Showing posts with label wind energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wind energy. Show all posts

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Go Wind, Young People

That's where the jobs are and will be.

Couple of points:

1) It’s hardly surprising that health care is the fastest growing overall work sector, although it’s also notable that the single biggest category of job growth is wind turbine technician, which I hope turns out to be true. (emphasis mine)

2) It’s equally unsurprising that the fastest declining job categories all revolve around the old industrial economy, with both production and movement of goods in collapse. I didn’t even know the U.S. still had sewing machine operators as a job except for often illegal sweatshops in California, but whatever is left of that sector is still declining.
 And there's nothing older and declining faster in the industrial economy than coal. Go wind, young people, wherever you can find it.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Cool in Every Way

From Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

Here’s a cool story: Nigerian Student Converts a VW Beetle Into a $6,000 Wind- and Solar-Powered Car. But of course you’ll need a picture for that one.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Greg Stumbo Still Dead Wrong on Renewable Energy

Just stop it, Greg.  Everybody knows Big Coal owns your ass.  Your attempts to pretend otherwise by citing false statistics just makes you look pathetic.

Germany is in fact leading the world on renewable energy and increasing, not decreasing, their investment.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The United States could easily be doing this. But we aren't.
Germany is now producing 28.5 percent of its energy—nearly a third—with solar, wind, hydro, and biomass. In 2000, renewables accounted for just 6 percent of its power consumption.

This is further proof that Germany is, essentially, the world leader in renewable energy. No other country has demonstrated such a dedicated, accelerated drive toward transitioning to clean power—in Germany's case, away from nuclear to solar and wind. It has done so by intensely incentivizing private and commercial solar, aggressively pursuing wind power contracts, and, yes, by raising, slightly, the cost of energy in the process.

A couple years ago, Germany broke a record when, for a day, its wind and solar plants generated enough clean power to meet half the country's energy needs. This year, it broke a new one when they whipped up enough power to meet 75 percent of demand. That's three-fourths of a nation, running on clean energy.
This despite the fact that we get far more sunshine than Germany (Fox News correspondents notwithstanding.)

On a geopolitical level, Germany is also doing its part to reduce Vladimir Putin's power over Europe by reducing its dependency on Russian natural gas. And, of course, there are the climate change impacts.

With our enormous deserts and wind-swept coasts and plains, there is just no reason at all for America not to be getting most of its energy from renewable sources. It's simple stubbornness and greed.
Also, the "natural gas will save us!" idiots are dead wrong. 

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Fossil Fuels Are Dead and Solar Killed Them

Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Gas are propping up rotting corpses to keep the poisonous profits and budget-busting government subsidies flowing. It's over and they know it.

Their longstanding claim that reducing fossil fuel use means the end of civilization, forcing us to huddle in caves lit by candles, stands exposed as a Big Lie: even here in coal-worshipping Kentucky, there's enough renewable energy available that your local power company will sell it to you instead of coal-generated energy if you request it.

Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation:

”We’re actually winning the fight against climate change, but most people don’t know it yet.”
 
That may seem a strange statement to make in a week when a landmark scientific report declares that humanity must quit fossil fuels within thirty years or risk catastrophic climate change. But Danny Kennedy, a former top Greenpeace activist who helps run the global solar company Sungevity, says that solar and wind power are growing so fast worldwide that they will displace fossil fuels much sooner than usually thought. He has lots of supporting data, much of which comes from the crazy tree-huggers at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Deutsche Bank and the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
SNIP
 
No political naïf, Kennedy knows that the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel titans must still be resisted. But he believes climate activists need to shift emphasis. “We’ve convinced the public that climate change is a problem and that the powers that be don’t have an answer,” Kennedy says. “The final step is to show we do have an answer. It’s divest, but also reinvest. Let’s talk about how we drive wind and solar forward in the US so they’re in not just half a million households but 40 million, which is entirely possible.”

Read the whole thing.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Nobody Does It Better: Chris Hayes on Energy

It bears repeating: if you're not watching Chris Hayes every Saturday and Sunday morning, you're missing the most insightful news commentary on or off television.

Ignore the flaws that make me want to throw heavy things at the television - the obligatory repug in every panel who gets away with far more lies than Chris can slap down and Chris' egregious use of the repug calumny "Democrat" when he means "Democratic" - because this is everything cable news should be: smart, informed, challenging discussions that make you want to jump up out of your chair and go change the world.

Saturday's show was all about energy, beginning with the catastrophe of fracking - and don't get me started on that industry hack claiming to be a toxicologist - moving through the politics of carbon pricing and ending with the inspiring story of renewables actually right now this minute changing lives and communities thought beyond help.

I want to bottle this show and make everybody drink it.

For some reason, there's no link to the show in one place, but here are all the segments embedded.

Attention MSNBC: Post a link to the whole show, and I'd use that with just one embedded segment.


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy