Last week was the biennial conference of the International Society of Industrial Ecology, held at the lovely University of California Berkeley. At four days, plus an extra workshop for the Sustainable Urban Systems section, it was a long event but the week went quickly with a number of excellent talks and interesting attendees. Here are some of my highlights.
I’ve had Malthus on my mind recently. You know, the Reverand Thomas Robert? Author of An Essay on the Principle of Population and probably the strongest candidate for a grandfather of environmental pessimism? I’m not sure why he’s become such an obsession but it probably has something to do with the proliferation of recent newspaper and magazine articles on the subject (1,2,3).
Read more on Malthus on my mind…
I’m reading a fantastic book right now called From Malthus to the Club of Rome and Back
, a collection of essays on demography and resource consumption by Paul Neurath. There have been lots of quotable lines, but this one in particular caught my eye:
Read more on Limits to growth and rates of innovation…
Last week, I talked about how to conduct a quantitative literature revew in R and the data set I used came from a paper that I’m working on with some colleagues. We’re trying to review the current state of urban energy system modelling in order to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what comes next. The paper’s working title sums it up nicely: “A review of urban energy system models: approaches, challenges, and opportunities”.
Read more on Types of urban energy system models…
Designing a new eco-city? Wondering if your master plan is ambitious enough or if you could go further? We have a new paper out describing how mixed-integer linear programming and Monte Carlo analysis can be used to calculate a minimum energy urban layout as a benchmark for evaluating master plans and policy options.
New census data shows that many American cities are being hollowed out, with populations shifting from the centre to the suburbs. The story isn’t uniform everywhere but the data provides a good opportunity to think about the dynamics of each city and the infrastructure legacies they may be leaving behind.
