Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On September 5, 2024, Shareable and our partners at RPC were thrilled to announce that the first round of New ERA projects has been unveiled, marking a significant step forward with a total investment of $29 billion—$7.3 billion of which comes directly from federal support for Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs).
For the material footprint of industrial production and our corresponding consumption, a change of energy source itself makes in most cases little difference.
Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world.
Premier Danielle Smith’s efforts to revive a contentious open-pit coal mining project owned by the litigious Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart have met a major legal hurdle.
Claims that existing (or augmented) patterns of urbanism are more pro-social and pro-nature than rural alternatives appeal to people’s contrarian nature. And since most people live in urban areas, especially in the rich countries, it also tells them what they want to hear…
The Oil Kills uprising and fellow movements around the world have placed their bodies between those tankers and our shared future to say, “here, and no further.”
My research focuses on the economic and environmental costs and benefits of producing electricity. Here’s how the clean energy transition is changing the role of peaker plants and some other options for keeping the lights on during peak demand periods.
The way popular understandings of economics shape our ability to accurately perceive the role of government in the fracking boom is an extremely complex and nuanced problem. The small facet I attempt to tackle here is the role of our belief in the free market.
We are stretching the material and labor limits of this planet to capacity merely to increase the complexity of our production methods, not to increase production, not to better meet our needs, not to create abundance or well-being for any body.
Retrofitting modern cities and their glass towers for better heat control isn’t simple, but there are techniques that can be adapted to new designs for living better in hotter and drier climates and for relying less on constant summer air conditioning. These ancient civilizations can teach us how.
Given the basically non-existent ‘transition’ into clean energy outlined in my previous post which is failing to meet even existing needs for energy, the vast increase in renewable electricity generation that would be required to fund the additional energy demands of manufactured food if it’s to play any major part in a sustainable future makes this technology a non-starter as a mass food approach.
The Southern Company has an official target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 — but its regional affiliates disclaim any responsibility toward achieving that goal, leaving open the question of how the company as a whole can decarbonize while its subsidiaries are building new fossil infrastructure and delaying the retirement of existing coal plants.
