Sunday, July 4, 2010

Can the world run on renewables, nuclear energy and geo-sequestration? The negative case

by Ted Trainer from Culture Change. This is a condensed version of a much longer article. It provides technical arguments to support its case that capitalism cannot be sustained by alternative sources of energy.
If this argument is valid it reinforces the case that major global problems such as the greenhouse effect, peak oil, energy supply, resource scarcity, Third World “development” and environmental destruction cannot be solved on the supply side, i.e., by finding more resources or moving to alternative technologies. These rapidly worsening problems can only be solved by dramatically reducing consumption. This means consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed; it must be replaced by what I refer to as The Simpler way.