Madeleine Henderson 🌍🌿💚
Term 1 Week 6: Limits to Growth
Limits to Growth is a book/study published 50 years ago (1972) by a group from MIT. They used system dynamics to create a model (obligatory “all models are wrong and most are useless” caveat) of the entire world, abstracted to include stocks like population, industrial capital, pollution, cultivated land, and flows like births, deaths, investmen... Read more 15 Nov 2022 - 4 minute read
Term 1 Week 4: Net zero, geoengineering, and carbon capture and storage
This is inspired by this article by a number of academics that I read this week. Their position is that “net zero” is yet another way to ignore the serious and systemic change we need to do to avoid crisis. Net zero means we take as much carbon out of the air as we emit into it, meaning that the overall level will not increase. This implies that... Read more 05 Nov 2022 - 6 minute read
Term 1 Week 5: The Commons
I distinctly remember learning about The Commons from Mr. Brian Arentsen in what I think was supposed to be World History (it could also have been supposed to be Biology 1 or Physical Science as I had Mr. Arentsen for all of those topics in my not-so-large high school, but learned many things besides those topics from him). I remember feeling di... Read more 31 Oct 2022 - 4 minute read
Term 1 Week 3: Climate Science, Products vs. Services, and Design for Disassembly
If you’re already plenty freaked out about the climate and don’t want an anxiety attack right now, skip the climate stuff. How do we know climate change is happening? How do we know the CO2 is from fossil fuels? We know very accurately how much fossil fuel (FF) is burned each year thanks to market data, and we know how much CO2 is produced... Read more 28 Oct 2022 - 6 minute read
Term 1 Weeks 1 and 2: Inequality and Demand Side Changes
This is my first week of sharing what I’m learning in my Global Sustainability Solutions MSc at the University of Exeter. Satisfying human needs at low energy use Using data from 106 countries for several indicators and multivariate regression, Vogel et al (1) show the relationship between energy consumed and need satisfaction (think decent li... Read more 08 Oct 2022 - 4 minute read