Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ever since 2013, the installation of new renewable energy capacity has outstripped all other major energy generating sources combined, coal, oil, gas and nuclear. There are impressive figures for all renewables but the growth and fall in costs of solar power has stunned even seasoned industry observers.
It will not help you make friends among politicians if you make an argument about the inevitability of degrowth because politicians and senior civil servants and journalists are almost without exception true believers in the faith of growth.
For the past two years, the Climate Action Tracker has been producing a series of memos that look at the decarbonisation required in high-emitting sectors to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5˚C warming limit.
On Solarcentury’s 21st birthday, an interesting question occurs to me. How many Solarcenturys would it take to stave off the climate crisis, at least where energy is concerned. The answer I arrive at might really surprise you.
Though there are still hurdles to leap, states basically know how to eliminate emissions from the electrical grid, said Mike O’Boyle, head of electricity policy at the think tank Energy Innovation in San Francisco.
But fossil fuels are doomed by depletion in any case, so what sense does it make investing the few resouces we still have in a technology that doesn’t have a future? In the end, CCS is mainly a failure of the imagination: we can and we should do much better than sweeping the carbon underground.
As the world now gets to grips with the realities of making a rapid transition away from fossil fuels in the next decade, is it time to look again at how quickly we moved back in the 1970s, when we had to?
We’re GOING to make the transition to renewable sources of energy. There is no scenario outside the dark mind of Dick Cheney where we continue to use depleting and polluting fossil fuels over the long run to power society. So how exactly are we going to make the transition?
California has four basic challenges to resolve on its journey to using solely renewables + large hydro to power its electric grid.
Modernizing and decarbonizing the country’s aging energy infrastructure now has so many economic, environmental, and health benefits that the overall benefit of strong climate action would be enormous.
Electric utility (re)municipalization is gaining popularity as a strategy to shift away from a reliance on fossil fuel extraction in the context of combating climate change.
Whether Green New Dealers or carbon taxers no allowance seems to be made for opposition to the projects needed to get the US off the fossil fuel standard. The parties to the conflicts are not just climate defenders and deniers.
