Humanity can and must do more with less, experts urge. By 2050, humanity could consume an estimated 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year -- three times its current appetite -- unless the economic growth rate is "decoupled" from the rate of natural resource consumption, warns a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme. Citizens of developed countries consume an average of 16 tons (ranging up to 40 or more tons) of those four key resources per capita. By comparison, the average person in India today consumes four tons per year. With the growth of both population and prosperity, especially in developing countries, the prospect of much higher resource consumption levels is "far beyond what is likely sustainable" if realized at all given finite world resources, warns the report by UNEP's International Resource Panel.
Achieving a rate of resource productivity ("doing more with less") greater than the economic growth rate is the notion behind "decoupling," the panel says. Challenges ahead include: Has the World Run Out of Spare Capacity? Samuel Brittan points us to John Kemp suggesting that global growth is hitting supply-side limits. The argument is that while high unemployment and low inflation may prevail in advanced economies, the rest of the world is facing accelerating inflation, together with rising commodity prices. And that is, indeed, a fair picture of what’s going on. What’s more questionable is the assertion that “The problem is not aggregate demand but its distribution.” In fact, it’s both. In The World After Abundance. Over the past month or so the essays on this blog have veered away from the details of appropriate tech into a discussion of some of the reasons why this kind of tech is, in fact, appropriate as a response to the predicament of industrial society.
That was a necessary diversion, since a great many of the narratives that cluster around that crisis just now tend to evade the necessity of change on the level of individual lifestyles. The roots of that evasion had to be explored in order to show that change on that level is exactly what can’t be avoided by any serious response to the crisis of our time. Still, if it’s going to do any good, that awareness has to be paired with something more than a vague sense that action is necessary. That last phrase is the crucial one. One of the best examples I can think of is provided by the ubiquitous wall sockets that, in nearly every home in the industrial world, provide as much electric current on demand as the residents want and can pay for. Third Depression Watch. PERLEY: Nuclear future beyond Japan. Just as Japan’s earthquake raises fears of catastrophe from a nuclear meltdown and Mideast turmoil jeopardizes the world’s supply of conventional energy, along comes word of a possible scientific breakthrough that holds out the hope of cheap, abundant power.
Cold fusion - discredited and vilified in the past - is back in the news. The potential benefits are great enough that, despite past failures, the technology deserves a fair hearing from the scientific community this time. In January, two Italian scientists announced they had invented a reactor that fuses nickel and hydrogen nuclei at room temperature, producing copper and throwing off massive amounts of energy in the process. Sergio Focardi and Andrea Rossi demonstrated their tabletop device before a standing-room-only crowd in Bologna, purportedly using 400 watts of power to generate 12,400 watts with no hazardous waste. Alternatives to oil all have their drawbacks. It is easy to understand why. Utopian and Critical (P2P) Visions on Energy. * ENERGY. Scientific and Artistic, Utopian and Critical Visions.
Acoustic Space. Issue No. 8 Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits have edited and published a very rich collection with contributions exploring the issue of energy, which gives substantial space to p2p approaches. Acoustic Space comes out as a peer-reviewed international journal for transdiscplinary research and is published in collaboration with RIXC, The Centre for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia, where the original conference on the topic was held. This volume includes a Latvian translation of my own essay on the political economy of peer production: * Mišels Bauenss. Here is a summary of the content, followed by an excerpt where the editors explain their motivations. 1. “The publication covers a broad scope of topics under 4 main sections: 2. In human society, energy is the most essential resource driving its economy and its future development. Blog Them Out of the Stone Age › Toward a Broader Vision of Military History and National Security Affairs. By Garrett Jones Garrett Jones is a retired operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency.
He spent extensive time in the Middle East and Africa and is a graduate of the U.S. Army War College. On the 19th of February 2012, the New York Times had an interesting article pointing out the logistical and tactical problems the Israeli Air Force would encounter if it were to try to interdict the development of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. [1] The conclusion reached by the author was that the problems involved precluded Israel from making an attempt at derailing the Iranian nuclear program through conventional military means. While I largely concur with the logic in the article, I do not believe the Israelis ever have seriously considered a conventional military strike as an effective way of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The morepertinent question is: Will nuclear weapons be used by Israel against Iran?
----------------------------------------------------------Notes. Optimism and Pessimism. Since the current recession began, I have been touting the importance of entrepreneurs in getting the economy back on its feet. One of the characteristics possessed by most entrepreneurs -- one that makes them well-suited to doing business in bad times (or good) -- is optimism. Having an optimistic boss is one thing, but an article in BusinessWeek claims that businesses with optimistic employees have an even larger competitive edge ["Is Optimism a Competitive Advantage," by Michelle Conlin, 24 August 2009 print issue].
The article equates an employee's optimism with his or her level of engagement in the company and concludes that "the link between a company's employee engagement and its bottom line is real: the more engaged the workers, the higher the sales and profits. " Conlin writes: The reason that Conlin equates engagement with optimism is that optimism is hard to gauge. "Companies don't directly measure the optimism of their employees. "'Depression,' writes [Dr. Contesting Abundance: Shared for the Common Good or Monopolized for Private Profit? It is hardly news by now that digital technologies have made available an abundance of information and knowledge on the Internet and the Web.
New technologies have created a global digital infrastructure, which, in turn, has become the basis for a new information economy, whose most obvious feature is the abundance of free or low-cost information and knowledge. With few exceptions, I have usually found a needed piece of information, skill or knowhow -- if it is public knowledge -- on Wikipedia, YouTube, a blog, a Web site, or a mailing list somewhere. The Internet search results below illustrate the extent of the abundance (search done on Feb. 28, 2011; Oct. 2010 hits are in parentheses). The first few hundred hits are usually more than enough for most purposes. Because it has become a dominant feature of our time, information abundance is forcing a deeper look at the concept itself. Wellspring of information abundance: the human urge to communicate Think of a bottle. Think of DNA.