Comments biggav has made

Nice title

After a few years of reading your witty titles I've learned to predict them in advance :-)

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-was-walrus.html
On Walruses trampled as a result of climate change -- no, seriously posted 1 year, 11 months ago 3 Responses

Not either/or

Colin hits the nail spot on its head here.

Its not an either / or question - we need to keep both issues in mind as there are a lot of feedback effects between the two - scrambling to replace declining crude oil supplies by turning to Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan heavy oil, shale oil (which is undergoing a revival of interest and is not entirely impractical even if the side effects are awful - see my latest update here - http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/12/queensland-shale-o ...) and coal to liquids programs.

Peak oil has the potential to make our carbon emissions jump very quickly if we aren't careful (ie. successful at moving away from liquid fuels for transportation).

And Odo - I'm glad you read the comments - I was hoping my editorial position on this stuff is well known by now, but apparently it ain't so...
On How will you ride the slide? posted 1 year, 11 months ago 7 Responses

And us foreigners are going to own bits of it

We even have sneaky tactics for crushing dissent...

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/01/silver-donut-comet ...On Turns out that NAFTA superhighway is superfictitious posted 2 years, 3 months ago 3 Responses

Me too

Jon - But as far as getting the PO/GW people together, one place to start is to talk about eliminating the use of fossil fuels, as opposed to just reducing carbon emissions, because the former addresses both communities. and Odo - The people I'd join, more than the fearful peak oilers, are the "bright green" futurists, who think we can be happy, even as we ride bikes and walk to nice restaurants. sum it up from my point of view.

1. Eliminate fossil fuels

2. Go bright green (though I suspect electric vehicles will be more popular than walking and they'll be serving a useful purpose by being the enabler for smart grids via V2G energy storage services)

But how do you implement natural capitalism ?

It is within capitalist and market-based societies that we have the greatest ability to change trajectories in production, bring new technologies on line, and respond to shifts in consumer demand. These are keys to a future where the environment is better protected.

It is not guaranteed within capitalist societies, but the potential is always there if the political will exists to ensure that the negative environmental effects of industrialization are taken into account by producers so that incentives exist to shift towards cleaner technologies.

Jason - I sort of agree with you - we need a system with flexibility to cope with changes and capitalism seems to be a lot better than monolithic socialism in that respect.

That said, capitalism is prone to various forms of corruption and decay, and the US demonstrates many of those today. While Cuba has been quite successful at adapting to less oil, I don't think its an example of the bright green future I aspire to - it seems more an example of successfully avoiding collapse (which is an achievement and I think tends to disprove a lot of peak oil doomer mythology). Of course, I haven't been there so I may have the wrong impression.

From my relatively pragmatic view, every system has it good points and its bad points and some cultures are better suited to one system than another. I think the way Sweden and Germany are going about the energy transition, in a fairly planned and social democratic way, will probably be quite successful. But many of the tools that they will use have (and probably will continue to) come out of California and its fairly free market / libertarian techie culture. A lot of the renewable alternatives I see a lot of promise in (and mechanisms for being more efficient in energy usage) do depend greatly on continuing technological innovation.

I would like to see more focus on how a non industrial capitalism would work (this is what I like about the whole Viridian / cradle to cradle / natural capitalism school of thinking) rather than just repeating the free markets are more flexble mantra and not explaining how incentives to go green would actually be implemented.

What form of expression does the "political will"  and "incentives" you talk about actually take - for example, if coal is by far the cheapest way to obtain energy, and we have enough coal supply available to trash the atmosphere completely, how does a "free market" stop this from happening ? (My answer is uniform, global carbon taxes and an end of subsidies to the fossil fuel industries - but I doubt many free market idealists - or ideologues - would agree with this).

ALso, beating up environmentalist strawmen is fairly annoying - there is a wide range of views amongst people who are concerned about the world they live in...On Confusing capitalism with industrialization posted 3 years, 3 months ago 24 Responses