Saturday, February 10th, 2018
Lorraine Chow, - EcoWatch
Stephan: Here is some excellent news about leaving the carbon energy era. In spite of the Trump administration doing everything that it can to sustain carbon, individual choices are pushing past that, the process I described in the 8 Laws.
California cars charging
While electric vehicles only make up a tiny 0.2 percent of passenger cars around the world, that number is growing, and growing fast. In 2016, there were 2 million EVs on the world’s roads, up from “virtually non-existent” in 2012. Nearly 200,000 electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. in 2017 alone, a new record.
This boom in electric car ownership has corresponded with growth in public charging infrastructure. EVgo, the largest public network of fast-charging stations in the U.S., charged 40 million miles of electric driving in 2017. That’s a dramatic increase compared to the 22 million EV miles charged in 2016.
The EVgo network increased by 20 percent last year, and now has more than 1,000 DC fast chargers across 66 markets nationwide. Network usage set a record with 1.1 million charging sessions, an increase of 50 percent.
Impressively, EVgo said that the 13 million kilowatt hours delivered from the network corresponded to 1.6 million gallons of gasoline saved and prevented the release of 9,000 metric tons […]
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Saturday, February 10th, 2018
SIMON EVANS, - CarbonBrief
Stephan: More good news about the transition out of the carbon era. Europe, in contrast with the U.S. is moving as fast as it can out of carbon era. For instance the goal in many European countries is no carbon powered vehicles on the road by 2040. But even before that, as this reports explains, they are working to close down coal.
EU electricity generation from wind, solar, biomass and coal. Credit: The European Power Sector in 2017, Sandbag and Agora Energiewende.
For the first time, the European Union generated more electricity from wind, solar and biomass than from coal in 2017, (emphasis added) according to new analysis from two thinktanks.
The figures, from London-based Sandbag and Berlin-based Agora Energiewende, are a best estimate, based on near-complete electricity market data from each of the 28 EU member states.
Their report says: “This is incredible progress, considering just five years ago coal generation was more than twice that of wind, solar and biomass.”
Despite this new milestone, EU power sector emissions were unchanged in 2017, the analysis suggests. Low-carbon sources met 56% of demand, a figure that is unchanged since 2014.
Renewable milestone
Wind, solar and biomass now supply more than a fifth of the electricity generated in the EU, at 20.9%, up from less than 10% in 2010. This is a few tenths of a percent more than coal (20.6%) and also more than gas […]
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Saturday, February 10th, 2018
, - Good News Network/Agence France-Presse
Stephan: I think Elon Musk is one of the most fascinating people in the business world today because he is one of the very few billionaires who has figured out that great fortunes will be made in the post carbon world.
One of the historical realities of wealth inequity is that the very rich and , particularly their children and their children resist new technologies because they threaten their invested capital in old technologies. It produces a drag on the society of which they are a part. America's great technological spurt past Europe occurred because the entrepreneurs focused on the new, because they were not rich on the basis of the old.
Elon Musk
Some 50,000 homes in South Australia will receive solar panels and Tesla batteries, the state government announced Sunday, in a landmark plan to turn houses into a giant, interconnected power plant.
South Australia is already home to world’s biggest battery in an Elon Musk-driven project to provide electricity for more than 30,000 homes.
The state government has since been looking for more ways — particularly through renewables — to address its energy woes after an “unprecedented” storm caused a state-wide blackout in 2016.
Under a new plan unveiled on Sunday, a network of solar panels linked to rechargeable batteries will be provided free to households and financed by the sale of excess electricity generated by the network, the government said.
“My government has already delivered the world’s biggest battery, now we will deliver the world’s largest virtual power plant,” state Premier Jay Weatherill said in a statement.
“We will use people’s homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefitting with significant savings in their energy bills.”
A trial phase will […]
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Friday, February 9th, 2018
Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch - EcoWatch
Stephan: Idaho, where the willfully ignorant are elected to public office, and do everything they can to keep the peasants equally ignorant.
Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter delivers his State of the State address inside the house chambers at the state Capitol building, Monday, Jan. 9, 2017 in Boise, Idaho.
Credit: AP/Otto Kitsinger
The Idaho House Education Committee voted 12-4 Wednesday on a motion to strip references to human-caused climate change in the state’s proposed new science education standards.
The motion, proposed by Rep. Scott Syme, R-Caldwell, strikes a section* from the Idaho Content Standards that includes the language: “energy and fuels are derived from natural resources and their uses affect the environment.” Several paragraphs of “Supporting Content”** that delves further into climate science were deleted as well.
Boise Republican Rep. Patrick McDonald, the committee’s vice chairman, joined the panel’s three Democrats that opposed the motion to scrub climate-related passages from the standards.
“I want to support these standards as written,” McDonald said, referring to the work that local teachers put in developing the standards. “What I don’t want to do is not support them. There has been a lot work involved […]
2 Comments
Friday, February 9th, 2018
Keegan Hankes and Alex Amend, - Southern Poverty Law Center
Stephan: I have said this several times, because I think it is very disturbing, and on the evidence, true. You are much more likely to be hurt or killed by a cowardly White racist than you are a Muslim jihadist, and in Donald Trump's America, these boys, they're not really men emotionally, feel liberated to express their hate, and the fear that lies under it.
This is a trend only culture can change, and culture is created through the aggregate of individual choices. It is up to each of us to end this through beingness. In the
8 Laws you can find the reason I say this with confidence.
James Alex Fields (center with black shield) with Vanguard America during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called “alt-right” — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.
On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life.
At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.
But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed […]
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