On friday 7 march 2025, my friend and colleague Isak Stoddard defended his PhD thesis Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation at Uppsala University. Below is the abstract in english from https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1929133&dswid=519. Increasingly emphatic warnings from scientists about the dire consequences of global climate change has contributed to the establishment of [...]
One unsustainable part of the industrial economy is the mining and processing of materials and fuels which creates also large flows of ‘waste’ and burdens environmental sinks. Upstream, huge amounts of solid waste are generated in mining and processing processes. One-fifth (2%) of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions arise from the production and processing [...]
Angkur Pailiwal and Jyotika Sood tell an interesting story about the rapidly increasing demand for guar gum for use in the exploitation of shale gas (‘frackgas’) in Down to Earth . It shows the interconnectedness in the world: oil depletion and geopolitical tensions cause investments in exploiting marginal gas deposits in the USA, which increases the [...]
Energy use: economics of energy saving The dynamics behind the changes in energy intensity is an important topic in energy economics. Goods and services are produced with a variety of inputs and a so-called production function has been proposed to describe it. Engineers prefer to construct it on the basis of physical flows (engineering production [...]
A technology to supply water in relevant amounts is desalinization of seawater. It is at the intersection of water, food and energy issues, because the water for drinking and food is a necessity of life but its production from seawater requires lots of electricity. It competes with other technologies such as extracting water from air. [...]
Models of oil and gas exploitation An important issue in sustainable development discourses is the depletion of finite resources of fossil fuels and minerals. The concepts of supply cost curves and reserve-production ratios (RPR) have been introduced in resource economics, in combination with learning-by-doing (see Appendix 8A.1 en Box 17.2 in Sustainability Science book and [...]
Energy forms and conversions Energy is a fundamental quantity in nature that is transferred between systems or parts of systems. It is ‘stored’ in a variety of forms and is associated with movement, combustion, heat and (the capacity to do) work. Boiling water for a cup of tea, using the microwave oven, switching on the [...]
Energy use: units Energy units. It is important to get some familiarity with the units of energy quantities (stocks) and flows. The energy stored in systems is a stock. Examples are the chemical energy stored in a liter of gasoline, the heat content of a cup of tea or the kinetic energy of a moving [...]
The astrophysicist Chaisson (2001) has proposed an interesting link between energy and complexity. Organisms can be viewed as dissipative structures: Ordered objects whose structure can be maintained thanks to a steady input of high-quality energy. The free energy flow density (ɸ) necessary to sustain such a non-equilibrium structure is a measure of complexity. It can [...]
The energy needed to deliver energy has always been a concern for societies. ‘All our societies require enormous flows of high-quality energy just to sustain, let alone raise, their complexity and order (to keep themselves [ . . . ] far from thermodynamic equilibrium) ... [and] after a certain point in time, without dramatic new [...]