Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future argues that the crises of climate change and peaking oil production are really one: a carbon problem. The book brings together six world-class experts to explore where we stand now and where we might be headed. Learn more »
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization sets out a theory of the growth, crisis, and renewal of societies. Some kinds of crisis can open up extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform of our societies, if we’re prepared to exploit these opportunities when they arise. Learn more »
Is our world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage? The Ingenuity Gap argues that a dangerous gulf is opening between our need for practical, innovative ideas to solve our increasingly difficult problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Learn more »
Environment, Scarcity, and Violence shows how scarcities of critical renewable resources like cropland, fresh water, and forests will contribute to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence in poor countries. Learn more »
Join the mailing list to receive the newsletter:
Your personal information is safe and will not be shared with anyone. You may unsubscribe at any time.
8 results found for: Energy
As the price of energy rises and as the planet gets hotter, we need significantly higher investment in innovation throughout society, from governments and corporations to universities. Perhaps the most urgent step, if humankind is going to return to coal as its major energy source, is to figure out ways of safely disposing of coal’s harmful carbon dioxide – probably underground.
While greater connectivity allows companies larger profits, and gives society better ways to combine diverse ideas, skills and resources, it also harbors dangers. Most obviously, damage in one part of a system – whether it’s a voltage surge in the electrical grid, a new disease in a far-off country, or the sudden devaluation of a key currency – can cascade farther and faster to other parts of the system.
Fossil fuels, especially petroleum, powered the industrialization of today’s rich countries and they still drive the world economy. But within the lifetimes of our grandchildren, the age of petroleum will wane. The combination of gasified coal plants and geologic storage can be our bridge to the clean energy – derived from renewable resources like solar and wind power and perhaps nuclear fusion – of the 22nd century and beyond.
The world’s energy needs—and their potential effects on the environment—can hardly be exaggerated. Producing, processing, and transporting energy costs more than $3.5 trillion every year— more than the U.S. federal budget or the gdp of most nations. The expense increases significantly every year, as the world’s population and economy grow.
The risk of massive network collapse is not just a problem for power generation. Our agricultural, financial, and computer networks, to name just three, are also vulnerable. This vulnerability has many sources, but these networks’ structure and their tight coupling seem to be particularly critical. These aren’t problems with technology in general—rather, they’re problems with the particular kinds of technologies we’ve chosen and how we’ve decided to use them.
Energy is our life-blood. Without an adequate supply at the right times and places, our economy and society would grind to a halt. Canadians are profligate users of energy: in fact, we have one of the highest per capita rates of consumption in the world. But if we were smarter about things, we would consume much less energy to support our current standard of living, and we would produce this energy with much less damage to our natural environment.
Humankind, I argue, is on the cusp of a planetary emergency. We face an ever-greater risk of a synchronous failure of our social, economic and biophysical systems, arising from simultaneious, interacting stresses acting powerfully at multiple levels of these global systems.
From Alberta’s point of view, the tar sands projects are, quite understandably, non-negotiable. But they immensely complicate our efforts to reduce Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions. There’s a way we can get out of this box, though: Alberta can become a world leader in two new technologies that are going to revolutionize humanity’s future energy production and consumption – underground carbon sequestration and hydrogen energy.
