The Two-Headed Dragon ~ Energy/Water/Food Scarcity and Climate Change. Top Ten Policies that Feed it, and Two New Technologies that Could Enable us to Slay It and Save the Planet

By Jerry_Toman on June 25, 2009 2 Comments Albert Bartlett, Boulder, CAFÉ, carbon balance, carbon emissions, Climate Change, coal mining, economic growth, economists, Energy Scarcity, Food Scarcity, foreign oil, Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis, Fuel scarcity, GDP, Jay Hanson, Jerry Toman, limits to growth, mega-projects, renewable energy, terra preta, University of Colorado, uranium mining, Water Scarcity

This post, by Jerry J. Toman, ScM, ChE examines five policies that are setting our future up for failure. They are: Reliance on the old-time political religion of economic growth (usually defined as by economists as GDP growth); Continue to practice incrementalism above all else, as the dominant means of solving the problems; Embarking willy-nilly into mega-projects that utilize technologies that often are half-baked in terms of knowing what the overall costs, impacts and benefits would be; Ignoring the “carbon balance” aspects of current practices and future remedies; and relying on technologies that involve extensive “mining” of the earth’s solid surface for minerals, as a means to achieve sustainability.