Resource Depletion

Education in a post carbon world

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Merit pay for teachers is a distraction; it ignores the larger context that should be the focus of debate in education: what curriculum (knowledge and skills) will best prepare students and their families for life in a post-carbon world? If we don’t shift our focus to this larger question and begin implementing such changes soon, all other concerns may be moot.

Peak eggs: Hubbert and the Easter Bunny

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Here is a little Easter post where I try to model the Easter Egg hunt as if it were the production of a mineral resource. A simple model based on system dynamics turns out to be equivalent to the Hubbert model of oil production. We can have “peak eggs” and the curve may also take the asymmetric shape of the “Seneca Peak.” So, even this simple model confirms what the Roman Philosopher told us long ago: that ruin is much faster than fortune.

How much will it cost to save our economy’s foundation?

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Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort, one far more demanding than the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan after World War II. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed before environmental deterioration translates into economic decline, just as it did for the Sumerians, the Mayans, and many other early civilizations whose archeological sites we study today.

If only we had free energy

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I thought I’d do a thought experiment. Suppose tomorrow morning a hypothetical university—let’s call it T.I.M.—sends out their weekly press release claiming a “revolutionary breakthrough” that will change the way we think about energy. Unlike every other time in the past decade they’ve made this claim, though, suppose this time it’s actually true: they’ve discovered a way of producing extremely cheap energy—as near to “free energy” as can be imagined.

Review: Petroplague by Amy Rogers

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We have a brand-new entrant to the oil-eating-bug-runs-amok tradition: the self-published novel Petroplague. It’s a Crichton-esque thriller written by microbiology professor-turned author Amy Rogers, who says she aims to “blur the line between fact and fiction so well that you need a Ph.D. to figure out where one ends and the other begins.” The plot involves a batch of experimental, oil-hungry bacteria inadvertently loosed upon Los Angeles, which proceed to wreak a near biblical swath of destruction. Part ecology lesson and part cautionary tale, Petroplague is an entertaining entrée into the subject of oil depletion and its implications for society, human health and the environment.

Forget the ‘golden age’ of capitalism: there’s no return, and our future can be better

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Not only are high levels of growth an undesirable goal and an utterly insufficient rubric for assessing the ‘common wealth’, it is also simply not possible to return to the annualized GDP growth of the post-war ‘golden age’.