Portside

Despite second consecutive year of declines, report concludes the long-term outlook for solar energy production is positive

In these times of climate change denial, macho military chest-beating, stagnant wages, and soulless extremes of wealth and poverty, light-bearing cracks are all that we have. The northern Great Plains, likely the richest wind regime in the world, the potential of tribal wind power exceeds 300 gigawatts across six states, according to the Department of Energy. This motherlode is equivalent to about half of the current electrical generating capacity in the United States.

The investment commitment made by the Chinese, combined with Mr. Trump’s moves, means jobs that would have been created in the United States may instead go to Chinese workers... Greenpeace estimates that China installed an average of more than one wind turbine every hour of every day in 2015, and covered the equivalent of one soccer field every hour with solar panels.

Since NY has banned fracking, a lot of people are working to try and develop clean energy at the state, county, and local levels. These efforts together are known as “fractivism 2.0.” “They’re trying to prevent the country and the planet from digging their own graves by committing ourselves to another 50 or 100 years of burning fossil fuels.”

2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries, the beginning of the end of the Fossil Fuel Era has come into sight. This shift will take place no matter how well or poorly the deal just achieved at the U.N. climate summit in Paris is carried out.

That would be enough electricity to power nearly 100 million homes. As wind grows, investments in wind energy would reach as much as $70 billion annually by 2050, according to a new report, at which point the industry would support 600,000 jobs.

Two U.S. initiatives to provide Africans with electricity seem likely to lead to large, climate-polluting projects rather than the locally sourced renewable energy rural Africa needs.

Fifty or a hundred years from now, the fiscal cliff, the current tensions with Russia, and many other issues that now seem pressing will be remembered dimly, if at all. What will be remembered is whether, as then-Senator Obama said in June of 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” It was an inspiring call to action then; in the wake of the droughts, the wildfires, and hurricane Sandy, it’s even more so now.