The EU nations are really trying to get out of the carbon power era. This also makes a difference, or should, to Americans, because the Earth’s matrix of life is is an interconnected interdependent system, and the success of the EU countries helps the Earth and all the countries on it.
Eurostat has now released electricity data from 2023, and it shows that 44.7% of EU electricity production came from renewable energy sources last year!* Fossil gas (aka “natural gas”) production was down, a lot. Coal production was down even more. Even production from oil and petroleum products (already quite low) was down. Meanwhile, of course, renewable energy production was up! Clearly, in Europe, renewable energy is now winning.
And this is a crossover year, because in 2022, electricity production from fossil fuels was higher than electricity production from renewable energy sources (by a smidge). Let’s get to some graphs and more actual stats now — just note the difference between supply and production with these.
Looking at supply stats for 2023 vs. 2022:
Brown coal supply down by 24.2%, to 222,840 million tonnes
Hard coal supply down by 20.4%, to 130,437 million tonnes
Fossil gas supply down by 7.4%, to 12.8 million terajoules (TJ)
Oil/petroleum electricity supply down 1.5%, to 526,862 thousand tonnes
Renewables supply increased 4.4%, up to 10.9 million TJ.
I confess I do not understand Israel. How can a religious nation of Jews who themselves for hundreds of years were persecuted, ghettoized, and killed by the millions, become a nation carrying out a genocide, and carrying out policies that replicate what was once done to them? To be candid I just can’t get past the tens of thousands of children that have been killed or are missing. I understand why Biden is supporting this war Israel is carrying out from a geopolitical perspective, but I cannot stomach his moral failure. The only positive statement I can make is that criminal Trump who had an affinity for Netanyahu, a fellow fascist, would have been even worse in his decisions than Biden.
Israel opposed a proposal at a recent United Nations forum aimed at rebuilding the Gaza Strip’s war-ravaged telecommunications infrastructure on the grounds that Palestinian connectivity is a readymade weapon for Hamas.
The resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia for last week’s U.N. International Telecommunication Union summit in Geneva, is aimed at returning internet access to Gaza’s millions of disconnected denizens.
It ultimately passed under a secret ballot on June 14 — but not before it was watered down to remove some of its more strident language about Israel’s responsibility for the destruction of Gaza. The U.S. delegate at the ITU summit had specifically opposed those references.
Israel, for its part, had blasted the proposal as a whole. Israel’s ITU delegate described it as “a resolution that while seemingly benign in its intent to rebuild telecommunications infrastructure, distorts the reality of the ongoing situation in Gaza,” according to a recording of the session reviewed by The Intercept. The delegate further argued the resolution does not address that Hamas has used the internet “to prepare acts of terror against Israel’s civilians,” and that any rebuilding effort must include unspecified “safeguards” that would prevent the potential use of the internet for terrorism.
