We gotta get a better battery. But how?

“It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done.” With that imperative, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that required California to obtain all of its electricity from sources like solar, wind, and hydropower by 2045. It was an admirably ambitious goal, commensurate to the civilizational challenge of reducing the carbon emissions responsible for climate change. The only difficulty was that neither Brown nor any anyone else knew how to do it.

Building a better battery.

The world’s fifth-largest economy had been on track to get half its power from clean sources by 2020. But by signing the new law on September 10, the governor made a promise that existing technologies cannot keep. The problem with advanced renewable sources of energy like solar and wind is that the sun doesn’t shine at night and wind blows intermittently, and both sun and wind (especially in California) are seasonal, waxing in summer and waning in winter. Right now, technologists don’t know how to store electricity from renewable energy at scale cheaply or efficiently. The person or group who solves that problem will be the Prometheus of our age.

Read the Wired story by Jason Pontin - “We gotta get a better battery. But how?”

Bikes aren't just transportation, they are climate action

California Governor Jerry Brown kicked off the Global Climate Action Summit with a big announcement, so big that according to David Roberts of Vox, it "was so out of left field and yet so profound in its implications that few in the media, or even in California, seem to have fully absorbed it yet." He has declared that by 2045, the state will be totally carbon neutral -- the entire state economy. As Roberts notes, this is a very big deal.

Bikes - they may be the single best
way to decarbonize transportation.

SB 100, the bill Brown signed on Monday, commits the state to clean electricity by 2045, but electricity only accounts for about 16 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions. Brown’s executive order would commit the state to doing something about the other 84 percent — transportation, building heating and cooling, industry, all the many and varied energy services that rely on direct fossil fuel combustion rather than electricity.

That's a tall order. How are we going to decarbonize transportation? We can't all drive Teslas. Over at Greenbiz, Andrea Learned suggests a new emphasis on bikes and e-bikes. 

Read the Treehugger story by Lloyd Alter - “Bikes aren't just transportation, they are climate action.”