‘Records falling everywhere': solar panel demand goes through the roof

For Amit Narang, an IT expert working for NSW Health, the choice to put solar panels on his roof was partly to cut carbon emissions but mostly because the financials had become conclusive.

Going up: The Narang family get their solar panels
installed by More Green Energy on their home in
The Ponds, in Sydney's west, this week.

"We felt we could recover the costs in four to five years," Mr Narang said on Thursday, hours after a 6.5-kilowatt photovoltaic system was installed on his home in The Ponds, in Sydney's west. "You're also saving the environment.”

By his calculation, the family's annual electric bill will dive from $1400 to $400, a compelling enough case that has two colleagues looking to take a similar plunge into PV.

Read the story from The Age by Peter Hannam - “‘Records falling everywhere': solar panel demand goes through the roof.”

'Everything Must Go' - George Monbiot

Everyone wants everything – how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.

But growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative. And we must adjust our tastes accordingly. In the name of autonomy and choice, marketing uses the latest findings in neuroscience to break down our defences. Those who seek to resist must, like the Simple Lifers in Brave New World, be silenced – in this case by the media. With every generation, the baseline of normalised consumption shifts. Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a minute.

Every Friday is a Black Friday, every Christmas a more garish festival of destruction. Among the snow saunas, portable watermelon coolers and smart phones for dogs with which we are urged to fill our lives, my #extremecivilisation prize now goes to the PancakeBot: a 3-D batter printer that allows you to eat the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal or your dog’s bottom every morning. In practice, it will clog up your kitchen for a week until you decide you don’t have room for it. For junk like this we’re trashing the living planet, and our own prospects of survival. Everything must go.

Read the piece by Guardian columnist, George Monbiot - “Everything Must Go.”

Coastal Cities Are Increasingly Vulnerable, and So Is the Economy that Relies on Them.

There was a time a decade or two ago when society could have made a choice to write off our massive investment in a fossil fuel-based economy and begin a policy driven shift towards a cleaner renewable infrastructure that could have forestalled the worst effects of climate change. But the challenges of collective action, a lack of political courage, and the power of incumbent pecuniary interests to capture the levers of power meant we did not. The bill is now coming due.

That means that many of our great, low-lying coastal cities are what we call “stranded assets.” GreenBiz founder Joel Makower defines a stranded asset as “a financial term that describes something that has become obsolete or nonperforming well ahead of its useful life, and must be recorded on a company’s balance sheet as a loss of profit.” Makower was talking about Exxon and other companies that built their businesses on the combustion of climate changing fossil fuels, not cities. But the concept easily transfers from businesses built on carbon to cities threatened by carbon’s impact.

Consider Miami. An invaluable, irreplaceable cultural jewel that will be stranded, both figuratively and literally, by climate change.

Read the Harvard Business Review story by Gregory Unruh - “Coastal Cities Are Increasingly Vulnerable, and So Is the Economy that Relies on Them.”