-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
The debate over the merits of renewable energy is over. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the advantages of replacing coal, oil, and gas with clean, renewable energy sources come under the heading of glaringly obvious.
Our challenge then, is not to convince people that renewable energy makes sense, but to help them see for themselves that the wave of the future is already breaking all around them. And although that seems like it should be easy, people have spent their entire lives in a fossil-fuel economy that has an illusion of permanence that can be hard to shake off. But The Grid is not The Matrix. People don't need a mysterious red pill to have their eyes opened to a world that's powered by renewable energy. It can be as simple as looking out the window.
Fact: Once someone sees solar panels appear on their neighbor's roof, they are far more likely to go solar themselves. This viral solar effect has been documented by researchers. One house gets solar and then it spreads outward from there. Despite the fact that most people agree that renewable energy is a good idea, seeing it happen in their own neighborhood somehow makes it more real.
This viral effect is helping to drive dramatic double-digit growth for rooftop solar installations year after year after year. Last year the U.S. set a record for rooftop solar installations, and this year is expected to have about twice as many. It took 40 years for solar to be installed on 1 million rooftops in the United States. We should hit the next million within two years.
And there are ways to make this growth happen even faster. One is through public awareness campaigns like the Sierra Club's Ready for 100, which just launched a national tour of nine cities across the U.S. to showcase the demand for clean, renewable energy. Last week, I attended the first one, in Aspen, Colorado (a town that has already achieved 100 percent renewable electricity), and it was fantastic.
But here's an idea: What if we could supercharge that rooftop solar viral effect by making it easy to see the solar potential of every home? To that end, the Sierra Club is collaborating with Google to help map the solar possibilities of residential rooftops across the U.S. Google's solar mapping tool is called Project Sunroof, and it's both powerful and incredibly easy to use. Enter your address into the mapping tool and -- bam! -- you'll see your home's solar potential based on your roof's position, shading, and usable hours of sunlight each year. At the same time, you'll get an estimate of your potential energy bill savings, details about different financing options, and next steps to explore making solar work for you.
Project Sunroof is currently available in 43 states (not yet included are Texas, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Idaho, South Dakota, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alaska, and the District of Columbia). If you haven't already gone solar and are curious about how much you could save, you should check it out. Fighting climate change isn't just an obligation; it's an opportunity to create the future we want.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Last week, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announced that it wants to retire California's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant by 2025. If the California Public Utilities Commission accepts the utility's proposal, it will mean the end of the nuclear era in California. Beyond that milestone, though, it marks what is now an undeniable trend. Clean, renewable energy like wind and solar -- combined with energy efficiency and storage -- can compete with any dirty fuel, be it coal, gas, or nuclear power.
The Sierra Club has unequivocally opposed nuclear energy for more than three decades, and Diablo Canyon is a good illustration of why we do. From the beginning it was a reckless enterprise. Nuclear power plants are not just accidents waiting to happen -- they are mega-disasters waiting to happen. Diablo Canyon was especially risky owing to the discovery of nearby earthquake faults, but no nuclear plant can be guaranteed to be safe. The potential consequences of a nuclear disaster are so horrific by themselves that they overwhelm any risk analysis.
In spite of all that, PG&E would likely have attempted to keep Diablo Canyon open if it could have done so profitably. What's driving the closure of this and other nuclear plants is not the obvious risks they pose, but their inability to compete economically. In Nebraska, the Omaha Public Power District decided to decommission its Fort Calhoun nuclear plant this year not because it had to be shut down owing to flooding of the Missouri River in 2011 but because clean, renewable energy and energy efficiency have helped drive the cost of electricity to levels that the plant couldn't match.
In fact, renewable energy has gotten so cheap so quickly that PG&E says it intends to replace all of the power from Diablo Canyon with carbon-free clean energy. That's a big deal, because Diablo currently generates around 18,000 gigawatt hours per year or 8.5 percent of the state's power mix. It's important to hold PG&E to that commitment. Diablo needs to be replaced with additional clean energy -- above and beyond what it would otherwise have developed -- by the time the plant shuts down less than 10 years from now. How PG&E actually does that (solar, wind, energy efficiency, and storage could all play a role) is less important -- as long as greenhouse gas emissions do not increase as a result of Diablo Canyon's retirement.
The good news is that last year, clean and renewable sources accounted for almost two-thirds of new electrical generation in the U.S. Even so, replacing Diablo Canyon with 100 percent clean, renewable energy is an ambitious goal for both PG&E and the state of California. But the fact that PG&E believes it's possible to do that in less than a decade speaks volumes about how far renewables have come and how quickly it is expected to dominate the energy industry.
It also sets a new, higher bar nationally. If indeed it is possible to do this for the largest power plant in California, then there's no excuse not to attempt to do the same thing on a rapid and responsible timeline for every polluting plant in the United States. From now on, the burden of proof is on polluters to show that clean, renewable energy can't do the job. In our work on retiring coal plants, we've seen utilities repeatedly fail at making that case, and it's only going to get harder to do so going forward.
The Diablo Canyon announcement is more than just another setback for polluting power plants. It reaffirms in a big way that renewable energy will be first and foremost in our future.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Derbid planthopper (Anotia uhleri) collected in Puslinch, Ontario, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG00856-B08; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=TTHFW359-11; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACB2705)
Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...
Link:Embed:
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Getting food from the farmer to the shop costs just 4 percent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer traveling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on a London plate as a Welsh lamb; a Dutch rose grown in a heated greenhouse and sold in London, has six times the carbon footprint of a Kenyan rose grown under the sun using water recycled through a fish farm, using geothermal electricity and providing employment to Kenyan women.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.