In A Post-Pandemic World, Renewable Energy Is The Only Way Forward

The Economist’s regular cartoonist, KAL, summed it up neatly in his cartoon last week: the battle humanity is waging against the coronavirus is only the preliminary round, and after that, we have a much bigger and stronger opponent waiting for us, called the climate emergency. That some people still may think that something as objectively and scientifically proven is still up for debate could be seen as one of the greatest achievements of the fossil fuel industry. It’s not. It’s the greatest threat to human life.

Pollution affects us all, very much so. In addition to being responsible for some seven million deaths annually, it makes us more vulnerable to all kinds of respiratory diseases, including, of course, those caused by viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which could also become seasonal and repetitive. Not only do we know that we need to fix this problem: we also know that not doing so is killing us, and we now have a pressing example of this.

Read the story from Forbes by Enrique Dans - “In A Post-Pandemic World, Renewable Energy Is The Only Way Forward.”

In a Stunning Turnaround, Britain Moves to End the Burning of Coal

Bigger than any medieval castle, with its 12 giant white cooling towers gleaming in the sun, the Drax Power Station dominates the horizon for tens of miles across the flat lands of eastern England. For four decades, it has been one of the world’s largest coal power plants, often generating a tenth of the U.K.’s electricity. It has been the lodestar for the final phase of Britain’s 250-year-long love affair with coal – the fuel that built the country’s empire and industrialized the world.

The Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire, England.

But no more.

The coal-devouring behemoth, and the endless trains of railroad wagons feeding it with fuel from coastal ports, is suddenly a relic of the past. In one of the greatest and fastest energy turnarounds in the developed world, the country that brought the world the industrial revolution – a revolution founded and sustained by burning coal – has cut the cord.

King Coal is, almost overnight, being banished from Britain.

When Drax opened for business in 1974, Britain got 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal. As recently as five years ago, the figure was 40 percent. But last year, it was 9 percent, and this summer coal supplied less than 2 percent of Britain’s electricity. On April 21, 2017, for the first time since its inception, the British power grid went 24 hours without coal.

Read the Yale Environment 360 story - “In a Stunning Turnaround, Britain Moves to End the Burning of Coal.”