I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it’s still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.
The progress we’re making might be slower than many of us would like, but we’re also at a tipping point where we’re making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that’s the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won’t want to.