The shift to a low-carbon future is turning the economy inside out. Policy has a crucial role to play, but ultimately it is businesses that will make the energy transition happen. In Energiewende home country Germany, many startups are at the forefront of transformation by bringing novel business ideas to market and by snatching market share from incumbents in sectors such as renewables, heating, or mobility.
Whoever still thinks climate change is purely an environmental issue, threatening only nature, needs to think again. Climate change is also essentially a human issue because of its devastating effect on human life — and rights. It exacerbates existing inequalities, undermines democracy and threatens development at large. Likewise, by far the greatest burden will fall on those already in poverty, while the rich will be able to buy their way out of rising heat and hunger.
SHS are micro-power plants with integrated energy storage that provide electricity to individual buildings or households. SHS typically provide DC power that can be used without any problems for lamps and mobile phone charging. For newly electrified households, these are typically the main power needs. The electricity from SHS is not fully comparable to AC power that we know in developed countries.
Dear Hollywood, clean energy is normal, not alternative. And the people fueling this industry have powerful, underrepresented stories to share.
Carboculture turns methane-spewing biomass into high-carbon charcoal, thanks to a patented technology that transfers waste into charcoal in a carbon-neutral way, allowing a cleaner, more efficient way to make charcoal and charcoal products.
Reducing deforestation, which is responsible for up to 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is crucial for the international community to achieve its goal under the Paris Climate Change Agreement to keep the global average temperature rise as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
As has been outlined on countless occasions, large tech conglomerates play a critical role in our day-to-day lives. Platforms like Facebook, for instance, help connect over 2.38 billion monthly active users. Thus, their social responsibility in everything from politics, news and even climate change is indisputable. Despite Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing his support for the Paris Climate Agreement, Facebook continues to take money from many fossil fuel companies via advertising.
History might lead us to believe that they can’t — but is that true for today’s developing countries?
Kenya taps most of its energy needs from dams built between 1970 and early the ’80s along Tana River, the country’s biggest river. Several other dams built on other rivers bring the total installed hydropower capacity to 743 MW, which makes up more than half of the country’s power sources.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is a major environmental problem, yet, in the context of the many warnings we’ve had over the last decade as to the damage we are doing to our planet, it seems perfectly in keeping with the times. Except, of course, that it’s not even new. Scientists have been officially monitoring its growth since the 1970s.
