The first numbers on last year’s energy trends are in and there are two pieces of great news and one that should worry us: Solar and wind energy are thriving, coal-fired generation sunk to a four-decade low — but natural gas infrastructure is expanding.
There is so much noise in politics. Some politicians — and perhaps even some political parties — live on that noise. The United States has a horrible voter turnout rate.
Let’s start with just a few adjectives about our daily lives — overexposed, overwhelmed, stimulated, toxic, deficient. It’s not enough that many young people lack good nutrition, but they are also challenged by circumstance by a lack of clean air to breathe and pure water to drink.
For the last forty-odd years, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has been a mainstay of the conservative movement and major force in shaping state laws. The organization brings together state lawmakers and corporate leaders to draft business-friendly policies that are then ferried to statehouses around the country.
The European Commission has notified VW, BMW, and Daimler of its preliminary view that they engaged in illegal anti-competitive practices between 2006–2014, keeping diesel engines dirty. The automakers now have the right to defend themselves, but if found guilty, they face fines of up to 10% of global annual revenue ($26 billion for VW alone).
The globe’s five largest publicly-traded oil and gas majors — ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total — invested over $1 billion in misleading climate-related branding and lobbying since in the three years since the Paris Agreement.
If you’ve read anything about electric cars, you’ve no doubt come across the arguments that suggest the world is still not ready to give up its century-and-a-half dependence on the internal combustion engine. The various cases against electric cars have evolved over the years, but these days there seem to be three in particular that keep making the rounds. Let’s take a closer look at them.
The most popular CleanTechnica stories of the past week covered a Tesla Model 3 Performance beating a Porsche 911 GT2 RS driven by a Formula 1 champion in a drag race, Tesla’s navigation system on long-distance trips, the Tesla Model Y versus fossil fuel competitors, geothermal energy + rooftop solar, Tesla’s cash and liquidity, a California solar record, and more.
The environment is not a political issue, it is an ethical issue.
Global energy demand increased by 2.3% in 2018, the fastest pace of growth this decade, driven by a strong global economy and increased heating and cooling needs, subsequently driving global energy-related CO2 emissions up by 1.7% to 33 gigatonnes.
