Renewable energy is now 'unstoppable'

Renewable energy in full flight -
it's now unstoppable.

Once upon a time, people imagined that replacing fossil fuels with renewables like solar and wind would jeopardize the electric grid’s reliability. Then along came some major countries which showed that it didn’t, and that there really are no limits to renewable integration.

The result was explained last year in a Bloomberg Business piece aptly headlined, “Germany Proves Life With Less Fossil Fuel Getting Easier”: “Germany experiences just 15 minutes a year of outages, compared with 68 minutes in France and more than four hours in Poland.”

Germany is the most powerful economy on the planet to depend so much on renewable electricity — renewables currently deliver 28 percent of Germany’s total grid power (and up to 40 percent in some regions). The United States has a very long way to go to hit that level, by which time there will be an even wider range of cost-effective strategies to deal with much higher levels of renewables.

Read the ClimateProgress story - “Why The Renewables Revolution Is Now Unstoppable.”

Plunge in global mining stocks kind to climate change activists

The $1.4 trillion lost in global mining stocks since 2011 exceeds the total market value of Apple Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Google’s parent Alphabet Inc.

When you’ve spent a decade building new mines from the Andean mountains to the West African jungle, it’s bad news when a downturn in China, your biggest customer, shows no signs of stopping. Investors have been unforgiving and concerns that it will only get worse pushed the Bloomberg World Mining Index to an 11-year low.

Read the Bloomberg Business story - “Mining's $1.4 Trillion Plunge Like Losing Apple, Google, Exxon.”

(Extraction, mining by another name, is a significant contributor to climate change and so if we are serious about mitigating the effects of our seriously disrupted climate system, it’s imperative that we, in some way, limit or control our mining affairs. Climate change will not be resolved without some pain and so this restructuring of the world’s mining stocks is just one of the many aches we will have to deal with – Robert McLean.)

Scientific consensus proves global warming, these charts illustrate it

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cientific consensus unequivocally illustrates the earth is warming, as a result of human behaviour.

Although there is no longer a genuine debate about what has been thoroughly scientifically proved, the many attempts to convey that message to the wider public have failed dismally.

People, it seems are incapable of dealing with such a complex issue and while that is not a criticism, rather a reality.

Most people have what can be described as a “finite pool of worries” and so there is simply not room for the complexities of understand global warming.

The language of scientists is, to many people incomprehensible, despite the fact that those among the more communicative scientists present their arguments in quite simple terms.

Research has repeatedly shown that many people respond best to, an absorb most, information presented via graphics and so Bloomberg Business has prepared and circulated a series of graphics that illustrate, undeniably, that it is you and I (humans) who are responsible for global warming.

See the graphics - “What’s really warming the world?”