There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else.

Other than bland ignorance, what does he base this statement on?

A fat tub of Crisco

From NY

To San Francisco.

If that figure is true, it's more of an argument that government regulation isn't the major mover.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

face it - mankind is going to burn every drop of recoverable oil and gas and most of the coal. Then we will die. There is absolutely no getting around that, unless someone invents an incredibly cheap, safe and reliable source of unlimited power.

When Andrew Leonard says market incentives he means making the current sources of energy much more expensive so that the crappy new alternatives can compete. This is a statement that advocates a huge regressive tax on all Americans whether they pay income tax or not (just don't tell that to the 95%).

We didn't stop producing it. We just outsourced it to other parts of the world. It's called NIMBY. And a good deal of the lowered energy consumption in the US can also be assigned to much of out food and manufactured goods coming from elsewhere. As teh current economic crisis get s worse and especially if the dollar collapses the way some people who post here think it's going to a lot of that could change.

On the other hand, if that does happen Americans in general are going to get a lot thinner, or at least less well nourished.

that as American manufacturing jobs have moved to the third world, our industrial pollution has moved with them? And though US GDP has grown, real incomes have fallen for most Americans, while the kind of wealth that can demand green tech is concentrated within a shrinking section of the population. So the premise of Tierney's argument and that curve don't quite hold logical water in my view.

Perhaps you were in a coma for all of 2007 and 2008. The only reason that alternative energy isn't at market parity right now is that the energy market collapsed late last year and there's a short term glut on fossil fuels. Naturally the lemmings among us are buying into the same "cheap gas forever" meme that they bought into after the 72 and 76 fuel shortages and a noncarbon energy poilcy is no longer politically popular. Anybody who thinks about it can see that this situation can't last and unless they are a complete nihilist should in favor of the government leaning on the market a little bit to get alternate energy sources on line before the economy turns up demand again.

In the Rosenfeld Curve article you mention, the authors specifically compare their findings to the CEC estimates. What they find is that CEC's conservation claims track very closely to the "unexplained" discrepancy between California and the Country as a whole.

While it may be unreasonable to assume 100% of the "unexplained" difference is policy driven, the comparison also leaves out spillover effects which would serve to lessen the "unexplained" savings in their methodology (which the authors also mention.)

Thank you, however, for linking the article, which, I think, is required carbon/energy geek reading.

Good point about offshoring. But it's gets worse. Even if there were resources for everybody to live a western lifestyle, what happens when China, Eastern Eurpoe and India all get affluent enough to want to move their dirty tech offshore? Eventually this game of musical chairs has to end.

Tierney is a bad reporter. He completely misrepresented the role of technology as proposed by Ehrlich and Holdren. In fact, he got it completely backwards.

While Tienrey accuses Ehrlich and Holdren of viewing technological advances as bad for the environment, they explicitly stated that technological advancement was probably good:

In their paper published in Science in 1972, they wrote (emphasis mine):

I = P*F

where P is the population, and F is a function which measures the per capita impact. A great deal of complexity is subsumed in this simple relation, how ever. For example, F increases with per capita consumption if technology is held constant, but may decrease in some cases if more benign technologies are introduced in the provision of a constant level of consumption.

Here's the Google Scholar link to their article: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=Impact+of+population+growth&btnG=Search

Please give me some facts and figures since you're such an expert. How much does it cost to produce electricity for the grid (per kilowatt) using coal, nuclear, solar, and wind? Then tell me how changing the entire U.S. car fleet to plug-in electrics wouldn't overwhelm the system and how it would compare with using gasoline (even at $4 per gallon).

to plan always for the best-case scenario. That way you can avoid doing anything unpleasant until the absolute last minute. And by then, the disaster is usually unstoppable anyway, so you can just throw your hands up, proclaim "Ah, there was nothing anyone could have done", and wander off to your next triumph.

First, the article I was referring to was actually published in 1971, not 1972.

Second, I looked into the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_PAT) and saw that Ehrlich and Holdren were actually the proponents of the idea that population size was the prime cause of environmental degradation. This was in opposition to an argument put forth by Barry Commoner that technological advancement was the prime cause of environmental degradation.

It's disgusting that a professional reporter (at the NYTimes no less!) could get away with such blatant misrepresentation as this. His entire article is based on attacking the Holdren/Ehrlich boogeyman:

[According to Ehrlich and Holdren], protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology

and...

[Consumers will continue to] buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

and...

Those projections make it easy to assume that affluence and technology inflict more harm on the environment.

The worldwide temperatures get warmer and then they get cooler again. Worldwide temperature records indicate that, tree rings indicate that, geology studies indicate that. Worldwide temperatures will rise then they will cool again, sometime in the future.

There are many more scientists that do not agree with man-made global warming, carbon footprints, or any other manufactured measurements by the likes of algore, than agree with these crazed alarmists. The only good thing about this manufactured crisis is that Americans are recycling and turning off electricity and trying not to waste resources, etc.; something I, as a Conservative, have done all my life. So good for you liberals, you finally get it.

Anyone who believes algore, who is in this only for the money, is a complete fool. It is too bad that it is not politically correct to refute algore totally erroneous movie, and if an expert does prove that his information is wrong, they are completely ignored by the msm.

I can't wait for the next msm manufactured crisis, GLOBAL COOLING. Egads, the glaciers are growing and moving into Northern Canada, what will we do? What we will do? Call algore to the rescue.