solar energy

Photograph from climate march in Washington, DC, Union of Concerned Scientists.

China will account for more than one-third of the world’s use of renewable energy by 2040 [By Kenueone [CC0 or CC0], via Wikimedia Commons]
With the US opting out of the Paris Accords on Climate Change, many have turned their focus to China to spearhead efforts to curb green house emissions and move from fossil fuel to renewable energy.
The potential for growth in the latter in China is usge says a British Petroleum Energy Outlook report for 2018.

The worldwide effort to harness, slow down, lessen, reduce, remove the threat of global warming is epitomized by the Paris ’15 climate accord. This agreement calls for nations of the world to implement plans to slow down greenhouse gas emissions, specifically CO2 from fossil fuels, and to take other remedial actions necessary to hold global temps below 2°C but preferably 1.5°C relative to the start of the industrial revolution over 200 years ago.
That task may be an overwhelming one, more so than realized, due to the simple fact that according to YaleEnvironment360:

In November 2017 war-torn Syria became the last country, other than the U.S., to sign Paris ’15 the worldwide effort to curb global warming. In the eyes of the world, America must be as mad as a hatter.
Actually, the madness runs much deeper than failure to acknowledge Paris ‘15. Not only that, the Mad Hatter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame has unique personality traits and keeps company same as Trump, terse personal remarks directed at adversaries whilst exchanging unanswerable riddles with his Tea Party friends.

This is a solar energy cell (source)by Gaius PubliusThe news about solar energy has been getting better and better for a decade or more. As storage schemes improve, so does the potential for completely replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources.

Illustration from the recent paper by Olivia Judson on “Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017) “The Energy Expansions of Evolution”.  Olivia Judson published a very interesting paper this March on “Nature Ecology & Evolution“. It is a wonderful cavalcade along 4 billion years of the history of the Earth, seeing it in terms of five “metabolic revolutions.” It is an approach that goes in[Read More...]

George Goodall’s The Switch: How Solar Storage and New Technology Means Cheap Power for All was enormously valuable in rectifying many of my prior misconceptions about renewable energy. First and foremost was my erroneous belief that high production costs would make renewable energy far more expensive than fossil fuels – that the renewable energy revolution would require either a) a major reduction in population or b) major sacrifice in terms of lifestyle choices.

China is fast  becoming the world leader in green energy production and in the innovation of technologies to more effectively harness green energy.
One of the keys to understanding China’s green revolution lies in China’s ability to quickly produce large quantities of modern green technologies, thus making these technologies cheaper, more abundant and more efficient to install than those in other countries.

National Geographic reports,

I grew up surrounded by farmland and lived near rural Tennessee for a time, yet I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to start a farm. But if I wanted to experience farming on a small scale, Farm From the Box would be the way to go. The tiny house movement has shown us that shipping containers can be turned into stylish homes, and 2-acre farms capable of feeding 150 people come in shipping containers, too.
The really cool part: you can do it off the grid. [1]