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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (64822)	6/10/2005 4:28:17 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

But trends don't have to be sustainable. Things change. "Sustainability" is a Greenie cliche meaning nothing much. We don't need sustainable energy supplies. While they are cheap, we can use them, when they aren't cheap, we can do something else other than use energy. Maybe play badminton instead of flying at 10 km high and 1000 kph. There are many ways to live and they don't all depend on burning a lot of oil. <But GDP has been rising, and the energy use per capita has been rising. It's an unsustainable trend, > I used to enjoy using a lot of energy, driving around all day, flying hither and yon. Now it seems a lot of effort. Even if the petrol was free I wouldn't use more of it. I don't want a bigger vehicle and I don't want to do more kilometres. Mqurice

To: Snowshoe who wrote (64822)	6/11/2005 9:51:01 AM
From: Moominoid	Respond to of 74559

Energy intensity of GDP (energy used per dollar) has been dropping for at least two centuries in US, Sweden, Spain and some other developed countries. In the UK and Germany it appears to have risen for a while in the 19th century. In China energy intensity has fallen since at least 1979, in Mexico maybe more recently. But energy use per capita is rising everywhere apart from a few European countries like Sweden. GDP is just rising faster. Part of the cause of declining energy intensity is the switch to electricity from less technically efficient fuels. The rest is mostly improvements in efficiency of energy use, particulary in manufacturing. Other factors don't appear to be important. The key question for the future is whether technological improvements in alternative energy sources will make them cheap enough soon enough to replace fossil fuels without a substantial cost increase. The industrial revolution saw the switch to fossil fuels because at the time they were so much cheaper and convenient than the alternatives (horses, human muscles and wood). Using corn to make fuel in the US is not cost-effective in terms of the energy input required to produce a given output. Of course using waste biomass to add to the fuel supply could make sense but growing the stuff on purpose seems to be silly. Brazil may be a different case as sugarcane has a lot of energy in it and less energy inputs probably going into growing it in that country. I asked Duane Chapman (Cornell) about this. He said that when he was at the World Bank he looked into this and believed that it too was more an energy sink. He is a bit of a conspiracy theorist though :) (but professor of economics at Cornell).