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Notes"As Hermann Scheer, the father of Germany’s feed-in tariff, often said, the intent of his disruptive law was to fundamentally restructure the German energy industry. Energy technologies, Scheer understood, came with their own “techno-logic.” Coal and gas and nukes and hydro were top-down and centralized, their profits earned by securing and exploiting scarce, expensive fuels.
Shifting to renewables isn’t a megawatt-for-megawatt swap between energy sources but a paradigm shift from one techno-logic to another. Renewables encourage smaller scale and decentralization; they reward efficiency over consumption; and they centralize the value at the level of technological development and implementation, thus to exploit free fuels.
In a market where small-scale, decentralized renewables thrive, you’ll invariably find angry conventional energy companies. They mastered a game and rigged a market for themselves, and now it doesn’t work quite as favorably for them. (Notice that none of Germany’s big energy giants, even the ones paying those big tariffs, went bankrupt during the solar industry’s heyday.)"
Writer Chris Turner explains the differing “techno-logic” associated with renewable and non-renewable energy in his MNN article, ‘What have we learned about cheap energy?’. If you’re interested, you can read one of Herman Scheer’s quotes about the transition to clean energy and its connection with democracy here.
(Photo credit: MNN)
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NotesThinking Globally: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’
From Planet Under Pressure via Vimeo:
A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
More here.
(Image credit: IGBP)
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Notes Climate Leadership: 'South Korea Passes Cap-And-Trade Legislation'
From Sustainable Business:
South Korea passed legislation to begin a national cap-and-trade program with a near unanimous vote of 148-0, with three abstentions.
The fourth largest economy in Asia, South Korea is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions among industrialized countries, doubling since 1990. It is the 8th biggest source of GHG emissions in the world and has a national target of cutting them 30% by 2020.POSCO, the world’s third largest steelmaker, and Samsung Electronics, the largest electronics manufacturer, are among South Korea’s biggest polluters.
Emissions trading is scheduled to begin in Korea in 2015, the same year as those in Australia and China. New Zealand started emissions trading in 2009, and the EU’s went into effect in 2005. South Africa has plans for a program. In the US, the northeastern states have a cap-and-trade program, California’s begins in 2013.
In April, both Mexico and Peru passed national climate change legislation.This opens the possibility of linking country cap-and-trade programs - allowing participants to trade regionallly and eventually worldwide - which would raise the value of carbon markets substantially.
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Photo credit: Energy Korea)
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Video
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NotesWendell Berry: ‘IT ALL TURNS on affection’
From The National Endowment for the Humanities:
Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
In his lecture, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry lamented the increasing divergence of modern man from the environment and local communities. Invoking the words of his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner, Berry observed that throughout history Americans have been divided into two kinds: the “boomers” who “pillage and run,” and the “stickers” who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
Inspired by a passage from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Berry called for for a land use ethic that is shaped by a sense of “affection” for land and place. “And so,” he said, “I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.” The full text of Wendell Berry’s lecture is available here.
Check out the rest of the article here. Berry’s talk starts approximately 10:00 minutes into the video and you can check out media coverage of it here, here, and here.
(Photo credit: NEH)
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Video
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NotesSustainability: ‘The Story of Bill Rees and the Ecological Footprint’
“Do you know your ecological footprint?” You can measure it here.
(Graphic credit: Global Footprint Network)
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Notes Nature Editorial: Peak Oil Has Come and Gone, Volatility Here to Stay
From Wired News:
The global production of oil has remained relatively flat since 2005 and peaked in 2008, declining ever since even as demand has continued to increase. The result has been wild fluctuations in the price of oil as small changes in demand set off large shocks in the system.
In Wednesday’s issue of Nature, James Murray of University of Washington and David King of Oxford University argue this sort of volatility is what we can expect going forward, and we’re likely to face it with other fossil fuels as well.
The notion of peak oil is fairly simple: Oil is a finite resource and at some point we simply won’t be able to extract as much as we once did. There is no getting around that limit for any finite resource. The issue that has made peak oil contentious, however, is the debate over when we might actually hit it. Murray and King are not the first to conclude that we’ve already passed the peak. Even as prices have climbed by about 15 percent per year since 2005, production has remained largely flat.
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“We are not running out of oil,” the authors argue, “but we are running out of oil that can be produced easily and cheaply.”
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What are the consequences of being stuck at or near peak oil? The authors have produced a graph showing that, while supply is elastic enough to meet demand, prices stay stable. Once demand consistently exceeds supply, prices swing wildly. Murray and King term this a “phase transition” and suggest we’ll be in the volatile phase from here on out.
That has some significant consequences. Of the 11 recessions the United States has experienced since World War II, 10 have been preceded by a sudden change in oil prices. The United States isn’t alone, either. Italy’s entire trade deficit, which has contributed to its financial troubles, can be accounted for by the rise in imported oil. The world, it seems, has allowed its economies to become entirely dependent upon fossil fuels.
“If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either,” the authors write. “This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.”
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The commentary concludes that we simply can’t rely on any fossil fuel to provide a stable and economic source of energy for more than a couple of decades. And, given the economic shocks that result from rapid changes in energy prices, that’s a serious problem.
“Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth,” the authors note. “But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven’t identified the necessary solution: weaning society off fossil fuel.”
Check out the rest of the article here.
The New York Times, Scientific American, PhysOrg, and Energy Bulletin all have their own coverage of this important study.
I’ve also attached the chart below from the International Energy Agency’s 2010 World Energy Outlook report. It pegs peak oil as having been reached in 2006. The chart’s white text was added by resilience strategist Chris Martenson in his economic analysis of the report’s implications.
(Photo source: Wired News)
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Notes"A HUNDRED years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything else—the financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, authoritarianism or democracy in China and Russia, the Great Stagnation or the innovation renaissance, democratisation and/or political Islam in the Arab world, Newt or Mitt or another four years of Barack—all this will fade into insignificance beside the question of whether we managed to do anything about human industrial civilisation changing the climate of Planet Earth. It’s extremely hard to focus on this, because environmentalism goes in and out of political fashion depending on the economy, war, and so forth. But from the perspective of our great-grandchildren, the only thing that’s going to seem important is whether we burned all the fossil fuel on the planet and sent global temperatures up by at least 4 degrees Celsius in the next century, or whether we took collective action, shifted our energy sources, and held the global temperature rise to 2 degrees or less."The opening paragraph from the article, ‘Climate change: Durban and everything that matters’, in The Economist. To get a sense of some of the modeled impacts of a 4 C (7 F) hotter Earth check out the map created by the United Kingdom’s national weather agency.
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Notes"Delaying action [on climate change] is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions."
This quote is from the International Energy Agency’s recent 2011 World Energy Outlook, which points to the huge economic benefits of building clean energy infrastructure ahead of 2020.
For more on the report check out the Guardian, which highlights that “if fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed [within the next five years], the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change.”
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NotesClimate Change: 200 Years of Global Warming in 2 Minutes
From YouTube:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produced this video showing the unique nature of the modern spike in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin looks at the trend and its implications here.
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Notes"When considering the consequences of peak oil, no everyday experiences and only few historical parallels are at hand. It is therefore difficult to imagine how significant the effects of being gradually deprived of one of our civilization’s most important energy sources will be. Psychological barriers cause indisputable facts to be blanked out and lead to almost instinctively refusing to look into this difficult subject in detail. Peak oil, however, is unavoidable."
~ A quote from the recently translated Peak Oil analysis written by the German Military (via ASPO). You can read a summary of the report over at Energy Bulletin.
(Image credit: Johns Hopkins Public Health)
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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels
via nextbigfuture
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Nature inspires more creative minds
The more you get away from the stresses of daily life and the more time you spend... -
The Spring of 2012 Is the Hottest in U.S. History
In case, you know, you haven’t been outside in the past three month, it’s...
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Walkable neighborhoods now more valuable than car-centric ones
If you can walk to the post office, library and eateries, your real estate could... -
Ride. a short film on bike commuting.
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Urbanized, a feature-length documentary by Gary Hustwit about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban...
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“Income Inequality As Seen from Space,” Per Square Mile, May 24, 2012
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Cycles of Life by Grant Snider
