Author Archive for audreyl

Photo Courtesy of Idea go

From Lucia Green-Weiskel, The Nation

In the wake of the partial meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan, China announced it would shelve plans for vast expansion of its nuclear power capacity, at least temporarily, until more stringent safety checks are performed. Construction will eventually resume, but with a potentially scaled-back role for nuclear power and with solar and wind energy picking up some of the slack. If nuclear remains a small fraction of China’s total energy mix (just 2 percent today, compared with America’s 20 percent), and Beijing looks to solar and wind for future energy growth in the era of climate change, the boost to those industries could make renewables cost-competitive with fossil fuels much earlier than previously projected.

The announcement marked a significant policy change. As recently as January, after reporting a breakthrough in nuclear fuel reprocessing technology, China reaffirmed its commitment to an expansion of its nuclear energy capacity that would be greater than that of all other countries combined. Construction began on twenty-seven reactors, adding to the existing thirteen. Another fifty-two were planned.

Just days after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, China passed into law its Twelfth Five Year Plan, which will serve as the country’s economic blueprint until 2015. The primary theme of the plan is sustainable development, with a high priority on securing nonfossil fuel energy sources. New policies include reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent by 2015. That means manufacturing entities would need to emit at least 17 percent less carbon in 2015 than they emitted in 2010 for the same amount of economic output. The plan also mandates ambitious energy-cutting targets, implementation of market mechanisms like cap and trade, and generation of 11.4 percent of total energy from nonfossil fuels by 2015, up from the current 8 percent. Pre-Fukushima, a sizable portion of that 11.4 percent was to come from nuclear sources. That target is being reconsidered.

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From Phil Patton, I.D.

In his 1937 song “Me and the Devil Blues,” Robert Johnson imagined his ghost on a Greyhound. “You can bury me down by the highway,” he sang. “Let my old evil spirit take a Greyhound bus and ride.”

In Johnson’s time, buses were emblems of speed, adventure, and escape. But a few generations later, most Americans wouldn’t be caught dead on a long-distance bus. From 1960 to the current decade, intercity bus travel saw steady declines. With the rise of car ownership and affordable airfare, buses came to be seen as slow and down-market, the province of post-traumatic vets and single moms with noisy infants. And bus stations became synonyms for seedy, dangerous urban spaces.

But now, astonishingly, long-distance bus travel is showing signs of a comeback. Of course, it never really went away: Greyhound alone makes some 13,000 daily ?departures in North America, carrying 25 million passengers a year to more than 2,300 destinations, many too small or out-of-the-way for air or rail. Total intercity bus ridership rose by 9.8 percent last year in the U.S., according to a DePaul University study, after a 7.6 percent increase in 2007, suggesting that the trend is about more than just the recession.

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From James Hrynyshyn, Class:M

As a father of a four-year-old, I’m a big fan of Bob the Builder. The basic plot of each episode of the charming stop-motion children’s series revolves around one or more pieces of heavy machinery learning self-discipline, which, as a new PNAS study shows, is a key skill associated with success and happiness later in life. I also like the optimism embedded in the catch-phrase that Bob’s machine team invariably declares: “Can we build it? Yes we can!”

If only that can-do spirit were as evident in the public debate over how to respond to the threat of climate change. Recently a spate of reports and papers are beginning to point in that direction. Are they too optimistic? Hard to say. But they are worth a look at least.

Some would have us believe that new-fangled, clean, renewable sources of electricity aren’t ready for prime-time and the only way we’ll replace greenhouse-gas-generating fossil fuels is with an aggressive research effort to turn prototypical schemes into commercial reality. Nobel laureate Burton Richter, author of Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, is one such scientist. He derides hydrogen fuel cells as lunacy, loves nuclear reactors, and generally insists that everything else already on the shelf is insufficient to make a serious dent in our power mix. Here he is at a 2010 conference organized by the like-minded Breakthrough Institute and the AGW-denying American Enterprise Institute, both of which don’t care much for the idea that we already have the tools we need to forestall catastrophic climate change.

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From dezeen,

The Energy Report: a comprehensive study developed by the WWF, AMO and Ecofys claiming that the world can be 100% reliant on renewable energy by 2050, launches globally today.

The report proposes to address the urgent problems caused by looming climate change and dwindling fossil fuel supply through its assertion that by 2050, the world’s energy needs could be met entirely by renewable sources. It outlines an ambitious energy saving scenario as the first step toward an energy system in which fossil fuels are gradually replaced by wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower and sustainable forms of bio-energy.

The aim of the report is to inspire governments and businesses to understand the challenges associated with this shift and, at the same time, to encourage them to move boldly to bring the renewable economy into reality. By demonstrating the advantages of global cooperation and the deeper integration of global energy infrastructure, The Energy Report shows that the benefits of a transition to renewable energy far outweigh the challenges.

AMO’s contribution to the report, led by Partner Reinier de Graaf and Associate Laura Baird, both conceptualizes and visualizes the geographic, political, and cultural implications of a 100 percent renewable energy world. AMO draws a vision of a world without borders in which all continents have equal access to sustainable energy.

Reinier de Graaf said: “The Energy Report is the first of its kind to claim the technical possibility of a global renewable energy supply by 2050. Through the realization that future energy provision really is a universal issue which must be addressed at a global scale, we have developed a new perspective on the world.”

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