News for the Foresight Community
> Hot
Topic: The End of Coal?
>
Futurists in the News: Alex Steffen
>
Publications: Lifeboat Books
> In
Transition: World Future Society
> In
Memoriam: Maurice Strong
> Blog
Report: Self-Driving Cars and Wild Nature
Hot Topic: The End of Coal?
About a
dozen years ago, energy policy analyst Barbara
Freese warned in her groundbreaking book, Coal:
A Human History, that our use of coal would one day
be condemned by future generations and that all of coal’s contributions to the
industrial development we’ve come to enjoy and take for granted would be
overshadowed by the predicted drastic climate changes.
While
responses to Freese’s recommendation that “we move quickly and aggressively
toward climate-friendly energy sources” have arguably been neither quick nor
aggressive, signs of the end of our dependence on coal (and our vulnerability
to its unhealthy impacts) are emerging.
Recent data
from the Institute for Energy Economics and
Financial Analysis
show that China’s slowing economy and its move away from heavy industry toward services
are dragging down demand for coal; both domestic coal production and imports
have declined, and the government has announced it “will not approve any new
coal mine projects for the next three years and will close down a thousand
small mines,” reports Tim Buckley, IEEFA’s director of energy finance studies,
Australasia.
As a result, “China’s total country emissions are on track to peak potentially
a decade earlier than their official target of no later than 2030.” Meanwhile,
China is ramping up its investments in wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear
production.
In the
United States, where renewable and efficient energy investment is about half
that of China ($56 billion in 2015 versus China’s $110 billion), coal is
nevertheless on a downward trend, with “a 10 percent year-over-year decline in
coal consumption in 2015 (and down already a staggering 29.7 percent so far in
2016) in addition to a three-year moratorium of new federal coal leases,”
Buckley reports.
As one sign
of the times, utilities in Oregon have agreed to phase out coal-fired plants by
2030 and to double the amount of renewable energy they generate by 2040. The
measures are popular with Oregon voters—and have united some seemingly unlikely
partners, Pacific Power spokesman Scott Bolton told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Some of these folks we’ve never
worked with before, so it is actually exciting to find some common interests,”
he said. “You don’t see PacifiCorp and Sierra Club on the same letterhead very
often.”
“Data Bite: China Continues to Drive
Global Markets Lower”
by Tim Buckley, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, January
18, 2016.
“Oregon Utilities Agree to Phase Out
Coal-Fired Power”
by Cassandra Profita, OPB/EarthFix, January 6, 2016.
Signals:
alternative energy, China, climate change, coal, Oregon, utilities
Futurists in the News: Alex Steffen
“Planetary
futurist” Alex Steffen, author of Worldchanging and Carbon
Zero, was one of a handful of non-tech innovators in the San Francisco Bay
area profiled on the blog The Bold Italic. (Also profiled for the piece were a
chef, a distiller, and a singer.) The article describes Steffen’s work as “environmentalism
to the core but goes beyond, requiring a complete rethinking of how humanity
engages with the environment” and Steffen as the kind of innovator needed “to guide us through
the hazy, tough road ahead.” Read: “Four Standout Bay Area Innovators
Who Aren’t in Technology”
by Ronny Kerr, The Bold Italic, January 15, 2016.
Publications: Lifeboat Books
The Lifeboat Foundation published three new books of
fiction and nonfiction at the end of 2015. Visions
of the Future, edited by J. Daniel
Batt, features stories and essays
on artificial intelligence, androids, life extension, and more, including
contributions from Ray Kurzweil, David
Brin, and Martin Rees. Prospects for Human Survival, by
theoretical physicist Willard Wells,
argues that technological advances may be accelerating faster than our ability
to control them, suggesting that humanity should develop friendly superhuman AI
as quickly as possible. The third edition of The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen—and What to Do by Daniel Berleant also was released. Details: Lifeboat
Foundation Books.
In Transition: World Future Society
In a recent
announcement to members, World Future Society board chair and Interim Executive
Director Julie Friedman Steele said
she would be conducting a listening tour over the next few weeks to share
thoughts on the future direction of the Society. With the endorsement of
founder Edward Cornish and his
family, WFS will hold its 2016 annual meeting July 22-24 in Washington, D.C.
The conference will take the form of a summit and celebration of the Society’s 50th
anniversary. WFS headquarters are now at 1875 Connecticut Ave., N.W., 10th
Floor, Washington, D.C. 20009. Download FAQs and profiles of Steele and the current WFS board of directors (PDFs).
In Memoriam: Maurice Strong
Maurice F. Strong, secretary general of the UN Conference on Environment and
Development, died November 30 at the age of 86. Perhaps best known as the
organizer of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Strong was a longtime World Future
Society board member and was on the Society’s Global Advisory Council through
2014. He shared his thoughts on “Reforming the United Nations” in the
September-October 2001 issue of The
Futurist.
“Maurice
Strong was a unique voice at the World Future Society, with senior leadership
experience in both the Canadian power industry and UN environmental programs,
thus bridging the gap between public and private,” said former WFS President
Timothy Mack, managing principal of AAI Foresight. “He also advised the UN on
such delicate matters as the Korean Peninsula and China’s changing role in the
world (living in Beijing for many years). He was consulted right up until his
death as an expert on multilateralism and peaceful resolution of conflicts and
enjoyed a high profile in the Rio and Rio+20 world environmental conferences.
Strong was instrumental in promoting government funding and entry into
international meetings for environmental NGOs for over 40 years.”
Blog Report: Self-Driving Cars and Wild Nature
As
autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles gain powers and popularity, one
potential impact has received scant attention. In his latest blog for AAI
Foresight, environmental futurist David
N. Bengston warns that proponents need to look beyond the first-order
effects of these technologies.
“Natural
systems near roads are degraded by an increased abundance of invasive species,
reduced carbon sequestration, severed wildlife corridors, and spillover effects
as people clear newly accessible forests and drain wetlands,” Bengston writes.
Read:
“Self-Driving
Cars and Wild Nature” by David N. Bengston, Foresight Signals Blog (January 2016).
Signals: automobiles, highways, nature, self-driving cars, sprawl,
wilderness
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