Categorie: English

  • Autonomous Big City Travel

    A week in Paris has opened my eyes on how inevitable the autonomous driving future really is. I live in the South of Holland and try to live a Practice What You Preach live because I am very concerned by the prospect of what our continued Western lifestyle will mean for the future of planet…

  • How much energy will a Fossil Free society need?

    Interesting discussions I have these days. Where climate change deniers usually just ignore the question of energy security (Big Oil will deliver) pro-nuclear folks acknowledge the climate issue and the scale of the needed transformation. That makes them good discussion partners. Pro-Nuclear points out that if every kWH of energy used today needs to come…

  • Pork Cycle meets Peak Oil

    The pork cycle, one of the few credible economic theories I know: a high market price for a product signals producers to invest in production capacity, by the time the capacity is available massive amounts of products enter the market leading to price drops. Prices fall so low that for some producers not even the…

  • Dreaded Demonized Deflation

    When I was al little kid I found German stamps in my grandaddies stamp collection. They were 1 billion Reichs Mark stamps. I was amazed btw the pages full of wealth he possessed. He only lived in a small house, and it wasn’t until High school that I understood why: the stamps were only worth…

  • An energy source for the industry ? : Lifter Plants – Thorium

    Households will have no issue whatsoever to decarbonize. Their rooftops will catch all the energy they need from Fusion reactor number 1, and community windmills will fill in the gaps when the sun is down. Our Tesla batteries store energy for half a neighborhood and in case we want to go all the way in…

  • Stop development of fuel efficient cars (Jevons Paradox)

    The IPCC’s latest report is out and creating a lot of fuzz around the globe. Summary of the report : 2 degrees temperature rise seems inevitable, and to stop temperatures from rising over 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels we need to take serious action, and do that very quickly. After I got over my anger…

  • Decision making for Junior Venture Capitalists : a model

    How to choose the business opportunities that have a higher chance of succeeding. @MattOgus at TechCrunch proposes to use Multi Factor Decision Analyses: He has a point : following gut feeling or listening to successful people may not be a broad enough basis to base your decisions on. Time to beef up my own Excel-sheet…

  • On Stakeholder Engagement: do it or they will do it to you

    MOOC’ing my way to a new job in “Sustainability”, and learning lots of interesting stuff. This week had “Stakeholder Engagement” on the menu. We learned about standards for doing this (AA1000ses), reasons to do it and ways on reporting on the interactions with stakeholders and the showing the results. All rather dry and theoretical but…

  • Monster El Niño beginning to emerge

    Since a couple of weeks I’m following Robert Scribblers website where he describes the building up of a monster El Niño that is bound to influence global weather this and next year. The graphs may seam a bit confusing at first, but once you understand what they mean they become self explaining: This is a…

  • MOOC @ Bath : Sustainability for Professionals : Week 3 reflection

    This week : Reporting standards Good to go through some of these standards. Until recently I was mainly on the “environmental” side of sustainability, but I have learned to appreciate the social aspect of sustainability. One thing that keeps coming to my mind, and that is something I hope will come back later in the…