It’s not just us gnats anymore, Southern Company now has yellowflies
giving it the business about converting from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
That’s smart business, since SO
called out solar power in its own 2014 Annual Report
for increased revenues in both 2013 and 2014.
Tomorrow at Callaway Gardens, stockholders including me will vote.
Dave Williams, Atlanta Business Chronicle, 15 May 2015, Southern shareholders to consider ‘green’ vote, Continue reading
The carbon bubble is popping faster than most people imagined,
and renewable sun, wind, and water power is taking over.
Ari Phillips, ThinkProgress, 15 May 2015, It Only Took Four Months For China To Achieve A Jaw-Dropping Reduction In Carbon Emissions,
China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, so small decreases in its emissions seem like monumental feats when compared to other countries. According to a new analysis, in the first four months of 2015, China’s coal use fell almost 8 percent compared to the same period last year — a reduction in emissions that’s approximately equal to the total carbon dioxide emissions of the U.K. over the same period.
The analysis, published by Greenpeace and Energydesk China, reviewed data from a number of sources, including China’s industrial output, and found that China had reduced its coal output by 6.1 percent in the first four months of 2015. The research team calculated that the drop in coal use translates into a nearly 5 percent drop in domestic CO2 emissions.
Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst who worked on the Greenpeace report, told RTCC that the report shows that China’s industrial output and thermal power generation are falling while renewable energy sources like hydro, wind, and solar are growing fast.
Niall McCarthy, Forbes, 12 May 2015, China’s Revolution In Wind Energy [Infographic], Continue reading
Changing the world is hard and takes courage, but that’s why we will win. Bill Sargent had given up on global projects and turned to smaller local problems where it seemed there was a greater change of making a real difference. He wrote for Harvard Heat Week 27 April 2015, Heat Week: Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks,
But then I met Divest Harvard. Here was a group of bright, eager, sleep-deprived young undergraduates and grad students — free of such skepticism and willing to take on both Big Oil and the richest University in the world in one fell swoop.
He listed a number of ways Divest Harvard is winning because they chose the biggest targets under adverse conditions. For example: Continue reading
Students, staff, faculty, and administration all say divest from fossil fuels. What will the VSU Foundation do now? One year after the committee was appointed 10 April 2014, it made a decision 8 April 2015:
S.A.V.E. applauds the decision by the President’s Special Committee on Campus Sustainability to support fossil fuel divestment. Leadership and stewardship are part and parcel to Valdosta State’s role as an institution of higher education and we call on VSU to honor these ethos by divesting from fossil fuels, ending its profiteering from ecological harm, environmental destruction, and human suffering.
Benjamin Vieth, the representative of Students Against Violating the Environment (S.A.V.E.) on that Committee, sent the above announcement after approval by S.A.V.E. Among other organizations included on that committee, Continue reading
Stop the Sabal Trail pipeline to help fossil fuel divestment. WALB got the connection at VSU Thursday 11 February 2015.
Colter Anstaett, WALB, 12 February 2015, Lowndes environmental groups march through VSU,
“We’re using so much at a rate that, within our generation or our lifetime, there’s gonna be catastrophic changes that won’t be reversed,” SAVE President Adrianna Taylor….
Taylor also said she believed that if the university ultimately did divest from fossil fuels, it would show that VSU students have the ability to critically think at the same level as students at Stanford, Harvard, and Continue reading
Let’s stop wasting money on the slide-rule technology of Keystone XL or Sabal Trail: they’re both bad investments, either short-term or long-term.
Andrew Winston wrote for Harvard Business Review 30 January 2015, Why the Keystone Pipeline Is the Wrong U.S. Energy Debate,
In the short run, with oil at $50 per barrel, Keystone will connect refineries to oil that may be unprofitable to extract. In the long run, as the world turns away from fossil fuels aggressively, the pipeline will be moot — a relic of the past.
Either way it’s a poor investment.
What, then? Continue reading
Batteries are just one of many reasons, including electric vehicles, smart grid, solar and wind power (including pass HB 57 and you can profit by getting financing for your own solar panels), plus massive savings on health care and electricity bills; batteries are one of many reasons that fixing climate change will save us all money, clean up our air and water, expand our forests, preserve property rights, and make some people rich:
In fact, a recent report suggests that revenue from the distributed energy storage market — meaning battery packs and other storage devices located directly at homes and businesses (many of which now generate electricity through solar) — could exceed $16.5 billion by 2024. Another report predicts $68 billion in revenue in the same time frame from the grid-scale storage market. This includes large-scale battery packs, hydro-storage systems that use cheap abundant electricity to pump water uphill to drive turbines later on, or even solar thermal systems that store energy as heat in molten salt.
And it’s all happening fast, so fast your jaw will drop if you’re not paying attention. So let’s stop talking about the costs of fixing climate change. It’s not just no-cost and free, not just in the future but right now; we’re all actually going to be better off through fixing climate change: healthier and more prosperous.
Sami Grover wrote Continue reading
The fossil fuel opposition is the child and grandchild of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
With their nonviolence, truth, and action as a model, we shall overcome.
Bill McKibben, The Guardian, 25 August 2011, Martin Luther King’s legacy and the power of nonviolent civil disobedience: In opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline, demonstrators are getting a sense of the civil rights leader’s courage,
Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest: First, it made Keystone XL “ the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico “ into a national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the route of the prospective pipeline who were organising against it. (And with good reason: Continue reading
It would go through our land to be sold everywhere else, with no jobs here. It wouldn’t even be a nominal benefit for those of us whose land, water, and taxes it would take.
President Obama was half right:
Understand what this project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.
In his press conference of 14 November 2014, he was referring to the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. Add Atlantic to Gulf and the above quote applies equally to the proposed Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline.
History has countered his next assertion: Continue reading
He concluded, “There’s nothing beneficial to the state of Georgia in this pipeline.”
Some Commissioners had never heard of Sabal Trail:
now they have, from local resident Alton Paul Burns,
at their
9 December 2014 Thomas County Commission Regular Session,
and they know it could come right through Thomasville.
Discussing among themselves, one Commissioner remarked that the pipeline wouldn’t go through her place, but it was still a concern, and they should ask Sabal Trail to come explain themselves.
Later, Continue reading