Stories tagged with "economic growth"

Energy Vision 2050 - part I

Posted by Luis de Sousa on September 10, 2008 - 9:10am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: 2050, alternative energy, economic growth, nuclear, renewable energy [list all tags]

This is a guest post by Sterling Smith (TOD user Sterling). This first installment of the series outlines the evolution of the energy panorama from now to 2050. A second installment will deal with technical and political aspects of the path put forward.



Sterling is a software architect who works in Silicon Valley and lives in Woodside, California. He was born in the suburbs of New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he majored in physics. He has worked in the software business for 35 years, still writes code, and has been part of eleven start-ups as well as several major corporations. Sterling's wife, Deborah Metzger, PhD, MD, is a very prominent gynecologist with whom he is raising four kids.

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Robert F. Kennedy on Defining GDP and Some Other Thoughts

Posted by JoulesBurn on June 10, 2008 - 9:00am
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: economic growth, gdp [list all tags]

A number of days ago, on a website of a particularly enlightened economist, I came across an excerpt from a speech given by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on March 18, 1968, at the University of Kansas. He was on the campaign trail in the US 1968 presidential race, and that context makes these words even more amazing. Less than three months later, he was shot and killed in California. Embedded above is a video montage with words from the speech, and the text follows below.

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Economic Impact of Peak Oil Part 2: Our Current Situation

Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 25, 2007 - 8:45am
Topic: Economics/Finance
Tags: balance of payments, bretton woods, debt, economic growth, fdic, productivity growth [list all tags]

This is the second of a three part series giving my view of the economic impact of peak oil.

Peak oil seems likely to make a huge change in our economic system--more than would be expected by a worldwide decline in oil production by a few percentage points a year. In Part 1, we looked at the contrast between economic systems before the industrial revolution and the current economic system. We also looked at economic studies that suggested that energy, and the more efficient use of energy, seem to be big contributors to the real economic growth that took place since the industrial revolution.

In this segment, we will look at some other changes affecting the economy besides the growth in the use of fossil fuels. We will look particularly at debt and how peak oil is likely to affect a financial system that is tied to debt. We will also look at some the stresses that the economy is currently under. Some of these stresses seem to stem from a failure of the United States to fully adapt to its own decline in oil supply since 1971; some of these stresses come from the fact that the world is finite, and we are reaching the earth's limits with respect to more than just oil.

1. Why is debt important to our economy today?

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