Steve Hallett

Efficiency Trap (eBook, ePUB)

Finding a Better Way to Achieve a Sustainable Energy Future

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

One of the key tenets of the environmental movement is the need for greater efficiency in our use of dwindling natural resources, especially coal, natural gas, and oil. If our products are designed to be more energy efficient, so the thinking goes, our environmental impacts will be reduced and our fossil fuels will last longer. In this surprising new look at sustainability and conservation, environmentalist Steve Hallett argues that this thinking is fundamentally flawed. In fact, based on the example of coal use throughout the Industrial Revolution, more efficiency leads to more consumption, faster depletion of resources, and ultimately more stress on the planet. This is the efficiency trap.

How do we avoid this trap? Hallett suggests that we focus on protecting natural resources, ecosystems, and social systems by making them more resilient. Knowing that we have reached limits to growth, we should work to decentralize energy-delivery services to give homes and communities some measure of independence. We can also build more sustainable food systems by diversifying the food-production landscape to address the vulnerabilities of the current supply chain.

Efficiency does have its place in specific areas such as recycling and home insulation, but it will not work as a long-term approach to our energy dilemma. Yet recognizing the inevitable limits to our growth and the shortcomings of our current approach to addressing our dwindling resources is a necessary first step toward the establishment of sound environmental policy.

This realistic appraisal of current environmental thinking will challenge environmentalists and industrialists alike.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Prometheus
• Seitenzahl: 337
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. April 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781616147266
• Artikelnr.: 38337741

Autorenporträt

Steve Hallett is a British-Australian-American poet and professor of horticulture at Purdue University, Indiana, where he studies and teaches ecology, international development, and sustainable agriculture. He directs the university's sustainable food and farming systems program and its student farm. Steve is the author of over fifty research articles and book chapters, and the author of two books: Life without Oil: Why we Must Shift to a New Energy Future (Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY; 2011) and The Efficiency Trap: Finding Our Way to a New Energy Future (Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY: 2013). Poetry is a new medium for Steve, through which he continues to explore themes of social and environmental justice, and humankind's relationship to the natural world. His poetry has been published in Bitter Oleander, Roanoke Review, Stillwater Review, Blueline, Plainsongs, and New Limestone Review. A Life for a Life is his first book of poems.