This would have been amazing progress twenty years ago.
Natural gas is a dirty fucking lie. Leaked methane from natural gas extraction and transportation is orders of magnitude worse for the environment than carbon dioxide in the short term (20-year to 100-year horizon).
It’s technically better past that, but by that point we’ll all be dead or underwater anyway.
It also breaks down to CO2 after, right? A small amount but still.
Good resource to compare different regions and situations: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fossil-nuclear-renewables?country=CHN~USA~OWID_EU27~FRA~Lower-middle-income+countries~Upper-middle-income+countries
I knew France leaned towards nuclear power, but damn
That’s actually shrinking now, it used to be a larger share a decade, two decades ago. Being replaced by renewables.
“X” Doubt
I mean it would have been nice to get this earlier but I’m somewhat impressed.
60% is still a ton of fossil fuels. At least solar and wind are the cheapest sources of electricity, so hopefully that helps speed things up.
Now if we could put in perspective the per capita CO2 emissions of USA, combined with the pollution generating guzzlers everyone likes to own, like F-350s and other mini trucks, that would tell us the real tale of environmental “wins”.
Per Capita equivalent CO2 emissions is quite high, but measurably on the decline as a result of more efficiency (mentioned in the article)
Per capita CO2 is 4x that of China, and on top of it, USA is not particularly highly responsible for reforestation in the world, unlike Asian countries. Its just something I wanted to bring up because its not meaningful to have some progress with emissions of electric grids, if the CEO country of capitalism shits out too much CO2, pollutes the world, does not care much about reforestation and has probably half the population that thinks global warming is a myth.
Per capita CO2 is 4x that of China
Sorry, I can’t leave your message uncorrected:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1966..latest
The USA is at 15t per Capita, on a steep decline, China is at 8t per Capita and growing fast. The EU is at 6.2t and equally on a steep decline.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cumulative-co2
From this we can easily plot a trajectory where China might, within a couple decades, overpass both the EU (earliest industrialized nations) and the US (largest economy) and become the largest CO2 emitter in the history of mankind.
IMO, no large historical polluter should get away scot free, but it’s certainly much worse to reach that point during the 21st century, when climate change is known and feared, and when clean energies are abundant.
nice!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.
Weather can also play a role, as unusually high demand for heating in the winter months could potentially require that older fossil fuel plants be brought online.
This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.
Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment).
But that’s likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs.
The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity.
The original article contains 849 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What I find truly amazing is that they have found a way to produce all the technology required for this system without any emissions!
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