Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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Rentable hybrids
Why, it seems like just the other day that Umbra wrote about eco-friendly car renting and car sharing options. Now, here are the johnny-come-latelys at the New York Times with a long story on that exact subject. I am sooo sick of the NYT ripping us off! It's like, dude, get your own stories.
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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.
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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.
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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?
