Skip to main content

Florida Career College to Close

Florida Career College to Close Doug Lederman Fri, 01/26/2024 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Doug Lederman from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/avZRfLi
Post a Comment

‘The New Map’ and the New Liberal Arts

Blog: 
Learning Innovation

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

Published in September of 2020.

Where you stand on Daniel Yergin’s The New Map will likely depend on where you sit on climate change.

Suppose you believe that global warming is an existential crisis, one that warrants coordinated actions to lower carbon emissions even at the price of slowing economic growth. In that case, you will read The New Map as tepid and under-argued. Conversely, if you view climate change as a manageable (rather than existential) crisis, then you will appreciate Yergin’s even-handed approach to the shifting global energy economy.

Since The Prize, Daniel Yergin’s books have been the ones in which I measure all other energy nonfiction. The New Map may not be as original as The Prize. Still, it is useful in that the book synthesizes the complex story of our 21st-century global energy transition within a fast-moving 512-page narrative.

The overall story of global energy can be summarized in three trends: 1) Fracking changed the energy game, as now the US is the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer. 2) Electricity is fast emerging as an essential type of energy (think electric cars), and natural gas and renewables are quickly replacing coal in producing electricity. 3) While renewable technology is improving quickly, wind and solar and hydro still only account for ~20 percent of global energy production.

Yergin believes that the transition to renewables is inevitable but will come more slowly than progressives would like. Declining demand for oil makes it cheaper, which reduces incentives to switch from gas to batteries. (Or home heating oil to solar). The New Map provides an excellent primer on the relationship between energy production and international political relations, with Russia (an enormous producer) and China (the world’s biggest energy consumer) at the center of this story.

I’ve long thought that the study of energy and society should be included as an essential element of a liberal arts education. Whether you believe that climate change is an existential or manageable crisis, there is little doubt that global warming will be the defining challenge of this century.

The New Map should be on the syllabus of any course on energy and society.

What are you reading?

Show on Jobs site: 
Disable left side advertisement?: 
Is this diversity newsletter?: 
Is this Career Advice newsletter?: 
Advice Newsletter publication dates: 
Monday, November 30, 2020
Diversity Newsletter publication date: 
Monday, November 30, 2020
Trending: 


from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3o8pnza
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debacle over review reveals racism in academy (opinion)

When medievalist Mary Rambaran-Olm wrote about having her book review “torpedoed” for not being “more generous” to the book’s authors, no one could have expected that this would send shock waves across the academic community in what became an online maelstrom revealing the extent of white academic gatekeeping, ally performativity and blatant racism. For those of us who work on decentering whiteness in premodern fields such as classics, medieval/early modern studies, archaeology and in or on the Global South, this latest attack targeting a scholar of color exposed what many of us have been trying to draw attention to for years—that racism is deep and pernicious in the so-called liberal and woke academy. Rambaran-Olm was commissioned to review The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe ( HarperCollins ) for the Los Angeles Review of Books because of her expertise in early English medieval literature and history, and because she is one of the leading scholars challenging the
Post a Comment
Read more

Consdierations for Another Uncertain Semester

Blog:  Just Visiting There are going to be a lot of sick people on college campuses in the fall. This is a pretty easy prediction because there are always a lot of sick people on college campuses given the very nature of the activities that happen on college campuses. I know I am not the only instructor to look out over a classroom and see lots of empty seats as students are felled by one virus or another.  I remember a particularly bad bout of mono that caught five students out of twenty in a single class and would’ve resulted in a passel of incompletes if I gave incompletes. (More on this in a moment.) While indications are that the coronavirus vaccines are holding up well against the Delta variant in preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death, even vaccinated people are getting sick. It is beyond frustrating that a virus that could’ve been isolated and marginalized continues to thrive, but for now, as measured by the worst outcomes, we are collectively in a di
Post a Comment
Read more