- Martin Wolf has been revisiting the robots and jobs topic over the past few weeks in a couple of articles in The Financial Times here and here (free access after registration). This is a theme I have been addressing a lot recently in a series of posts starting here. Wolf finishes his last article with the observation that technology does not always have to shape institutions; it should be the other way around: “A form of techno-feudalism is unnecessary. Above all, technology itself does not dictate the outcomes. Economic and political institutions do. If the ones we have do not give the results we want, we must change them.” I agree, but this will not be easy.
- I have also just discovered a fascinating blog that pulls together articles on the new robot economy called RobotEnomics (sic). For example, check out this post on the economic implications of driverless cars.
- California has experienced significant rainfall over the last few days. The latest Drought Monitor (released weekly) doesn’t capture this rainfall, so we should see some slight improvement when the next update comes out. Critically though, California’s water bank—its high mountain snow pack—is still running at around 20% of average. You can see the end month figures as measured by the Department of Water Resources here and an article giving background to the snowpack here. Mother Jones has some nice graphics on the crops being hurt by the drought here, while The Atlantic has a very interesting (and very long) article on the history and future of California’s massive water engineering projects here.
- Here I go again: linking to the March 1998 Campbell and Laherrere article titled “The End of Cheap Oil” in Scientific American. The authors ended the article with this sentence “The world is not running out of oil—at least not yet. What our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend.” Average price of Brent crude in 1998: $13.2 per barrel, equivalent nowadays to around $19 after adjusting for inflation. Brent now: $109 per barrel. But isn’t fracking going to give us an endless supply of cheap oil? Here is an article in Bloomberg titled “Dream of Oil Independence Slams Against Shale Costs”. In other words, Campbell and Laherrere continue to be proved right and the energy cornucopians continue to be proved very wrong.
- For technological optimists the dream is for a transformational technology that can permanently alter the energy supply equation. Fusion has always been one such hope, but forever decades away from commercial development. The New Yorker has just published a superb article called “A Star in a Bottle” on the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor (ITER) being built in France. The audacity and scope of the project is extraordinary. Yet my takeaway from the article is that fusion provides little hope of providing a timely saviour with respect to either climate change or fossil fuel depletion.
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Thanks for the link to the ITER article. Like you, I doubt that fusion will be available in time to affect our energy related problems. Even if producing electricity from fusion on a commercial basis might eventually be possible, I doubt that it would be cheaper than other forms of non-fossil energy, particularly concentrating solar power (with massive thermal storage to make it base-load).
Collecting energy directly from the fusion reactor in the sky has been possible for over a century, with technology that hasn’t changed much in all that time. When I look at pictures of Frank Shuman’s solar equipment in Egypt (1912) and see how modern it looks, it makes me despair over the bad energy choices we have made. We could have created a sustainable energy system based on solar thermal, but instead opted to waste our fossil fuel patrimony. Now, I fear, it is too late to do anything about it.