Is there a positive side to consumption?

One of our Great Energy Challenge advisers, Dan Kammen, of the World Bank and UC Berkeley, raised that question in a brainstorming session on questions to ask the panelists here at Aspen Environmental Forum 2011. The sessions are focused on the strain on the planet as population nears 7 billion.

I wasn’t sure I understood how consumption ever could be an advantage in the search for environmental solutions—but now that I was listening for it, I began hearing examples.

At a session on clean coal (entitled “Oxymoron or Salvation?”), Jim Rogers, the outspoken chief executive of Duke Energy, talked about his company’s two partnerships in China—with the nation’s largest utility, Huaneng Group, and with