How US renewable-energy growth persists despite federal policy uncertainty
Despite recent shifts in federal energy policies, a Carbon Brief analysis shows that the US transition to renewable energy is continuing.
Renewable Energy
War in the Middle East made the case for renewables – what’s happening in each country tells a harder story
The war in the Middle East has exposed the costs of fossil fuel dependence, but the path to renewable energy looks very different across regions.
What Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations can teach us about today’s failed energy transitions
Despite three decades of COP climate talks and a boom in renewables, global emissions continue to rise, rooted in capitalism’s relentless drive to expand energy use. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations helps explain why renewable energy has grown without pushing fossil fuels out.
Small modular nuclear reactors are a dead end
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are being promoted as cheaper, safer, and faster to build than older nuclear plants, winning support from some environmentalists and a more pro‑nuclear public. Amid an energy crisis and soaring AI‑driven electricity demand, SMRs seem promising, but many critics, rightly, still see them as a dangerous dead end.
A realistic ‘energy transition’ is to get better at using less of it
We must develop a realistic plan for energy descent, rather than clinging to naive fantasies of endless consumer abundance powered by alternatives to fossil fuels.
The oil security paradox: Every war becomes an oil crisis in a fossil-fuel economy
The war in Iran has made the paradox inescapable. The pursuit of energy security through fossil fuels produced the very disruption it was meant to prevent. Instead, the transition to renewables offers the genuine insulation that oil never can: from global price shocks, from the geopolitical risks embedded in that dependence, and from the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis.
The clean energy economy turns out to be the metals energy economy
The fossil fuel era led to widespread dependence on greenhouse gas producing nonrenewable energy sources. The emerging clean energy era is leading to widespread dependence on vast new supplies of nonrenewable metals
Turning a Pain in the [Coal] Ash into an Asset (2)
There are two basic ways of correctly dealing with coal combustion residuals (CCR) — whether existing or new. They are storing it in lined ponds, preferably as far from potable water supplies as possible, and finding a way to use it so it doesn’t need to be stored at all.
The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics
We are going to have to dramatically downsize the dream of a future in which we replace 150-year-old fossil fuel infrastructure with “clean energy” by 2050.
Renewables will be world’s top electricity source within three years, IEA data reveals
Renewables will cover almost all of global electricity demand growth out to 2025, becoming the world’s top source of electricity within three years, new figures reveal.
EROI of RE
Do renewable energy sources generate enough energy ‘profit’ to make them worth continued investment? And is any energy profit large enough to run our modern world, as renewables displace fossil fuels?
The Energy Transition Narrative
When I go in search of figures, numbers, data, about energy in relation to ecology and economy, I’m often brought to the website of the very same EPA whose lead scientist studying sewage sludge faked his science and unleashed a toxic torrent upon the world.
