Renewable energy is becoming much cheaper

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Here’s a note from Mark Campanale, Founder and CEO of the Carbon Tracker Initiative:

Delighted to see Bill McKibben writing about Carbon Tracker in his latest column in the New Yorker. “…if you want real hope, the best place to look may be a little noted report from the London-based think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Titled “The Sky’s the Limit,” it begins by declaring that “solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over.” Taken by itself, that’s not a very bold claim: scientists have long noted that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too expensive to capture that power.

That’s what has shifted—and so quickly and so dramatically that most of the world’s politicians are now living on a different planet than the one we actually inhabit. “The Carbon Tracker report, co-written by Kingsmill Bond, is full of fascinating points, including how renewable energy is the biggest gift of all for some of the poorest nations, including in Africa, where solar potential outweighs current energy use by a factor of more than a thousand.” We haven’t yet fully grasped this potential because it’s happened so fast.