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  • inspired search:[how much of royal bank of canada investments is in fossil fuels?] (https://search.brave.com/search?q=how+much+of+royal+bank+of+canada+investments+is+in+fossil+fuels%3F&source=desktop)

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• for: velocar, low carbon transportation
• title: Up the velorution: appropriating the bicycle and the politics of technology

• for: velocar, low carbon transportation
• Title: The Velomobile as a Vehicle for more Sustainable Transportation

• for: zoning, city council, re-zoning, low carbon city, walkable city

• Title: What a 1.5C lifestyle actually looks like
• Summary
  • Many people want to participate in the transition
  • to a regenerative, low carbon future
    • but the existing high carbon infrastructure
    • makes it very challenging to do so
  • This article features interviews with activists who are trying to live a lifestyle
    • that is consistent with a 1.5C world
    • WITHIN infrastructure that is not yet consistent with a 1.5C world.
    • It is challenging, to say the least!
      • and demonstrates the lock-in feedbacks,
      • a chicken-and-egg situation
      • that creates the challenge holding the masses back
  • From a Stop Reset Go (SRG) perspective
    • this illustrates the entangled relationship between
      • the individual and
      • the collective
    • and how each has an important role to play
      • to influence the other.
    • As an organization working on helping accelerate a bottom-up movement, this brings up the question:
      • what are the leverage points for citizens to accelerate top down actors such as
        • government to establish new policies and
        • manufacturers to create affordable regenerative products aligned with a 1.5C world?
• Interviewee:
  • Carys mainprize
  • Rosalind Readhead

Will this conference debate rebound effects of efficiency? If not, it will not have the desirable net effect.

My linked In comments were:

Alessandro Blasi, will this conference address the rebound effect? In particular, Brockway et al. have done a 2021 meta-analysis of 33 research papers on rebound effects of energy efficiency efforts and conclude:

"...economy-wide rebound effects may erode more than half of the expected energy savings from improved energy efficiency. We also find that many of the mechanisms driving rebound effects are overlooked by integrated assessment and global energy models. We therefore conclude that global energy scenarios may underestimate the future rate of growth of global energy demand."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121000769?via%3Dihub

Unless psychological and sociological interventions are applied along with energy efficiency to mitigate rebound effects, you will likely and ironically lose huge efficiencies in the entire efficiency intervention itself.

Also, as brought up by other commentators, there is a difference between efficiency and degrowth. Intelligent degrowth may work, especially applied to carbon intensive areas of the economy and can be offset by high growth in low carbon areas of the economy.

Vaclav Smil is pessimistic about a green energy revolution replacing fossil fuels https://www.ft.com/content/71072c77-53b3-4efd-92ae-c92dc02f09ad, which opens up the door to serious consideration of degrowth, not just efficiency improvements. Perhaps the answer is in a combination of all of the above, including targeted degrowth.

Technology moves quickly and unexpectedly. At the time of Smil's book release, there was no low carbon cement. Now there is a promising breakthrough: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/carbon-free-cement-breakthrough-dcvc-put-55-million-into-brimstone.html

As researchers around the globe work feverishly to make low carbon breakthroughs, there is obviously no guarantee of when they will occur. In that case then, with only a few years to peak, it would seem the lowest risk pathway would be to prioritize the precautionary principle over a gambling pathway (such as relying on Negative Emissions Technology breakthroughs) and perhaps consider along with rebound effect conditioned efficiency improvements also include a strategy of at least trialing a temporary, intentional degrowth of high carbon industries / growth of low carbon industries.

It is critical to create stories and narratives of what an ecologically regenerative society living within planetary boundaries looks like at a local level that we are familiar with. We need enliven and enact futures studies and backcast to our current reality.

Imaginative storytelling by the artists is critical at this time so that we can imagine and not be so afraid of what a transformed future looks like. Indeed, if we do it right, it can be FAR BETTER than our current unbalanced civilization.