What will the impact of this generation be? From cradle to grave of all the techno crap and prepackaged consumables?
The world is finding out very quickly that the impact is deep and will reshape us forever... This inforgraphic is just a small "gadget" impact, but what will the lifetime environmental and energy impact be?
The short answer is we consume 3 earths of energy and resources while throwing away 2/3rds of it. This generations sure "talks a lot" about "sustainability" but we have never been so far from it.
Or more importantly the human impact of a generation raised on gadgets and "social" networks vs volunteering, being productive or human interactions with family and society?
The short answer is everything that was considered antisocial or introverted, becomes acceptable as normal... I better tweet that :-(
via @GOOD- It's no secret that Millennials (loosely classified as people born between 1977 and 1993) are the generation ... the most plugged in to the digital world around us.
Check out this latest sponsored infographic about how Millennials stay connected, whether using tablets, game consoles, or the latest communication technology.
“When people think about environmental sustainability, they immediately focus on population,” one of the paper’s authors, Ian Roberts, told the BBC. “Actually, when it comes down to it, it’s not how many mouths there are to feed. It is how much flesh there is on the planet.”
To get a sense of scale, here is a chart showing how many kilocalories a day were required per person in 2005, from a selection of countries:
“The weight of nations: an estimation of adult human biomass,” by Sarah C. Walpole, David Prieto-Merino, Phil Edwards, John Cleland, Gretchen Stevens and Ian Roberts. BMC Public Health.If all countries were as fat as the United States, the resulting increase in global weight would increase energy requirements by 261 kilocalories a day per adult. That’s the same as adding the energy requirements of 473 million adults of average B.M.I. to the planet.
“Tackling population fatness may be critical to world food security and ecological sustainability,” the authors conclude.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its Annual Energy Outlook for 2012 (AEO) this week. The AEO updates EIA’s reference case forecasts for regulatory changes and data changes that have occurred since it released its earlier version at the beginning of this year. The full outlook also contains 29 sensitivity cases that examine changes to the reference case assumptions to highlight the uncertainty that exists in projecting the energy future for the next 25 years.[i] In the updated reference case, the nation’s future looks roughly the same as it did in the early release version that IER summarized here.
Crude Oil and Petroleum
According to EIA, by 2020, nearly half of the crude oil the United States consumes will be produced at home, and 82 percent is expected to come from this side of the Atlantic. Government forecasters expect that U.S. petroleum purchases from the Middle East, Africa, and Europe will fall to about 2.5 million barrels a day by 2020, from more than 4 million barrels today. Oil imports from the Persian Gulf’s OPEC members are expected to drop to 860,000 barrels a day in 2020—about half of their current level. Even OPEC predicts that oil shipments from the Middle East to North America “could almost be nonexistent” by 2035.[ii]
EIA’s estimates are backed up by data from IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (IHS CERA). IHS CERA calculates that between 2003 and 2011, oil and gas investments nearly quadrupled in the Western Hemisphere. Due to greater political stability in the Americas, 48 percent of global oil investment ($320 billion) occurred here in 2011, compared to 39 percent in 2003.
North Dakota surpassed Alaska earlier this year to become the nation’s second largest state oil producer, exceeded only by Texas. North Dakota developed its Bakken Shale formation through the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology. Average U.S. daily production of crude oil increased 6 percent between October 2011 and March 2012 spurred by production of shale oil from the Bakken and the Eagle Ford shale formation in Texas. In November 2011, U.S. oil production was over 6 million barrels per day for the first time since 1998.
EIA’s updated energy outlook finds that tight oil found in low-permeability reservoirs such as shale and chalk formations is the largest new source of U.S. supply since the offshore Gulf of Mexico was developed. Production of tight oil is expected to more than double over the next two decades. Production from eight tight oil prospects is expected to reach 1.23 million barrels per day by 2035, more than double their 2011 levels. In 2012, tight oil output is expected to reach 720,000 barrels per day, or 12.5 percent of domestic production.[iii]
The new energy outlook also finds that total U.S. oil production is expected to peak at 6.7 million barrels per day in 2020, the highest since 1994 with about 18 percent coming from tight oil. In 2035, EIA expects tight oil to account for 20.5 percent of the 5.99 million barrels per day of total oil it expects to be produced in the United States. Tight oil production is expected to reach its peak in 2029 at 1.33 million barrels per day.
@RRapier - In the first installment of this series, I reviewed U.S. and global oil reserves according to the 2012 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. The second installment covered oil production. Today, I want to examine the changes in consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas since 1965 in the three major consuming regions of the world: Asia Pacific, the United States, and European Union countries.
Highlights of this article and topics that will be explored include:
I have often said that I view the growth of carbon emissions as an unstoppable hurricane, for reasons I will reiterate in the next article. Further, I believe one of the reasons that climate change advocates are so ineffective is that they are constantly aiming at the wrong target. The first figure of regional coal consumption emphasizes that point.
Statements and press releases from organizations involved in climate change advocacy leave the strong impression that the biggest obstacle in the war on climate change is Big Oil. In fact, this is where advocates spend the vast majority of their time; fighting against oil consumption. The battle over the Keystone Pipeline is a case in point. But compared to the explosive growth of coal consumption in the Asia Pacific region, potential emissions as a result of the Keystone Pipeline are trivial.
Since 1965, consumption of coal in the U.S. and in European Union countries (the European Union did not exist in 1965, but I will refer to these countries here as the “EU”) has changed at a relatively slow pace. Over the past 46 years, coal consumption in the U.S. has grown by 72%, but it has fallen by 44% in the EU. In recent years, coal consumption has declined in the U.S. as well — down 13% since 2005.
The Asia Pacific region — dominated by consumption in China and India — is an entirely different story. Coal consumption in the region has increased by more than an order of magnitude since 1965, and is currently more than triple the coal consumption of the EU and U.S. combined. This represents enormous growth in global carbon emissions, which will be the topic of the next post.
The next figure shows that oil consumption trends for Asia Pacific are similar; the region has experienced rapid growth since 1965. The past 46 years has seen oil consumption grow by 63% in the U.S., 60% in the EU, and 777% in Asia Pacific. Oil consumption in the U.S. and the EU has been trending downward since about 2005. But the reason there has been little relief from high oil prices — despite the drop in demand in the West — is that global oil consumption continues to climb on the back of very strong Asian demand.
Natural gas consumption trends tell a somewhat different story. While the trend for Asia Pacific is the same — 2011 is more than 100 times the region’s 1965 consumption — the next figure shows that natural gas consumption in the U.S. is also on the rise
Another one bites the dust. Colorado-based thin solar panel manufacturing company Abound Solar on Thursday announced that it will be filing for bankruptcy next week.Read on at: http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/abound-solar-recipient-of-70m-energy-dept-loan-guarantee-goes-bankrupt.phpThe company was awarded a $400 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy in 2010, but as both the company and the Energy Department have made clear today, it only claimed about $70 million of the total before the guarantee was frozen by the government after Abound failed to hit financial targets.
Coal-powered facilities account for roughly a third of all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, and most climate scientists believe that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could have costly consequences.
Today CBO released a report—prepared at the request of the Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—on federal efforts to reduce the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS), a much-discussed option for reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions while preserving the ability to produce electricity at coal-fired power plants.
No CCS-equipped coal-fired power plants have been built on a commercial scale because any electricity generated by such plants would be much more expensive than electricity produced by conventional coal-burning plants: Engineers’ estimates indicate that electricity generated by the first CCS-equipped commercial-scale plants would initially be about 75 percent more costly than electricity generated by conventional coal-fired plants. Since 2005, lawmakers have provided the Department of Energy with about $6.9 billion to develop CCS technology, demonstrate its commercial feasibility, and reduce the cost of electricity generated by CCS-equipped plants.
In the absence of a significant technological breakthrough, it seems clear that a large amount of new CCS capacity—installed either at new plants or, through retrofitting, at existing plants—would be needed to reduce costs substantially. Such an investment seems unlikely in the foreseeable future and it might not occur even if the technology became more competitive economically. Unless the federal government adopts policies that encourage or require utilities to generate electricity with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, the projected high cost of using CCS technology means that the government’s current program for developing CCS is unlikely to do much to support widespread use of the technology.
We all carry in our bodies the legacy of our dependence on plastic products: 93 percent of U.S. urine samples contain bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical compound used in the production of plastics and resins. Most of this exposure comes from food packaging. You may also recall the shift away from the use of BPA by Nalgene, the water bottle maker.
Sydney Brownstone over at Mother Jones points out the growing body of scientific research showing that BPAs screw around with our hormones and much more:
Exposure to the chemical has been associated with risk for obesity, breast cancer, prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, infertility, diabetes, thyroid dysfunction, and neurological problems.
BPAs are ubiquitous in the modern industrial food system, and figuring our just how they find their way into our bodies can be complicated, points out Brownstone. Earlier this week researchers from the University of Rochester and Mount Sinai Medical Center published a study with a novel approach to this question. They tested the urine of pregnant Mennonite women in upstate New York for their exposure and found their levels to be four times lower than average.
“Suddenly normally calm economists are talking about 1931, the year everything fell apart,” writes Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
“The parallels between Europe in the 1930s and Europe today are stark, striking, and increasingly frightening, write Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen in [external] the new preface to Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929-1939.
“We see unemployment, youth unemployment especially, soaring to unprecedented heights. Financial instability and distress are widespread. There is growing political support for extremist parties of the far left and right.”
Congress has six months to prevent the U.S. economy from falling off the so-called fiscal cliff. If Congress does not act, on Jan. 1, 2013 a mix of tax hikes and $1.2 trillion in budget cuts are set to take effect, which the Congressional Budget Office says will likely throw the country back into recession.
Most economists agree that failing to act will have about a $600 billion drag on the economy in 2013. But little discussion has been given to the direct impact on jobs, particularly in the defense sector, which will suffer from half of the budget cuts. The $500 billion cut to defense spending would be phased in over 10 years with $55 billion to take effect next year.
A recent study by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a lobbying and advocacy group, found that more than 1 million private sector jobs could be lost by 2014 due to fiscal constraints. The proposed job cuts would increase the national unemployment rate by 0.7 percent and decrease Gross Domestic Product by nearly 1 percent, according to NAM.
Prof Chang, Dr Giannis, Prof Wang, Dr Rajagopal, and Dr Chen with the No Mix Vacuum Toilet./Promo image
Science Daily titles their post New Toilet Turns Human Waste Into Electricity and Fertilizer; It's based on a presser from Nanyang Technological University titled NTU’s new loo turns poo into power. Neither is accurate.
What the scientists from Nanyang Technological University are standing around is a urine separating toilet that uses a vacuum to evacuate it instead of water. All you get out of this is urine and poop, much like you do with theSwedish No-Mix toilets
Roediger vacuum system/Promo image
What matters is the whole system, what they do with it. The scientists at NTU have connected it to a vacuum system, like those used in airplanes or in theRoedigner No-Mix vacuum separating toilet, described our post Waste Not, Want Not: The Future of Toilets
The coal-fired power industry in the U.S. is facing the biggest plunge in asset values in a decade, risking billions of dollars in pollution-control spending by utilities such as Exelon Corp. (EXC) and American Electric Power Co. (AEP)
An indication of how much new emissions rules and cheaper natural gas have hammered the value of coal-burning generation will come when Exelon announces the results of the first big sale of U.S. coal-fired power plants in four years.
Exelon, the largest U.S. power company, may have to take a 40 percent discount for three Maryland plants it’s seeking to sell by the end of August. Bidders including NRG Energy Inc. (NRG) have offered $600 million to $700 million for the units, which have a fair value of $1 billion, said Travis Miller, Chicago- based director of utilities research for Morningstar Inc.
“This is going to be the first meaningful transaction for coal assets since the downturn,” Julien Dumoulin-Smith, a New York-based analyst with UBS AG, said in a phone interview. “You can get a little anxious about what the repercussions are.”
Constellation Energy Group, which Exelon bought this year, spent $1 billion on the plants to keep them in compliance with pollution rules. Their sale, the biggest since 2008, comes in an era of more stringent pollution rules and competition from facilities burning gas, a fuel cost that is near 10-year lows.
An official from the government of Malaysia's biotechnology investment agency BiotechCorp sent the blog an email today regarding their Malaysian ringgit (M$)170m (€42.3m, $53.3m) investment for a biorefinery complex in Kertih, in the Terengganu State, which is expected to attract foreign companies to set up shop for their cellulosic-based manufacturing facilities.
The site will reportedly be Asia's largest biorefinery complex, which will sit on a 1,000 hectare land located at Kertih Biopolymer Park (developed by the East Coast Economic Region Development Council or ECERDC or Malaysia).
The site will also have a 30,000 hectares of land dedicated for feedstock plantations that will produce 10.5m tonnes/year of woodchips from Acacia mangium and Leucaena leucocephala -- I have no idea how to pronounce this -- but it is also locally known as "Petai Belalang.".
...The agencies expect to get a total of M$6.8bn investment from foreign companies. Operation of the complex is expected to start by early 2014. The site will also use renewable energy coming from cellulosic feedstock instead of natural gas.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Americans' net worth collapsed in recent years, but don't blame the housing market for it all.
A CNNMoney analysis of new Census Bureau data shows that if you strip out the effects of the housing collapse, median household net worth still fell by 25% between 2005 and 2010. The decline was driven largely by the plummeting stock market, which devastated Americans' portfolios and retirement accounts.
...Asian, black and Hispanic households each lost a much greater share of median net worth, around 60%, than their white counterparts, at 30%.
As for median home equity values, Hispanic households experienced a 55% drop, while Asians saw a 43% decline and blacks a 35% decrease. Whites, on the other hand, lost just under a quarter.
Age was also a factor, with younger Americans losing a greater share of their wealth than their parents' generation.
Households of people age 35 to 44 saw the largest percent decline in median net worth of any age group: 59%. If home equity isn't factored in, they lost 40%.
Please continue reading at:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/19/news/economy/net-worth-housing/index.htm
The EPA is actually considering regulating chemicals under the law that was put in place in the 1970′s to regulate chemicals: Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Most environmental lawyers don’t even bother looking at TSCA because they assume that it gives them nothing to work with in terms of actually getting toxic chemicals out of our products and environment. But in speaking to state officials attending the Environmental Council of the States’ forum, Jim Jones, EPA’s acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention said, “We will try and exercise some muscle we have not exercised for decades.”
...In the meantime, meet Joe Chemical in Safer Chemicals Healthy Families’ latest ad in Politico for the Safe Chemicals Act, which would inject some steroids into that TSCA muscle so that when the EPA exercises it, it actually does its job.
Dirty Dozen: The 12 to buy organic (in order of pesticide load, apples being the worst offenders).
1. Apples
2. Celery
3. Sweet bell peppers
4. Peaches
5. Strawberries
6. Imported nectarines
7. Grapes
8. Spinach
9. Lettuce
10. Cucumbers
11. Domestic blueberries
12. Potatoes
1. Onions
2. Sweet corn
3. Pineapples
4. Avocado
5. Cabbage
6. Sweet peas
7. Asparagus
8. Mangoes
9. Eggplant
10. Kiwi
11. Domestic cantaloupe
12. Sweet potatoes
13. Grapefruit
14. Watermelon
15. Mushrooms
Other disheartening data from the report includes:
For the full list, see Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce. You can also download a pocket-sized guide here.
A quickie, this is great: Next time someone tries telling you that without using such and such genetically engineered biotech crop we won't be able to solve world hunger, just quote them some Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food:
People are hungry not because there is too little food: they are hungry because they are marginalized economically and powerless politically. Securing the right to food is therefore the only path to durably tackling hunger.The importance of improving the incomes of the poor, facilitating internal and foreign investment, and increasing agricultural yields cannot be downplayed in the hunger equation. But for genuine, sustainable progress to be made in tackling hunger and malnutrition, political processes must first be made accountable, participative, and attuned to the cross-cutting complexities of the hunger question.
Only when the political process is human rights-proofed in this way can we be confident that the reinvestment in a country and its agriculture will truly benefit the poor and food insecure.
Read more: The Drum
By the way, De Schutter has also said some choice words on the role of sustainable agriculture:
To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available.Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live -- especially in unfavorable environments. [...] To date, agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects. Recent projects conducted in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop yields over a period of 3-10 years.Conventional farming relies on expensive inputs, fuels climate change and is not resilient to climatic shocks. It simply is not the best choice anymore today.
The conclusion most certainly makes sense: There’s more people on Earth that are eating more food than ever before. This, according to a new study published in BMC Public Health, could further drain the world’s natural resources.
“Increasing population fatness could have the same implications for world food energy demands as an extra half a billion people living on the earth,” the studyconcluded.
The U.S., not surprisingly, leads the pack in obesity and is among the largest drainers of food resources. Researchers used body mass indexes (BMI) and overall population to calculate biomass or overall weight of the nation. “Total biomass by age-sex group was estimated as the product of the number of people in the group and their average body mass.”
Researchers then used “extreme scenarios” to calculate usage of natural resources. They calculated the drain on natural resources if all the countries had BMIs like the U.S. versus if all the countries had BMIs like Japan. These particular countries were chosen because while they are similar socioeconomically, their obesity rates are at two different ends of the spectrum as shown in the study below.
Before the meltdown, atomic energy provided about 30 percent of Japan’s power, but now, post-meltdown, even the prime minister realizes that the country needs to decrease its reliance on nuclear power. Taking a page from Germany’s book, Japan’s government is sharply increasing the amount that utilities must pay consumers who generate solar power, a subsidy that is expected to rejuvenate the country's struggling solar industry.
Japanese consumers who decide to install solar panels will be paid roughly 53 cents per kilowatt-hour of solar power that they produce. (To put that number into context, it's about twice as high as the subsidy rate in Germany, which has long been the world leader in solar power). Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the subsidy will encourage consumers to invest up to $9.6 billion in solar power, leading to new solar output equivalent to not one, not two, but three nuclear plants. In other words, the subsidy will make solar power more profitable for both consumers and solar companies, likely making Japan the world’s second-largest market for solar power.
