Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I try, often as not, to refrain from raising problems without suggesting something by way of useful answers. There are those times, of course, when anything approximating an upbeat response is simply beyond the ken or need wait for events to catch up. Regarding the incoming Trump administration, any definitive answer to WHAT NOW for clean energy and climate sustainability will require patience.
I don’t doubt the nation’s transition to a clean energy economy will continue after The D is inaugurated in January. Economics, a rapidly growing number of companies owning responsibility for their carbon emissions and ordinary people acting on behalf of future generations underpin the trend towards environmental sustainability.
The US Energy Information Administration, or EIA, regularly updates its estimates for how much oil and gas might be recovered in the future, and at what rate. With the application of new technology from year to year, those estimates generally keep going up. But it’s important to remember that they are just estimates — and the devil is always in the details.
As captains of the fossil fuel industries and their lobbyists prepare to take over the White House – appointed by a President elected by a minority, claiming to represent the people on an anti-elite ticket yet possessing by far the highest cumulative wealth of any cabinet ever – they will face evidence breaking out all around them of a fast-moving global energy transition threatening to strand the fossil fuels they seek to boost.
Authors Richard Heinberg and David Fridley in their recent book Our Renewable Future make the case for a society that runs on 100 percent renewable energy. But they don’t pull any punches, giving us both the good news and the bad news.
Photo-Voltaics (PV) is an energy source where this problem has been more acute. Equipment and installation prices collapsed four or five fold since 2010, but published EROEI studies have not converged; in fact it appears they dispersed even further.
Oil has fueled a bully bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The notion of “decoupling” energy consumption from economic growth has become vogue in policy circles, but how much evidence is there that it’s really happening?
Americans are literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat of world oil consumption.
Scroll through Donald Trump’s campaign promises or listen to his speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies…
In which we learn how a sensible family of limited financial means achieved their goal of reducing their energy usage and utility bills.
U.S. shale’s possibilities may seem endless, but the low hanging fruit in terms of efficiency and costs savings has been picked and therefore current discoveries might not be so prolific.
