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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate
The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climateby Al Gore at Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-turning-point-new-hope-for-the-climate-20140618/
"SNIP....................
In the struggle to solve the climate crisis, a powerful, largely unnoticed shift is taking place. The forward journey for human civilization will be difficult and dangerous, but it is now clear that we will ultimately prevail. The only question is how quickly we can accelerate and complete the transition to a low-carbon civilization. There will be many times in the decades ahead when we will have to take care to guard against despair, lest it become another form of denial, paralyzing action. It is true that we have waited too long to avoid some serious damage to the planetary ecosystem some of it, unfortunately, irreversible. Yet the truly catastrophic damages that have the potential for ending civilization as we know it can still almost certainly be avoided. Moreover, the pace of the changes already set in motion can still be moderated significantly.
...
There is surprising even shocking good news: Our ability to convert sunshine into usable energy has become much cheaper far more rapidly than anyone had predicted. The cost of electricity from photovoltaic, or PV, solar cells is now equal to or less than the cost of electricity from other sources powering electric grids in at least 79 countries. By 2020 as the scale of deployments grows and the costs continue to decline more than 80 percent of the world's people will live in regions where solar will be competitive with electricity from other sources.
No matter what the large carbon polluters and their ideological allies say or do, in markets there is a huge difference between "more expensive than" and "cheaper than." Not unlike the difference between 32 degrees and 33 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not just a difference of a degree, it's the difference between a market that's frozen up and one that's liquid. As a result, all over the world, the executives of companies selling electricity generated from the burning of carbon-based fuels (primarily from coal) are openly discussing their growing fears of a "utility death spiral."
Germany, Europe's industrial powerhouse, where renewable subsidies have been especially high, now generates 37 percent of its daily electricity from wind and solar; and analysts predict that number will rise to 50 percent by 2020. (Indeed, one day this year, renewables created 74 percent of the nation's electricity!)
......................SNIP
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The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate (Original Post)
applegrove
Jun 2014
OP
Uncle Joe
(58,355 posts)1. "The utilities are fighting back"
The utilities are fighting back, of course, by using their wealth and the entrenched political power they have built up over the past century. In the United States, brothers Charles and David Koch, who run Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned corporation in the U.S., have secretively donated at least $70 million to a number of opaque political organizations tasked with spreading disinformation about the climate crisis and intimidating political candidates who dare to support renewable energy or the pricing of carbon pollution.
(snip)
One of the most effective of the groups financed by the Koch brothers and other carbon polluters is the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which grooms conservative state legislators throughout the country to act as their agents in introducing legislation written by utilities and carbon-fuel lobbyists in a desperate effort to slow, if not stop, the transition to renewable energy.
The Kochs claim to act on principles of low taxation and minimal regulation, but in their attempts to choke the development of alternative energy, they have induced the recipients of their generous campaign contributions to contradict these supposedly bedrock values, pushing legislative and regulatory measures in 34 states to discourage solar, or encourage carbon energy, or both. The most controversial of their initiatives is focused on persuading state legislatures and public-utility commissions to tax homeowners who install a PV solar cell on their roofs, and to manipulate the byzantine utility laws and regulations to penalize renewable energy in a variety of novel schemes.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-turning-point-new-hope-for-the-climate-20140618page=2#ixzz357P4853G
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Thanks for the thread, applegrove.
Benton D Struckcheon
(2,347 posts)2. Texas is even getting in on it, so you know it's real