The Alternative Energy Tipping Point - The Connector?
In our article "The Alternative Energy Tipping Point - Is it Here, Will it Happen?" we pondered the point at which Alternative Energy (AE) would become mainstream - that is, when would the concept tip, in the sense of Malcolm Gladwell's book, the Tipping Point.
Connectors
For anyone familiar with the book, it presents - among other things - the concept of connectors: in essence, people who know lots of people and who can get the word out about a topic, so to speak. I think we have recently found a connector - more on that in a minute.
Indicators
Now, in our article we touched on things that were indicators that a tip may be approaching. One thing we also mentioned was that these days, high prices seem to be a result of consumption. What we didn't outright mention was the idea of peak oil. Remember, we were simply looking at indicators in the world around us to see how mainstream AE was at the moment.
The Big Connector?
On March 1st, 2006, the New York Times published an article titled "The End of Oil" (subscription required) where they outline the idea of peak oil, provide some numbers and use phrases like The crisis will occur, and it will be painful
(from "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil.") and catastrophic price increases that could make today's $60-a-barrel oil look like chump change
.
It is going to be interesting to see how this works itself out. Between 2006 the State of the Union address - pushing AE - and articles like this one that flat out state that energy problems are more than a security issue, I wonder:
- Can we avoid
painful
(see quote above) and instead prepare a better world for our future? - Will it simply take more information like the NYT article and Bush's speech to make ideas like AE and reducing energy consumtion tip?
- Will we need government policy to enforce change, or will we need to hit rock bottom before the world wakes up to what it is doing to itself with respect to both the environment and to the oil supply?
Just to add a little more push to the issue, the Oil Drum writes "Why peak oil is probably about now".
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