Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world’s electricity for the first time last year following a rapid rise in wind and solar power, according to new figures....
Which still means that fossil fuel power plants loose money in those periods due to low electricity prices. Those low prices also lead to electricity storage and more electricity consumption. The later is good, when it replaces other fossil fuel consumption(usually that is).
There are basically three options to deal with overproduction:
export
storage
shutting it done
The cheapest way of using wind and solar actually includes shutting done some of it at excellent days, so the capacity is enough to provide enough power at just okay days. The other problem is that storage is an issue. Right now pumped hydro and batteries are the only ways we have economically somewhat able to actually store electricity economically and both are at the expensive end. So they are usually just used to balance the grid. Hence the optimum is more in having overcapacity. The other option is to use the water reservoir of large hydro river plants, to vary the electricity production. that works rather well. The other big one is exports. As soon as a grid is large enough(continent sized), the weather matters a lot less. So you might see a lot of hvdc lines going from your country to other ones being planned, built and finished.
However most of the world is not even close to that. At 30% and a lot of it hydro, renewable electricity production is mostly just replacing fossil fuel.
Vermonts electricity was 48% clean energy(renewables and nuclear). To go to 100% they need to add storage, a lot more renewable generation and upgrade the grid. All of that requires planning, ordering the parts and then building it. Doing it in a decade is a realistic, but ambitus target.
Oil companies usually do not, but electricity companies do. The problem is that oil companies are great in geology, drilling and chemistry. Geothermal is a similar skill set and chemistry can be used in other products, but the first is small business and the other not renewable nexessarily.
The project was always dumb. The way you do it, is to have one large project in the new city center to grab headlines and create a symbol for the city. The rest should be cheaper lower end buildings. NEOM is just the expensive mega projects, without the normal construction.The simple truth is that Saudi Arabia has just such a project with the King Abdullah Economic City, with what is planned to be the tallest building in the world. The issue is that Saudi Arabia just can not be a playground for the super rich. There are just not enough of them to make it work.
Clean energy is able to somewhat solve the problems of fossil fuel. However they do not solve other environmental problems like a massive crisis in soil depletion from industrial agriculture, over fishing, pesticides and many other things destroying biodiversity and so forth. The only way we can solve those is by using earths resources better. Since economic growth and resource consumption are linked, that means we have no chance of solving those problems, if we continue to grow our economy no matter what. That is also true for the climate crisis, but clean energy helps.
You want high population density as it makes sharing resources easier. The per capita emissions of a Londoner are at 3.3t. However UK is at 6t.
Also some processes make sense to be moved to the grid, even when they increase electricity generation. EVs are lower emissions then a petrol engine, even with coal electricity.
Otherwise a decrease in consumption is key. However only to a level, where we can provide the basics for everybody. Right now that means we also need more green tech.
I found these kind of cool as an idea, as they can be added rather easily to existing cities and provide some greenery without taking up space, while providing shade:...
If you built dense cities, like this you massively reduce land usage of cities. It also removes the need for cars and allows for easier sharing of many other resources. This means dense cities have a much lower carbon footprint then other forms of living. London for example has per capita emissions of 3.3t. Skyscrapers are not the best solution for density, but they work and in this case thats mid density housing.
This is a good way to have some greenery in a place, where planting a tree is difficult. This is a 6m wide street with shops on both sites, which is mainly used by pedestrians. If you plant a tree on the sites of the street, it does not get enough light. In the middle of the street it ends up blocking trucks from resupplying the shops, which is also not an option.
It does have an irrigation system. You can see the pipe assembly on the left. It is that big white thing running through. That goes to a water tank, which collects the rainwater from the sails and then pumps it back up when needed.
I. Occupations are effective because they are disruptive. The April 1968 occupations shut down the entire university for over a week. This forced the administration to concede to their demands, even after the movement faced repression....
And communists and anarchists do not necessarily a problem with personal possessions. The idea is to seize the means of production aka companies and to use those for the public good by transferring them into public or collective ownership. However for consumer goods like clothes, furniture, food, bicycles and so forth would in most cases remain private property, within reasonable levels(no mansions).
So most people would actually gain property in this case, as they have a share in public and collective property.
Houses require maintenance. How much and how often depends on the design and its surroundings. They also require occupants - in my brief experience at least, they degrade much faster when they’re left cold and empty than when someone lives there, even if that someone doesn’t fix things. Weather, encroaching water, mold, ice,...
Suburbs are like most cities built on good farm land. It is also usually around a dense city core. So it would make a lot of sense to me to turn suburbs into an agricultural zone, rather then complete wilderness. That is some suburbs should also be densified. Something like a McMansion could be turned into multi family housing, the garage into a flat and so forth. Roads are around and parts of them can be turned into protected bike lanes and some proper public rail based transport is an option as well.
There are a few ways of going about it. One is third parties. If you vote for the Green Party for example, you get voting reform, anti genocide policies and a much better enviromental policy. At the same time Biden is still much better then Trump and being realistic about what you can get should also be part of voting strategy. Also it is incredibly important to say, that citizenship does not end at the ballot box. You got to and can do more to influence politics. So I would probably vote Biden in a swing state and Green Party in an state, which is not a swing state. This matters in two ways. Firstly the more people vote third party, the more likely they can get into some actual power, but also the Democrats see that they can gain potential votes, by improving policies.
Also no lesser evil has to be distinguised from compromise and deals. If you get an actual improvement out of doing something, it can be worth doing even at a price. So if two countries face a powerfull invader, it can be worth making a deal that country A gets 40% of the invaders land and country B also 60%, if country B is already stronger for example. In that case both get something out of it. However without the alliance both would probably fail. In this case the question is, if Biden would actually net improve the US compared to today.
In Pakistan the Lahore High Court was able to rule that the government was in violation of climate protection. So I guess rule of law is better in Pakistan then it is in the US.
English translation (Deepl)> Climate protection projects worth millions run by oil companies in China apparently only exist on paper, according to research by ZDF frontal. Consumers are paying for it anyway. > > It might be one of the biggest cases of fraud in the German mineral oil industry. It involves so-called UER...
The EU Fuel Quality Directive has certain rules regarding fuel emissions and one of the options is to buy these Upstream Emission Certificates to show that the fuel was pumped out of the ground with relativly low emissions. Since EU oil production is low, this means production somewhere else has to be cleaner.
The smart move would be to ban those certificates and force them to use direct air capture or e-fuels instead.
There is a legal system and companies can be sued for damages. Having a lot of this in a very offcial place like the Senat helps. Also way to many still believe fossil fuel lies.
Renewable energy passes 30% of world’s electricity supply (www.theguardian.com)
Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world’s electricity for the first time last year following a rapid rise in wind and solar power, according to new figures....
Vermont just passed a 100% renewable electricity mandate (electrek.co)
“…across all the state’s utilities by 2035.”...
Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption (www.theverge.com)
Forcing workers back to the office could be terrible for the environment (www.motherjones.com)
The scaling back of Saudi Arabia’s proposed urban mega-project sends a clear warning to other would-be utopias (theconversation.com)
‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites (www.theguardian.com)
Arrested for Giving Gifts: Anticapitalist Santa Claus Protest in Copenhagen (www.youtube.com)
Clean Energy is not enough (quotefancy.com)
Generate shadows without trees: vegetable awnings, a new way to generate shadows in the city. (www.singulargreen.com)
I found these kind of cool as an idea, as they can be added rather easily to existing cities and provide some greenery without taking up space, while providing shade:...
First We Take Columbia: Lessons from the April 1968 occupations movement (illwill.com)
I. Occupations are effective because they are disruptive. The April 1968 occupations shut down the entire university for over a week. This forced the administration to concede to their demands, even after the movement faced repression....
Deconstruction crew disassembling abandoned McMansions so the material can be reused - Postcard from a Solarpunk Future (pixelfed.social)
Houses require maintenance. How much and how often depends on the design and its surroundings. They also require occupants - in my brief experience at least, they degrade much faster when they’re left cold and empty than when someone lives there, even if that someone doesn’t fix things. Weather, encroaching water, mold, ice,...
Exclusive: Bernie Sanders worries young people are underestimating the threat from Trump (www.usatoday.com)
US appeals court says kids' climate lawsuit must be dismissed (www.reuters.com)
Archived copies of the article: ghostarchive.org archive.today
CO2 Projects: Suspicion of Fraud in Climate Protection Projects | ZDF (in German!) (www.zdf.de)
English translation (Deepl)> Climate protection projects worth millions run by oil companies in China apparently only exist on paper, according to research by ZDF frontal. Consumers are paying for it anyway. > > It might be one of the biggest cases of fraud in the German mineral oil industry. It involves so-called UER...
Senate Hearing Exposes Big Oil's 'Campaign of Deception and Distraction' (www.commondreams.org)
Studies show that as energy prices rise, so do right-wing movements against green policies (wapo.st)
This makes it important to use cheap wind, solar, and storage to cut costs as we decarbonize.