Thomas Ackerman
Home page	Curriculum Vita	Publications	Current Research
	Teaching	Other stuff

Reading material for FOSEP discussion

There is a lot of material around that deals with energy policy and technology. The problem is finding material that is clearly written and without a particular slant. We start with the IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2007: Mitigation: Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (I took this straight off the IPCC web page.)

Here are several articles from the New York Times. While the Times has a particular editorial slant, I think Andy Revkin is arguably the best science writer in the country and Thomas Friedman is a very perceptive columnist. It is hard to argue with his assessment:

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

This quote is from the article

· Thomas Friedman: Dumb as We Wanna Be

Here are a couple of Andy Revkin’s columns and some additional material

· Column on falling budgets for research

· Column on solar energy

· Graphic summarizing energy technology options

· Graphic summarizing US budget changes over last 30 years

Roger Pielke, Jr., at the University of Colorado has published quite a bit on the subject of climate change policy and technology. Here is a recent publication from Nature on Dangerous Assumptions about the technology associated with climate change.

Thanks to Dr. Susan Solomon, I recently read an article written by Drs. John Gibbons and Peter Blair on US Energy Transition. This article was written in 1991 but could have been written yesterday because the issues and problems are identical (unfortunately).

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has a variety of reports of climate and technology issues. One recent one on Energy Policy is here.

Guemes Island house

We are fortunate to own a small 2-bedroom house on Guemes Island in beautiful Puget Sound, just a short ferry ride from Anacortes, WA (Google Earth Image). Our house is situated on the beach facing west with views of the Sound. Here are some views of Cypress Island and Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island take taken from our deck.