Tag: fossil fuels
America’s twisted politics may slow the transition to renewables, but other countries are now pushing the pace. In July of 2017, for instance, the Chinese announced that Qinghai Province—a territory the size of Texas—had gone a week relying on 100% renewable energy, a test of grid reliability designed to show that the country could continue its record-breaking pace of wind and solar installation.
A district judge in ruled that 13 fossil fuel pipeline protesters were not responsible for any infraction because of the necessity of their actions. “This may be a first in America,” tweeted Bill McKibben. The charges the defendants faced stemmed from actions they took in 2016 to block Spectra Energy’s fracked gas West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline.
The German non-profit Energy Watch Group (EWG) teamed up with Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology to present a study at the COP23 climate summit. The results of the study show “that a 100% renewable electricity system is an effective and urgently needed climate protection measure. A global zero emission power system is feasible and more cost-effective than the existing system based on nuclear and fossil fuel energy.”
You’re NOT going to believe this – Wyoming senators have proposed a new bill that will FINE for using renewable energy! Read this!
Big banks are still funding extreme fossil fuels. Read this and be informed!
In a landmark case, the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines (CHR) announced Friday it will launch the first-ever investigation into dozens of fossil fuel companies for alleged human rights violations over the industry’s role in worsening climate change.
“The greatest challenge to energy transitions concerns whether political, institutional, and cultural changes can occur fast enough to support technological changes,” Jennie Stephens and Elizabeth Wilson wrote Thursday at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Instead of aligning his investments with a clean energy future, Gates is continuing to support the very industries who are lobbying against progress on clean energy and whose business models are deeply out of line with averting the climate crisis.
Power plants have been generating electricity from the oceans’ tides since 1966, but the Swansea Lagoon is the first to employ a radically new method.
In order to generate sufficient capital for these initiatives, Sweden plans to implement heavy petroleum and diesel taxes.
Some have argued that divestment movements have little direct consequences for the finances of major companies. But the premise is simple, no CEO wants to catch the slow-brewing disease of bad-public relations.
The oil price drop that has dominated the headlines in recent weeks has been framed almost exclusively in terms of oil market economics, with most media outlets blaming Saudi Arabia, through its OPEC Trojan horse, for driving down the price, thus causing serious damage to the world’s major oil exporters – most notably Russia. While the market explanation is partially true, it is simplistic, and fails to address key geopolitical pressure points in the Middle East.
Not even unlimited clean energy is an automatic magic bullet that will completely solve the crisis our world is currently facing. We still must learn to treat the Earth with respect and reverence, and only take what we need.
The applicability of these findings depends on where you live, but in many cases, renewable power is now competitive with fossil fuels, even with no subsidies.
Jane Goodall has stressed the need for governments to challenge the fossil fuel industry in order to confront the climate crisis. The “window of time” left to act on the climate crisis requires individual action, the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace said. But politicians must act as well, and that means “governments standing up to the big corporations, the oil and gas industry.”
