A Copenhagen Conundrum
This post is meant chiefly to provide some background facts, figures, and food for thought regarding the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. While I will be providing a bit of a narrative along the way, please feel free to ignore that: the numbers pretty much speak for themselves.
Climate Change and International Trade
Continuing on with my guest-speaker discussion posts. This is no. 2:
The Challenges of Climate Change and Implications for International Trade
Patrick Low, Chief Economist (Director of Economic Research and Statistics), World Trade Organization (WTO)
As governments gear up to engage more intensively in cooperative actions to address climate change, many questions arise regarding the nature and timing of appropriate action. International trade may be significantly affected by future climate change mitigation policies, especially if governments fail to cooperate effectively.
The Nuclear Option
The Necessity of Nuclear Energy
The single most defining feature of our age is that invisible substance that flows through cables that coil their way from house to house, building to building, city to city, country to country and even across continents. The modern magic that is electricity is the one thing, the only thing, that has made everything around us a reality. From the light bulb to the elevator, from the blender to the blog, everything around us is profoundly reliant on electricity. Without it, we would probably still be burning whale oil for light at night (though, where we’d get the whales from, I don’t know). We’d have no radio, no television, no space travel, no internet (no YouTube? Wikipedia? no!!), no lights, no phones, no motor cars, not a single luxury[1].
Yet, where does electricity come from? Simply: it comes from coal, gas, oil, water, heat, light, wind, or plutonium/uranium. The first three we burn. The second three we harness. The last two we fission.
While each of these serves an important and vital role in a diversified energy source matrix, the tragedy is that we have an exponentially expanding population with an even greater growth in the demand for electricity. Simply put, no amount of fire, water, wind, and earth (or love and any combination thereof) can, alone, solve our insatiable hunger for power (electrical, not megalomania).
