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Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A picture is worth a thousand words. This graph compares the price history of solar energy to conventional energy sources. The comparison is striking. This is what a disruptive technology looks like. While conventional energy prices remained pretty flat in inflation adjusted terms, the cost of solar is dropping,fast, and is likely to continue doing so as technology and manufacturing processes improve.
Resilience has recently become a recurrent term in the urban design debate, predominantly in connection with climate change and natural disasters.
Energy conservation is our best strategy for pre-adapting to an inevitably energy-constrained future. And it may be our only real option for averting economic, social, and ecological ruin.
Even amid policy uncertainty in major wind power markets, wind developers still managed to set a new record for installations in 2012, with 44,000 megawatts of new wind capacity worldwide.
Hawaii generates more of its power from the sun than any other state. Here’s what the rest of us can learn from the obstacles that came up along the way and and what’s being done to overcome them.
Energy intensity — energy use per dollar of GDP — is the last refuge of fossil fuel proponents. Instead of measuring real improvement in energy efficiency, it hides the outsourcing of dirty, coal-based manufacturing to developing countries and changes during times of economic growth or recession, irrespective of efficiency.
•Learning from Germany’s Renewable Energy Transition •German energy surplus quadruples despite renewable push •The ‘unstoppable’ renewable grid •German village offers blueprint for rural green energy •Desertec on the Ropes: Competitors and Opponents Threaten Energy Plan •Renewable energy providers to help bear cost of new UK nuclear reactors •Energy policies ‘reduce bill rises’ •Philippines turns trash into clean energy windfall
What if, instead of giving Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming Nobel prizes for their life-saving work on radiation and penicillin, they’d been thrown in jail? Or, instead of being awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d’honneur for his work on the germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur was imprisoned like Napoleon on Elba? It would be perverse to return the favour of great, public works by depriving people of their freedom. Yet that is just what we’re doing in Britain right now. The contributions of the people above were remarkable, but how much greater is the challenge of preserving a readily habitable climate, and how thankful should we be to those prepared to throw their life’s energy and creativity at the task?
•Giant investment bank taken over by hippie alarmists •Fossil Fuels Divestment Fever: Canadian Students, Doctors Launch New Campaign •Republican Mayor Leads City To First-Ever Solar Energy Mandate •New Research Confirms Global Warming Has Accelerated •Why Russian doomsday climate predictions may prove prophetic •Carbon in Worst Quarter Since 2011 Set for Rescue Vote
The winds of change brought some great progress to Maryland this week when the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2013 passed through both houses of the legislature. The offshore wind bill has been championed from the start by Governor Martin O’Malley, who stands ready to sign the bill into law.
There are signs the climate movement could be on the verge of a remarkable and surprising victory. If we read the current context correctly, and if the movement can adjust its strategy to capture the opportunity presented, it could usher in the fastest and most dramatic economic transformation in history. This would include the removal of the oil, coal and gas industries from the economy in just a few decades and their replacement with new industries and, for the most part, entirely new companies. It would be the greatest transfer of wealth and power between industries and countries the world has ever seen.
Within the next decade, Germany will have shifted from a coal- and nuclear-powered economy to a thriving, decentralized system with power from renewable sources. This transformation, writes John Mathews, will not only make a real reduction in global carbon emissions. It is leading to a democratization of economic power that is unprecedented in the industrial world.
