Articles by David Roberts

Product service systems

You know what's cool? Product service systems.

What are product service systems, you ask? How can they revolutionize the way we think about ownership and affluence? How can they dramatically reduce our ecological footprints?

These are good questions. However, I'm too lazy, and it's too Friday, to answer them here. Instead, I'm going to do the bloggy thing and point you to a bunch of stuff you should read. Meet back here for discussion.

• For a long and reasonably comprehensive description of PSS stuff, download this UNEP report (PDF).
• You could browse around the Product Service System Information Network's website.
• You could read this Worldchanging post, which, as is their wont, is packed with further links.
  
  Or, if you find all that stuff too taxing...
  
  
• You could browse through Treehugger's PSS category, replete with fun pictures and snappy descriptions of real-world PSS examples.

I'll write more about PSS some time, when it's not so damn Friday.

Wind

Speaking of Jim Motavalli, he has a nice primer in E Magazine on the history and current challenges of the wind power industry. Good reading.

Black gold, Texas tea

Relating to this post: One good argument for using public policy to aggressively push alternative fuels and regulate environmental quality is that affordable oil is running out. There is, of course, much dispute over when Hubbert's peak will be reached, or whether it already has been. Some even believe that new technologies will continue to enable us to extract oil from more and more obscure places, ensuring steady supply.

Unlikely.

Four good posts to read on oil: Joel Makower says Hubbert's peak is here, drawing on a letter from an anonymous oil company employee on EnergyBulletin. Then, there's Kevin Drum, who points out that of course demand is about to exceed supply -- we've known that's coming for years -- and points back to this post of his from last year, which gets into the details.

I leave you with this cheery thought from anonymous oil guy:

It is not a question of "if" peak oil has occurred - it has! The better question might be "when are the crows coming home to roost?" When will we begin to actually experience the shortages and the rising prices? I think we might make a decade, if everybody plays nice across the world. But when has that ever happened when something got scarce?

REACH

Great post over on greenState about the power and implications of the E.U.'s new REACH regulations (it stands for "Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals"). As Grist readers -- but few in the U.S. public -- probably know, very few of the 30,000 some chemicals on the market have been tested for safety. We're testing them -- you, me, our children -- right now, by using them. REACH says that companies must test chemicals, and publicly post the results, before putting them on the market.

Naturally, this scares the shit out of chemical companies, and they're doing everything they can to derail it, with the help of their handmaidens in the Bush administration. But the E.U. has become a global economic power, and we might not be able to manipulate them at will. Says greenState:

As the EU has an economy similar in size to the U.S., it will become difficult for the $500 billion chemical industry to develop one set of products for Europe and another set for the U.S. Once REACH is in place, citizens around the world will be able to access detailed information on the safety of chemical products, and use that information to force their own governments to pass similar laws. California has already indicated its desire to enact regulations similar to REACH, and other governments are sure to follow suit.

So this may be a new development for political activists in the U.S., that decisions in Europe can affect health and environmental standards around the world. But considering the current political climate in America, this comes as welcome news. Let's hope that the EU continues to pursue aggressive environmental legislation, and that corporate lobbyists do not succeed in weakening such legislation the way they have in the U.S.

Yup.