“Ethics of Energy?” Presentation

Jessica M. Smith The US coal industry appears to have entered a terminal bust, spurred by technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling, low natural gas prices, and federal clean power regulations that will hasten the retirement of coal-fired plants. With few exceptions, the collapse is celebrated as a victory in mitigating climate change. […]

Catherine Alexander Certain normative statements about environmental problems and how to address them have become pretty well accepted. We might call them environmental principles or ethical dicta. Briefly, they are that a) primary resource use and CO2 generation is excessive (we therefore ought to cut resource use), and b) too much waste is produced (we […]

Cymene Howe Whether the Sharp-shinned Hawk is killed by a turbine blade or befalls another fate should not pose a different moral conundrum than it did when humans first trapped wind to power machines in the first century AD. But it does. Our current demand to have energy at our disposal surfaces an equation between […]