Bullish on Renewable Energy
My fourth book, Bullish on Renewable Energy, is now up on Amazon.
As the subtitle suggests, I present:
• Fourteen reasons that I believe renewable energy is rapidly becoming the deal of the century,
• The way in which the forces of pure market economics are rapidly conspiring to make fossil fuels comparatively unattractive, and
• Evidence that all this is happening far faster than most people understand.
Yes, it would be fabulous if the people living in developed countries and their leaders actually cared about our natural environment to the degree that they were willing to pay extra for energy that didn’t ruin the planet, and then helped the third world make the transition as well. But the point of the book is that this, albeit my fondest hope, is not at all required to bring clean energy forward.
Makes a great Valentine’s Day gift. 🙂
When the market forces are behind it, renewable energy is unstoppable. When a process is uneconomical it will die. Government subsidies that prime the pump may work in initial stages of a new technology but if the process is unsustainable it will fail.
China is finding out that coal may be a quick fix to their limitless demand for more energy but they are choking to death from the smog in Beijing. When they start to clean up the coal emissions they will most likely find that nuclear is not only cleaner but less expensive in the long run. Maybe we in the U.S. will figure that out before we have brownouts due to base load issues.
Interesting report from North Carolina State: http://www.proudgreenhome.com/news/should-you-invest-in-home-solar-power-instead-of-the-stock-market/
People are not too eager to pay more for a better product. A cheaper product may cause illness and extra doctor and hospital bills in the future. You can go without food for weeks, water for days and air for just a few minutes. Have you ever been in Los Angeles or any other city when there was gridlock and 16 lanes of traffic at a standstill? It gets hard to breathe with all the vehicle engines running. Electric vehicles can’t come too quickly. Tesla’s superchargers being built around the world should reduce the pollution from auto missions.
Remember when they started to use unleaded gas and people would not pay the extra money for a less toxic fuel? They made smaller filling pipes and smaller nozzles so the leaded gas could not be put into the car’s gas tank. Some solved that problem by carrying a funnel which could be inserted so the unleaded gas could still be used.
I think your comment on developed countries not responding is particularly telling in light on the fact that virtually half of the US Congress doesn’t believe that WE caused the climate change.
Currently, the safest, cheapest and most sustainable nuclear power available to us with current proven technology is 93 million miles away, and we spin around it every year.
All currently operating and genuinely planned commercial nuclear fission energy technology is prohibitively expensive when all the costs are accounted for – mining, refining, construction, insuring, waste containment, facility lifespan, decommissioning. On top of that, given natural disasters, human error and sabotage/terrorism potential, current nuke tech is clearly proven to be inherently dangerous to the biosphere just to operate.
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) is safe, clean, proven technology, and modern energy storage systems and HVDC make it viable – now, today – with no brownout risk. Wind (actually at it’s base another form of solar) is already even more economical.
Harvesting modern sunshine (by a number of proven methods) is much cleaner and safer – and cheaper in the long run – than sucking and digging up filthy prehistoric sunshine, dragging it dangerously all over the planet, burning it up, and pouring 32 billion metric tons of prehistoric CO2 yearly into the modern sky. Only the bribery that protects massive cost externalization keeps that toxic fossil filth marketable.
WELL SAID!
Fond thanks to you both. Here’s my press release: http://2greenenergy.com/2015/01/22/renewable-energy-author-bullish/
Congratulations, Craig on your latest work.
Hey folks, buy this book! 🙂