energy transition

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The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

There is certainly no consensus as to the speed of the transition, nor as to what the transition will look like decades from now, nor as to the cost—nor as to how it is all to be achieved. Energy transitions are not new. They have been going on for a long time and unfold over time. Previous energy transitions have primarily been driven by technology, economics, environmental considerations, and convenience and ease. The current one has politics, policy, and activism more mixed in. The first energy transition began in Britain in the thirteenth century with the shift from wood to coal. Rising populations and destruction of forests made wood scarce and expensive, and coal came to be used for heating in London, despite fumes and smell.

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., 47 and China’s development of petroleum resources, 160 and current geopolitical challenges, 427 and Eastern Mediterranean petroleum resources, 254–57 and electric vehicles, 341 and energy transition in the developing world, 408–9 and energy transition in U.S., xv and gas supplies to Europe, 84–89 and Nixon administration, 53 and opposition to Russian gas exports, 109 and politics of U.S. shale production, 55 and Russia-Europe relations, 83 and South China Sea tensions, 171 and varied approaches to climate change, 412–13 “energy superpower” status, xv, 57, 70–71 Energy Transfer Partners, 49, 51 energy transition and breakthrough energy technologies, 403–6 and carbon capture technology, 419 and current global challenges, xiii–xx, 427–29 and developing world, 407–10 emerging consensus on climate issues, 382–87 and “green deal” proposals, 388–91, 391–93 historical perspective on, 377–79 and IPCC, 379–80 and Paris climate agreement, 380–82 and push for renewable energy sources, 394, 400–401 and U.S. position, xv and varied approaches to climate change, 412 Eni, 256 environmental issues and activism and American shale gas reserves, 113 and Fukushima nuclear disaster, 87 and global power politics, xiii and hydraulic fracturing, 28–29 and indoor air pollution in developing countries, 407–8 and opposition to pipeline projects, 46–51 and U.S. transition to LNG exporter, 37 See also carbon emissions; climate change Environmental Defense Fund, 28–29 EOG, 14–17 Erbil, Kurdistan, 232 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 247, 305, 315 ESPO pipeline, 118 Estonia, 69 EU Council, 102 Eurasian Economic Union, 92, 93, 189 Europe and China Belt and Road Initiative, 182, 184 and Eastern Mediterranean petroleum resources, 258 and impact of U.S. shale and LNG, 38, 55, 61–62 and push for renewable energy sources, 398–99 See also European Union (EU); specific countries European Central Bank, 187 European Commission, 388–90 European Union (EU) and energy security issues in Europe, 85–88 and energy transition challenges, 381 and “green deal” proposals, 388–91 and Nord Stream 2 pipeline, 102, 104, 108–9 and Russian annexation of Crimea, 95 and Russian gas supplies to Europe, 85 and Russian geopolitical ambitions, 70, 115 and Russia-Ukraine tensions, 93 and Syrian refugees, 248 Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and territorial waters, 142–45, 148, 159, 170, 257 extraterritoriality, 108, 139 ExxonMobil, 15, 65, 76, 395 Fabius, Laurent, 381 Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, 214 Faisal I, King of Iraq, 198–200, 202–3 Falcon rockets, 332 Farouk I, King of Egypt, 203 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 103 financial crisis of 2008, 26–27, 333, 429 Financial Stability Board, 385 Financial Times, 113, 273 financing for energy projects and China Belt and Road Initiative, 182–83 and “green recovery” proposals, 428 and push for renewable energy sources, 397, 400–401 and Russian interests in Central Asia, 125–26 and Russian LNG, 112 Fink, Larry, 385 First Opium War, 139 First Sino-Japanese War, 154 5G technology, 175, 354 “flight shaming,” 387, 415 Ford, Bill (and Ford Motor Company), 329, 338, 346, 351, 369–70, 373 Ford, Henry, 372–73 Fort Laramie Treaty, 49 Fracking Debate, The (Raimi), 28 France, 138, 195–96, 201–2, 227, 232, 247, 343 Freeport LNG facility, 24, 35–37, 38 Free Syrian Army (FSA), 244 Fukushima nuclear accident, 63, 87, 401, 430 G7, 129 G8, 129 G20, 129, 280, 319–20, 388, 426 Gadhafi, Muammar, 239 Gadkari, Nitin, 342 Gaidar, Yegor, 73 gasoline and Auto-Tech advances, 368, 370–72 and “clean diesel,” 335 and consumer behaviors, 421 Mexican imports, 41, 43 and oil embargo of 1973, 53–54 and oil price war, 316–17, 323 and pipeline battles in U.S., 47 Gates, Bill, 315, 385–86 Gates, Robert, 237–38 Gaza, 253 Gazprom, 76, 80, 86, 89, 105, 107–8, 109, 125 Geely, 338 General Motors, 171, 329, 333–34, 369 Georges-Picot, François, 194–95, 196–98, 201–2 Georgia (country), 82 Germany and “clean diesel,” 336 economic growth before World War I, 132 and energy security issues in Europe, 86–88 and energy transition challenges, xix and global order after First World War, 200 and Iranian nuclear ambitions, 223, 227 and Khashoggi affair, 305–6 and Nord Stream 2 pipeline, 102, 104–5, 107–8 and push for renewable energy sources, 395–96, 400–401 and Russia’s “pivot to the east,” 117 and Syrian refugees, 248 and the Thucydides Trap, 131, 154 and U.S.

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The Rise of the “Eastern Med” 33. “The Answer” 34. Oil Shock 35. Run for the Future 36. The Plague ROADMAP 37. The Electric Charge 38. Enter the Robot 39. Hailing the Future 40. Auto-Tech CLIMATE MAP 41. Energy Transition 42. Green Deals 43. The Renewable Landscape 44. Breakthrough Technologies 45. What Does “Energy Transition” Mean in the Developing World? 46. The Changing Mix Conclusion: The Disrupted Future Photographs Acknowledgments Notes Illustration Credits Index Introduction This book is about the new global map that is being shaped by dramatic shifts in geopolitics and energy.

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Then, from the eighteenth century, humans used the steam engine to power their looms, propel locomotives, and float battleships to reign over the seas. Steam powered the first industrial revolution. This was the world’s first energy transition, and one underpinned by the use of an indispensable fuel: a black stone called coal. In the twentieth century, humans cast aside steam for another innovation: the petrol engine. This technology made vehicles, boats, and tanks more powerful, and paved the way for a new machine — the aeroplane — to conquer the skies. This second industrial revolution was also an energy transition, this time relying on the extraction of another resource: a rock oil called petroleum. The disruptive effects of fossil fuels on the climate since the turn of the current century have driven humanity to develop new and supposedly cleaner and more efficient inventions — wind turbines, solar panels, electric batteries — that can connect to high-voltage ultra-performance grids.

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In the twenty-first century, one state is in the process of dominating the export and consumption of rare metals. That state is China. Consider this economic and industrial observation: by committing to the energy transition, we have flung ourselves headlong into the jaws of the Chinese dragon. Arguably, the Middle Kingdom holds a near monopoly over a profusion of rare metals without which low-carbon and digital energies — the very foundations of the energy transition — cannot exist. And, as I will address later in this book, China has used barely credible chicanery to position itself as the sole supplier of the most strategic of the rare metals.

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For further reading, also refer to Olivier Vidal’s book Mineral Resources and Energy: future stakes in energy transition, ISTE Press Ltd, 2018. Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé, and Nicholas Arndt, ‘Metals for a Low-Carbon Society’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, November 2013. Ibid. ‘The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future’, The World Bank Group, June 2017. See also ‘Métaux: les besoins colossaux de la transition énergétique’ [‘Metals: the colossal needs of the energy transition’], Les Échos, 20 July 2017. ‘How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?’, Population Reference Bureau, 2011.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

In the energy sector, which we’ll look at in more detail in Chapter 5, we’ll see that oil and gas companies need to transition to alternative energy sources. If shareholders like those involved with the Climate Action 100+ initiative put pressure on them, that could help to speed up the energy transition. Some people argue that it could even be damaging, at this early stage of the energy transition, to dump fossil fuel stocks altogether. A January 2020 report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch warned that as energy companies had already been a frequent target of divestments, a key risk for the energy transition was that there wouldn’t be enough capital investment in the sector in the years ahead to sufficiently support a seamless transition to a low-carbon economy.

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The report concluded that the global energy industry was verging on its next energy transition, with wind and solar likely to be the fuel of the twenty-first century. The transition could be at a much faster pace, due to the pressure of regulation, in contrast to previous transition periods, which were more opportunistic. But historical examples have both fast and slow energy transition periods, making the pace this time around a critical uncertainty. Still, everyone recognises that if we are going to meet the Paris commitments, the world now has to undergo its third energy transition: from coal, oil and gas to renewable energy.

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This prompted hopes that energy emissions might have peaked. The head of the IEA, Fatih Birol, told the Financial Times in February 2020: ‘The clean energy transition is starting to accelerate very strongly. This makes me hopeful we are seeing a peak in emissions and they will now start to decline.’ He was speaking before the pandemic had hit. By April, the IEA predicted that global energy-related CO2 emissions would fall by nearly 8 per cent in 2020, reaching their lowest level since 2010. ‘No oil and gas company will be unaffected by clean energy transitions, so every part of the industry needs to consider how to respond,’ the IEA said in its 2020 report.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

The cities could not have sustained high rates of growth without both agricultural and energy transitions that were able to supply food, thanks first to railways and then to new global markets for crops and meat (including refrigerated shipments since the late 1870s) and fuels and electricity, enabling unprecedented urban power densities. And the urban-led economic transition created new mass-scale opportunities in manufacturing and services that acted as the pull force for rural emigration and that provided new and affordable inputs of machines, devices, and processes needed to sustain and to expand both agricultural and energy transitions. The expanding reach of cities beyond their immediate hinterlands and their demand for food, energy, and materials had eventually extended worldwide, and urban areas became the most prominent generators of local and regional environmental pollution.

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Economic implications of this dependence (profound changes of labor markets, impressive gains in manufacturing productivity, shifts from primary and secondary economic activities to services, increases of national economic product and of per capita incomes) will be detailed in the next chapter. In this chapter I will focus on the three principal components of energy transitions: the rapid shift from phytomass to fossil fuels and from animate to inanimate prime movers; the electrification of modern societies (an even more transformative development than the combustion of fossil fuels); and an increasing variety of energy uses. These shifts have been accompanied by impressively improving conversion efficiencies and declining energy intensities—but we still produce too much waste. Energy Transitions Once again, there is strong contrast between the stagnation and only a very slow rate of improvements during the millennia preceding industrialization and rapid changes beginning during the second half of the 19th century.

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But the three fundamental markers of economic transition—rising growth of output, profound structural shifts, and the arrival of mass-scale consumption of products and experiences—became clearly and widely discernible only as population, dietary, and energy transitions combined with technical innovations and with better modes of governance to start a new era of unprecedented economic advances. End points or asymptotic levels indicating the completion of demographic, dietary, and energy transitions are either self-evident or can be well defined. There can be no doubt that a society has completed its demographic transition once its fertility rates have declined below the replacement level and remained there for decades; that it has gone through its dietary transition once its supply of food has greatly surpassed even the highest conceivable nutritional requirements and has generated an unacceptably high level of waste; and that it has accomplished its energy transition when it consumes no traditional phytomass fuels and relies solely on a mixture of fossil fuels and primary electricity consumed at high per capita rates.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Throughout the next summer, Marchetti and a colleague inputted data from three hundred cases of energy transitions from around the world. The transitions were from wood to coal, whale oil to petroleum, coal to oil, and many other combinations. “I could not believe my eyes,” he wrote, “but it worked.”44 He added, “The whole destiny of an energy source seems to be completely predetermined in the first childhood.”45 The study of what we today call energy transitions was born. Wars, big changes in energy prices, and even depressions, Marchetti found, had no effect on the rate of energy transition. “It is as though the system had a schedule, a will, and a clock,” he wrote.46 Older histories emphasized the role of scarcity in raising prices and stimulating innovation, such as how Europeans had to import wood from increasingly distant forests, making it more expensive, and the newcomer fuel, coal, relatively cheaper.47 But Marchetti found that “the market regularly moved away from a certain primary energy source, long before it was exhausted, at least at world level.”48 While scarcity helps incentivize entrepreneurs like Drake’s investors to create alternatives, it is often rising economic growth and rising demand for a specific energy service, like lighting, transportation, heat, or industry, that allows fossil fuels to replace renewables, and oil and gas to replace coal.

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And natural gas, or rather, its main component, methane, has four hydrogen atoms to one carbon atom, hence its molecular expression as CH4.52 As a consequence of these energy transitions, the carbon-intensity of energy has declined for more than 150 years. Between 1860 and the mid-1990s, the carbon intensity of primary global energy declined about 0.3 percent per year.53 Marchetti was right that human societies tend to move from energy-dilute to energy-dense fuels, but wrong that “the system had a schedule . . . and a clock.” While the direction of energy transitions he predicted was broadly correct, Marchetti’s timing was off. For example, in the United States, the share of electricity coming from coal declined from more than 45 percent in 2010 to just less than 25 percent in 2019.54 Europe saw similarly large declines in electricity from coal and increases from natural gas during the last two decades.55 Marchetti predicted the coal-to-gas transition would occur in the 1980s and 1990s and was thus two decades off.

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“What probably sustains the whaling industry against the inroads of vegetable oil,” reported The New York Times in 1959, “is the desire of the whaling nations to conserve their foreign exchange. In general, they do not produce enough vegetable oil for their own needs and hence must either catch whales or buy fats and oil abroad.”100 The moral of the story is that economic growth and the rising demand for food, lighting, and energy drive product and energy transitions, but politics can constrain them. Energy transitions depend on people wanting them. When it comes to protecting the environment by moving to superior alternatives, public attitudes and political action matter. 7 Have Your Steak and Eat It, Too 1. Eating Animals When Jonathan Safran Foer was nine years old, he asked his babysitter why she wasn’t eating the chicken that he and his brother Frank were having.

What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth by Chris Goodall

blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, decarbonisation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, food miles, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, hydroponic farming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Ocado, ocean acidification, plant based meat, smart grid, smart meter

CLOTHING AND STUFF The website of Ellen MacArthur’s foundation (www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org) contains much of interest on the circular economy, and clothing in particular. WRAP (www.wrap.org.uk), the waste minimisation institute, publishes consistently interesting material on cutting the use of resources. The work of the Energy Transitions Commission (www.energy-transitions.org) is exceptional and includes detailed reports on sectors of the economy which are most difficult to decarbonise. REFORESTATION George Monbiot, Feral (Penguin, 2014). This is only in part about reforestation, alerting us more widely to the damage to the environment caused by sheep grazing and offering climate-friendly solutions for the restoration of our environment.

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And how do we reduce (as we must) the sales of clothing when over a third of a million people work in the fashion business? Some argue that a transition to zero emissions is impossible in a world controlled by short-term modern capitalism, noting that few shareholder-owned companies have done much to speed up the energy transition (although there are notable exceptions, often from Nordic Europe). Most fossil fuel businesses have doggedly opposed rapid change at the same time as shamelessly and relentlessly advertising minor initiatives to reduce responsibility for climate breakdown. However, my contention in this book is that a global carbon tax at a high enough level could rapidly rotate fossil fuel companies into allies in combating climate change.

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This, again, will help counterbalance remaining greenhouse gas emissions. 9 Introduce a meaningful carbon tax, remitting its proceeds to the less well-off, with the principal objective of incentivising the big fossil fuel companies to switch from oil and gas to zero carbon energy. Capitalism can and should be the servant of the energy transition. 10 Research and plan geoengineering techniques. The world will need to have safe, equitable means to artificially hold down global temperatures. Although ‘geoengineering’ has its risks, we probably have no alternative if we want to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 or 2 degrees celsius.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

After the nuclear false start, the world is running out of time to switch over to clean energy. It doesn’t help that global energy transitions take a very long time. As the energy scholar Vaclav Smil has pointed out, global energy transitions—for example, from wood to coal to oil—have each taken roughly a half-century.45 If the world can zero out its carbon emissions within a half-century, then it stands a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.46 But if the transition toward solar energy sputters by midcentury, there will be no opportunity for another do-over. A particularly rosy 2016 study suggested that a clean energy transition could happen much faster—in just a decade or two—with the right support from policymakers.47 And some argue that more sensible climate policies than the ones we have today are inevitable.

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Varun Sivaram, Gireesh Shrimali, and Dan Reicher, “Reach for the Sun: How India’s Audacious Solar Ambitions Could Make or Break Its Climate Commitments,” Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, December 8, 2015, https://law.stanford.edu/reach-for-the-sun-how-indias-audacious-solar-ambitions-could-make-or-break-its-climate-commitments. 21.  Varun Sivaram, “Can India Save the Warming Planet?” Scientific American (May 2017), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-india-save-the-warming-planet. 22.  “Financing India’s Energy Transition,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance, November 1, 2016, https://about.bnef.com/blog/financing-indias-clean-energy-transition. 23.  Rajesh Kumar Singh and Saket Sundria, “Living in the Dark: 240 Million Indians Have No Electricity,” Bloomberg, January 24, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-24/living-in-the-dark-240-million-indians-have-no-electricity. 24.  

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Stefan Nicola, Weixin Zha, and Lorenzo Totaro, “Solar Age’s First Eclipse Passes with Brief Surge in Power Price,” Bloomberg, March 20, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-20/eclipse-tests-european-power-grid-flooded-by-solar-farms-i7hlfkm0. 6.  Soren Amelang and Jakob Schelandt, “Germany’s Electricity Grid Stable Amid Energy Transition,” Clean Energy Wire, October 24, 2016, https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electricity-grid-stable-amid-energy-transition. 7.  Amy Gahran, “Germany’s Course Correction on Solar Growth,” Greentech Media, November 3, 2016, https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germanys-course-correction-on-solar-growth. 8.  Fraunhofer ISE, “Recent Facts About Photovoltaics in Germany,” Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2017, https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien-en/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/recent-facts-about-photovoltaics-in-germany.pdf. 9.  

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

That reality was reflected in Copenhagen in December 2009 when leaders from 192 countries met for what the Associated Press called “the largest and most important UN climate change conference in history.”21 After two weeks of wrangling and lofty rhetoric, the meeting ended with an eminently predictable result: no legally binding agreement on any reductions in carbon emissions, only a promise to reduce emissions “individually or jointly,” and an agreement to meet again a year later in Mexico City to discuss all of the same contentious issues one more time.22 In short, all of these concerns, from worries that we have reached (or will soon reach) a peak in oil production and are (or will soon be) entering a period of inevitable decline, to the alarmist cries over impending global warming—and the supposed solutions to them—hinge on the belief that the transition away from hydrocarbons to renewable resources can be done quickly, cheaply, and easily. That. Is. Not. True. Tomorrow’s energy sources will look a lot like today’s, because energy transitions are always difficult and lengthy. “There is one thing all energy transitions have in common: they are prolonged affairs that take decades to accomplish,” wrote Vaclav Smil in November 2008. “And the greater the scale of prevailing uses and conversions, the longer the substitutions will take.”23 Smil, the polymath, prolific author on energy issues, and distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, wrote that while a “world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable ... getting there will demand not only high cost but also considerable patience: coming energy transitions will unfold across decades, not years.”24 Indeed, energy transitions unfold slowly and are always under way whether we recognize them or not.

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“And the greater the scale of prevailing uses and conversions, the longer the substitutions will take.”23 Smil, the polymath, prolific author on energy issues, and distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, wrote that while a “world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable ... getting there will demand not only high cost but also considerable patience: coming energy transitions will unfold across decades, not years.”24 Indeed, energy transitions unfold slowly and are always under way whether we recognize them or not. Between 1973 and 2008, the amount of electricity generated in the United States with nuclear reactors increased by more than 800 percent. Nuclear power now accounts for about 20 percent of the electricity generated in America.

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And that’s one of the biggest problems when it comes to energy transitions. We have invested trillions of dollars in the pipelines, wires, storage tanks, and electricity-generation plants that are providing us with the watts that we use to keep the economy afloat. The United States and the rest of the world cannot, and will not, simply jettison all of that investment in order to move to some other form of energy that is more politically appealing. Yes, we will gradually begin moving toward other forms of energy. But that move will be just that: gradual. And for those who doubt just how lengthy energy transitions can be, history offers some illuminating examples.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Kingsmill Bond, 2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming, Carbon Tracker, September 2018, https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/2020-vision-why-you-should-see-the-fossil-fuel-peak-coming/ (accessed March 23, 2019), 31.   7.  Kingsmill Bond, Myths of the Energy Transition: Renewables Are Too Small to Matter, Carbon Tracker, October 30, 2018, https://www.carbontracker.org/myths-of-the-transition-renewables-are-too-small/ (accessed March 23, 2019), 1.   8.  Roger Fouquet, Heat, Power and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services (New York: Edward Elgar, 2008).   9.  Bond, Myths of the Energy Transition, 3–4. 10.  Bond, 2020 Vision, 4. 11.  Ibid., 5. 12.  Ibid., 32. 13.  Bobby Magill, “2019 Outlook: Solar, Wind Could Hit 10 Percent of U.S.

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According to a November 2018 study by Lazard—one of the world’s largest independent investment banks—the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of large solar installations has plummeted to 36 dollars/megawatt hour, while wind has fallen to 29 dollars/megawatt hour, making them “cheaper than the most efficient gas plants, coal plants, and nuclear reactors.”16 “LCOE is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime.”17 Within the next eight years, solar and wind will be far cheaper than fossil fuel energies, forcing a showdown with the fossil fuel industry.18 The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank serving the energy industry, reports that the steep decline in the price of generating solar and wind energy “will inevitably lead to trillions of dollars of stranded assets across the corporate sector and hit petro-states that fail to reinvent themselves,” while “putting trillions at risk for unsavvy investors oblivious to the speed of the unfolding energy transition.”19 “Stranded assets” are all the fossil fuels that will remain in the ground because of falling demand as well as the abandonment of pipelines, ocean platforms, storage facilities, energy generation plants, backup power plants, petrochemical processing facilities, and industries tightly coupled to the fossil fuel culture.

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According to Chairman Liu Zhenya, if we “can firmly grasp the historical opportunity for the Third Industrial Revolution, [it] will largely determine our position in future global competition.”50 In November 2014, President Xi Jinping surprised the world community by announcing his country’s commitment to increase the use of non–fossil fuel energies in primary energy consumption—primarily solar and wind—to 20 percent by 2030.51 Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s (BNEF) annual long-term economic analysis of the world’s power sector has China benefiting from having 62 percent of its electricity being supplied by renewables by 2050.52 This would mean that the majority of energy powering the Chinese economy would be generated at near-zero marginal cost, making China and the European Union the two most productive and competitive commercial spaces in the world. While China followed the EU’s lead in the first generation of the solar and wind energy transition, a visionary Chinese green energy pioneer, Li Hejun, the founder and CEO of Hanergy, leaped ahead in second-generation green energy adoption, becoming the world’s number-one solar thin-film producer. In his 2015 biography, China’s New Energy Revolution, Li Hejun said that he “was deeply moved [by the] powerful set of coordinates and insights” in The Third Industrial Revolution and was particularly struck by the contention that solar energy was “more suitable for future independent and distributed production.”53 In September 2013, Li Hejun, who at the time was also the vice chairman of the powerful All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, invited me to Beijing to share the vision, theory, and practical application of renewable energies—and the role China might play in the next great energy revolution—with twenty of China’s key policy leaders, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

But natural gas reached only 20 percent in the same amount of time. (Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions) Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world’s energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years. This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.

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Judging only by how long previous transitions have taken, “as soon as possible” is a long time away. We have done things like this before—moving from relying on one energy source to another—and it has always taken decades upon decades. (The best books I have read on this topic are Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions and Energy Myths and Realities, which I’m borrowing from here.) Many farmers still have to use ancient techniques, which is one of the reasons they’re trapped in poverty. They deserve modern equipment and approaches, but right now using those tools means producing more greenhouse gases. For most of human history, our main sources of energy were our own muscles, animals that could do things like pull plows, and plants that we burned.

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Fuel sources aren’t the only issue. It also takes us a long time to adopt new types of vehicles. The internal combustion engine was introduced in the 1880s. How long before half of all urban families had a car? Thirty to 40 years in the United States, and 70 to 80 years in Europe. What’s more, the energy transition we need now is being driven by something that has never mattered before. In the past, we’ve moved from one source to another because the new one was cheaper and more powerful. When we stopped burning so much wood and started using more coal, for example, it was because we could get a lot more heat and light from a pound of coal than from a pound of wood.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

The price of solar power has been coming down too, by about 20% every time the rate of installation doubles, and this may well continue for a long time12. The problem is that as the scale goes up, it becomes a lot harder to maintain the growth rate. Already it is starting to fall to around 30% per year. That is still huge, but the declining trend is not good. Sceptics of the solar silver bullet point out that energy transitions of the past – from animals to coal, from steam to internal combustion engines and so on – have taken a long time13. The counter argument is that never before has there been such a globally acknowledged imperative to make a fast energy switch for the sake of humanity, not to mention many other species.

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There could be millions of species of these microscopic organisms, potentially giving us humans a wealth of genetic resources to tweak and develop efficient biofuel resources. However, algae are far from commercialisation, with challenges ranging from species selection (breeding and genetics) to refining and Should we frack? 79 processing of oils26. Exxon invested $100m in this before pulling out. At best it looks too far off to put into energy transition plans. So, to answer the question, biofuels in moderation are not entirely bonkers, but do need treating with a great deal of caution lest they become so. If carefully handled, they can provide a small but worth-having part of the energy mix. If an unregulated free market were allowed to run its course in the transition to a low carbon world they could be a disaster.

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Solar, wind and hydro power don’t have this problem because they are in the form of electricity from the start. This means that if it is electricity that you need, a kilowatt hour of any of these is worth about two and a half kilowatt hours of coal or oil. This mark-up factor gives renewables a huge boost in the early stages of the clean energy transition. A similar mark-up also applies to land vehicles for almost the same reason. The efficiency of electric motors compared to 86 3 ENERGY internal combustion engines means that a unit of electricity can power a car two or three times further than the same energy in the form of liquid hydrocarbon.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

This fits with the lessons that Arnulf Grübler, an academic at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis outside Vienna, has drawn from decades spent studying the history of energy systems, and in particular the ‘energy transitions’ in which one energy technology displaces another; the steam engine replacing the draft animal and the waterwheel, for example. One general principle, he says, is that energy transitions have been slow – they take about a century. Things are different now, say the mainstream environmentalists and the environmentally conscious politicians in the Yes/No camp. Previous energy transitions were for the most part realized with no overarching plan. This one will be deliberate. And there has already been a renewables revolution on which the transition can be built.

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And as far as the end user is concerned, renewable electricity is just another form of electricity – it offers no advantage as a means of powering things, even if generating the electricity that way has various charms. Its benefits are felt at the level of the system, not at the level of the individual buyer. That means a renewable-energy transition will need significant pushing. As with Grübler’s observations about the time transitions take, this points merely to decarbonization being unprecedented, not impossible. But the best example in recent history of an energy transition that governments tried to push through, rather than simply letting users pull, is not very encouraging. Governments in various countries pushed quite hard for a transition to nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s.

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The fuel costs for some renewables, on the other hand, are fixed and very low – wind, sunshine and the tendency of water to flow downhill come for free, and the plants grown to burn as biomass can often be furnished pretty cheaply, too. It is a fine list of benefits. But there is a second lesson from Grübler’s studies of past energy transitions to be confronted. They have, in the main, been driven not by the availability of new ways of providing energy, but by new ways of using it: transitions are pulled by demand, not pushed by supply. Electricity and internal combustion engines were adopted because they allowed people to do things they hadn’t done before, and people demanded those new energy services in ever-greater numbers.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Although its scale is so significant precisely because it will unfold in a multigenerational – and therefore unpredictable – manner, it must be present generations that take decisive action. Yet more than simply an intervention determining the future capacity of our planet to maintain life, the politics of energy transition must also articulate its ambition of bringing limitless energy to the world’s rich and poor alike. That is the prize on offer with solar and wind, almost as much as saving the planet, and should be stated as such when demanding energy transition alongside UBS. Switching to renewable energy won’t just mitigate increasingly chaotic climate systems, it will also deliver greater prosperity for all of us. But while the opportunities are huge, and the political scope for integrating ecology and economic development increasingly clear, there is little time to act.

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Of course, profit wouldn’t be the bottom line, but as John Clancy has written, their returns from investments in overseas equities often prove distinctly underwhelming, which means funds are actively looking for more sustainable and, if necessary, local investments. In keeping with the new ethos of municipal protectionism, these banks would be similarly restricted in their lending both by amount and geographical area. What is more, their remit would be to maximise social value as well as returns, focusing on energy transition and accelerating specific sectors as well as financing a new wave of worker-owned business. The positive benefits of growing the cooperative and worker-owned economy are well documented, from helping deal with low productivity to under-investment in small and medium-sized enterprises – not to mention reducing economic and regional inequality.

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In the Global North, where mass decarbonisation will start, this will be far simpler to administer as many countries have already hit a ceiling in terms of population and per capita energy use. What is more, they tend to enjoy robust state institutions and a significant base of renewable energy capacity. The worker-led economy will be financed by locally based and geographically restricted institutions. But because of the shortened timeframe, financing energy transition will be the responsibility for much larger National Energy Investment Banks (NEIBs) operating through regional hubs and capitalised – depending on the country – to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. Alongside financing renewable energy generation and storage for public buildings, homes and workplaces, with this new infrastructure being democratically owned at the local level, these banks will also offer credit for local energy cooperatives.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Figure 7.3 Approximate estimates chart the shares contributed by major fuels to the Old World’s primary energy supply during the past 3,000 years (top). Reasonably accurate (except for the consumption of traditional biomass fuels) post-1850 statistics reveal successive waves of slow energy transitions (bottom): by 2010 crude oil was the leading fossil fuel, but coal and natural gas were not far behind. Plotted from data in UNO (1956) and Smil (2010a). My reconstruction of global energy transitions shows coal (replacing wood) reaching 5% of the global market around 1840, 10% by 1855, 15% by 1865, 20% by 1870, 25% by 1875, 33% by 1885, 40% by 1895, and 50% by 1900 (Smil 2010a). The sequence of years needed to reach these milestones was 15–25–30–35–45–55–60.

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Maximum capacities are plotted from prime mover–specific sources cited in this book. Figure 7.3 Approximate estimates chart the shares contributed by major fuels to the Old World’s primary energy supply during the past 3,000 years (top). Reasonably accurate (except for the consumption of traditional biomass fuels) post-1850 statistics reveal successive waves of slow energy transitions (bottom): by 2010 crude oil was the leading fossil fuel, but coal and natural gas were not far behind. Plotted from data in UNO (1956) and Smil (2010a). Figure 7.4 Maximum capacities of prime movers predating 1700 and those introduced during the past three centuries. The largest turbogenerators are now six orders of magnitude (nearly two million times) more powerful than heavy draft horses, the most powerful animate prime movers.

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Before 1950 gasoline and diesel engines became the dominant prime movers in transportation and steam turbines in the large-scale generation of electricity (Smil 2005); the widespread use of gas turbines (stationary for electricity generation or powering jetliners and ships) came only after 1960 (Smil 2010a). Recent studies of energy transitions demonstrate many commonalities governing these gradual shifts and identify major factors that have promoted or impeded the process (Malanima 2006; Fouquet 2010; Smil 2010a; Pearson and Foxon 2012; Wrigley 2010, 2013). These have ranged from technical imperatives, with prolonged periods of experimentation followed by a peak growth phase and upscaling (Wilson 2012), to some considerably earlier and faster transitions in small energy consumers (Rubio and Folchi 2012).

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

So the overall message of this book is not necessarily one of doom — but it is one of inevitable change and the need for deliberate engagement with the process of change on a scale and speed beyond anything in previous human history. Crucially: we must focus on and use the intangibles that are not peaking (such as ingenuity and cooperation) to address the problems arising from our overuse of substances that are. Our One Great Task: The Energy Transition As we have seen, just a few core trends have driven many others in producing the global problems we see today, and those core trends (including population growth and increasing consumption rates) themselves constellate around our ever-burgeoning use of fossil fuels. Thus, a conclusion of startling plainness presents itself: our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels — and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible.

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Again, my thesis: many problems rightly deserve attention, but the problem of our dependence on fossil fuels is central to human survival, and so as long as that dependence continues to any significant extent we must make its reduction the centerpiece of all our collective efforts — whether they are efforts to feed ourselves, resolve conflicts, or maintain a functioning economy. But this can be formulated in another, more encouraging, way. If we do focus all of our collective efforts on the central task of energy transition, we may find ourselves contributing to the solution of a wide range of problems that would be much harder to solve if we confronted each one in isolation. With a coordinated and voluntary reduction in fossil fuel consumption, we could see substantial progress in reducing many forms of environmental pollution.

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Perhaps unemployment will have to rise to 10 or 20 or 40 percent, with families begging for food in the streets, before embattled policy makers begin to reconsider their commitment to industrial agriculture. But even in that case, as in Cuba, all may depend upon having another option already articulated. Without that, we will be left to the worst possible outcome. Rather than consigning ourselves to that fate, let us accept the current challenge — the next great energy transition — as an opportunity not to try vainly to preserve business as usual (the American Way of Life that, we are told, is not up for negotiation), but rather to re-imagine human culture from the ground up, using our intelligence and passion for the welfare of the next generations, and the integrity of nature’s web, as our primary guides. 3 (post-) Hydrocarbon Aesthetics THOUGH I COULD HARDLY call myself a professional violinist these days, I still get the occasional call for a wedding or other special function, and I cherish these increasingly rare opportunities to work alongside competent players.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

As energy demand continues to rise, material extraction for renewables will become all the more aggressive – and the more we grow, the worse it will get. Even after achieving a full energy transition, to keep the global economy growing at projected rates would mean doubling the total global stock of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries every thirty or forty years, for ever. It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global South. Parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia are likely to become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonisation.

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And natural gas is less intensive still.17 As the global economy has come to rely more on these less polluting fuels, one might think that emissions would begin to decline. This has happened in a number of high-income nations, but not on a global scale. Why? Because GDP growth is driving total energy demand up at such a rapid pace that these new fuels aren’t replacing the older ones, they are being added on top of them. The shift to oil and gas hasn’t been an energy transition, but an energy addition. The same thing is happening right now with renewable energy. Over the past couple of decades there has been extraordinary growth in renewable energy capacity, which is worth celebrating. In some nations, renewables have begun to displace fossil fuels. But on a global scale, growth in energy demand is swamping growth in renewable capacity.

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If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies – buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way, a tragedy that is already unfolding.22 This is important. Progressives who promote the idea of a Green New Deal or other plans for rapid energy transition also tend to promote values of social and ecological justice. If we want the transition to be just, we need to recognise that we cannot increase our use of renewable energy indefinitely. Some hope that nuclear power will help us get around these problems – and surely it will need to be part of the mix.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Quitting Paris, in what hedge fund manager Tom Steyer called a “traitorous act of war against the American people,” turns the United States into the biggest winner from Paris.2 Access to cheap energy gives American businesses and workers a colossal competitive advantage in world markets as other nations increasingly burden themselves with high-cost, unreliable wind and solar energy. What is it about wind and solar? Sanctimonious European leaders parading their moral superiority overlook Germany’s epic climate fail. The fall in German power-station emissions stalled and then began to reverse as wind and solar capacity increased. Germany’s Energiewende (Energy Transition) is reckoned to cost up to €1 trillion ($1.12 trillion) by the end of the 2030s. Yet the big falls in carbon dioxide emissions happened in the wake of German reunification (cost: €1.3 trillion) as East Germany’s inefficient, communist-era economy was closed down. What they do tells us more than what they say.

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Germany’s chief solar lobbyist and architect of the renewable energy law was inspired by an early-twentieth-century scientist, Wilhelm Ostwald. Much as modern environmentalists do, Ostwald believed that society’s energy consumption should be no greater than what the Earth receives each year from the sun (Chapter 12). The renewable energy transition would cost the equivalent of a scoop of ice cream on monthly electricity bills, the Greens claimed. Nine years after the scoop of ice cream came a revised price tag—€1 trillion ($1.13 trillion). Soaring electricity bills led to a consumer backlash. Renewables turned out to be an engine of financial destruction, costing shareholders of the three quoted German utility companies nearly €70 billion ($79b) and consumers €269 billion ($304b) in higher electricity bills.

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Fischer wanted an “entrepreneurial left” to make profits from a steadily growing environmental sector of the economy.10 The 1998 election that brought Fischer and the Greens into the federal government was not, however, a mandate to turn Germany green. In part, Germany’s Energiewende—normally translated as Energy Transition, though Wende implies something big and significant*—was the product of a specific set of circumstances. In part, it was the outcome of a small group acting more like a revolutionary cell than a democratic party to bring about the most far-reaching changes to the electricity system since Edison first flicked the switch that brought electric light from the Pearl Street generator.

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

The US Census for 1930 found three times as many registered Percherons in America as the other four draft breeds combined. Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans. Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers.

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They estimated as well, “on the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident,” that “nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 [gigatons of CO2-equivalent] emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury [2050], depending on which fuel it replaces.”45 This projection, needless to say, assumes that nuclear power will continue to find political support as one component of the largest energy transition in human history, the ultimate transition, the one the world faces today as it confronts global climate change. Or can renewables save the day? * * * I. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who promoted a pseudoscientific theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

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With support from the Club of Rome, IIASA was established in 1972 as a think tank that might bridge the increasing digital (and continuing political) divide between the United States and Europe and the Soviet bloc countries. Marchetti’s earlier work had been in nuclear power technology, including reactor design and nuclear waste processing. His interest at IIASA has been energy, especially modeling the regularities of energy transitions. An informative graph based on research he and his colleagues pursued in the late 1970s drew my attention. In an autobiographical sketch, Marchetti writes that he was asked when he joined IIASA in 1973 to find “a simple and predictive model describing energy markets for the last century or so.”

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 (British Petroleum, 2020); UK Government, Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics 2020 (UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2020); R. Fouquet, Heat, Power and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services (Cheltanham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2008); R. Fouquet, “Consumer Surplus from Energy Transitions, Energy Journal 39 (2018); V. Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010); H. Ritchie, Energy. Our World in Data (2014), https://ourworldindata.org/energy. 6. T. Cowan, “Want to Help Fight Climate Change? Have More Children,” Bloomberg (2019), https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-14/want-to-help-fight-climate-change-have-more-children; M.

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BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 (British Petroleum, 2020). 20. BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 (British Petroleum, 2020); V. Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010); H. Ritchie, Our World in Data (2014), https://ourworldindata.org/energy. 21. R. Fouquet, Heat, Power and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2008); V. Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010); H. Ritchie, “Energy,” Our World in Data (2014), https://ourworldindata.org/energy; BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 (British Petroleum, 2020); International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics (International Energy Agency, 2014); “The Pandas Development Team,” Pandas-dev/pandas: Pandas, Zenodo, 2020, doi:10.5281/zenodo.3509134; J.

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BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 (British Petroleum, 2019); IEA, World Energy Outlook 2019 (IEA, 2019); A. Kahan, “EIA Projects Nearly 50% Increase in World Energy Usage by 2050, Led by Growth in Asia” (US Energy Information Administration, 2019), https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41433#; V. Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010); H. Ritchie, Our World in Data (2014), https://ourworldindata.org/energy. 10. BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 (British Petroleum, 2020). 11. BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 (British Petroleum, 2020). 12.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Many who write on the subject of energy policy forget that until wind turbines and solar PV panels (the focus of Chapter 7) can produce energy at a cost equal to or lower than those of fossil fuels they will likely continue to be marginal technologies that cannot accelerate the transition so badly needed to mitigate climate change. Understanding how businesses transform government support mechanisms into lower-cost, higher-performance products through the innovation process is typically the ‘missing link’ in discussions of energy policy, and this missing link can undermine not just our desire to push an energy transition – but to do it with high-road investments in innovation. State support for clean technologies must continue until they overcome the sunk-cost advantage of incumbent technologies, and these sunk costs are a century long in some cases. That is why much of this chapter focuses on supply-side support mechanisms (although I of course also discuss crucial demand-side policies).

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Funding a Green Industrial Revolution First, what is a ‘green industrial revolution’? There are many ways to conceptualize a green industrial revolution, but the basic premise is that the current global industrial system must be radically transformed into one that is environmentally sustainable. Sustainability will require an energy transition that places non-polluting clean energy technologies at the fore. It moves us away from dependence on finite fossil and nuclear fuels and favours ‘infinite’ sources of fuel – the ‘renewable’ fuels that originate from the sun. Building a sustainable industrial system also requires technologies for recyclable materials, advanced waste management, better agricultural practices, stronger energy efficiency measures across sectors, and water desalinization infrastructures (to address resource and water scarcity, for instance).

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It is also an issue that can be partially ‘solved’ with the aid of non-renewable technologies like nuclear power or carbon sequestration. Is that really what we want? Deployment of resources meant to facilitate the innovative process must occur alongside the courage to set a technological direction and follow it. Leaving direction setting to ‘the market’ only ensures that the energy transition will be put off until fossil prices reach economy-wrecking highs. Pushing – Not Stalling – Green Development The history of US government investment in innovation, from the Internet to nanotech, shows that it has been critical for the government to have a hand in both basic and applied research.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

Chapter 11 The Green Copper Tycoon 1 Robert Friedland, keynote speech at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference in Toronto, March 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-FbTqJW6eg. 2 Gates, B., How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (London, Allen Lane, 2021), p. 41. 3 Ibid., p. 79. 4 See Koelsch, J., ‘Chinese firms position for an energy transition copper supercycle’, Baker Institute Blog, 5 April 2021, http://blog.bakerinstitute.org/2021/04/05/chinese-firms-position-for-an-energy-transition-copper-supercycle/: ‘For instance, every thousand battery electric vehicles (BEVs) produced can require approximately 83 metric tonnes (MT) of copper (well more than triple conventional vehicles at 23 MT), while wind turbines incorporate 3.6 MT of copper per megawatt (MW) of output, photovoltaic cells 4-to-5 MT per MW, and flywheels for pumped hydropower 0.3-to-4 MT per MW.’ 5 Azadi, M., Northey, S.A., Ali, S.H. et al., ‘Transparency on greenhouse gas emissions from mining to enable climate change mitigation’, Nature Geoscience, 13 (2020), 100–4. 6 ‘CRU/CESCO-WRAPUP 1 – As copper projects rev up, deficit still seen’, Reuters, 8 April 2010. 7 Lipton, E., Searcey, D., ‘How the US lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy’, New York Times, 21 November 2021. 8 Isaacson, W., Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 37. 9 Brennan, The Bite in the Apple, p. 85. 10 Ibid. 11 Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 39. 12 McNish, The Big Score, p. 26. 13 ‘Controversial investor makes Burma centrepiece of Asian plan’, Inter Press Service News Agency, 10 December 1996. 14 Larmer, M., ‘At the crossroads: mining and political change on the Katangese-Zambian copperbelt’, Oxford Handbooks Online, July 2016, www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935369.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935369-e-20?

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A man who had led Glencore’s coal business in Asia and Australia, building it up through acquisitions, had vowed to not make any more in coal. It also went against his beliefs that coal would still be needed in the future, in countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Vietnam. ‘What transition?’ Glencore’s chairman Tony Hayward had asked at a FT conference the previous year in response to a question about the energy transition. The Glencore men told things as they were, not how they hoped them to be. It was an attitude similar to the first lines of V.S. Naipaul’s book, A Bend in the River, about the Congo: ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ Now for the first time since Marc Rich founded the company, it was publicly making a commitment to the planet’s well-being.

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Gécamines said all that money could be traced in its accounts, ‘dollar by dollar,’ he said. ‘Their [NGOs’] only objective is the destabilisation of the DRC to serve without hindrance, in the name of pseudo-democratic ideals, foreign demand for cobalt, coltan, copper, gallium, germanium and other strategic minerals that the world so badly needs to ensure its energy transition,’ Yuma said. 9 Blood Cobalt ‘No one wants to touch ASM [artisanal mining] with a bargepole.’ Head of procurement at a carmaker ‘The economic history of Congo is one of improbably lucky breaks. But also of improbably great misery. As a result, not a drop of the fabulous profits trickled down to the larger part of the population.’

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

It could inform specific interventions at the scale of workplaces and building workers’ collective capacities, such as: the incorporation of carbon-reduction strategies within collective agreements through clauses on reductions of the carbon footprint, energy committees, and adjustment plans for jobs affected by climate change; workers’ plans forged to extend best practices for carbon reduction in labour processes and between workplaces; building democratic planning capacities for plant conversion to sustain capital equipment, workers’ skills, and community infrastructure as ecologically responsible production norms are internalized; and participatory planning structures built at the level of local wards for carbon reduction and ecological clean-up in neighbourhoods. An energy transition extends beyond particular labour processes, and the fossil fuel branches of production, to the energy sector as a whole.22 In providing the general conditions facilitating production and consumption, the energy sector tends to be both highly concentrated and monopolistic, as well as highly decentralized and diversified. An energy transition entails concerns not only with the phasing out of fossil fuel production (and immediate limits on extreme energy, such as the tar sands) and the reversal of the neo-liberal privatization of power supplies.

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In a striking example of market fetishism, more prices and more markets are proposed. Nature and pollution are put forward as new zones of accumulation, with the state facilitating the creation of markets and property rights where none existed before. With more complete and transparent markets, capitalist growth will be “greener,” and an energy transition from fossil fuels towards renewables will “naturally” occur via firm responses to more efficient price signals. “Green jobs” will follow in due course. The market imperatives that drive capital accumulation and carbon emissions are now offered up, without any sense of paradox or doubt, as the solution to the climate crisis.

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But this should not be exaggerated (as renewables producers do), as this is still quite capital-intensive production. A shift to renewable energy is a solution to neither the general problem of unemployment in capitalism, nor to the employment instability resulting from climate change. The political imaginary of a climate justice movement cannot be confined, therefore, to a market-led energy transition, whether spurred by further institutional coordination or not. It can become a vital example of societal political alliances co-joining in programmatic alternatives. At the scale of the workplace, this struggle has formed around the notion of a just transition. As noted above, this is set narrowly as retraining policies for workers as fossil fuel extraction is phased down and workers shift to indeterminate prospects elsewhere in the economy.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

But unlike CARES in 2020 or the Rescue Plan of March 2020, which disbursed trillions in a matter of months, these are long-term programs stretching out over a horizon of eight to ten years. Aspirationally, before haggling with Congress began, they amounted to roughly 2 percent of American GDP per annum. Spread across priorities ranging from childcare to the energy transition, that was far too little to effect a transformation of American society or to put the United States on course to climate stabilization. Especially with regard to the energy transition, they appeared to rest on optimistic assumptions about the private investment that would be triggered by modest public stimulus combined with regulatory change. When it came to long-term policy, Bidenomics was a continuation of the public-private, blended finance, Frankenstein policies that had been so typical of the crisis-fighting in 2020.

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In fact, it was increasingly clear that the gods, at least as represented by the nature goddess Gaia, were at odds with economic growth full stop.15 Climate change, which had once been a preoccupation of the environmental movement alone, became an emblem for a wider imbalance between nature and humanity. Talk of “Green Deals” and of the energy transitions was everywhere. And then, in January 2020, the news broke from Beijing. China was facing a full-blown epidemic of a novel coronavirus. It was by that point already worse than the SARS outbreak, which in 2003 had sent shivers down the spine. This was the natural “blowback” that environmental campaigners had long warned us about, but whereas climate change caused us to stretch our minds to a planetary scale and set a timetable in terms of decades, the virus was microscopic and all-pervasive and was moving at a pace of days and weeks.

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Member states would access their allocation of funding by submitting national recovery and resilience plans to the European Commission, which would pass them for approval to the European Council.37 Those plans were expected to meet the priorities of the Green Deal. The EU would use the crisis to supercharge a program of energy transition. Thirty percent of the combined EU budget and Next Generation EU package, €555 billion over 2021–2027, was to be directed toward climate policy.38 For the EU, it marked a moment of relaunch.39 Since the climax of the eurozone crisis in 2012, the lack of progress on deeper integration had been demoralizing.

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of people who use the term certainly do not mean it in that sense. That said, people who use the term would be well advised to explain what they do and do not mean by it. 6 THE ROLE OF CLEAN ENERGY This chapter will focus on the energy technologies most widely discussed for a transition to a low carbon economy. It will explore the scale of the energy transition needed to explain why some energy technologies are considered likely to be major contributors to the solution and others not. What kind of changes in our energy system would a 2°C target require? To have a significant chance of keeping total warming below 2°C, we need to cut global emissions of carbon dioxide and other major greenhouse gas (GHG) pollutants by more than 50% by mid-century.

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It is ironic, as one of the Stanford authors noted, “At the moment, Germany makes up about 40% of the installed market, but sunshine in Germany isn’t that great. So from a system perspective, it may be better to deploy PV systems where there is more sunshine.” Germany has done the world a great favor by investing so heavily in its renewable energy transition, which has helped to bring down the cost of solar energy for every country. However, solar power is considerably more cost-effective in places where it is sunnier longer during both the day and year, such as the Southwest United States and the Middle East. This is another reason we can expect the amount of solar PV generated to continue its rapid increase.

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These include extracting energy from the tides and from waves, as well as ocean thermal energy conversion, which uses the temperature difference between warm shallow water and cooler deep water to generate electricity. Currently, these are niche technologies whose future potential is unknown, but at this point, they do not seem significant relative to the scale of the energy transition required to stabilize at or near 2°C. Finally, fusion remains a popular long-term hope for carbon-free power, as it has for a half-century now. Re-creating the sun’s power source on Earth in a practical and cost-effective fashion has proved intractable even after decades of research. We currently do not know whether practical or affordable fusion is possible.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The cities of Frankfurt and Munich, which had never sold off their energy grids, had already joined the transition and pledged to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and 2025, respectively. But Hamburg and Berlin, which had both gone the privatization route, were lagging behind. And this was a central argument for proponents of taking back Hamburg’s grid: it would allow them to get off coal and nuclear and go green.5 Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition—particularly the speed at which it is being achieved, as well as the ambition of its future targets (the country is aiming for 55–60 percent renewables by 2035).6 The weaknesses of the program have also been hotly debated, particularly the question of whether the decision to phase out nuclear energy has led to a resurgence of coal (more on that next chapter).

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Yet in the process of trying to achieve that goal, these residents discovered that they had no choice but to knock down one of the core ideological pillars of the free market era: that privately run services are always superior to public ones. It was an accidental discovery very similar to the one Ontario residents made when it became clear that their green energy transition was being undermined by free trade commitments signed long ago. Though rarely mentioned in climate policy discussions, there is a clear and compelling relationship between public ownership and the ability of communities to get off dirty energy. Many of the countries with the highest commitments to renewable energy are ones that have managed to keep large parts of their electricity sectors in public (and often local) hands, including the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway.

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Current experience from around the world, including the markets of Europe, also shows that private companies and electricity markets cannot deliver investments in renewables on the scale required.”16 Citing various instances of governments turning to the public sector to drive their transitions (including the German experience), as well as examples of large corporate-driven renewable projects that were abandoned by their investors midstream, the Greenwich research team concludes, “An active role for government and public sector utilities is thus a far more important condition for developing renewable energy than any expensive system of public subsidies for markets or private investors.”17 Sorting out what mechanisms have the best chance of pulling off a dramatic and enormously high-stakes energy transition has become particularly pressing of late. That’s because it is now clear that—at least from a technical perspective—it is entirely possible to rapidly switch our energy systems to 100 percent renewables. In 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Mark A.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The countries and companies that reap the benefits will be those that are ahead of the curve and shape the transition, as opposed to those that seek to hold on to the fading past. It is incumbent on governments to protect and help those who are collateral damage in the energy transition, for example coal miners, but not those that choose to impede it, like some powerful corporations. The amount of time available to make the energy transition is vanishing. To achieve it, we need all the tools in the toolbox. Technology alone is unlikely to solve the problem, and technologies also come with a variety of risks and challenges of their own. Behavioural change in isolation is unlikely to solve the problem, but ignoring it makes the challenge even harder.

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Electric cars are a stopgap, in one sense, until the moment when we’ve built decent systems of electrically powered public transit. If we use cheap renewable energy to build ever bigger homes and stuff them with ever more junk, then we’ll still use up the world’s farms and forests, still kill off its animals. An energy transition may be our most immediate crisis, but it’s far from the only peril we face. Still, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential of this moment. One way to think of it is: we’ve now reached the point when we need to stop burning things on the surface of the Earth. We shouldn’t be digging down to find coal and gas and oil and setting them on fire – that’s dirty, dangerous and depressing.

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In practice, countries must implement whatever policies and incentives that will work for them, even if they are far from perfect. While such a mosaic of policies and incentives may be the nightmare of economists, the climate system does not allow us the time to find the perfect policy solution that is acceptable to all. The energy transition is also going to inflict pain on some while bringing rewards to others. This is unavoidable, but the world is full of examples of these transformative shifts. From horses to cars, typewriters to computers, landlines to mobile phones, petrol to electric cars, fossil power to renewable power. Many of these transitions are not driven by policy but by technology and society.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

David Stern, “Energy Mix and Energy Intensity,” Stochastic Trend, posted April 17, 2010, stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/04/energy-mix-and-energy-intensity.html. 20. Cutler J. Cleveland, “Energy Quality, Net Energy and the Coming Energy Transition,” in Frontiers in Ecological Economic Theory and Application, Jon D. Erickson and John M. Gowdy, eds. (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007), pp. 268–284. 21. Cleveland, “Energy Quality, Net Energy, and the Coming Energy Transition,” 7; Kenneth S. Deffeyes, chapter 3 in Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); David I. Stern, “Energy and Economic Growth in the USA: A Multivariate Approach,” Energy Economics 15, no.2 (1993), pp. 137–150. 22.

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Of course, this is not to say that all activities will be localized, that trade will disappear, or that there will be no specialization. The point is simply that the recent extremes achieved in the trends toward specialization and globalization cannot be sustained and will be reversed. How far we will go toward being local generalists depends on how we handle the energy transition of the 21st century — or, in other words, how much of technological civilization we can preserve and adapt. The near-religious belief that economic growth depends not on energy and resources, but solely on increasing innovation, efficiency, trade, and division of labor, can sometimes lead economists to say silly things.

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Cleveland, “Energy Quality,” The Encyclopedia of Earth (online). 23. In 2009, the US imported nearly $300 billion in consumer goods from China. For information on the trade balance between the two nations see US Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Statistics, census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/. 24. Cleveland, “Energy Quality, Net Energy, and the Coming Energy Transition.” 25. David Murphy and Charles A. S. Hall, “EROI, Insidious Feedbacks, and the End of Economic Growth,” pre-publication, 2010. 26. Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use — The New Report to Rome (Sydney, AU: Allen & Unwin, 1998). 27.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

It is no surprise, then, that we are seeing the emergence of localised currency initiatives seeking to reappropriate money as a common good and reattach it to the ethical and community principles shared by its users. Here we can take the example of carbon currency. In connecting money to the major challenge of the energy transition, carbon currency constitutes a different, more global means of rehabilitating money in a way that enables it to serve the common good. Part II The Historical Trajectories of Money In Part I, we saw that money is a total social phenomenon. This has been true throughout history.

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These mechanisms are tied to the official monetary system, so there is no need for the monetary authority to provide specific regulation in order for them to be properly structured. Their development benefits from a collective learning process, which draws lessons from past experiences that posed problems of fraud and inflation. Such was the case of the local currency initiatives taken in Argentina.15 Beyond Local Currencies: The Monetary Financing of the Energy Transition Taking action against global warming and emerging from economic stagnation are the two urgent tasks of our time. The public authorities – especially in Europe – are addressing these as if they were totally separate problems. And up until now, they have failed on both counts. On the one hand, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s mean projection tells us that the world is on course for a 4°C rise in temperatures by the end of the century, and there is a non-negligible possibility of an extreme risk of around 6°C.

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Finally, and most importantly, this meant that profits were monopolised by financial intermediaries and the services associated with them (which is to say, all manner of consultancy firms and law offices). The planetary challenge of the new industrial revolution – both the second phase of IT innovation and the energy transition necessary to meet the threats of climate change – consists in placing finance at the service of the economy. Finance must be deployed in the interests of a massive new wave of productive investment at the global level. The principle guiding this new age in societies’ development must be the promotion of the commons.

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

As importantly, and this is not something extensively discussed by Smil, we will need no new physical infrastructure in the form of tanks, storage caverns and pipes for storing and moving these zero carbon fuels. Smil makes the correct assertion that energy transitions normally need new networks, meaning such things as pipelines and electric grids. One of the most positive aspects of THE SWITCH is that the cost of this will be tiny in the case of the move to PV. It will be the first energy transition that has ever occurred that does not require a new distribution network. Equally important, for poorer countries with weak or nonexistent electricity grids there will be no need to build a large infrastructure for electricity distribution.

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Combined with eight times as much PV, this would, over the full year, have given the country about twice as much power as it needs. This may be the right thing to do, but covering the winter months by hugely investing in wind will approximately double the cost to Germany of the remainder of its energy transition. What might we do instead to provide stored power? The four main storage options The best way of providing storage of months’ worth of energy is either to use plants and trees as the source of seasonal storage or to convert electricity into hydrogen in periods of substantial surplus, possibly then using the gas to make storable fuels, either methane or liquids.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

., p. 63. 3 Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History, p. 6. 4 Annie Kelly, “Apple and Google Named in US Lawsuit over Congolese Child Cobalt Mining Deaths,” Guardian, December 16, 2019, Theguardian.com. 5 Elsa Dominish, Sven Teske, and Nick Florin, Responsible Minerals Sourcing for Renewable Energy, report prepared for Earthworks by the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, 2019, Earthworks.org. 6 Siddharth Kara, “I Saw the Unbearable Grief Inflicted on Families by Cobalt Mining. I Pray for Change,” Guardian, December 16, 2019, Theguardian.com. 7 Kirsten Hund et al., “Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition,” The World Bank, 2020, Worldbank.org. 8 “Turning Down The Heat: Can We Mine Our Way out of the Climate Crisis?,” Mining Watch Canada, November 2020, Miningwatch.ca. 9 “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” International Energy Agency, May 2021, Iea.org. 10 Ibid. 11 Dominish, Teske, and Florin, “Responsible Minerals Sourcing for Renewable Energy.” 12 “Mineral Commodity Summaries 2021,” U.S.

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For example, 70 percent of the mines controlled by the six largest mining companies are in regions without sufficient water.7 While electric vehicles are not the only reason that resource demand is increasing, MiningWatch Canada estimated that without significant changes in how we organize transportation networks, “battery storage for electric vehicles is currently projected to be the main driver of additional metals and materials needed for the energy transition.”8 To that point, the International Energy Agency reported in 2020 that meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement to keep warming well below 2ºC will cause total mineral demand to quadruple by 2040, but the distribution of that demand is not uniform across different technologies. Electric vehicles are estimated to account for a significant majority of the increased demand, but most of it—about 80 percent—will be for passenger and light commercial vehicles.9 While the increased mineral intensity does not mean that electric vehicles generate more emissions than conventional vehicles, the significant proportion of demand coming from passenger vehicles illustrates why we cannot just replace everything that was once powered by fossil fuels with equivalent products powered by batteries.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

“Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800.” European Review of Economic History 4, no. 1: 1–25. ———. 2009. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. “Anthropocenic Poetics: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age.” In “Energy Transitions in History: Global Cases of Continuity and Change,” edited by Richard W. Unger. Special issue of Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 2013, no. 2: 11–15. Altieri, Miguel. 1999. “Applying Agroecology to Enhance the Productivity of Peasant Farming Systems in Latin America.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 1: 197–217.

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“Meat’s Large Water Footprint: Why Raising Livestock and Poultry for Meat Is So Resource-Intensive.” Food Tank, December 16. http://foodtank.com/news/2013/12/why-meat-eats-resources. Oram, Richard. 2013. “Arrested Development? Energy Crises, Fuel Supplies, and the Slow March to Modernity in Scotland, 1450–1850.” In Energy Transitions in History: Global Cases of Continuity and Change, edited by Richard W. Unger, 17–24. Munich: Rachel Carson Centre. Ormrod, David. 2003. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orren, Karen. 1991.

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The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slicher van Bath, Bernard Hendrik, and O. Ordish. 1963. The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850. London: Arnold. Smil, Vaclav. 1999. “Detonator of the Population Explosion.” Nature 400, no. 6743: 415. ———. 2010. Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Smith, Adam. (1759) 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, Daniel Scott. 1993. “The Curious History of Theorizing about the History of the Western Nuclear Family.” Social Science History 17, no. 3: 325–53.

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Energy experts and environmentalists praised the political genius of the government and looked forward to the steady increases contemplated by the schedule of tax rates in the years ahead. Few expected the social unrest that was about to come.19 Because the planned rise in carbon tax revenues had not been accompanied either by additional compensatory mechanisms to offset the burden on low- and middle-income households or by a significant increase in energy transition investments, however, millions of households had no low-carbon transport or heating alternatives. In the absence of any meaningful financial assistance, rising carbon tax rates were bound to trigger popular discontent. This is what finally happened in 2018, when the new center-right government of Emmanuel Macron ratcheted up the carbon tax as part of a broader plan to scrap the wealth tax and reduce tax rates on capital incomes.

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The French example might usefully serve as a case study of how not to reform taxation in the twenty-first century. If governments do not develop comprehensive programs that will help working-class households adapt to new tax and regulatory environments and ensure that all social groups contribute their fair share to energy transition efforts, environmental policies are likely to be opposed, sometimes by violent means. The reality is that there are other courses of action available to us. In Indonesia, as we have seen, an adroit combination of energy price increases and investments in social security made it possible to secure public support for the measure—the opposite of what happened in France in 2018.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

We were inspired by these models—and by the hundreds of thousands of jobs they have created—but we were equally inspired by examples in the United States, where, through networks like the Climate Justice Alliance, low-income communities of color have been fighting to make sure the places that have been most polluted and neglected benefit first from a large-scale green energy transition. In Canada, the same patterns are clear: our collective reliance on dirty energy over the past couple of hundred years has taken its highest toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people, overwhelmingly Indigenous and immigrant. That’s whose lands have been stolen and poisoned by mining. That’s who gets the most polluting refineries and power plants in their neighborhoods. So in addition to calling for “energy democracy” on the German model, we placed reparative justice at the center of the energy transition, calling for Indigenous and other front-line communities (such as immigrant neighborhoods where coal plants have fouled the air) to be first in line to receive public funds to own and control their own green energy projects—with the jobs, profits, and skills staying in those communities.

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Over the past decade, the German government has treated the green economy as the main way to revive its manufacturing sector. In the process, it has created 400,000 jobs, and now 30 percent of the country’s energy comes from renewables. And Germany has the strongest economy in Europe by far. The energy transition there is incomplete—Germany remains excessively reliant on coal—and its government has inflicted merciless austerity on other countries while choosing another course for itself. But if the US had followed Germany’s domestic example, it would have been so far along the road to a renewables-based economy that it would have been impossible for Trump to undo—no matter how many executive orders he signed.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Not to mention the fossil fuel−gulping corporations they ran. Read felt it was worth a shot, though. If just a tiny fraction of the world’s super-rich would join a “Billionaires Rebellion,” it could be game-changing. In a private meeting hosted by Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the forum’s Energy Transitions Commission, Read addressed some of the world’s leading industrialists, including a high-ranking executive at an oil major. Civilization, he said, faced the risk of collapse if immediate action wasn’t taken to sharply reduce carbon emissions. In the meantime, he said, the world needed to take adaptive measures to prepare for the destructive forces to come—the superstorms, the rising sea levels, the scorched crops.

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Rather, they’re caused by “endogenous” events that take place inside the market, strategies reacting to strategies, cascades causing cascades—earthquakes triggering earthquakes. Similar phenomena could be found in book sales, species extinctions, social unrest, and more. He wrapped up his speech with a nod toward a looming problem he said gave him the greatest concern in the world today—the clean-energy transition away from fossil fuels. Sornette said he believed much of the talk behind efforts to decarbonize the global economy was an “aspirational infantile fantasy” that didn’t take into account the fact that the project was an energy replacement, rather than an addition of new energy sources. It was a monumental effort on a scale of World War II, taking place at a time when vast regions of the world were clamoring for more energy.

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The paper went viral https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy. Vice magazine called it https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51857722. “These are profound economic shifts” https://www.wsj.com/articles/green-finance-goes-mainstream-lining-up-trillions-behind-global-energy-transition-11621656039. A 2022 study by a group of Oxford scientists https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X. A harbinger of the shift https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/larry-fink-ceo-letter. “All the cool kids are doing carbon capture” Jinjoo Lee, “Exxon’s Well-Timed Hop onto Carbon-Capture Bandwagon,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxons-well-timed-hop-onto-carbon-capture-bandwagon-11612785602.

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

5.Fusion Technology 5.1Magnets 5.2Plasma Heating and Current Drive 5.2.1Inductive 5.2.2Neutral beam 5.2.3Electromagnetic wave 5.3First Wall 5.4Divertors 5.5Tritium Breeding Blanket 5.6Vacuum Vessel 5.7Diagnostics 5.8Radioactive Waste and Remote Maintenance 5.9Generating Net Electricity PART 3THE STATE OF THE ART 6.The Past: Fusion Breakthroughs 6.11920s: Understanding Stars 6.21950s: A Kick-Start for Fusion 6.31960s: Superconducting Magnets 6.41960s: The Tokamak 6.51970s: Bootstrap Current 6.61980s: H-Mode 6.71980s: Plasma Shaping 6.81990s: Deuterium–Tritium Fuel 6.92000s: Supercomputers 7.The Present: ITER 7.1ITER’s Goals 7.2ITER’s Strategy 7.2.1Heating systems 7.2.2Divertor 7.2.3First wall 7.3ITER’s Schedule and Cost 7.4Transition to DEMO 7.5Other Things to be Excited for 8.The Future: Designing a Tokamak Power Plant 8.1Power Plant Design from First Principles 8.2Maximizing Net Electric Power 8.3Maximizing Plasma Pressure 8.4Maximizing Plasma Current 8.5Maximizing Magnetic Field Strength 8.6Minimizing External Power 8.7Minimizing Heating Power 8.8Maximizing Plasma Density 8.9Minimizing Current Drive Power 8.10Maximizing Material Survivability 8.11Striking the Right Balance PART 4SPECIAL TOPICS 9.Alternative Approaches to Fusion Energy 9.1Stellarators 9.2Inertial Confinement Fusion 9.3Private Fusion Startups 9.3.1Tokamak Energy Ltd 9.3.2General Fusion 9.3.3Lockheed Martin 9.3.4TAE Technologies 9.3.5Lawrenceville Plasma Physics 9.3.6Helion Energy 9.3.7Commonwealth Fusion Systems 10.Fusion and Nuclear Proliferation 10.1Nuclear Physics: A Double-edged Sword 10.2Building Nukes 10.2.1Uranium enrichment 10.2.2Plutonium production 10.2.3Weapon designs 10.3Conventional Fission Reactors 10.4Breeder Reactors 10.5Fission Proliferation Risks 10.6Fusion Proliferation Risks 10.7The Nuclear Energy Transition 10.8Reshaping Geopolitics 10.9Being a Role Model 11.Fusion and Space Exploration 11.1Basics of Spaceflight 11.2Fusion Thruster PART 5CONCLUSIONS 12.When Will We Have Fusion? Bibliography Index Introduction: The Case for Fusion Fusion powers the universe. Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy.

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It’s only necessary for the widespread adoption of fusion power in a world without nuclear weapons. In a world with nuclear weapons, why would bomb-makers bother with a fusion power plant? Countries will still have dedicated uranium enrichment and plutonium production facilities and there will still be fissile material to steal. 10.7The Nuclear Energy Transition After fusion power plants become available, it seems likely that there will be a period in which both fission and fusion power coexist. We will transition from an era of pure fission, through an era of fission and fusion, to an era of pure fusion. As fusion power plants are built and fission plants are phased out, there will be a period of time when both fissile material and tritium will be abundant in the world (see Figure 10.17).

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Index A agriculturalists energy sources, 4 air conditioners, 12 Al-Qaeda, 308 Alcator C-Mod, 231, 280, 301, 361 Alpha Centauri, 348 aneutronic see p-B, 292 ARC, 248 Argentina see Ronald, 179 Arkhipov, Vasili, 305 arsenals by country nuclear weapons, 304 ASDEX-U, 129, 193, 277 Aston, Francis, 177 atmospheric pollution, 238 B B-59 submarine, 305 bald spot, 103 banana orbits see super-bananas, 118, 190 baseload sources, 46 bell curve, 39, 83 Bell Telephone Laboratory, 184 Beria, Lavrenti, 189 beryllium, 162, 224, 324 Bethe, Hans, 178 Big Bang, 12 binding energy, 70–71 biomass, 35 Boeing 747 airplane, 353 Boltzmann constant, 69 bootstrap current, 189 bootstrap multiplication see bootstrap current, 254 brains, 59 bravery, 59, 335 brawn, 59 breakeven, 135 Breakthrough Starshot, 353 breeder reactors, 26, 330 fuelling proliferation, 333 bremsstrahlung see p-B, 293 burning plasma see ignition, breakeven, triple product, Lawson criteria, 136, 214 C C-2U, 278 Californium, 316 CANDU reactors, 327 capital cost, 240 carbon capture and storage, 39 Carnot limit, 31 catalyzed D–D fuel cycle, 85, 355 central solenoid, 145, 283 chain reaction, 314 chemical propulsion, 352 Chernobyl, 24 Chicago Pile-1, 311 classical transport, 123 climate change, 238–239 CNO cycle see stars, Bethe, Hans, 178 cold fusion, 77 Commonwealth Fusion Systems, 301 confinement, 82 electrostatic, 112 empirical scaling laws, 251 energy confinement time, 90 toroidal magnetic, 109 volume to surface area ratio argument, 256 conservation of momentum, 349 frozen lake argument, 350 convective eddies, 32 conventional spacecraft, 350 Coriolis force, 32 cost of electricity, 239 critical mass, 315 cross-section, 77–78 Cuban Missile Crisis, 304 current drive, 144 electron cyclotron, 152 electromagnetic wave, 150 inductive, 145 neutral beam, 148 cusp geometry see Lockheed Martin, 288 D D–3He fusion, 85, 300, 354 D–D fusion, 20, 85, 202, 301, 354 D–T fusion, 20, 83, 161, 202, 269, 281, 287, 292, 337 Darwin, Charles, 175 Debye length, 99 dense plasma focus see Lawrenceville plasma physics, 297 deuterium abundance on Earth, 22 diagnostics, 164–165 diffusion see random walk diffusion, 123 DIII-D, 277 direct drive see indirect drive, inertial confinement fusion, 272 dirty bombs, 321 dispatchable sources, 46 disruptions, 153–154, 222, 244, 267 mitigating, 155 divertor, 157, 194, 220, 256 double-edged sword nuclear energy as blueprint, 345 nuclear physics, 310 technologies, 311 E early hominids, 3 Earth–Moon system, 16, 41 Eddington, Arthur, 178 edge localized modes see ELMs, 194 Edison, Thomas, 6 electric field, 94, 150 electromagnetic force, 74 electromagnetic induction, 5, 12 electromagnetic repulsion, 67 electromagnetic waves, 269 electromagnetism, 90 electromagnets, 93 electrons, 65 in light bulbs, 6 electrostatic, 95 ELMs, 194, 222 ELMO bumpy torus, 114 empirical scaling law, 130, 251 enrichment, 333 energy conservation of, 11 flows of, 13 energy hierarchy, 58 energy storage, 50 Enola Gay, 305 entropy, 11 EPED, 197 exhaust velocity, 350 expanding electrical grids, 54 external power, 249 F Faraday, Michael, 5 Fat Man, 305 fissiled percent, 322 fertile material, 330 field-reversed configuration, 290 first wall, 153, 222 fission proliferation, 333 fission reactors, 325 climate versus nuclear security tradeoff, 335 fission–fusion hybrids, 332 flow, 197, 245 Fokker–Planck simulations see gyrokinetics, 209 formation of fossil fuels, 37 Forrest, Michael, 188–189 fossil fuels, 37 Fukushima, 24 fusion, 13, 16, 19 enrichment in fusion blanket, 337 proliferation, 336 fusion fuels, 83 fusion power density, 243 fusion reactor design, 237 disabling a proliferator, 338 small fusion system, 339 smallest planned, 159 timescale for blanket proliferation ramp-up, 340 fusion thruster, 354 G gas centrifuges, 318 gaseous diffusion, 317 General Atomics, 198, 279 General Fusion, 284 geopolitics, 343 geothermal, 16, 27 global zero, 343 gravitational confinement, 89 gravity, 13, 89 gravity-assist, 351 Greenwald limit, 251 gun-type bomb, 323 gyrokinetic simulations, 252 gyrokinetics, 206, 252 scale separation, 207 gyroradius, 92 H H-mode, 130, 193, 206, 252 hairy ball theorem, 103 Halite-Centurion, 274 half-life, 20 Harwell, 187 heat death of the Universe, 12 heat flux, 221 heating, 14, 218 electron cyclotron, 152 ion cyclotron, 152 heavy element synthesis, 15 heavy elements, 16 heavy water reactors, 327 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, 79 Helion Energy, 300 heliotron, 114 helium-3 abundance, 354 hex, 317 Hiroshima, 322, 336 hohlraum see inertial confinement fusion, 272 hydroelectric, 39 hydrogen bomb, 89, 304, 324 hydropower, 17 I IAEA, 334, 339 ignition, 131, 250, 269 MCF and ICF ignition differences, 274 implosion bomb, 323 inboard see torus terminology, 110 indirect drive see direct drive, inertial confinement fusion, 272 inductive heating, 147 Industrial Revolution, 4 inertial confinement fusion, 269 weaponization propspects, 271 intercontinental ballistic missiles see ICBM, 309 intercontinental electrical grids, 55 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 9 internal transport barriers see pedestal, 196 intermittency, 30, 46 INTOR, 225 IPA, 278 Iron Curtain, 181 isotopes, 20, 73 isotope effect, 204 isotopic semantics, 73 ITER, 137, 203, 211, 237, 248, 257, 273, 302, 353, 361 ignition, 214 Q, 213 strategy, 216 Ivy Mike, 304 J JET, 140, 155, 169, 198, 200, 260, 273, 277 jet engine, 349 JT-60, 260 JT-60SA, 140, 169, 361 JT-60U, 140, 277, 361 Juno spacecraft, 347 K K-DEMO, 361 Kelvin, Lord, 177 Khrushchev, Nikita, 187 kink limit, 246 Kremlin, 186 Kurchatov, Igor, 188 Kurchatov Institute, 185 L L-mode, 193, 252 Lamb, Horace, 127 Landau energy levels, 298 Landau damping, 151 Landau, Lev, 151 Langmuir, Irving, 165 Langmuir probes, 165 laser enrichment, 320 lattice structure, 156 Lavrentyev, Oleg, 186 Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, 296 Lawson criterion see triple product, 131, 324 Lawson, John, 131 levitated dipole, 114 limiter see divertor, 157, 194 linear magnetic, 100 lithium, 21, 242 lithium pebbles, 163 lithium-6, 84, 161 lithium-7, 161 lithium-ion batteries, 22, 51 Little Boy fissiled percent, 322 Lockheed Martin, 287 Lufthansa Flight 181, 199 M magnet(s), 139 permanent, 93 magnetic confinement fusion, 247 magnetic field, 91, 150, 247 magnetic islands, 117, 265 magnetic mirror, 100, 355 magnetic surfaces, 114, 144, 158, 191, 265 open versus closed, 158 magnetized target fusion see MTF, 284 magnetohydrodynamics see MHD, 121 Manhattan Project, 318 Mars, 347 mass–energy equivalence, 77 material survivability, 255 matter–antimatter annihilation, 352 mechanical stress, 142, 283 Mercury, 181 Mercury laser see NIF, 276 messy engineering endeavor, 259 MHD, 209, 246 MHD stability, 153 mini-golf, 68 Mini-Sphere, 278 MIT, 301 Model C stellarator, 189 moderator, 326 Moore’s Law see triple product, 136, 205 MRI machines, 140 MTF, 284, 300 Munich, 199 N Nagasaki, 305, 322 neoclassical transport, 126, 265 net electric power, 241–242 net electricity, 169 neutral beam, 220 negative ion acceleration, 220 neutral beams, 291 efficiency, 149 neutron capture cross-section, 331 neutron flux, 156 neutron multiplication, 224 neutron multiplication factor, 162 neutron multipliers, 162 neutron shielding, 292 New York Times, 180 NIF, 273, 336 niobium–titanium, 184 niobium–tin, 184, 248 Nixon, Richard, 224 Nobel Peace Prize, 186 Nobel Prize, 183 non-inductive see current drive; neutral beam, 149 non-renewable, 19 North Korea, 339 nucleons, 65 nuclear energy transition, 341 nuclear fission, 16, 23 nuclear proliferation, 238, 359 nuclear potential, 66 nuclear security, 336 nuclear weapon, 303 boosted implosion bomb, 323 defenses, 309 gun-type bomb, 322 hydrogen bomb, 323 implosion bomb, 322 inspectors, 340 neutron initiator, 324 proliferation with increased tritium availability, 342 significant quantity, 334 tamper, 322 Teller–Ulam design, 325 weapon designs, 321 yield, 303 nuclear winter, 308 O ocean waves, 44 Onnes, Heike, 181 outboard see torus terminology, 110 Oxford, 199 P p-B fusion, 290 particle drifts, 104 E × B drift, 106, 128 B drift, 106, 194 curvature drift, 106 Pauli exclusion principle, 183 pedestal, 193 Pelamis, 46 Perhapsatron, 114, 181, 285 photosynthesis, 35 plasma, 86 plasma current, 114, 264 maximization, 246 plasma flow, 197, 245 plasma gain, 169 plasma heating, 144 plasma power engineering multiplication factor, 170 plasma power multiplication factor, 135 plasma pressure, 244 plasma shaping, 198 Pluto, 321, 347 plutonium, 90 plutonium-239, 25 production, 320 reactor-grade, 329 weapons-grade, 321 poloidal field coils, 144 poloidal see torus terminology, 110 polonium-210, 162 power multiplication, 170 Princeton, 189, 198 Princeton University, 180 profits, 238 proliferation, 333 propellant, 349 proton–proton chain see CNO cycle, stars, Bethe, Hans, 179 proton–proton fusion, 28 public relations, 359 pure fission weapons, 325 Q quasineutrality, 97–98, 150 R radioactive waste, 167 random walk diffusion, 123 rate of energy consumption, 18 Rayleigh–Taylor instability, 271, 285 remote maintenance system, 204 renewable, 19, 57 resistivity, 141 Richter, Ronald, 179, 187 right-hand rule, 93 robotic maintenance, 169, 257 rocket equation, 351 role model effect of fusion technology, 344 S safety factor, 115 Sakharov, Andrei, 186 Saturn, 347 scattering collision, 67 scientific notation, 26 seasonal energy storage, 52 Seebeck effect, 6 seeds, 35 shaping, 198 D-shape, 198 shattered pellet injection see disruptions, 156 significant quantity, 340 solar, 16, 28 Solar System, 17, 348 energy flows, 15 space capsules see divertor, 160 space colonization, 349 SPARC, 301 spent fuel current world production, 334 spherical tokamaks, 281 spheromak, 114, 287 Spitzer, Lyman, 113, 180, 263 ST40, 278 Stalin, Joseph, 187 stars, 175 possible fusion reactions, 178 red giant phase, 15 steam engine, 4 steam turbine, 6 stellarator(s), 114, 263 ignited, 267 stochastic regions, 117, 265 strong nuclear force, 66 Sun, 347 lifetime of, 176 super-bananas see banana orbits, 118 super-duper H-mode, 259 supercomputers, 204 superconductivity, 141, 181, 248 Cooper pairs, 183 type I, 184 type II, 184 superconductor, 283 high-temperature, 185, 283, 301 REBCO, 186 materials, 182 problem with neutrons, 163 supernovae, 14–15 surface-to-air missiles, 309 Sword of Damocles, 306 Symmetric Tokamak, 189 T T-1, 188 T-3, 113, 189, 263, 278 T-7, 185 T4, 278 TAE Technologies, 280, 290 Tamm, Igor, 186 TCV, 201, 280 technetium, 24 temperature, 83 TFTR, 203, 277 tritium detection, 339 thermal equilibrium, 82 thermodynamic efficiency, 31 thermonuclear bomb see nuclear weapons — hydrogen bomb, 324 thermotron, 180 Thor, 110 Thomson scattering, 166 thorium, 321 Three Mile Island, 24 tidal, 16, 41 TNT, 304 toast making of, 7 tokamak, 113 Tokamak Energy Ltd., 281 Tore Supra, 141 toroidal torus terminology, 110 toroidal field, 140 toroidal field coils, 198 toroidal symmetry, 264 torsatron, 114 torus, 104 torus terminology, 110 trapped particles, 118 TRIAM-1M, 185 Trinity, 303, 344 triple product, 135, 267 tritium, 20, 161, 338 cost, 202 current reserves, 341 detecting use in fusion reactor, 339 increased availability proliferation risk, 342 tritium breeding, 215 tritium breeding blanket, 160, 247 Troyon limit, 243, 282 game of chicken, 244 violation, 245 Tsar Bomba, 304 Tuck, James, 181 tungsten, 224 turbulence, 206, 255 turbulent eddy, 128, 197 turbulent transport, 126 U U.S.S.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

A shadow of It is clear that in the early ignorance and denial had fallen twenty-first century, imme- over people who considered diate steps should have been themselves children of the taken to begin a transition enlightenment. to a zero-net-carbon world. Staggeringly, the opposite occurred. At the very time that the urgent need for an energy transition became palpable, world production of greenhouse gases increased. This fact is so hard to understand that it calls for a closer look at what we know about this crucial juncture. Bangladesh Among North Americans, Bangladesh—one of the poorest nations of the world—served as an ideological battleground.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

The world population in 1918 was 1.84 billion, which means this pandemic wiped out 2.7 percent of the entire global population. TB and swine flu. The data on swine flu comes from WHO[17], and the data for TB from WHO[10,11]. See gapm.io/bswin. Energy sources. The data comparing energy sources is from Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (2016). Smil describes the slow transition away from fossil fuels and also debunks myths about food production, innovation, population, and mega-risks. See gapm.io/tene. Future consumers. For an interactive visualization of the graphs on page 138, see gapm.io/incm.

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“Study on the Concept of Per Capita Cumulative Emissions and Allocation Options.” Advances in Climate Change Research 2, no. 2 (June 25, 2011): 79–85. gapm.io/xcli11. SIPRI Trends in world nuclear forces, 2017. Kile, Shannon N. and Hans M. Kristensen. SIPRI, July 2017. gapm.io/xsipri17. Smil, Vaclav. Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016. gapm.io/xsmilen. . Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. gapm.io/xsmilcat. Spotify. Web API. https://developer.spotify.com/web-api. Stockholm Declaration. Fifth Global Meeting of the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, 2015. https://www.pbsbdialogue.org/en.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

In 2019, Germany’s Auditors General stated that the change had cost €160 billion in the last five years alone and that the expenditure is ‘in extreme disproportion to the results’.18 Attempts to transform everything from the top created instability and uncertainty in the entire electricity system, and the decommissioning of nuclear power meant that perversely Germany had to use more coal power. The result of the massive government push was that Germany reduced CO2 emissions less than other European countries and it cost them more – in taxes and in the highest electricity prices in the EU. When I asked the energy expert Dieter Helm about the German energy transition’s three goals of reducing emissions, and increasing competitiveness and safety, he replied briefly: ‘to fail on one is something the politicians should answer for. But to fail on all three, that’s a pretty big achievement.’19 More Vasa than NASA Failures are admittedly part of all innovation processes, including private ones.

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When China and other emerging economies did the same a century later, they only emitted 500 grams for every dollar at the dirtiest point. The present generation of fast-growing economies in Africa and south Asia have already peaked at 300 grams per dollar produced and are moving towards a greener energy transition.36 But the fact that we emit less per person and per unit of wealth produced is unfortunately not enough, for the simple reason that tomorrow there will be even more of us on this planet and we will produce more units of wealth. Energy use therefore increased by 59 per cent during the same period and CO2 emissions by approximately 38 per cent.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Lofty pledges promise to reduce emissions by 50 percent for the United States and 55 percent for Europe by 2030, but actual policies in rich countries cannot meet such ambitious goals. With advanced economies at peak GHG output, a brake on global warming will depend in part on a developing world that is out of step with environmental goals. “If energy transitions and clean energy investment do not quickly pick up speed in emerging and developing economies, the world will face a major fault line in efforts to address climate change and reach other sustainable development goals,” the International Energy Agency warned in a 2021 special report. “This is because the bulk of the growth in global emissions in the coming decades is set to come from emerging and developing economies as they grow, industrialise and urbanise.”28 In other words, it was okay for the United States and other rich countries to pass through a period of massive emissions, until they became wealthy enough to have the resources to start to curb them.

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“A 30C World Has No Safe Place,” The Economist, July 24, 2021, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/07/24/a-3degc-world-has-no-safe-place. 27. “IPCC Assessment of Climate Change Science Finds Many Changes are Irreversible,” IISD/SDG Knowledge Hub, August 10, 2021, https://sdg.iisd.org/news/ipcc-assessment-of-climate-change-science-finds-many-changes-are-irreversible/. 28. “Financing Clean Energy Transitions in Emerging and Developing Economies,” International Energy Agency, World Energy Investment 2021 Special Report, https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6756ccd2-0772-4ffd-85e4-b73428ff9c72/FinancingCleanEnergyTransitionsinEMDEs_WorldEnergyInvestment2021SpecialReport.pdf. 29. Jeffrey Ball, Angela Ortega Pastor, David Liou, and Emily Dickey, “Hot Money: Illuminating the Financing of High Carbon Infrastructure in the Developing World,” iScience 24, no. 11 (November 19, 2021), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221013274. 30.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Long II) Biomass Energies The Bad Earth Carbon Nitrogen Sulfur Energy Food Environment Energy in China’s Modernization General Energetics China’s Environmental Crisis Global Ecology Energy in World History Cycles of Life Energies Feeding the World Enriching the Earth The Earth’s Biosphere Energy at the Crossroads China’s Past, China’s Future Creating the 20th Century Transforming the 20th Century Energy: A Beginner’s Guide Oil: A Beginner’s Guide Energy in Nature and Society Global Catastrophes and Trends Why America Is Not a New Rome Energy Transitions Energy Myths and Realities Prime Movers of Globalization Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts (with K. Kobayashi) Harvesting the Biosphere Should We Eat Meat? Power Density Natural Gas Still the Iron Age Energy Transitions (new edition) Energy: A Beginner’s Guide (new edition) Energy and Civilization: A History Oil: A Beginner’s Guide (new edition) Growth From Microorganisms to Megacities Vaclav Smil The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved.

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Besides, all of this misses the most obvious point of such curve-fitting exercises based on cumulative numbers of creative acts (compositions, novels, or paintings): those analyzed numbers are mere quantities devoid of any qualitative content and they do not reveal anything about the course of a creative process or about the appeal and attractiveness of individual creations. Marchetti has been also an enthusiastic user of logistic curves in forecasting technical developments in general and composition of global primary energy demand in particular. In his studies of energy transitions, he adopted a technique developed by Fisher and Pry (1971). Originally used to study the market penetration of new techniques, it assumes that the advances are essentially competitive substitutions which will proceed to completion (that is, to capturing most of the market or all of it) in such a way that the rate of fractional substitution is proportional to the remainder that is yet to be substituted.

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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smil, V. 2016a. Embodied energy: Mobile devices and cars. Spectrum IEEE (May):26. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7459114. Smil, V. 2016b. Still the Iron Age. Oxford: Elsevier. Smil, V. 2017a. Energy and Civilization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smil, V. 2017b. Energy Transitions. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Smil, V. 2017c. Oil: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Oneworld. Smil, V. 2017d. Transformers, the unsung technology. Spectrum IEEE (August):24. Smil, V. 2018a. February 1878: The first phonograph. Spectrum IEEE (February):24. Smil, V. 2018b. It’ll be harder than we thought to get the carbon out.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

Long II) Biomass Energies The Bad Earth Carbon Nitrogen Sulfur Energy Food Environment Energy in China's Modernization General Energetics China's Environmental Crisis Global Ecology Energy in World History Cycles of Life Energies Feeding the World Enriching the Earth The Earth's Biosphere Energy at the Crossroads China's Past, China's Future Creating the 20th Century Transforming the 20th Century Energy: A Beginner's Guide Oil: A Beginner's Guide Energy in Nature and Society Global Catastrophes and Trends Why America Is Not a New Rome Energy Transitions Energy Myths and Realities Prime Movers of Globalization Japan's Dietary Transition and Its Impacts (with K. Kobayashi) Harvesting the Biosphere Should We Eat Meat? Preface: Why and How The story of humanity – evolution of our species; prehistoric shift from foraging to permanent agriculture; rise and fall of antique, medieval, and early modern civilizations; economic advances of the past two centuries; mechanization of agriculture; diversification and automation of industrial protection; enormous increases in energy consumption; diffusion of new communication and information networks; and impressive gains in quality of life – would not have been possible without an expanding and increasingly intricate and complex use of materials.

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Studies show their effects ranging from negligible (less than 5% increase) to substantial, with more than a 50% rise in specific energy consumption – and there is even greater uncertainty about indirect rebound, that is, on spending the income freed by savings on products or services that are equally or even more energy-intensive, particularly on a nationwide scale (IRGC, 2013). 5.6 Decarbonization and Desulfurization Decarbonization of national and global energy supply – a gradual shift toward burning fuels with lower carbon content and generating more primary electricity – can be seen as a form of dematerialization that is particularly welcome from the environmental point of view because it reduces specific emissions of CO2, the most important greenhouse gas, as well as the generation of acidifying sulfur and nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. The process is an organic result of gradual energy transition from solid to liquid to gaseous fossil fuels and of rising shares of primary electricity (hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal) in the total energy supply. In turn, these transitions have been driven by the need for increasingly higher power densities of final energy uses that are required to support urbanization, industrialization, higher intensity of transportation, and more affluent lifestyles.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

Fuel efficiency of new U.S. passenger cars, even excluding gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and pickups, increased at an annual rate of just 2.5 percent since 1973.7 And efficiency gains are partly offset by consumer preferences (such as for bigger cars and SUVs) and what economists call the “rebound effect”—higher efficiency lowers the cost of driving, inducing motorists to drive more.8 So while oil has been displaced in electricity generation, there are no scalable substitutes on the horizon for oil use in transportation, which accounts for 55 percent of world consumption.9 Oil’s strong and likely enduring advantage in transportation stems from its application in a variety of vehicle types, cost competitiveness, infrastructure availability and supportive government policies.10 Scale also is critical to thinking about energy transformations. The larger the scale of prevailing energy forms—in this case, the near-total dominance of transportation by gasoline and diesel—the longer energy transitions will take. “Even if an immediate alternative were available,” leading energy researcher Vaclav Smil has written, “writing off this colossal infrastructure that took more than a century to build would amount to discarding an investment worth well over $5 trillion—but it is quite obvious that its energy output could not be replicated by any alternative in a decade or two.”11 As for policy, and the call that we must stop using oil because of climate change: Although elected officials from many nations pledged to reduce future carbon emissions in Paris in 2015, we are not going to see a forced march off of oil in the foreseeable future.

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While economists believe people could adjust to steadily rising prices, and abrupt spike caused by unexpected peaking would be catastrophic, economically and politically. Modern transportation, agriculture, defense, and other core systems depend on oil, and there is no near term alternative to oil in these vital sectors. Peak oil adherents warn against assuming that past, smooth energy transition such as from wood to coal in the 1800s or coal to oil in the 1900s are a model for peak oil, which will be “abrupt and revolutionary.” In 2005 a report by three researches sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (though not reflecting government views) titled “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management” concluded: The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

But as with AI and synthetic biology, albeit at an earlier stage, it appears to be at a point where funding and knowledge are escalating, progress on fundamental challenges is growing, and a range of valuable uses are coming into view. Like AI and biotech, quantum computing helps speed up other elements of the wave. And yet even the mind-bending quantum world is not the limit. THE NEXT ENERGY TRANSITION Energy rivals intelligence and life in its fundamental importance. Modern civilization relies on vast amounts of it. Indeed, if you wanted to write the crudest possible equation for our world it would be something like this: (Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Modern Civilization Increase any or all of those inputs (let alone supercharge their marginal cost toward zero) and you have a step change in the nature of society.

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Vast quantities of methane will escape the melting permafrost, threatening a feedback loop of extreme heating. Disease will spread far beyond its usual ranges. Climate refugees and conflict will engulf the world as sea levels inexorably rise, threatening major population centers. Marine and land-based ecosystems face collapse. Despite well-justified talk of a clean energy transition, the distance still to travel is vast. Hydrocarbons’ energy density is incredibly hard to replicate for tasks like powering airplanes or container ships. While clean electricity generation is expanding fast, electricity accounts for only about 25 percent of global energy output. The other 75 percent is much trickier to transition.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

In a 2006 speech delivered at a conference sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, Smil—one of the world’s most authoritative writers about energy and the history of technological advances—said that energy transitions are “deliberate, protracted affairs.” Today’s energy technologies are “still dominated by prime movers and processes invented during the 1880s (steam turbines, internal combustion engines, thermal and hydro electricity generation) or during the 1930s (gas turbines, nuclear fission) and no techniques currently under development,” Smil said, will be able to rival those technologies over the next two or three decades. He continued, “Energy transitions span generations and not, microprocessor-like, years or even months: there is no Moore’s law for energy systems.”

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

That increases the likelihood of seeing the benefits from what General Georges Doriot, the founder of modern venture-capital investing, called “applied science” being successfully applied to energy. The lead times may be long owing to the scale and complexity of the vast system that supplies energy, but if this is to be an era of energy transition, then the $6 trillion global energy market is “contestable.” That is, it is up for grabs among the incumbents—the oil, gas, and coal companies that supply the bulk of today’s energy—and the new entrants—such as wind, solar, and biofuels—that want to capture a growing share of those dollars. A transition on this scale, if it does happen, has great significance for emissions, for the wider economy, for geopolitics, and for the position of nations.

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Although there was some continuity on the issue of price controls, renewable energy was an entirely different story. It had become apolitical divide—indeed, an ideological test—and, as such, represented a major discontinuity between the two administrations. The difference was made abundantly clear at the outset of the Reagan administration by Michael Halbouty, the head of the energy transition team and successful Texas wildcatter, as well as the developer of the sprawling Galleria shopping center and hotel complex in Houston. To a visitor at the Department of Energy, Halbouty announced that he could sum up the energy policy of the Reagan administration in just three words—“Production, production, and production”—as in domestic production of oil and natural gas.

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In 2010 the Obama administration announced that solar panels and a solar water heater would be reinstalled on the roof of the White House residence—from where Jimmy Carter’s solar hot water heater had been removed in 1986.34 If a transition to renewables is really made on a large scale, it will rival the importance of the world’s transition to reliance on oil in the twentieth century, whether seen from a geopolitical or economic or environmental perspective. However, it will likely be a long road. Historically, energy transitions have occurred over many decades. Thus even with rapid growth, renewables in 2030 are likely to still be far from being a dominant energy resource. Their actual role and market share will be determined by the interplay of policy, economics, and innovation. There is not a single scenario for the future of renewables.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

It also enhances the likelihood that continental interdependence itself will move forward when the centrally located nation is growing and politically influential. How strong today are these forces for integration, and where might they lead the continent? Those are the central questions that we now confront. The balance of this chapter considers the three most basic and dynamic sectoral catalysts for Eurasia’s deepening integration: energy, transit trade, and finance. Animating all three are even more elemental forces— economic growth and technological change. Both of these latent transformative agents have been unusually vigorous across the continent over the past three post– Cold War decades, with the Logistics, AI, and 5G Revolutions accelerating connectivity still further.

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In Conclusion Eurasia has undergone a profound transformation over the past quarter century, becoming an increasingly integrated and interactive chessboard, albeit 98 chapter 4 one on which important political, social, and economic differences still remain. The three most important drivers of this transformation have been energy, transit trade, and finance. Together, they have fostered deepening economic interdependence across Eurasia, including more concentrated transit trade and production networks linking China and Europe. These networks potentially hold long-term significance for global geopolitics, and for global governance as well.

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Powering a Hydraulic Nation If state intervention in the rural landscape accelerated in the twentieth century, the energy transition was without doubt its most striking evolution. With the benefit of hindsight, one can see just how remarkable the transition was. In 1900, a third of all energy came from sheer human and animal muscle. Fuel wood, mostly for heating, did much of the rest. A century later, human work accounted for only 5 percent, as the total energy use grew tenfold. That energy transition was a story of water. Its early stages had already been tightly bound to water, from mine drainage to canal transport in support of the coal economy, and water resources development would also later play a role in the rise of oil.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

We deploy vast arrays of real-world sensors and online surveillance algorithms to track human behavior, converting it into data so it can be modeled, predicted, and influenced. Everything is made compatible with the market. So sure, it’s a more “inclusive market,” in that the market is able to include everything . Not even progressives complain about this part. The Green New Deal is banking on the idea that the great energy transition to come will not only save the planet but give everyone jobs. They cheer when the United States or the European Union adopts new, more ambitious goals for rapid transformation of the energy infrastructure, anxious to reach carbon neutrality before global temperatures rise beyond repairable levels.

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

Elvik, R (2008) Road safety management by objectives: a critical analysis of the Norwegian approach, Accident Analysis and Prevention 40 (2008), 1115-1122. Elvik, R and Amundsen A H (2000) Improving road safety in Sweden. Main report. TOI Report 490, Oslo Institute of Transport Economics. Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply (2011), Germany’s Energy Transition: A Collective Endeavour for the Future, German Federal Government, Berlin, 30 May 2011. EUROCONTROL (2008) Long-Term Forecast Flight Movements 2010 – 2030. European Commission (1999) EU focus on clean air. European Commission (2009) European Air Traffic Management Master Plan, European Commission, SESAR and EUROCONTROL.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

Washington’s failure to invest significantly on the green front in recent years has been mostly due to the enormous clout of the fossil fuel industry, which feels threatened by the prospect of a green energy revolution. “Energy markets are dominated by some of the largest and most powerful companies on the planet, which are generally not driven to innovate,” writes Mazzucato. “Leaving direction setting to ‘the market’ only ensures that the energy transition will be put off until fossil fuel prices reach economy-wrecking highs.” In November 2018, Detroit-based General Motors dealt a staggering blow to 2,700 Canadian workers when it announced plans leading to the closure of a key automotive assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario. In its heyday decades earlier, GM Oshawa had been the largest auto complex in North America and had employed twenty-three thousand workers.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

A key test is how, in economically stressed times, affordable finance can be made available in a targeted way to kick-start new, low-carbon, energy, transport, food and housing sectors. One useful precedent is the example of South Korea. Over years it channelled lines of low-cost credit to key parts of its economy. The success of this, policy can be measured in the fact that the sections of South Korea’s industry that benefited are now ‘world leaders’. 17 Pay for energy transition and fuel poverty: a windfall tax on the unearned profits of the fossil fuel companies to provide a safety net for those in fuel poverty, and to help finance the UK’s transition to clean energy Fossil fuels are an unrepeatable windfall from nature, yet the UK government has so far failed adequately to take advantage of its income from oil to prepare for a lowcarbon future.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

“Refrigeration for Towns and Cities by Street Mains,” Scientific American, September 5, 1891. 11.Ingels and Carrier, Willis Haviland Carrier, 88. 12.Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer (New York: The New Press, 2010), 9. 13.Marsha Ackerman, Cool Comfort: America’s Romance with Air-Conditioning (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2010), 121. 14.Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 11. 15.Daniel A. Barber, “Heating the Bauhaus: Understanding the History of Architecture in the Context of Energy Policy and Energy Transition” (Philadelphia: Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, 2019), 5. 16.Pam Belluck, “Chilly at Work? Office Formula Was Devised for Men,” New York Times, August 4, 2015. 17.Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 2. 18.Patrick Sisson, “How Air Conditioning Shaped Modern Architecture—And Changed Our Climate,” Curbed, May 9, 2017, accessed February 24, 2021, https://archive.curbed.com. 19.Christopher S.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, Bloomsbury, 2006. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Peter Maass, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, Allen Lane, 2009. Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects, Praeger, 2010. Steven Solomon, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilisation, Harper Perennial, 2010. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Alan Weisman, The World without Us, Picador, 2007.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths by Steven M. Gorelick

California gold rush, carbon footprint, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jevons paradox, meta-analysis, North Sea oil, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, statistical model, stock buybacks, Thomas Malthus

The transition will be difficult, and for some catastrophic’ with ‘major economic and political discontinuity’ globally and ‘great suffering’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 177).”11 • “Intervention by governments will be required, because the economic and social implications of oil peaking would otherwise be chaotic. … The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. … Without mitigation, the peaking of world oil production will almost certainly cause major economic upheaval.”12 The Oil Panics of 1916 and 1918 One of the first major oil depletion scares occurred near the turn of the last century.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

As these demonstrations grew and turned violent, the government backed down, announcing a (perhaps indefinite) delay in imposing the tax. France’s neighbor Germany is also running into problems as it works to combat global warming, and its troubles highlight an important failure at the intersection of public awareness and responsive government. Germany has embarked on an ambitious Energiewende—literally, a national “energy transition”—away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. However, the results to date have been unimpressive: electricity prices for consumers have doubled since 2000, and carbon emissions have been flat or increasing in recent years (after decreasing substantially for more than a decade after 1990). Why is this?

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Wind capacity needs to grow by a factor of nine, which means a lot more turbines, both on- and offshore. The possibilities are hotly disputed; the equation has to include back-up generation and storage, which awaits better battery technology. Cue massive public investment. Land, Sea and Air Markets don’t work alone. The need for the state to shape the energy transition is echoed in other spheres, if necessary overriding individual owners of property to secure the greater good. The planning profession has suffered grievously, especially in town halls, and needs to be remotivated. Victoria Hills, chief of its institute, said, ‘Places that put planning at the heart of their corporate strategy are successful places to live, yet our research uncovers a prevailing sense that council planners face huge challenges to their ability to plan effectively in the public interest.’

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Business leaders are being told that the global economy is heading for the mother of all downturns as the carbon bubble bursts.12 This process, largely driven by disinvestment from fossil fuels and the exponential growth of new technologies in renewable power generation and electric vehicles, could ensure that the oil industry’s vast reserves turn into stranded assets, undermining pension funds heavily invested in old forms of energy—and triggering both mass unemployment and, as a consequence, new waves of populist politics. Recall that the financial crisis of 2008 was triggered by the loss of $0.25 trillion, then imagine what might happen when this coming energy transition wipes somewhere between 1 and 4 trillion dollars from the global economy. Stage 2: RESPONSIBILITY Fifty years ago, as already mentioned, Chicago economist Milton Friedman famously declared that the “one and only” social responsibility of business is to create profits. Ever since, variants of these words have become the mantras of capitalism, corporations, and business schools—with a growing range of consequences, many of them unintended.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

Van Lierde, Jean, ed. (1972). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1968–1961. Little, Brown & Co. Boston. Van Reybrouk, David. (2014). Congo: The Epic History of a People. HarperCollins. New York. World Bank. (2020). “Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.” Washington, D.C. Young, Crawford. (1965). Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

The West African Power Pool organization has been created to integrate the national power system operations into a unified regional electricity market—with the expectation that such a mechanism would, over the medium to long term, assure the citizens of ECOWAS member states a stable and reliable electricity supply at affordable costs.11 This will create a level playing field, facilitating the balanced development of the diverse energy resources of ECOWAS member states for their collective economic benefit, through long-term energy sector cooperation, unimpeded energy transit, and increased cross-border electricity trade. The major sources of electricity under the power pool would be hydroelectricity and gas to fuel thermal stations. Hydropower would be mainly generated on the Niger (Nigeria), Volta (Ghana), Bafing (Mali), and Bandama (Côte d’Ivoire) rivers. The World Bank has committed a $350-million line of credit for the development of the WAPP, but a billion more is needed in public and private financing.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Turkey is the odd man out when it comes to energy resources; it must import 90 percent of its energy, mainly from Russia and Iran. But it does have its own special resource—water, or, more properly, the control of the water that flows from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into Syria and Iraq. It is also an important energy transit point between suppliers in Central Asia and their key European markets, giving it a degree of influence as an alternative supply route to those offered by Russia. Plus, there is the likelihood it will seek a role in how the energy reserves of the eastern Mediterranean—essentially the oil and gas fields discovered between Israel, Lebanon, and Cyprus—are developed.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

These researchers found that by 2050, solar energy could provide 69 percent of our power and wind energy another 18 percent, with the rest coming mostly from hydroelectric dams. In the process, we’d create thirty-six million new jobs and the cost per megawatt hour would drop from the present eighty-two dollars to sixty-one dollars. The study’s lead author, Christian Breyer, put it like this: “Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will.”8 Other economists insist it would be cheaper and faster if there were some nuclear power in the mix, but the bottom line is fairly clear. If human beings wanted to, they could figure out how to extricate us from the climate mess by producing most of our energy from the wind and the sun.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

That market logic was probably always shortsighted, but over the last several years, as the cost of adaptation in the form of green energy has fallen so dramatically, the equation has entirely flipped: we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today. If you don’t think of the price of a stock or government bond as an insurmountable barrier to the returns you’ll receive, you probably shouldn’t think of climate adaptation as expensive, either. In 2018, one paper calculated the global cost of a rapid energy transition, by 2030, to be negative $26 trillion—in other words, rebuilding the energy infrastructure of the world would make us all that much money, compared to a static system, in only a dozen years. Every day we do not act, those costs accumulate, and the numbers quickly compound. Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel draw their 50 percent figure from the very high end of what’s possible—truly a worst-case scenario for economic growth under the sign of climate change.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

Carbon War Room: This group was founded in 2009 by Richard Branson and a team of like-minded entrepreneurs wanting to speed up the adoption of market-based solutions to climate change. In December 2014, Carbon War Room (CWR) merged with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a U.S.-based NGO dedicated to transforming global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future. Together, they work across all energy sectors to accelerate the energy transition and reduce carbon emissions. The B Team: See the chapter “People Are Your Purpose” for more information. Memories in the making. 3 Generations Celebrating Virgin Unite's 10th Birthday Conclusion The Weconomy Needs You By Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, and Marc Kielburger We'll finish where we started, with this promise: In the WEconomy, you can make money and change the world—you can make money by changing the world.

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

The film’s authorized celebration of Gates is calibrated in the manner of a thousand other profiles from the last twenty years: once a brash, restless, and perhaps overly ambitious genius, Gates has become philanthropist-philosopher touched by humility, heroically channeling his genius and wealth into repairing a world in crisis. The series shows Gates crunching the numbers and studying the angles with darting eyes that feed the mighty processor of his visionary mind. If we are to survive climate change, the energy transition, and infectious disease, Gates concludes, “It’s important that we start deploying solutions unnaturally fast.” A few months after the release of Inside Bill’s Brain, Gates received an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to historically speedy solutions. As described in the last chapter, COVID-19 triggered urgent planning sessions and international debates about the most effective strategies to defeat the first airborne pandemic virus in a century.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Not, of course, American quantities – each of us uses on average eight times the energy that a Chinese citizen does – but relatively serious quantities nonetheless. Kelly Sims Gallagher, one of the savviest early analysts of climate policy, has devoted the last few years to understanding the Chinese energy transition. Now the director of the Energy Technology Innovation Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, she has just published a fascinating account of the rise of the Chinese auto industry. Her research makes it clear that neither American industry nor the American government did much of anything to point the Chinese away from our addiction to gasguzzling technology; indeed, Detroit (and the Europeans and Japanese to a lesser extent) was happy to use decades-old designs and processes.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

It’s therefore possible that the mature energetic human ecology of a small farm future could achieve a reasonable level of well-being for most people at much lower levels of energy consumption than our current fast-throughput energy ecology delivers. That’s a happy conclusion if it’s true, because transitioning to a low-throughput energy ecology seems increasingly unavoidable if we’re to avert climate breakdown. Some less happy conclusions are that energy transitions usually take a long time, and we haven’t yet started one. Crisis #4: Soil Farming, and therefore human life, depends upon the soils in which crops grow. Despite the attention garnered by various costly forms of modern soil-free cultivation like hydroponics, vertical farming and cultured protein, that fundamental truth is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

They believed that Sullivan County was there to be worked. Small subsistence farmers were settling all over the county, clearing out the hemlock forest to harvest the bark, which was used in nearby tanneries. Soon railroads would enter the county, to transport its coal north and blocks of ice south. The United States was in the midst of an energy transition; coal would soon displace wood as America’s primary fuel and fire the nation’s industrialization. Pennsylvania embraced its role as a resource provider and became a leading producer of coal, iron, steel, timber, and petroleum. Sullivan County required tax revenue to build roads and supply services to its population, which increased by nearly half between 1860 and 1880.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

UNEP (2016) Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity: A Report of the International Resource Panel, available at: http://www.uneplive.org/material#.V1rkAeYrLIG 8. Goodall, C. (2012) Sustainability. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 9. Global Footprint Network (2016) ‘National Footprint Accounts’, available at: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_data_and_results/ 10. Heinrich Böll Foundation (2012) ‘Energy transition: environmental taxation’, available at: http://energytransition.de/2012/10/environmental-taxation/ 11. California Environmental Protection Agency (2016) ‘Cap-and-Trade Program’, available at: http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/capandtrade/capandtrade.htm 12. Schwartz, D. ‘Water pricing in two thirsty cities: in one, guzzlers pay more, and use less’, New York Times 6 May 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/business/energy-environment/water-pricing-in-two-thirsty-cities.html?

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Rising Oil Price Threatens Fragile Recovery Financial Times. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/056db69c-1836-11e0-88c9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1IagH4LTi. 15.Ibid. 16.Wolf, M. (2011, January 4). In the Grip of a Great Convergence. Financial Times. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/072c87e6-1841-11e0-88c9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1IagH4LTi. 17.Ibid. 18.Ibid. 19.Edwards, J. (2002, March 14). [E-mail message to Jeremy Rifkin]; Edwards, John D. Twenty-First Century Energy: transition from Fossil Fuels to Renewable, Non-polluting Energy Sources. University of Colorado, Department of Geological Sciences—EMARC. April 2001. 20.Rich, M., Rampell, C., & Streitfeld, D., (2011, February 25). Rising Oil Prices Pose New Threat to U.S. Economy. New York Times, p. A1. 21.Farchy, J., & Hook, L., (2011, February 25).

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

See also an extended discussion in Cowen and Southwood (2019) of why digital does make such a difference. 27 See for example Colvile (2017) or innumerable op-ed pieces casually making the same claim. 28 For the impact of energy on civilisations, see Smil (2017). 29 Storrs Hall (2018) 30 Of course, while there are signs of an energy transition to renewables at the frontier as well, this is not contra the Henry Adams curve delivering a thirtyfold increase in available energy. See Storrs Hall (2018) for more detail on why the curve flatlined and how it could change in future. 31 Dorling (2020) 32 This wording – an age of consolidations not revolutions – comes from a conversation with Peter Watson, while the quote is from Patrick Collison in Smith (2021). 33 There is a considerable debate on this question.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Coal-fired power generation reached new highs in 2021 during the pandemic rebound, and the rebound from the Russian invasion of Ukraine breathed new life into oil and gas; overall emissions rose almost 5 percent from the previous year. Even the countries that have moved first and fastest on the energy transition have fallen short of their goals—Germany, for instance, missed its most recent emissions targets by a wide margin, despite spending more than half a trillion dollars on climate action over a few decades, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced many European countries to consider restarting coal plants and building new terminals to import natural gas.

Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

It was an act of political courage that paid off with regard to the objectives he set out to achieve. As national and global challenges mount, so too will the demand for decisive leaders to champion the application of new technologies. There are two examples that offer diverse needs for leadership. The first is the field of energy transitions. A variety of concerns such as climate change and international security call into question the continued use of fossil fuels. Much of this debate has occurred under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Reaching agreement on climate presupposes the existence of sovereign champions willing to promote the adoption of renewable energy technologies and other climate mitigation measures.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

Nor should we be surprised that these behemoths of old power are unwilling to embrace a transformation that will quite likely put them out of business. In this they are no different from any company—though it is easy to valorize smaller more innovative endeavors—none of them commit suicide on purpose. Maneuvering to capture market share is a big part of what is driving the energy transition, and it is in a constant state of vacillation. One step forward, two steps back, we lurch rather than cruise into the future. The changes to our grid will not happen overnight, but they are already far enough along to be rightly considered irreversible. As the first decade of the twenty-first century crested, making power from renewable sources shifted from a nice idea and a minor player on the electricity scene into the mainstream.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Trash collection and disposal is run by local or national companies that turn a profit if they run their businesses efficiently, so this industry has been operating well even though Americans contribute more than half of their trash to landfills. Part of what allows these companies to profit is their commitment to recycling 35% of the 258 million tons of MSW and turning another 13% into energy. Transit: D-Approximately $90 billion is needed to rehab the nation’s transit system due to underfunding and aging systems. Many Americans do not even have access to public transit, a crime against those dependent on this government service for getting to their jobs that are getting harder and harder to come by.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Since early 2012 Germany has been able to borrow for ten years at negative interest rates, after allowing for inflation, and it faced very low interest rates before that. It was an ideal opportunity to invest in upgrading the country’s rundown infrastructure, in the clean energy needed to realise Merkel’s desired “energy transition” (Energiewende) and more generally in future growth. This would also have helped offset the squeeze on demand in southern Europe – by providing a growing market for southern European exports and those of other countries to which southern Europe might export, a role that southern Europe played for Germany in the pre-crisis years.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

More generally, until the Paris Agreement in 2015, India had simply refused to contemplate limits on its own emissions, arguing that it could not afford to hinder its own economic growth and rich countries should bear the brunt of the adjustment. The position evolved when India ratified the Paris Agreement and came up with a concrete commitment, asking in exchange for some serious financial aid to afford the energy transition, to be financed from an international fund paid for by the rich countries. Although Indian emissions are not a large fraction of world emissions today, India will be a key player moving forward, as its growing middle class consumes more and more. And unlike the United States, a large part of its population will also be directly and severely affected by climate change, so it should be in a good place to understand the costs of today’s choices.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Karen Pallarito, “Government to Pay for More Than Half of U.S. Health Care Costs,” U.S. News (February 4, 2010). 11. Geoffrey Lean, “Water scarcity ‘now bigger threat than financial crisis,’” The Independent (March 15, 2009). 12. Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending. 13. Peter Voser, “Energy transition: not for the faint-hearted,” Globe and Mail (September 17, 2009). 14. Susan Kraemer, “China Now Spending $9 Billion a Month on Renewable Energy,” CleanTechnica (December 1, 2009). 15. The links between poverty and extremism are contentious, according to Ömer Tapinar, a professor of national security studies at the National War College and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In a sense, Iran is the last man standing, although it has been badly weakened by US-led economic sanctions. The “Turkish pillar” has been a mainstay since the end of World War II. As one cable notes, “A stable Turkey is important to the United States mainly for geostrategic reasons. Turkey is situated amid the troubled Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East regions, and is a critical energy transit hub between Central Asia/the Caucasus and Europe” [CRSRL34642]. Turkey fields the largest army in NATO and bolsters the alliance’s southern border with Russia. For several years, US Jupiter medium-range missiles carrying nuclear warheads fifty times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb were deployed in the country.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

In The Handbook of AI Governance, edited by Justin Bullock, Yu-Che Chen, Johannes Himmelreich, Valerie M. Hudson, Anton Korinek, Matthew Young, and Baobao Zhang. New York: Oxford University Press. Acemoglu, Daron, Philippe Aghion, Lint Barrage, and David Hemous. Forthcoming. “Climate Change, Director Innovation, and the Energy Transition: The Long-Run Consequences of the Shale Gas Revolution.” Acemoglu, Daron, Philippe Aghion, Leonardo Bursztyn, and David Hemous. 2012. “The Environment and Directed Technical Change.” American Economic Review 102, no. 1: 131‒166. Acemoglu, Daron, Nicolás Ajzeman, Cevat Giray Aksoy, Martin Fiszbein, and Carlos Molina. 2021.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

People don’t need resources: Deutsch 2011; Pinker 2002/2016, pp. 236–39; Ridley 2010; Romer & Nelson 1996. 18. Probability and solutions to human problems: Deutsch 2011. 19. The Stone Age quip is commonly attributed to Saudi oil minister Zaki Yamani in 1973; see “The End of the Oil Age,” The Economist, Oct. 23, 2003. Energy transitions: Ausubel 2007, p. 235. 20. Farming pivots: DeFries 2014. 21. Farming in the future: Brand 2009; Bryce 2014; Diamandis & Kotler 2012. 22. Future water: Brand 2009; Diamandis & Kotler 2012. 23. Environment is rebounding: Ausubel 1996, 2015; Ausubel, Wernick, & Waggoner 2012; Bailey 2015; Balmford 2012; Balmford & Knowlton 2017; Brand 2009; Ridley 2010. 24.