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Stephen Brown says:
One fact that you have not taken into account is China’s whole-hearted embrace of nuclear power. Daya Bay, see here for details ( http://www.nuctrans.org/Nuc_Trans/locations/daya-bay/daya-bay.html ) was just the first of many more such plants planned and even now under construction.
China knows that the most viable option is nuclear power if it wants to provide for future growth. And that is just the route it has taken.
China will soon become the world’s leader in nuclear power generation. The coal that they have will be saved for other uses.
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HR says:
Would it be fair to say that commentators have been making predictions of an energy crisis for 40years or more? These people no doubt based their predictions on sound numbers. What makes the present day doom mongers any better at predicting the future? It strikes me that what is always left out of these calculations is the resiliance and ingenuity of H. sapiens.
On Willis’ graph in the first post does anybody have any comments on how productivity has shifted globally? Anybody have good links for a summary of globalisation of production, heavy industry etc. I’d like to be able to back up the follow statement. Most of the carbon increase in the developing world is still to produce products for consumption in the industrialized West.
Finally I’ve always thought spreading greater wealth as a good thing. Since when did this become seen primarily as a problem? I’d prefer to support greater wealth in resourse poor regions and then deal with any unwelcome side affects afterwards rather than buy into the idea that the planet can’t afford to see these people access what we already have.
fyi
I haven’t read the Comments from the article, but it is going to be quite interesting ...from a consumption perspective. As India and China develop frenetically, so do Russia and Brazil, so does Turkey and Viet Nam, the Asian Tigers and Tiger Cubs, and a good number of African countries (there are more people in the fastly growing middle class in sub-Saharan Africa than in India, one other reason why China is really focussing there apart from raw materials). Education is also rising in these areas, meaning an ever larger pool of (educated) and capable workers willing to compete with those from the developed world. The education in the top schools in these regions is quite good (I was born and raised in Kenya, only going to the US for my university - achieving a 3.96GPA was almost easy), and in some places like India it can get to world class (eg their IIT colleges roughly modeled on MIT). The edge the Developed World holds is innovation ...the moment that is given up (it has to be given up, since if the US keeps striving forth it would be VERY hard for it to be taken) then the edge will be significantly degraded. This is why the US needs real leadership. This is why Europe is awakening to the perils and folly of their past quasi-socialist mini/macro experiments. This is why Japan’s fate may be already sealed, mired in a demographic blackhole they will probably never get out of. The next 5 decades will either lead to a veritable utopia of development and technological advancement, or it will be quite bad. Real strong leadership will lead to the former, weakness and surrender of prime advantage will lead to the latter.