Energy crisis – three fundamental questions
The decline of oil production will start in less than a generation and burning all coal, oil & natural gas would only take a short century. Since fossil fuel is the fabric of modern life, most people would agree that the better option is to manage the decline.
But what exactly does it mean – “managing” the decline? Well I think it means having the answers to 3 fundamental questions:
- By how much do we need to reduce our consumption?
- How quickly do we need to attain the reduction targets?
- What are the tools we’ll use to get there?
We tackle these three questions in this video. Enjoy!..
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
It means that we have to start paying real attention to our consumption and we have to educate our children and ourselves on the importance of creating a sustainable society, which is hard to do because Americans love their SUVs.
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:58 am
Thanks Jason for your comment. Indeed what makes this crisis unlike any we had to deal with before is that it can’t be solved by simply getting rid of a few items from our daily lives. It reminds me of a study from the MIT (Timothy Gutowski) which stated that Americans with the least energy usage still emit twice as much CO2 as the average global citizen. A homeless person for instance may eat at the soup kitchen and sleep at a homeless shelter: energy and carbon are associated with running these support structures. Part of our emissions are under our control but another part is systemic.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:48 am
Yes, we really do need to wake up and take action against this problem now before we doom our children’s and grandchildren’s futures. The environment is not something we should take lightly.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Thanks for your comment. I agree with you that public awareness has a major role to play, as it makes the hard but necessary fixes more widely acceptable / accepted.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Information is necessary, but the real long-term driver will be economical: will we reach a point when insurance companies will incur so much damage that they will be happy to fund R&D in economical & environmental-friendly technologies for our day-to-day life ? or governement ? I don’t know the answer, but still believe the trigger to do the right thing for all of us will be driven by individual decisions. Last time I checked, I could not find any study on economical impact of pollution over the society. That was 3 years ago. Slow food for thought.
March 11th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Thank you for your comment! The way I look at it, information is useful mainly because it’s a powerful enabler for (tough) economic decisions.
The example of the tobacco industry illustrates what I’m trying to say. For decades, it was all over the news that smoking was unhealthy but these awareness campaigns had very little impact in convincing smokers to kick the habit. Their true virtue was to enable the gathering of enough public support to make socially acceptable measures that couldn’t have been adopted otherwise: namely, raise taxes on tobacco products and ban smoking in public areas. These decisions are the ones which had a significant impact on tobacco consumption.
Information on the climate & energy crisis may make a small percentage of the population change some of their behaviors but its true purpose is to make socially acceptable, for a large portion of the population, measures that will help us transition to a post fossil fuel economy.