<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/11/hope-fight-ecological-disaster-climate-catastrophe>
"Once upon a time, the world was powered by whale. Oil made from whale blubber
burns cleanly and well, though it smells strongly of fish. It was, for a while,
the perfect fuel. To meet the growing demand, whales were hunted almost to
extinction.
And then we discovered that oil could come from the ground. Lamps once lit by
rendered blubber were swiftly changed over to run on what Americans call
kerosene and the British call paraffin. Later, those lamps were changed to run
on electricity, and instead of burning oil in the lamps themselves, we began to
burn it in power plants miles away.
This is where we find ourselves today. When a fossil fuel is combusted, it
releases energy, which boils water, which turns to steam, which drives a
turbine, which generates electricity. This is an almost comically inefficient
process, requiring immense amounts of material: more than 8bn tons of coal and
4tn cubic metres of fossil gas every year. And given the basic chemistry of
combustion, it’s unavoidable that burning all this stuff leads to an immense
buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Worse, fossil gas itself is made
of methane – shorter lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but more than
80 times more potent while it lasts. Around a quarter of annual greenhouse gas
emissions come from using fossil fuels to generate electricity.
To have a hope of limiting warming, this has to change. The transition to clean
energy will be difficult, but not impossible. Some of it is already happening.
Renewable energy technologies have become good, reliable and inexpensive. Solar
and wind, as well as the batteries needed to compensate for their
intermittency, are getting cheaper at an astonishing rate. The price of onshore
wind power plummeted 70% in the last decade, while solar costs fell by almost
90%. As a result, renewables are already being deployed at rates forecasters
never imagined. If you had told me, even five years ago, how quickly the energy
transition would be proceeding, I would not have believed you. It’s more than I
ever dared to hope for. Finally, things are beginning to move. But they need to
move faster. We know they can. They have before."
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
