Flex-Fuel Humans
This is a guest post by Tom Murphy. Tom is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. This post originally appeared on Tom's blog Do the Math.
If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, th...
Advice to President Obama: Yes We Can, But Will We?
The post below shares Nate Hagen's timeless address to President Obama about the importance of energy in our society, written in January 2009. It goes into how energy ties into our economic system, the importance of energy quality, and discusses policy...
Thoughts on why energy use and CO2 emissions are rising as fast as GDP
In a recent post, I discovered something rather alarming–the fact that in the last decade (2000 to 2010) both world energy consumption and the CO2 emissions from this energy consumption were rising as fast as GDP for the world as a whole. This re...
Are We Reaching “Limits to Growth”?
It looks to me as though 2012 is likely to be a truly awful financial year, with several crises converging:
Either very high oil prices or recession,
The US governmental debt limit crisis,
The Euro crisis,
The Chinese debt problem,
Debt deleveraging i...
Drilling Down: Tainter and Patzek Tell the Energy-Complexity Story
Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek are authors of a soon-to-be-released book called Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma. This book is part of Charles Hall's Briefs in Energy series with the publisher Springer. An earlier book in t...
Thoughts on a Sustainable Human Ecosystem
It is clear there are limits to the pollution a given ecosystem can absorb, the level of resources that can be depleted, and debt that can be incurred. Despite concerns of many about these limits we are far from tackling any of these problems on a mean...
The Seneca Effect: Why Decline Is Faster Than Growth
"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."
Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters ...
The Seneca Effect: why decline is faster than growth
"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."
Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters ...
An alternative version for three of the “key graphs” in IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook
This is a guest post from Dolores García, an independent researcher based in Brighton, UK.
Recently Jorgen Randers (best known for being one of the co-authors of The Limits to Growth, 1972) asked me to do some modelling work on the World3-Energy model...
Ten Thousand Holes in Fuku Dai-ichi
I read the news today (...) and it seems that there are a growing number of holes at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility. Although nobody has actually seen them, much less counted them all, holes from 3cm to perhaps 7cm in diameter are believed to ...
The Fukushima Disaster and Other Irreproducible Experiments
The situation at the Fukushima nuclear reactors has evolved to one of chronic catastrophe or, more optimistically, feed and bleed followed by dialysis. For the viewer at home, the long-awaited debut of picture-taking robots inside the reactor buildings...
Fukushima Open Thread Fri 4/11
Yet another large aftershock shook the region around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing a brief evacuation of workers and an interruption to the electricity flow to external pumps used to provide fresh water to cool the reactor pressure...
