Does Energy Policy Matter?

…of fuel cells. A Canadian company, Ballard in Vancouver, is generally regarded as the world leader, but it is early in the game. Stimulating competition in fuel cell design and…

Elektron: Electrical Systems in Retrospect and Prospect

JH Ausubel, C Marchetti. Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment 110–134 1997 Also appeared in Daedalus 125(3):139-169, Summer 1996.

…hours. Projecting electricity demand matters because it influences investments in capacity. Accurate projections might have lessened the pain for the utilities, which ordered and then canceled plants; the equipment suppliers,…

The Great Reversal: Nature’s Chance to Restore Land and Sea

JH Ausubel. Technology in Society 22: 289–302 2000

…Greater wealth enables people to buy higher speed, and when transit quickens, cities spread. Both average wealth and numbers will grow, so cities will take more land. What are the…

Special Report

…benefit. The warmer it gets, the more air conditioners people buy. And the more air conditioners they buy, the warmer it gets: Air conditioners, after all, are major consumers of…

Can Technology Spare the Earth?

JH Ausubel. Am Sci 84 (2): 166–178 1996 Republished in Current Perspectives in Geology, Fourth Edition, Michael McKinney, Robert L. Tolliver, Parri Shariff, eds., Wadsworth, Boston, MA, 1998.

…requires micro- or zero emissions per unit of economic activity to maintain or enhance environmental quality In other words, Americans need to clean processes by more than one order of…

Students Use DNA Barcodes to Unmask “Mislabeled” Fish at Grocery Stores, Restaurants

…of Life: www.eol.org Barcode of Life Database: www.barcodinglife.org Consortium for the Barcode of Life: barcoding.si.edu Barcoding marine species: www.marinebarcoding.org FishBol: www.fishbol.org Barcoding blog: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/blog Ten Reasons for Barcoding Life: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/docs/TenReasonsBarcoding.pdf “Barcode of Life” Scientific American, October 2008: https://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/BarcodeScientificAmerican.2008.10.pdf…

Five Worthy Ways to Spend Large Amounts of Money for Research on Environment and Resources

JH Ausubel. The Bridge 29 (3): 4–16 1999

…ETH-Lausanne, Switzerland, 30 August 1996. URL https://sentenext1.epfl.ch/swissmetro. [18] U.S. Department of Transportation, Compendium of Executive Summaries from the Maglev System Concept Definition Final Reports, DOT/FRA/NMI-93/02, pp. 49-81, March 1993. On-line at https://www.bts.gov/smart/cat/CES.html…

Full PDR issue online

The entire issue of Population and Development Review with our article about Peak Farmland is now online: Population and Public Policy: Essays in Honor of Paul Demeny https://www.popcouncil.org/publications/books/2012_PDRSuppPopPublicPolicy.asp and will…

Reasons to Worry About the Human Environment

JH Ausubel. Journal of the Cosmos Club of Washington D.C 8 (1): 12 1998 Republished in Technology in Society 21:217-231, 1999. 

…The annual worldwide production of most of the toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, and mercury, has increased by 2–3 orders of magnitude over the past 1–2…