Critical comments on “The Energy Report” by WWF and Ecofys

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The Energy Report aligns with several others in recent years in confidently claiming that we could transition to full reliance on renewable energy, without any disruption of high material living standards or the pursuit of economic growth. These reports are typically quite impressive involving glossy formats with lots of coloured graphs and pictures, a large cast of heavy-weight authors, and a long list of high-powered endorsements.

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.

Brussels vs. Barbastro: two peak oil conferences

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Barbastro seemed to be willing to tackle wider questions and to ask unmentionable questions; for instance, do we really own everything in this planet? If we are justified in poisoning people in order to produce combustible liquids and gas, why don’t we jump to the ultimate consequence and turn human corpses into oil? Some talks in Brussels were frankly scary, but in Barbastro some presentations made you feel like running away screaming.

Putting on blinders – the EIA budget cuts

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At some point in the future, perhaps even that soon, politicians and Administrators are going to complain “but nobody told us!!” and rush to blame the industry yet again. But the truth is that there was a group that was keeping the records, and who could tell those with the responsibility to fix it that there was a problem. And the Administration just closed it down. We will regret that lack of information and the warning messages that it would have brought.