Climate Climate & Energy
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Don’t fight it
Energy wonk Robert McLeod has long post filled with statistics and graphs, arguing a simple point: if historical trends continue, solar power is going to dominate. Soon. (You’ll recognize this as substantially similar to the argument made by solar booster Travis Bradford.) If you’re into statistics and graphs, read the whole thing. If not, here […]
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Eyes wide shut toward global collapse?
Ecological Footprint, Energy Consumption, and the Looming Collapse:
This article explores dynamic relations governing population growth, resource depletion, and world economics by means of a few simple modeling and simulation exercises. To this end, we start out by exploring the concept of an ecological footprint, representing the amount of land that a person needs to produce everything that he or she consumes: food, clothing, energy, shelter, the tools that are needed to make the clothing, etc. and place it in relation with the human development index, a measure of the quality of life of an individual. We then relate the ecological footprint to the per capita energy consumption. This discussion serves to provide a quantitative understanding of the limited resources that are at our disposal.
The article continues by exploring the dangers and seductions of exponential growth, and uses a system dynamics approach to illustrate why we are moving at a rapid pace toward global collapse with our eyes wide shut.
The article ends by discussing what we would need to do in order to avoid the looming collapse. -
Smells Like Progress
As climate summit continues, fed-up mayors unveil actual plans They cover 1 percent of the Earth’s surface, but the world’s cities spew 80 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions — and 180 percent of climate-action plans. “Where national governments can’t or won’t lead, cities will,” said Toronto Mayor David Miller at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit […]
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Making a market for solar in Eugene, Oregon
Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) offers to buy solar power produced by customers at 15 cents/kWh.
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The weather will matter more and more
Energy dependence seems to be the topic of the day, or at least the last two days. David Roberts posted a link yesterday to an eye-opening article about the surge of interest among the Amish of Ohio for solar PV panels. I had always assumed, wrongly, that the Amish eschewed electricity, period. Actually, they just don't like depending on the outside world.
Meanwhile, renewed violence in Nigeria, a major petroleum producer, is giving oil markets the jitters.
So is home-produced energy always better?
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Crap, another means of continuing business as usual failing to survive scrutiny
Important, albeit somewhat depressing, post about biofuels from algae on chemical engineer Robert Rapier's always excellent blog.
Here's his introduction to the article, which you should read in its entirety:
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The Big Yapple
World’s mayors gather for climate-change summit in New York City Gone are the days when mayors chomped cigars and handed out keys to the city. Today’s civic leaders face a somewhat more monumental task: saving the planet. This week, mayors from more than 30 of the world’s biggest cities — from Bangkok to Berlin, Sydney […]
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Contest in need of Grist readers and their funny
In a world without glaciers, what would you call Glacier National Park? Tongues firmly in cheeks, National Environmental Trust is sponsoring a contest to come up with a new name for the park. The winner gets a $250 gift certificate to REI, but really, it’s about calling attention to the fact that continued inaction on […]
