Alden's Blog Home

Taxonomies Systems

Posted on Sep 17, 2018

List of Taxonomies

All ideas for coherent taxonomies

  • Energy Types (Country by Country Energy Mix) -
    • high renewable
    • mostly coal
    • mostly nuclear
    • mostly gas
    • import/export ratio
  • Policy Goals
    • Seeking investment
    • Building infrastructure
    • Making revenue
    • Reducing carbon admissions
    • National security
    • Political kick-backs
      • Prop up the failing coal industry to own the libs (Just the US)
    • Reducing city pollution
    • Don’t rock the boat
  • Market Structures and Regulatory Regimes
    • Deregulated generation to transmission markets
    • Regulated vertically integrated private utilities
    • State-run vertically integrated utilities
    • State/private grey area uh oh zone
  • Ownership (who owns what where and what power do they have)
    • Power of generation owners' lobbying (not sure how to measure)
    • Acumulated wealth of energy investors and company owners as % of GDP

Due to the vastness and scope of nations' global energy policies I have been imagining so far pursuing a scattershot approach, with a few entries from different categories, say, for example, an entry on Japan’s nuclear energy policies, an entry on FERC chairman Kevin J. McIntyre, an entry on McKinsey & Company, an entry on Gazprom, an entry on hydropower, an entry on Chinese investment in central African countries' energy infrastructure, an entry on liquid natural gas processing plants and shipping sites, an entry on Enron and United States energy deregulation in the 1990s. Unifying them together is the vision of the state, synthesizing this messy state of affairs into a clean unified whole underpinned by laws and tariffs. I prefer this to going country by country, which gives too much consistent priority to the top-down vision of the subject.

As for the tone and character of the piece I am envisioning a George-Saunders-esque revelment in inane bureaucratic minutiae, a bit of PG Wodehouse breeziness, and good dose of ironic salt. Good pinch of lurid gossip of dubious provenance. All with a foundation of a future vision of the painful nostalgia humanity will feel for a time before we messed it all up. Maybe it’s a document from the future, or is that too cliche? Maybe it’s ambiguous, but is ambiguity of the author too cliche?

Visually I am taking stock and public domain photography and tracing it. Traced line drawings with no color. The energy industry mostly presents itself with stock photos of abstractions, pictures of lightbulbs, an old man looking up at the sky and smiling, a sunset, and this is a visual system I am emulating. Sometimes the photo will be metaphorical (e.g. McKinsey as group of people in suits) and sometimes directly iconographic (“Enron logo”), and sometimes directly

I am also imagining either an intro or an epigraph, maybe split into two pieces, one on the global effort to stop the growth of the ozone hole, and another about when we almost fixed climate change.