NeoFiles Interviews Jamais Cascio
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 06.23.05
The very inspirational Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging has been interviewed by NeoFiles. He talks about tons and tons of interesting things, among others: The path that led him to where he is now, WorldChanging.com and future modifications to the site, memes and reframing, the importance of positive and solution-centered environmental coverage, open source software, leapfrogging, etc. Check it out.
Here's a great quote from the interview:
With 1% annual improvement, population stabilizing at around 10 billion, and overall increase in standards of living to US/EU levels, the globe would be using 40 percent more energy in 2100 than today. But by bumping up overall efficiency improvement to 2% averaged over the next century, we'd actually end up using half our current levels of energy.
The creation of fictional future worlds serves organizational strategy. Think about that. Everyone on the planet — 10 billion people, a bit more than the UN estimate for the end of the century — with Western lifestyles ... and using half the amount of energy we use today. All by paying slightly more attention to efficiency in our designs.
*Blush*
Thank you for linking to this. But I would be remiss if I didn't correct something in what I wrote (and you excerpted). Reviewing the data from the California Energy Commision, I discovered that I had slightly misstated the numbers. It doesn't detract from the overall point, but I want to make sure people don't miss that point because of the error. Here's how that first quoted paragraph should read:
"With 1% annual improvement, population stabilizing as around 10 billion, and overall increase in standards of living to EU levels, the globe would still be using four times as much energy in 2100 as today. By bumping up overall efficiency improvement to 2% averaged over the next century, we'd cut that down to just 40% more than the present. And if we could push to 3% averaged over the century -- still very possible, and less than we've managed in the recent past -- we'd actually end up using half our current levels of energy."
As you can see, the argument's the same -- a slight improvement in efficiency can have big results -- but the numbers are, if anything, *more* dramatic.