Naturally Interesting

The Economist has 2 worthwhile articles on energy:

The Future of Energy

The Power and the glory

Climate Progress takes issue with their views on nuclear, coal, and energy efficiency.But everyone apparently agrees:

We are at the beginning of a Third Industrial Revolution in which renewable energy technologies — driven by factors such as peak oil, climate change and the old-fashioned profit motive — will permanently transform the global economy and its impact on the environment.

“A fundamental change is coming sooner than you might think,” the newspaper says.

“Everyone loves a booming market, and most booms happen on the back of technological change,” the Economist writes. “The world’s venture capitalists, having fed on the computing boom of the 1980s, the internet boom of the 1990s and the biotech and nanotech boomlets of the early 2000s, are now looking around for the next one. They think they have found it: energy.”

The latest science suggests that national and global climate policy is seriously misdirected. We must aim at achieving average annual carbon dioxide emissions of less than 5 GtC [5 billion metric tons of carbon] this century or risk the catastrophe of reaching atmospheric concentrations of 1,000 p.p.m. A carbon price set by a cap-and-trade system is a useful component of a longer-term climate strategy. Implementing such a system, however, is secondary to adopting a national and global strategy to stop building new traditional coal-fired plants while starting to deploy existing and near-term low-carbon technologies as fast as is humanly possible.

Go read Joseph Romm’s full post here. It is, as always, excellent