Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

Area of Research: Energy and Climate

Where is Energy Going?

This article appeared in the magazine The Industrial Physicist, published by the American Institute of Physics, in the February 2000 issue.

The essay had appeared in Italian in the special millennial edition of the Italian financial newspaper, Il Sole/24 Ore, on 17 November 1999; also in Italian as Benvenuti nel millennio nucleare, pp.163-168 in Duemila: Verso una societa aperta, M. Moussanet, ed., Il Sole 24 Ore, Milano, 2000.

There was an error in the printed version of Figure 3. Both the figure labeling and caption are wrong. The error has been corrected in the PDF version here and on The Industrial Physicist web site.

Figure 3 should read:

Figure 3. When total world per capita energy consumption (tons coal equivalent) is dissected into a succession of logistic curves, normalized on a scale that renders each S-shaped logistic pulse into a straight line, energy history is a succession of growth pulses evolving around the lead energy commodity of the era. In each era, consumption triples. “F” is the fraction of market share.

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Nordhaus Nobel recollection

In December 2018 Jesse Ausubel had the privilege and fun of inclusion in the delegation to Stockholm of William Nordhaus for his receipt of a Nobel prize.  The occasion stimulated Jesse’s recollection, “Getting to know Bill Nordhaus and Climate: On the occasion of his receipt of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for the study of the economics of climate change.“

Nordhaus Nobel

William Nordhaus today earned the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his pioneering work on climate change.  Hooray for Bill!

Jesse first encountered Bill’s work in the late 1970s, started a magazine file of it, and retains to this day first editions of the classic inventive papers from 1975, Can We Control Carbon Dioxide?, and 1977, Strategies for the Control of Carbon Dioxide, and others that followed (see photo below).

Jesse served as a research assistant to Bill during the 1981-1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and co-authored with him the 1983 paper, JH Ausubel, WD Nordhaus. A review of estimates of future carbon dioxide emissions in Changing climate: Report of the carbon dioxide assessment committee, pp. 153-185, National Academy Press, Washington DC 1983.