Nobel laureates say sustainability needs more than science

[n2doc]

UC BERKELEY
Nobel laureates say sustainability needs more than science
Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 21, 2007

The United States has the technology -- or at least the brains to build it -- to make significant progress in the fight against global warming. However, without widespread public and government support of energy conservation, technology can only go so far, say some of the brightest minds in Berkeley.

Half a dozen Nobel laureates -- five UC Berkeley professors plus the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory -- met before a vibrant crowd of 600 at the East Bay campus Saturday afternoon to exchange suggestions for battling global warming, from expanding the country's nuclear power program to designing nanotechnology that would mimic the way insects dispose of energy waste.

"Science is not the problem," said Donald Glaser, a UC Berkeley physics professor who won the Nobel Prize in 1960. "We can certainly build fuel-efficient cars. (But) year after year, Congress has refused to improve the mileage requirements for automobiles. We have to get together as a democracy and get our government to make changes."

Saturday's presentation was billed as a discussion on working toward energy self-sufficiency and ending the country's dependence on foreign oil and environmentally destructive sources of energy.

But UC Berkeley economics Professor Daniel McFadden, who won his Nobel in 2000, kicked off his presentation with a slightly pessimistic look in a lecture he called "The Dismal Science of Energy Self-Sustainability."

Human beings, he said, will probably never be as energy-self-sufficient as such species as "crocodiles and cockroaches." But on a more optimistic note, he said that while the world's energy consumption clearly is increasing, per capita consumption actually has been mostly stable in relation to overall increases in income. Meaning, we aren't necessarily wasting more energy as we get richer.

California has long been ahead of the game in energy conservation, said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics who won the Nobel Prize in 1964. The state was the first to set regulations for energy-efficient appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners, and its housing standards are among the most rigorous.

Like Glaser, McFadden noted that the immediate strategy in fighting energy addiction is personal conservation. "The best answer is to just say no to energy," he said.

"Adoption of currently feasible energy-efficiency standards would go two-thirds of the way to energy independence," McFadden said. "It should be feasible for us to achieve energy sustainability by 2050 using primarily existing standards. Then we support research into new technologies, which we will need in the last half of the century."

more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/NOBEL.TMP

[jwirr]

1. I have been reading Al Gore's book "Earth in Balance" and he

says much the same thing. We need a universal thought change that lets us think differently about the world as a whole, economy as if people mattered and the world was made not just for us but for the future generations.

[kestrel91316]

2. Conservation? Horrors!!!!!!!!! Besides, Unka Dick said the

Amurkan way of life was nonnegotiable.

Conservation is therefore unamerican.

I think I'll go buy me one o' them Suburbans.