Jonathan Schofield

@green @jgkoomey @jackofalltrades @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas ha!

@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green I’m in the same place as you Jack. I’m just trying to acknowledge that we’re talking about turning round an unimaginably huge super tanker and we haven’t even got our hands on the controls yet.

As Mike Berners-Lee has said “If aliens were observing us they would conclude we haven’t even noticed we have an atmosphere problem”.

Right now the most important thing to do is to begin to turn.

(inadequate mixed metaphors end)

@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green …If we can make a jump to being serious at scale we’ll know soon which of those territories we are actually in. And if we can’t it’ll mostly be moot

@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green I’ve stayed relatively quiet on Jonathan’s push back because, frankly, I don’t share his optimism, but that doesn’t mean I’m a doomer: we should fight like hell for conserving as much biosphere as we can.

What we are up against is of a scale none of us can make robust sense of. Our different dispositions and attachments mean we each seize upon different territories of plausible probability…

@FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green from my reading, efficiencies have a very well-established pattern of feeding Jevons paradox.

And that’s what animals are evolved to do. They pursue energy sources subject to external pressures on them. We think we’re cleverer than that. The last 30 years, in particular, strongly suggest otherwise

@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green Thank you for taking the time to point to further nuance and reading. I’ll endeavour to dive in.

Like you, I hope we buck our ideas up. Fast

@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green e.g. in this much shared tweet from last year, Ireland is the decoupling poster child but its rate of consumption-based emissions reduction over the 14 years was around 3.6% per year and 2 of those years were the global financial crisis.

It sure looks like decoupling is running at a rate decades too late so maybe we should be pulling other levers?

@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green As with your other reply, I defer to your scholarship and understanding but unfortunately I don’t have an Elsevier subscription.

I’m aware of many scholars whose analysis suggests really significant decoupling is at best extremely doubtful. I guess we’ll know in years to come who was right.

From my layperson’s perspective the immovable constraint would appear once again to be time…

@jgkoomey @nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green thanks for the recommendation Jonathan. I’ll explore that. I’m aware of the point you make about not needing to replace fossil energy completely.

I defer to your scholarship. From my much more limited awareness it sure looks like the scarce commodity is time. There’s what is possible in principle and what’s possible within the less-than-a-decade of Paris budget we have left

@nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green I agree that for consumer end-use, renewable* power is waaay preferable to fossil-fuelled equivalents. But that’s just part of the problem.

We absolutely need them at scale to buy us time though.

*renewables are more properly thought of as re-buildables

@ajsadauskas @green is it not worse than that?

There is more or less a 1:1 correlation between energy use and GDP.

We don’t have the time to build out the scale of renewable infrastructure that would replace our current energy use.

We need to use much less energy which means much smaller and therefore radically different economies

https://tickzero.com/film-3-techno-optimism/