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In an interview with The Guardian this week, Bill McKibben said he is not an optimist. “Optimism may not be exactly the right word,” he said. “The things that we were warning about in The End of Nature almost 40 years ago have happened. The planet is now warming fast. The scientists were absolutely right. We face an endless series of disasters that will get worse. This is the main legacy of our moment on Earth so far.
“But as of the last three or four years, we finally have a tool, not at this point to stop global warming — it’s too late for that — but perhaps to at least shave some tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets. And that tool is cheap energy from the sun and the wind and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. Alternative energy is the commonsense, obvious, straightforward way to make power on this planet, which is why 95 percent of new generating capacity around planet Earth last year came from these clean sources.
A Reality Check
Optimist may not be the right word to describe McKibben, who has done so much to educate anyone who will listen about renewable energy and the climate emergency we are facing. Realist might be a better choice. But even a realist can spot trends. He told The Guardian, “About 36 months ago, if you were paying attention, you couldn’t help but notice this sudden spike beginning. We’d finally hit the steep part of the S curve.
“All of a sudden there were stories coming in from around the world, especially … China, which is providing the leadership here, and which is doing things on an almost inconceivable scale. In May, the Chinese were building three gigawatts of solar panels a day. A gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. They were putting up one of those out of solar panels every eight hours. This is like building the pyramids or something, the scale at which this is going on.
“There are similar stories from many corners of the world, and they just keep coming. In Australia, they’ve built so much solar power that the government has now decided that electricity will be free for all Australians for three hours every afternoon. Human beings for 700,000 years have worked hard to get energy for our lives, if it meant collecting firewood, if it meant paying your electric bill. Now you don’t have to do that any more, at least if you’re in a place that’s had the foresight to build the solar panels and the wind turbines.”
The Capitalism Conundrum
The current system involves extracting fossil fuels and distributing them to end users. It has made some people immensely RICH, largely because the game is rigged so that producers are excused from paying for the damage they do to the environment. There has always been a tacit understanding that the benefits to society of fossil fuels are so significant that the harm they do can be written off in sacrifice of a net positive social benefit.
Assuming that is true — which those of enjoying a holiday sit and schvitz in the CleanTechnica sauna definitely do not — that begs this question: If everything on the debit side is socialized, why isn’t everything on the credit side socialized as well? The titans of industry who control these enormous corporations like to thump their chests and brag about how many millions have been lifted out of poverty thanks to the wonders of fossil fuels.
There is some justification for that claim, but we suggest many millions more would have risen out of poverty if the profits those companies have reaped over the past century had been shared with the people of the world. Call us idealists (or worse), we don’t care. It’s a question we think deserves asking.
McKibben doesn’t pull his punches. He told The Guardian, “As long as you rely on a source of power that’s only available in a few places, the people who control those places will end up with inordinate wealth and power. John D Rockefeller, the first plutocrat, was the first guy to recognize that. His heirs include Vladimir Putin, who’s using his winnings to run a land war in Europe. They include the Koch brothers, our biggest oil and gas refiners and pipeline suppliers, who use their winnings to systematically undermine our democracy. They include the king of Saudi Arabia, who likes to cut up journalists like you and me with saws.”
The Kochtocracy
We have written often about Charles Koch, who learned at his father’s knee to despise the American government. Fred Koch was a co-founder of the John Birch Society, the fringe organization that helped light the fuse on the whole make America great again madness. Would the profits from the oil business benefit society more if they were distributed to the citizens of the nation instead of piling up in private bank accounts that fund such extremist organizations as the Heritage Foundation? It’s a question worth asking.
Why does the world kowtow to the fossil fuel industry? McKibben says it is precisely because of the fabulous wealth these companies have accumulated. But things have started change. Despite the enormous amounts of fossil fuels exported last year, China exported green technologies worth half again as much.
The Ice Is Slowly Melting
The results can be seen in Pakistan, where low-cost solar panels from China made it possible for it to refuse 27 LNG tankers from Qatar. Yes, Pakistan has to pay a penalty for refusing the cargo, but the money the country saved by making its own locally produced solar power more than offset that penalty.
The shift has been noticed in financial circles. This month, the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing surveyed 950 institutional investors in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific and found that four out of five said they expect to increase allocations to sustainable investments over the next two years.
Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of We Don’t Have Time, said the survey shows capital is “already behaving as if a fossil fuel phaseout is underway — not through headlines or pledges, but through mandates, risk models, and capital allocation decisions that quietly reroute money away from assets with declining transition credibility.”
National Self-Sabotage
McKibben laments that many renewable energy technologies were first invented in the US, which then failed to capitalize on them. “We have had 35 years of a full-on disinformation campaign from the fossil fuel industry about climate change, about alternative energy, all designed to drive home the idea that only the way that we’re doing things now could possibly work. And that’s sunk in with too many people especially in [the US], but the rest of the world is quickly shaking off that habit.
“You could tell watching the climate talks this year in Belém, Brazil, that people are sort of moving past the US, like we’re sort of receding into the rear view mirror. It’s becoming clearer and clearer where the future lies.
“As patriotic Americans, that should upset us. These technologies were all invented in the US. The first solar cell in 1954 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first industrial wind turbine in 1941 at Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont. We could have owned these technologies, and instead we’ve just ceded them to our theoretical main rival on this planet. I don’t think there’s been an act of national self-sabotage quite like this that I can think of anywhere in human history.”
CleanTechnica readers, being well above average, will add that one of America’s major industrial corporations — General Motors — was the first to produce an electric car and a compelling plug-in hybrid, but let both inventions lapse so it could build more pickup trucks and SUVs.
Exxon had a laboratory in New Jersey that was experimenting with hybrid technology in the 1970s when the OPEC embargo sent gasoline prices soaring. After the end of the embargo, it shut the program down and shipped everything off to a company in Japan that was willing to accept it. That company was Toyota, which today has sold more hybrid cars than any manufacturer in history. Was Exxon the godfather of the Prius? That’s an intriguing question.
The Renewable Energy Transition
Often momentous changes are not easy to spot. Like ice melting on a pond, one morning we wake up and the ice is gone. “Ice out” is a phenomenon familiar to everyone who lives near a lake that freezes in winter.
With Bill McKibben as our guide, we can see the early signs of a wholesale transition to renewable energy happening in many places around the world. It is even happening in the US, despite the blistering attack on renewables by the current maladministration. The EU and the US and Canada are all backpedaling furiously on their pledges to add renewable energy resources to address global heating, but there is a sense they are fighting a rear guard action while the energy transition moves forward without them.
We took our own survey here at CleanTechnica headquarters, where the consensus is that both the EV revolution and the transition to renewable energy are now unstoppable. They are like those little pools that form on the surface of a frozen lake that precede the melting of the ice — small signs that foretell big changes ahead.
Are we just whistling in the dark? We don’t think so. Here is one of those little announcements that hints at the changes ahead. According to Interfax, a 100 MW solar power plant has been commissioned this week in the Kemin district of Kyrgyzstan’s Chui region. The cost of the facility totaled $56 million, the country’s presidential press service said. This is the country’s first solar power plant and will generate about 210 million kWh of electricity per year and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 120,000 tons.
“The opening of the solar power plant is the beginning of an important stage in strengthening our country’s energy independence and developing renewable energy sources. We have come to understand that without the active development of renewables, it is impossible to fully provide the population and economic entities with a stable electricity supply,” the country’s president Sadyr Japarov said.
A Drip Becomes A River
Is that the end of the news, one piddly little 100 MW system? No, it is not. There are currently agreements in place to construct 12 more solar and wind facilities with a total capacity of more than 5 GW in place. Recently we reported that Uzbekistan is also climbing aboard the clean energy express, thanks to China.
Drip, drip, drip, drip….
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