Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Oil shales, if they live up to proponents’ expectations and can be produced commercially, could change the economic and political fortunes of the United States and transform the geopolitical map of the world.
Everything is changing on energy, and yet everything remains the same. This is the message from the latest World Energy Outlook by the International Energy Agency.
Ever since Europeans arrived on this continent they have been digging and mining, shipping the fruits of these soils back across the Atlantic.
Recognizing that all human economic activity is a subset of nature’seconomy and must not degrade its vitality is the starting point for systemic transformation of the energy system.
Perhaps the most important energy story on the planet right now is the precarious situation for fuel rods stored in a damaged building at the Fukushima nuclear power station. However, there is another story beyond the immediate danger that tells us something about how we think about risk.
The fossil fuel industry hurts the climate – and the economy. In Norway, environmentalists and labour union activists have formed a new alliance, and published a book on how to wean the country off oil.
Basically, if we burn all the fossil fuels, we’re all going down and taking the rest of the species on the planet with us, and we really will be the dumbest smart species ever to cause our own extinction.
Albert Bartlett might have been another obscure physics professor had he not put together a now famous lecture entitled "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"in 1969. The lecture begins with the line: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
If the experts at the U.S. Department of Energy are right, the startling “new” fuels of 2040 will be oil, coal, and natural gas — and we will find ourselves on a baking, painfully uncomfortable planet.
In this far ranging discussion, Paul and Asher discuss the importance of the psychology of winning within the climate movement and the evidence Paul sees — in the debate of ideas, in the renewable energy market, in the fear of investors — that the fossil fuel industry is on the cusp of becoming a dying industry.
When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems.
Naïve or Necessary? How does the economic and ethical case for divestment stack up?
