Planetary Thinking

Archive for the ‘Energy’ Category

Cloudcharging

In Carbon neutrality, Energy, Uncategorized on April 25, 2011 at 12:27 pm

People who’ve followed my writing will know that I’m deeply skeptical of electric vehicles as a solution, not because I don’t think they lower emissions (they do), but because

a) so much of our lack of sustainability stems from the direct and indirect effects of auto-dependence as a system, from the roads and infrastructure to the sprawling land use to the health and ecological impacts; and EVs do little to fix any of that;

b) at current rates of adoption, there is simply no way to electrify the global car fleet in the scant two or three decades we have to create carbon zero societies.

That said, where we do have cars, they should clearly be EVs. And since a large barrier to wider adoption is EVs’ limited range, PlugShare is a pretty cool idea for an ap: a tool that maps available charging stations, shared private outlets and so on, helping drivers with vehicles that have limited ranges to plot out longer trips.

This might be, it seems to me, a step towards a more general availability of charging stations for EVs misted over the landscape, a sort of cloudcharging function.

Reality in the Energy/Climate Debate

In Energy on February 24, 2011 at 1:16 am

I think normal people have a hard time grasping how entirely US energy debate is distorted by oil+ coal money, powerful spin and political pressure.

Independents who dig deep almost invariably come to conclusion we could be running this country on clean energy, with a stronger economy. In fact, the numbers are so good on many bright green changes, that people have tendency to think something must be wrong with the calculations.

The sheer practicality of many of the changes we need to make to reduce our climate emissions clashes with the frame we’ve all been given by the media (e.g., that climate action hurts the economy).

It’s hard to get your head around idea that bedrock assumptions of Beltway debate on climate and energy are essentially Carbon Lobby propaganda. Even a lot of smart, extremely well-educated and connected people hit this wall: a moment where it just seems impossible that the accepted conventional wisdom can be so massively wrong, even as a direct result of the spending of billions of dollars to influence the process of opinion formation, media coverage and political campaigns.

And it does really boggle the mind, sometimes.

On the other hand, this state of affairs is paradoxically one of the things that makes me more optimistic about climate action in America: most people don’t know how strong the real arguments are.