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Gas prices are sky-high and people are hurting. Is it market speculation, tight supplies or the first throes of peak oil? And, if it’s the latter, how can civilization survive?
Well, residents of the small Alaskan capital of Juneau are showing us how. Following an April 16 avalanche that severed the city’s main power lines, Juneau found itself forced to cut its energy calories big-time literally overnight. It was that, or face energy bills double or triple or many times more than the month before. The good news: society didn’t collapse.
How did residents do it? Let’s count the ways:
I’ve recently witnessed a few scenes of life after peak oil, and it isn’t necessarily the Apocalypse.
In Juneau, Alaska, for example, people are proving it’s possible to change our energy-hogging ways literally overnight and still keep a community up and running. The inspiration in their case: an avalanche that severed the hydroelectric power lines serving the remote Alaska capital, cutting off about 80 percent of the city’s available electricity.
If you think the virtual, online world helps reduce energy consumption in the real world (a topic we’ve touched on before here at Green Options Media), think again: a new study by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company provides scary insights into how Internet computing is devouring more and more power and spewing out more and more greenhouse gases.
Based on data from the Uptime Institute, a technology consulting company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the McKinsey report finds that, between 2000 and 2006, the amount of energy needed to power data centers doubled, and that consumption is likely to double again by 2012. In the U.S. alone, we would need to build 10 new power plants by 2010 just to meet the growing energy needs of this country’s data centers.
How do we meet the world’s future energy demands? Not an easy question, but it gets even more complicated when you factor in another critical need: water.
While water hasn’t always been factored into energy discussions — or vice versa — the two are “inextricably linked,” according to Sandia National Laboratories. That’s why researchers there are working [...]
There’s good news for the future of green-collar employment, but it comes with a caveat: maximizing job growth in green industries will require the right public policy support. That means law-makers need to approve measures such as a renewable portfolio standard, incentives for renewable energy, public education programs and adequate funding for research and development.
If such measures are put in place, the U.S. could see as many as one out of every four [...]
Can better energy efficiency help us reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and curb our greenhouse gas emissions? Maybe not as much as some hope.
While some people tout better and more energy-efficient technology as one solution to our current fuel and climate challenges, their expectations might be overblown. A new study from the UK Energy Research Centre, for example, finds that improved efficiency sometimes creates a tendency to use more energy, or [...]
So every big corporation is green now, huh? That’s apparently what I’m supposed to believe based on every other commercial on prime-time TV: Walmart, esurance.com, Waste Management, GE, Delta, Coca Cola, and on and on. But, to one degree or another, I’m not buying it.
Sure, some companies are doing some things to reduce their carbon footprints or save energy … but, in plenty of cases, those are moves
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