A small family business based in Maine, the company sells 1. Other manufacturers, including Gamblin Artists Colors , have deemed the costs associated with creating YInMn Blue too high to mount large-scale production.
Her work has also appeared in Artsy , the Columbia Journal , and elsewhere. YInMn Blue derives its name from its chemical components: yttrium, indium and manganese. In Japanese power stations, ash is a favourable by-product used for landfills.
They are demanding that more power stations produce more landfill materials. With the use of electrostatic precipitators with bag filters, it should be perfectly possible to extract up to 99 per cent of the ash from coal combustion.
But, of course, the more the ash, the more expensive is the removal. Indian coal industries and thermal power stations have a lot of scope to improve their image and efficiency by adopting newer technologies that allow high-ash coal burning. They work best if applied within the economic radius of the mine. Otherwise, the ash is turned into a major component in cement, or as landfill. Or once it has been processed, it can be used as bricks and in road constructions.
In any case, coal should be washed first. This reduces the ash content, increases its energy content and burning efficiency. The utilities must realise they gain from higher quality coal. Not only do they have less ash disposal problem, they have less equipment wear and tear and greater thermal efficiency. The other aspect about India's coal production is its labour intensiveness. The moment you talk about introducing capital-intensive techniques or some imported modern technology, you face the question, 'How much labour does it displace?
Germany has the same problem, and now Russia, too. The major problem is how to change at a socially acceptable pace. But the industry may be destroyed if it is uneconomic and not competitive, and if it carries too many people. You just have to work out your own productivities to compare well with those elsewhere in the world. That is what is making imported coal appear cheap.
The main thing is to get efficient and more productive workers. I am concerned to hear about the vast labour force the Indian mining industry carries. It's a political as well as a social question. It is a question of drawing up a plan and acting on it steadily.
Otherwise, the industry may eventually collapse. Oil sands are significantly more expensive to produce than conventional oil, in that a lot of energy must be used to create steam that is injected underground to extract the bitumen. For every unit of energy input into oil sands production, less than 6 units of energy come out in the extracted bitumen. The U. Considering the additional energy inputs for refining the oil to products such as gasoline and jet fuel, oil sands deliver less than 3 units of energy, whereas historically gasoline delivers between 5 and And this equation also largely governs which energy sources can be produced economically.
Right now, sources such as the kerogen oil shale of the Piceance Basin in Colorado have a ratio too low for production. Unfortunately, many biofuels also have ratios that are too low aside from southeastern Brazilian sugarcane for ethanol and electricity , and all suffer from limitations in productive land and climates.
But can we become more efficient to enable consumption of such higher cost fuels? One general response to increased costs is to become more efficient in the use of resources, both in terms of energy and capital. But in , British economist William Stanley Jevons noted that technological improvements that increased efficiencies of energy use often caused industries to raise their energy consumption. Because of this rebound effect, also called the Jevons paradox, efficiency can help to promote growth that would otherwise not occur.
So efficiency is a good cure for lack of growth. Consider car fuel efficiency standards. In Americans drove their cars with an average fuel use of With gasoline at an average of In the numbers were It is not a coincidence that fuel costs were practically the same, relative to GDP, in and Consumers adjust their habits to available technology and energy prices.
If car fuel economy had not increased, Americans certainly could have afforded to drive only a fraction of the 2. Today, the full cost of car ownership payments, fuel, parking, and so on is increasingly beyond, or unnecessary for, the urban Millennial generation, who will soon reach the peak driving ages of 35 to Millennials have already influenced the 16 to 34 age demographic, driving 23 percent fewer miles from to than previous generations had done.
Overall demographics are additionally pointing to less driving older people drive less, and our population is aging. As the U. PIRG Education Fund reported in , these changes indicate most driving forecasts are overly optimistic.
Millennials appear to be increasingly turning to car and ride sharing, examples of disruptive combinations of technology that can get around socioeconomic limitations. The services provide less transportation convenience than owning your own car and garage, but at significantly reduced costs and more efficient use of existing car capital. Thus, they are attractive services with enough grassroots support that it is too difficult for politicians to halt them on behalf of vested interests in the status quo such as taxi services.
An additional factor in the distribution of consumption relating to energy is inequality, both within and between countries. Other populations could make decisions affecting Western lifestyles. The United States no longer had increasing quantities of cheap oil of its own to pay down debts such as from the Vietnam War and provide a middle-class lifestyle. Income and wealth inequality have become central topics since the Great Recession and Financial Crisis that began in late Per-capita income and energy consumption largely go hand in hand.
A person who has more income consumes more energy both directly fuel and electricity and embedded in products consumer purchases. From to the United States and Western Europe achieved historically unprecedented high levels of income equality. Cheap energy and distributive policies gave the American middle class easy living.
French economist Thomas Piketty puts into perspective the wealth equality in the several decades after World War II, pointing out that it was uniquely high because so much wealth was destroyed in the wars.
In other words, rich people got poorer; poor people did not get richer. The developed economies have become decidedly less equal in income and wealth distribution since because of changes in domestic policies such as lower taxes on capital and less benefits for labor and globalization forces. Physicist Victor Yakovenko at the University of Maryland has calculated that from to , the distribution in power consumption per capita between countries has shown increased equality.
The same holds for income. Developing countries benefitted from declining equality in developed countries as manufacturing globalized. Americans now need two-income households to maintain the incomes from the s, but Asians obtain higher incomes from working in new manufacturing and services jobs. Considering developing countries specifically, economist Martin Ravallion at the World Bank recently showed that total inequality adding inequality between countries to inequality within countries decreased from to Perhaps not coincidentally, developing country inequality then increased from to along with food and energy prices.
If inequality in developing countries is no longer decreasing, and developed economy households have had increasing income inequality for the past several decades, then how can consumption increase? Maybe we can just borrow to increase consumption. As economists Carmen M. It occurred in an atmosphere of economic ignorance about the influence of debt and the dependence of the economy on biophysical resources within the environment. The low-point of energy-food cost share and an aging infrastructure are shocks over demographic time scales of hundreds of years.
Rather than watching gas prices tick up along with our electric bill, Amyx predicts we will have commercialized nuclear fusion, which will enable us to have "an almost infinite, cheap energy source" that will bring make the cost of energy negligible. But while the cost of energy will plummet, other commodities are likely to shoot up in two centuries, according to Amyx.
He points to things such as gold, organic produce and even purified oxygen as things that will get pricier—as well as "foods grown underground and in labs and purified, clean water.
Speaking of reconsidering the relationship between our mental and physical forms, in years, we can expect to see technology that allows our bodies to be powered down while our mind can live a busy, virtual life. That's the prediction of David Tal, president of Quantumrun Forecasting , a strategic forecasting agency.
Just as hours-long flights have replaced days-long cross-country train travel, a similar replacement is likely to happen as space travel evolves and democratizes. While that might sound pretty out there, Tal points out that companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are making relatively speedy progress in reusable rockets that will lead to the cost of flying rockets dropping potentially lower than that of airliners.
Don't think of it as time travel as much as seriously enhanced time management. As technology and science advances, the things once considered fundamental about men and women may get further blurred, expects Skarp. The level of collaboration and interdependence between nations today would seem unimaginable years ago even taking into account the nationalist movements that have been on the upswing in recent years.
That is likely to continue even faster in the decades to come, according to Nielsen. While a number of futurists expect that colonization of distant planets might begin as soon as the next 50 years, within two centuries, it looks likely to shift from a novelty to unexceptional. Things might go even further than that, however.
In two centuries, especially if colonization of distant planets grows, we might see that approach extend beyond the Earth, suggests Fast Future CEO Rohit Talwar, with our planet becoming a member of something like the Inter-Galactic Federation of Planets.
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