od energy group read

What size house and how many occupants?

88 square metres, 3-bedroom semi, one single occupant (GSOH, WTLM similar...)

That's about 1 football pitch per person. If we evenly dot the wind turbines around the country, that means living in the football pitch and putting a turbine into the area around the goal. Of course, England is v.dense and Scotland v.sparse and windy. Will Scottish energy resources bail out England again?

It is also a political issue of trust in the government. There is a great write-up of the politics of the last UK energy review over here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/paul-dorfman/2008/11/07/nuclear-consultation-public-trust-in-government There are 2 distinct issues: the truth of the matter (the numbers, what we are looking for in EWHA and the communication of the truth and value judgements based on the numbers. There has certainly been failure in the latter.

I have to disagree: some social effort aggregates. We all pay a bit of tax, but it amounts to quite a lot in the collective purse. Just one obvious example.

It depends on how each person's "little" is determined. If you make it a percentage of energy use it would be quite significant. If you take as your starting point a low income person changing to low energy light bulbs and extrapolate that up you would have quite a few people giving up intercontinental flights and maybe the odd Range Rover..

Isn't the point that it makes sense to quantify the climate reduction impacts of actions so that when one alters one's behaviour in some respects, hoping to do "a little", that little has x% impact and not 0.00x% impact.

Both Charles' and Michael's points are about presentation of numbers, not impacts. I took David to be talking about changes to the physical world, not to the world of opinions. The logic of the "Tragedy of the commons" is that each person can take actions which individually seem harmless - or very low harm - but, when everyone performs them - add up to something substantial. Take throwing away litter as a (trivial but obvious) example - as someone said in NPR phone-in today ... despite all the good sentiment about collective action at the Obama inauguration, Washington was still covered in rubbish by the end of the day !

And remember that BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum" ... from the school of spin that says "if accused of x, simply assert that the opposite is the case".

Past polluting is a distraction: 125-year emissions estimates are debatable; the message is clear based on today's actual and forecast emissions; and it's hard to moralize about a time when nobody foresaw the consequences. Should we apologise to the world for Victorian factory smoke?

The point of view from China is this: "there was 400ppm of CO2 concentration to "safely" get to; the early birds to the party eat up 90% of the cake; they are asking us not to eat much of the remaining 10% on grounds of equity..." This is a powerful argument from fairness, it seems to me. The point is not that the best place to cut emmissions is China, but rather who should pay for the cut. Tony

Good reminder that "energy conversion-efficiency ratios" are a part of the technology/economic detail that are actually contingent on social and environmental choices. Imagine we were to sink a huge amount of capital into sustainable electricity sources that have about zero operating costs. We'd quite likely then be in the situation David describes with respect to chemcial/electric conversion multipliers.

This speaks vividly to the social liberation made possible by the taming of energy!

This is a _very_ important point. I spent a long time as an economist working on energy and environment issues - but the detail often obscures rather than elucidates. The question to focus on for energy policy is what kind of world to aim for - one of radical simplicity, or one supporting the "moderately affluent lifestyles" that David takes as a benchmark. The economics can follow once the broad lines are set.

so ... how would we localise the book? presumably by hacing a wiki version where the numbers and countries could be changed.

The book has indeed already got a wiki, with a page for every country, for anyone who wants to contribute country-information or country-calculations. www.withouthotair.com

got it - it is here: http://www.withouthotair.com/Wiki.html it would be great to see this happening. Tony

Could we have the source of these correct data somewhere (for readers who like to triangulate information)? [apologies if this comes later, I haven't got far]

try footnote 8 page 20

So common ... :)

Is this an average population over the period? Population is forecast to rise, no? Why not base the trajectory on a 9 bl population?

1 ton Co2e per year per person for 6 bl people can probably be sustained

Here is the essence of the outrage felt by emerging econmies that _they_ ought to be bearing a cost.

just as a placemark, before reading the book, my answers are 1.yes, 2.no, 3.yes, 4.not literally, 5.no, 6.maybe, 7.yes, 8.no ... yours?