Tag Archives: Clean Energy

Climate Solutions, Earth Day, Observation, Sustainable Energy

The World Must Transition to 200% Renewable Energy Sources: no, that’s not a misprint

Video

net-zero by 2050 was a joke, but nobody’s laughing

Attitude matters. Imagine that in the run-up to the 20xx Olympics your country declared: we will strive to not-lose and achieve net-zero gold medals!

OK maybe not the best metaphor but still – why aim to not trigger armageddon by… 2050?

  • It is international scientific consensus that, in order to prevent the worst climate damages, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. –

Once that lofty non-goal was agreed upon by governments across the globe, it quickly became apparent that virtually none of them were doing anywhere near what it would take to get to said uninspired non-goal.

The idea was (and still is) to drag and under-achieve as long as politically possible and then suddenly, in the final stretch, accelerate efforts (with resources controlled by future politicians) and reach net-zero. And then declare victory.

People want more than net-zero. People need more than net-zero. At the very least there has to be a better name, and a serious plan to make it actually happen.

You are going to hear a lot about minus-zero carbon soon. The reason is a good one. When the stakes are as high as the extinction of all life on earth, just getting to a tie score is not a good plan. So those who are in the trenches, working on solutions for global warming and reducing the carbon footprint, are search also for better ways to communicate what the goal is and what it means.

This, hopefully, can lead to a focus on a goal, or at least the articulation of a desire, that can inspire people to become highly active, even agitated, perhaps even alarmed, and begin the hard work and striving that it will take to get to a net-positive outcome for all of us.

And, who exactly decided that it would be a good idea to prolong the carbon carnival as long as possible in the first place? Carbon emitters and oil profiteers perhaps?

60 years of feet dragging, obfuscation and deliberate blocking of any solutions threatening the status quo have already come and gone.

Also, if energy is clean and abundant, why not use more? Energy is good, more energy use, if clean and sustainable, could be better. It can give us amazing things. Efficient use is good too, of course, but this is a mind-set issue. This is thought error or a thought liberation.

Minus-zero carbon x 100% (with 200% energy availability) is a much better goal and represents a thought liberating idea.

Perfection can’t be the enemy of good in the energy arena

Do we need architects and inventors, innovators and scientists, and massive amount of ammunition in the form of trillions of dollars in funding, from both public and private sources? Hell yes.

And must these magicians and Mavericks do amazing things that were believed impossible just a short while ago? Absolutely. Is this a ‘moon-shot’ to, not just save, but catapult humanity into a better future? You bet-ur-a%$ it is.

That means that the challenges of finding better tech, examples such as for soil regeneration, or more efficient battery storage, or for alternatives to rare earth metals, if they are too, um, rare need to be figured out and set into motion, fast. It means inventing and discovering tech that does not exist, that has not been tried or even sought after, why never sought? Because oil was cheap and available, so don’t stress it, Bub.

watch video

And, there are those out there, already today, that are thinking beyond net-zero in 2050. There are those that want more, that know that we need more. Those that understand that political inertia and corrupt vested interests are not the excuses we want written on our tombstones.

And why not look for half-full glasses or beliefs manifested into action? Why not aim for something that makes us want to get up, stand up, and make something possible that looks like hope and feels like success and winning?

Decentralized solutions are coming, in every part of life

The reality is that it is not only the world’s energy infrastructure that needs a total makeover. Financial inequality, political and economic systems are fragile and failing, regardless where.

There is a whiff of collapse that could turn into a whirlwind and then could derail any progress made, as we plunge into dark ages, even before factoring in the catastrophic climate challenges.

We need new, innovative ways to learn, to communicate, interact and collaborate. And these are emerging – if you don’t believe in crypto, web3 or any other new directions that many are seeing as alternatives to broken systems of the past, you at least have to acknowledge that actively looking for a better way, one that does represent a solution, is what is needed even as the current systems are failing us.

So if you don’t agree with the ideas for change and proposed ways to improve methods for human interaction and coexistence, come up with new ideas and put them forth, ok?, maybe we have to try and strive and stumble until a truly better way presents itself.

Give yourself and all you have into actions that will finally change the direction from one that spells doom, in this case continuing to burn carbon in insanely massive amounts while we fight, disagree and kill one another (war, etc.), to something new, something that at least could have a chance to win the peace.

Losing is unacceptable for-real this time. Winning isn’t everything, no sir, it’s the only thing. And starting on 04-22-2022 this net-zero BS needs to be sent to Mars, or perhaps Uranus.

Meanwhile here on earth we gotta get busy building the only thing that will prevent oblivion: a tiny taste of utopia that will grow from a seed into a raging forest of real, not fossilized, success.

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Climate Solutions, Earth and Ecology, Sustainable Energy

Electrifying homes to slow climate change: 4 essential reads

The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that to avoid massive losses and damage from global warming, nations must act quickly to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that experts believe it’s possible to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 through steps such as using energy more efficiently, slowing deforestation and speeding up the adoption of renewable energy.

Many of those strategies require new laws, regulations or funding to move forward at the speed and scale that’s needed. But one strategy that’s increasingly feasible for many consumers is powering their homes and devices with electricity from clean sources. These four articles from our archives explain why electrifying homes is an important climate strategy and how consumers can get started.

1. Why go electric?

As of 2020, home energy use accounted for about one-sixth of total U.S. energy consumption. Nearly half (47%) of this energy came from electricity, followed by natural gas (42%), oil (8%) and renewable energy (7%). By far the largest home energy use is for heating and air conditioning, followed by lighting, refrigerators and other appliances.

The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from home energy consumption is to substitute electricity generated from low- and zero-carbon sources for oil and natural gas. And the power sector is rapidly moving that way: As a 2021 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed, power producers have reduced their carbon emissions by 50% from what energy experts predicted in 2005.

“This drop happened thanks to policy, market and technology drivers,” a team of Lawrence Berkeley lab analysts concluded. Wind and solar power have scaled up and cut their costs, so utilities are using more of them. Cheap natural gas has replaced generation from dirtier coal. And public policies have encouraged the use of energy-efficient technologies like LED light bulbs. These converging trends make electric power an increasingly climate-friendly energy choice.

The U.S. is using much more low-carbon and carbon-free electricity today than projected in 2005. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, CC BY-ND

2. Heat pumps for cold and hot days

Since heating and cooling use so much energy, switching from an oil- or gas-powered furnace to a heat pump can greatly reduce a home’s carbon footprint. As University of Dayton sustainability expert Robert Brecha explains, heat pumps work by moving heat in and out of buildings, not by burning fossil fuel.

“Extremely cold fluid circulates through coils of tubing in the heat pump’s outdoor unit,” Brecha writes. “That fluid absorbs energy in the form of heat from the surrounding air, which is warmer than the fluid. The fluid vaporizes and then circulates into a compressor. Compressing any gas heats it up, so this process generates heat. Then the vapor moves through coils of tubing in the indoor unit of the heat pump, heating the building.”

In summer, the process reverses: Heat pumps take energy from indoors and move that heat outdoors, just as a refrigerator removes heat from the chamber where it stores food and expels it into the air in the room where it sits.

Another option is a geothermal heat pump, which collects warmth from the earth and uses the same process as air source heat pumps to move it into buildings. These systems cost more, since installing them involves excavation to bury tubing below ground, but they also reduce electricity use.

3. Cooking without gas – or heat

For people who like to cook, the biggest sticking point of going electric is the prospect of using an electric stove. Many home chefs see gas flames as more responsive and precise than electric burners.

But magnetic induction, which cooks food by generating a magnetic field under the pot, eliminates the need to fire up a burner altogether.

“Instead of conventional burners, the cooking spots on induction cooktops are called hobs, and consist of wire coils embedded in the cooktop’s surface,” writes Binghamton University electrical engineering professor Kenneth McLeod.

Moving an electric charge through those wires creates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an electric field in the bottom of the cookware. “Because of resistance, the pan will heat up, even though the hob does not,” McLeod explains.

Induction cooktops warm up and cool down very quickly and offer highly accurate temperature control. They also are easy to clean, since they are made of glass, and safer than electric stoves since the hobs don’t stay hot when pans are lifted off them. Many utilities are offering rebates to cover the higher cost of induction cooktops.

4. Electric cars as backup power sources

Electrifying systems like home heating and cooking made residents even more vulnerable to power outages. Soon, however, a new backup system could become available: powering your home from your electric vehicle.

With interest in electric cars and light trucks rising in the U.S., auto makers are introducing many new EV models and designs. Some of these new rides will offer bidirectional charging – the ability to charge a car battery at home, then move that power back into the house, and eventually, into the grid.

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Only a few models offer this capacity now, and it requires special equipment that can add several thousand dollars to the price of an EV. But Penn State energy expert Seth Blumsack sees value in this emerging technology.

“Enabling homeowners to use their vehicles as backup when the power goes down would reduce the social impacts of large-scale blackouts. It also would give utilities more time to restore service – especially when there is substantial damage to power poles and wires,” Blumsack explains. “Bidirectional charging is also an integral part of a broader vision for a next-generation electric grid in which millions of EVs are constantly taking power from the grid and giving it back – a key element of an electrified future.”

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Jennifer Weeks, Senior Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation

How fast can we stop Earth from warming?

The ocean retains heat for much longer than land does. photo / adobe stock / lynxotic

Richard B. (Ricky) Rood, University of Michigan

Global warming doesn’t stop on a dime. If people everywhere stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, stored heat would still continue to warm the atmosphere.

Picture how a radiator heats a home. Water is heated by a boiler, and the hot water circulates through pipes and radiators in the house. The radiators warm up and heat the air in the room. Even after the boiler is turned off, the already heated water is still circulating through the system, heating the house. The radiators are, in fact, cooling down, but their stored heat is still warming the air in the room.

This is known as committed warming. Earth similarly has ways of storing and releasing heat.

Emerging research is refining scientists’ understanding of how Earth’s committed warming will affect the climate. Where we once thought it would take 40 years or longer for global surface air temperature to peak once humans stopped heating up the planet, research now suggests temperature could peak in closer to 10 years.

But that doesn’t mean the planet returns to its preindustrial climate or that we avoid disruptive effects such as sea level rise.

I am a professor of climate science, and my research and teaching focus on the usability of climate knowledge by practitioners such as urban planners, public health professionals and policymakers. Let’s take a look at the bigger picture.

How understanding of peak warming has changed

Historically, the first climate models represented only the atmosphere and were greatly simplified. Over the years, scientists added oceans, land, ice sheets, chemistry and biology.

Today’s models can more explicitly represent the behavior of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. That allows scientists to better separate heating due to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the role of heat stored in the ocean. https://www.youtube.com/embed/_WUNMzC98jI?wmode=transparent&start=0 Why global warming is ocean warming.

Thinking about our radiator analogy, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere keep the boiler on – holding energy near the surface and raising the temperature. Heat accumulates and is stored, mostly in the oceans, which take on the role of the radiators. The heat is distributed around the world through weather and oceanic currents.

The current understanding is that if all of the additional heating to the planet caused by humans was eliminated, a plausible outcome is that Earth would reach a global surface air temperature peak in closer to 10 years than 40. The previous estimate of 40 or more years has been widely used over the years, including by me.

It is important to note that this is only the peak, when the temperature starts to stabilize – not the onset of rapid cooling or a reversal of climate change.

I believe there is enough uncertainty to justify caution about exaggerating the significance of the new research’s results. The authors applied the concept of peak warming to global surface air temperature. Global surface air temperature is, metaphorically, the temperature in the “room,” and is not the best measure of climate change. The concept of instantly cutting off human-caused heating is also idealized and entirely unrealistic – doing that would involve much more than just ending fossil fuel use, including widespread changes to agriculture – and it only helps illustrate how parts of the climate might behave.

Even if the air temperature were to peak and stabilize, “committed ice melting,” “committed sea level rise” and numerous other land and biological trends would continue to evolve from the accumulated heat. Some of these could, in fact, cause a release of carbon dioxide and methane, especially from the Arctic and other high-latitude reservoirs that are currently frozen.

For these reasons and others, it is important to consider the how far into the future studies like this one look.

Oceans in the future

Oceans will continue to store heat and exchange it with the atmosphere. Even if emissions stopped, the excess heat that has been accumulating in the ocean since preindustrial times would influence the climate for another 100 years or more.

Because the ocean is dynamic, it has currents, and it will not simply diffuse its excess heat back into the atmosphere. There will be ups and downs as the temperature adjusts.

The oceans also influence the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because carbon dioxide is both absorbed and emitted by the oceans. Paleoclimate studies show large changes in carbon dioxide and temperature in the past, with the oceans playing an important role.

The chart shows how excess heat – thermal energy – has built up in ocean, land, ice and atmosphere since 1960 and moved to greater ocean depths with time. TOA CERES refers to the top of the atmosphere. Karina von Schuckman, LiJing Cheng, Matthew D. Palmer, James Hansen, Caterina Tassone, et al., CC BY-SA

Countries aren’t close to ending fossil fuel use

The possibility that a policy intervention might have measurable impacts in 10 years rather than several decades could motivate more aggressive efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It would be very satisfying to see policy interventions having present rather than notional future benefits.

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However, today, countries aren’t anywhere close to ending their fossil fuel use. Instead, all of the evidence points to humanity experiencing rapid global warming in the coming decades.

Our most robust finding is that the less carbon dioxide humans release, the better off humanity will be. Committed warming and human behavior point to a need to accelerate efforts both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to this warming planet now, rather than simply talking about how much needs to happen in the future.

Richard B. (Ricky) Rood, Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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News, Observation, Politics, Science

Nuclear fusion hit a milestone thanks to better reactor walls – this engineering advance is building toward reactors of the future

Scientists at a laboratory in England have shattered the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. The production of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus – or JET – experiment in England has been called “a breakthrough” by some news outlets and caused quite a lot of excitement among physicists. But a common line regarding fusion electricity production is that it is “always 20 years away.”

photo collage / Lynxotic / adobe stock

We are a nuclear physicist and a nuclear engineer who study how to develop controlled nuclear fusion for the purpose of generating electricity.

The JET result demonstrates remarkable advancements in the understanding of the physics of fusion. But just as importantly, it shows that the new materials used to construct the inner walls of the fusion reactor worked as intended. The fact that the new wall construction performed as well as it did is what separates these results from previous milestones and elevates magnetic fusion from a dream toward a reality.

Fusing particles together

Nuclear fusion is the merging of two atomic nuclei into one compound nucleus. This nucleus then breaks apart and releases energy in the form of new atoms and particles that speed away from the reaction. A fusion power plant would capture the escaping particles and use their energy to generate electricity.

There are a few different ways to safely control fusion on Earth. Our research focuses on the approach taken by JET – using powerful magnetic fields to confine atoms until they are heated to a high enough temperature for them to fuse.

The fuel for current and future reactors are two different isotopes of hydrogen – meaning they have the one proton, but different numbers of neutrons – called deuterium and tritium. Normal hydrogen has one proton and no neutrons in its nucleus. Deuterium has one proton and one neutron while tritium has one proton and two neutrons.

For a fusion reaction to be successful, the fuel atoms must first become so hot that the electrons break free from the nuclei. This creates plasma – a collection of positive ions and electrons. You then need to keep heating that plasma until it reaches a temperature over 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million Celsius). This plasma must then be kept in a confined space at high densities for a long enough period of time for the fuel atoms to collide into each other and fuse together.

To control fusion on Earth, researchers developed donut-shaped devices – called tokamaks – which use magnetic fields to contain the plasma. Magnetic field lines wrapping around the inside of the donut act like train tracks that the ions and electrons follow. By injecting energy into the plasma and heating it up, it is possible to accelerate the fuel particles to such high speeds that when they collide, instead of bouncing off each other, the fuel nuclei fuse together. When this happens, they release energy, primarily in the form of fast-moving neutrons.

During the fusion process, fuel particles gradually drift away from the hot, dense core and eventually collide with the inner wall of the fusion vessel. To prevent the walls from degrading due to these collisions – which in turn also contaminates the fusion fuel – reactors are built so that they channel the wayward particles toward a heavily armored chamber called the divertor. This pumps out the diverted particles and removes any excess heat to protect the tokamak.

The walls are important

A major limitation of past reactors has been the fact that divertors can’t survive the constant particle bombardment for more than a few seconds. To make fusion power work commercially, engineers need to build a tokamak vessel that will survive for years of use under the conditions necessary for fusion.

The divertor wall is the first consideration. Though the fuel particles are much cooler when they reach the divertor, they still have enough energy to knock atoms loose from the wall material of the divertor when they collide with it. Previously, JET’s divertor had a wall made of graphite, but graphite absorbs and traps too much of the fuel for practical use.

Around 2011, engineers at JET upgraded the divertor and inner vessel walls to tungsten. Tungsten was chosen in part because it has the highest melting point of any metal – an extremely important trait when the divertor is likely to experience heat loads nearly 10 times higher than the nose cone of a space shuttle reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The inner vessel wall of the tokamak was upgraded from graphite to beryllium. Beryllium has excellent thermal and mechanical properties for a fusion reactor – it absorbs less fuel than graphite but can still withstand the high temperatures.

The energy JET produced was what made the headlines, but we’d argue it is in fact the use of the new wall materials which make the experiment truly impressive because future devices will need these more robust walls to operate at high power for even longer periods of time. JET is a successful proof of concept for how to build the next generation of fusion reactors.

The next fusion reactors

The JET tokamak is the largest and most advanced magnetic fusion reactor currently operating. But the next generation of reactors is already in the works, most notably the ITER experiment, set to begin operations in 2027. ITER – which is Latin for “the way” – is under construction in France and funded and directed by an international organization that includes the U.S.

ITER is going to put to use many of the material advances JET showed to be viable. But there are also some key differences. First, ITER is massive. The fusion chamber is 37 feet (11.4 meters) tall and 63 feet (19.4 meters) around – more than eight times larger than JET. In addition, ITER will utilize superconducting magnets capable of producing stronger magnetic fields for longer periods of time compared to JET’s magnets. With these upgrades, ITER is expected to smash JET’s fusion records – both for energy output and how long the reaction will run.

ITER is also expected to do something central to the idea of a fusion powerplant: produce more energy than it takes to heat the fuel. Models predict that ITER will produce around 500 megawatts of power continuously for 400 seconds while only consuming 50 MW of energy to heat the fuel. This mean the reactor produced 10 times more energy than it consumed – a huge improvement over JET, which required roughly three times more energy to heat the fuel than it produced for its recent 59 megajoule record.

JET’s recent record has shown that years of research in plasma physics and materials science have paid off and brought scientists to the doorstep of harnessing fusion for power generation. ITER will provide an enormous leap forward toward the goal of industrial scale fusion power plants.

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David Donovan, Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Tennessee and Livia Casali, Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Business, Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Climate Movement Hails ‘Mind-Blowing’ $40 Trillion in Fossil Fuel Divestment Pledges

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”

Over the past decade, nearly 1,500 investors and institutions controlling almost $40 trillion in assets have committed to divesting from fossil fuels—a remarkable achievement that climate campaigners applauded Tuesday, while warning that further commitments and action remain crucial.

“Divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”

“Amidst a depressing era in the race against climate change—with killer fires and titanic storms, political stalemate, and corporate greenwashing—the fossil fuel divestment movement is a source for tremendous optimism,” states a new report—entitled Invest-Divest 2021: A Decade of Progress Toward a Just Climate Future—published Tuesday.

“Ten years in, the divestment movement has grown to become a major global influence on energy policy,” the publication continues. “There are now 1,485 institutions publicly committed to at least some form of fossil fuel divestment, representing an enormous $39.2 trillion of assets under management. That’s as if the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and China, combined, chose to divest from fossil fuels.”

The paper—a joint effort between the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Stand.earth, C40, and the Wallace Global Fund—comes on the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, and notes that the divestment movement “has grown so large that it is now helping hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the true cost of their unregulated carbon pollution.”

The report continues:

Since the movement’s first summary report in 2014, the amount of total assets publicly committed to divestment has grown by over 75,000%. The number of institutional commitments to divestment has grown by 720% in that time, including a 49% increase in just the three years since the movement’s most recent report. The true amount of money being pulled out from fossil fuels is almost certainly larger since not all divestment commitments are made public.

The movement has now expanded far beyond its origins as a student-driven effort on college campuses. Divestment campaigners now target cities, states, foundations, banks, investment firms, and any player who participates in the global investment pool.

“Major new divestment commitments from iconic institutions have arrived in a rush over just a few months in late 2021,” the report notes, “including Harvard University, Dutch and Canadian pension fund giants PME and CDPQ, French public bank La Banque Postale, the U.S. city of Baltimore, and the Ford and MacArthur Foundations.”

Underscoring the paper’s assertion, ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund announced Tuesday that it would stop investing in fossil fuel producers.

“Divestment remains a critical strategy for the climate movement,” the publication states. “It must be combined with an accelerated push for investment in a just transition to a clean, renewable energy future if the world is to avoid a future of worsening human injustice and irreversible ecological damage. Financial arguments against divest-invest no longer hold water.”

Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, wrote in a Tuesday New York Times op-ed that “divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”

“This movement will keep growing, and keep depriving Big Oil of both its social license and its access to easy capital,” McKibben said in a separate statement introducing the new report.

The report’s authors contend that institutional investors must agree to three principles “if they want to be on the right side of history and humanity”:

  • Immediately and publicly commit to fully divesting from and stopping all financing of coal, oil, and gas companies and assets;
  • Immediately invest at least 5% of their assets in climate solutions, doubling to 10% by 2030—including investments in renewable energy systems, universal energy access, and a just transition for communities and workers—while holding companies accountable to respecting Indigenous and other human rights and environmental standards; and
  • Adopting net-zero plans that both immediately cut investments in fossil fuels and ensure that all other assets in their portfolio develop transition plans that reduce absolute emissions by 50% before 2030.

“Institutional investors everywhere are beginning to come to terms with the danger that fossil fuels pose to their investment portfolios, their communities, and their constituencies,” the report states. “This realization is important but it is not enough. Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”

“Societies, economies, and the climate are all changing,” the paper concludes. “The financial world will have to change with them.” 

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of Hip Hop Caucus, said in a statement that “the climate crisis is here, and so are climate solutions. We know communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis here in the U.S. and across the world. In order to create a just future, we must divest from fossil fuels and invest in communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”

“It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions.”

Yearwood added that “over 10 years the divest-invest movement has become one of the most powerful global forces in a just transition to a clean energy future.”

Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, said that “the activist-driven divestment movement has yielded unprecedented and historic results in moving tens of trillions of dollars out of the industry driving the climate crises and exposing its failing business model.”

“But investors need to do more,” she argued. “It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions with at least 5% of their portfolios, scaling to 10% rapidly.”

“Mission investors have a unique role to play to ensure the energy transition is a just one and that all people have access to safe, clean and affordable energy by 2030,” Dorsey added. “To do anything less does not address the scale or pace of this climate crisis.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Tech

Tesla’s Success Story of ‘Zero Emission Sexy Fun’ is at a Tipping Point: now the entire Auto Industry Races to Join In

Tesla Model Y

The main factor preventing carbon emission reductions? Over-reliance on fossil fuel for energy & transport

As the climate crisis rages on and protests for climate action happen all over the world, peoples and nations worldwide struggle with implementing a sustainable alternative to the biggest cause of carbon emissions: fossil fuels.

The backbone of the fossil fuel strangle-hold on the world economy is cars and, particularly in the US, a transportation infrastructure based on solo drivers and individual cars. Because of this, a fossil fuel alternative is hard to obtain without the use of fossil fuels themselves throughout the process.

The European Union, for example, despite being the top funds provider for global projects aimed at fighting against the climate crisis, has also provided funding and subsidies for fossil fuels at the same time. However, on Friday, November 8th, the European Union Finance Ministers backed a declaration to end all fossil fuel funding for the first time.

After previously only agreeing to end funding for coal power plants, they issued a joint statement with the EU calling “to phase out financing of fossil fuel projects, in particular those using solid fossil fuels, taking into account the sustainable development, and energy needs, including energy security, of partner countries.”

The European Investment Bank’s official decision regarding the matter is unclear as a number of countries push for the continuance of gas funding in the face of the EU’s general fear that those countries would turn to Russia for help. The EIB board will meet on November 14th to further discuss this policy issue.

Tesla’s Mission and Vision is Coming to Fruition

Fortunately, Tesla has been aware of this complex socioeconomic issue from its establishment, and they are the leading cause of change and innovation that combats this issue on all fronts.

On May 9, 2019, Tesla’s twitter account released a thread detailing the company’s mission and how they plan to execute it in a multitude of ways as they go forward. Their mission is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”

The first part of their “Master Plan” to realize this mission is to influence the auto industry to transition to electric power because the current leading cause of global CO2 emissions is the constant use of fossil fuels for transportation, especially in the U.S., where its infrastructure primarily relies on transportation via solo, gas-powered cars with individual drivers.

Tesla accomplished this by designing the Tesla Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, and the upcoming Model Y to prove that “people didn’t need to compromise to drive all-electric” in order to benefit the environment.

Tesla’s planned impact on the auto industry is clearly a success as various hybrid and all-electric model cars are set for deliveries in 2020.

Tesla Successfully Influences Auto Industry to Embrace EVs as ‘Sexy & Fun’

As Tesla’s founding ethos of making sustainable transportation fun and ‘sexy’ is proven to be successful, many car manufacturers are following suit by moving towards producing hybrid and/or all-electric vehicles that guarantee a high quality that lives up to, or even surpasses, their long-established, gas-powered, vehicle brand names.

https://youtu.be/o0F9Uktpgtk

On Sunday, November 17th, it looks like Ford is about to jump on this trend first introduced by Tesla and incorporated into the recent practices of renowned car manufacturers, like Lamborghini, Porsche, and Jeep.

Porsche and Jeep have already produced hybrid plug-in versions of their iconic Cayenne and Wrangler models as a movement towards sustainable energy, but Ford’s Mustang Mach-E is going to be the first all-electric SUV to bear a name originally reserved for a trademark, powerful, gas-powered, “muscle” car.

This marks a major shift in values for traditional automakers. At first, car manufacturers would produce moderate-to-low quality electric vehicles just to pacify the environmentalist demographic, essentially putting the carbon emissions reduction burden on consumers, who rightfully find that sacrificing the quality transportation that they deserve in the name of saving the planet is too inconvenient, rather than themselves for failing to give consumers a compatible alternative to their gas-powered vehicles.

But now, with Tesla’s burgeoning global success in high-quality EV sales, the demand for electric vehicles has finally increased to a level that traditional auto companies were unable (or unwilling) to achieve. As a result, high-quality EV production is finally at the top of production priorities in heightening the possibility for a real start toward a sustainable future.

BMW i4

Auto Companies Rushing Forward to Ramp Up EV Production in Fear of Losing the Market to Tesla

Audi, Mercedes and BMW all have big projects for EV production, and have, in essence, capitulated and conceded that EVs will be 100% of the car market in the relatively near future, within a decade for example. They are now concerned that Tesla will dominate with a massive market share if they do not start working to catch up. And if this shift isn’t seen in the various hybrid and electric models coming out in 2020, it demonstrates a clear trend, based on recent auto company investments and factory expansions.

On Wednesday, November 13th, Volkswagen unveiled an $800 million investment into an expansion project for their Cattanooga, Tennessee factory to be turned into VW’s main base for electric vehicle manufacturing in North America. They also expect to introduce 1,000 new jobs at the factory through the 564,000-square-foot body shop addition that’s part of the expansion.

In light of their 2015 emissions cheating scandal, the expansion is also a piece of Volkswagen’s broad plan to turn away from diesel, which globally entails a $50 billion commitment towards EV development and production.

Photo / Volkswagen

Volkswagen’s expansion will also enable the production of their all-electric compact SUV, the VW ID.4, by mid-2022, which is expected to compete with Tesla’s Model Y, which will begin production in early 2020.

Thanks to Tesla’s success, this insurgence of EV popularity amongst consumers is forcing auto companies to measure up to the high-quality Tesla standard, which indicates that the tipping point leading to a clean energy future through sustainable transportation has arrived.

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