Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With the era of cheap fossil fuels coming to a close, what’s left as low-cost fuel is wood and that had to be the target of the next wave of exploitation. Naively, I was thinking that the rush to wood would have taken the form of desperate people moving to the woods with hand-held axes, but no, in Italy it is coming in a much more destructive way.
Researchers estimate that the global fossil fuel industry is subsidised to a tune of $5.3 trillion (6.5% of global GDP) every year yet this raises few eyebrows. We believe that subsidies for energy access related projects are not an outlandish proposition and in fact, if implemented correctly could be the catalyst that tips the nascent rural off-grid sector into rapid scalability.
As a whole, the American fracking experiment has been a financial disaster for many of its investors, who have been plagued by the industry’s heavy borrowing, low returns, and bankruptcies, and the path to becoming profitable is lined with significant potential hurdles.
As pipeline protests continue to delay and, sometimes, stop energy projects in their tracks, the fossil fuel industry and Republican lawmakers are looking for new ways to clamp down on environmental protest.
The ‘circular economy’ is, in my opinion, a ruse to make affluent consumers feel that they can keep consuming without the need to change their habits. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the central reason for that is the necessity for energy to power economic activity.
But beyond illuminating the often dismal conditions under which teachers in this country are often forced to work, the walkouts in Oklahoma and West Virginia illuminate something else — what happens when states prioritize tax breaks for fossil fuel companies over education.
But the solar panels generating that power don’t last forever. The industry standard life span is about 25 to 30 years, and that means that some of the panels installed at the early end of the current boom aren’t long from being retired.
The pending battle between the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Trump administration bears following. At a minimum, the conflict will determine whether the state or the administration ends up setting the defacto national 2025 fuel efficiency standard.
It comes as no surprise that EPA Administrator Pruitt recently announced the Agency’s intention to rollback the 2022 through 2025 Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for autos and light trucks.
Hall invented the very term energy return on investment, and he’s done decades of seminal research on the phenomenon that it describes. As the current shale oil miracle goes the way of all mirages—causing the issue of energy depletion to reenter the public discourse in a big way—one can only hope that Hall’s ideas will draw a great deal of well-deserved notice.
For the first time in 2017, global solar capacity grew faster than all fossil fuels combined, including coal, oil and gas-fired power stations. That’s one finding of the latest annual report on global trends in renewable energy finance, from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
Shell knew climate change was going to be big, was going to be bad, and that its products were responsible for global warming all the way back in the 1980s, a tranche of new documents reveal.
