Our friendly neighbourhood fireball
It’s Thanksgiving, so let’s take some time around the table to appreciate some big things that are actually going right in this climate mess. We’ll try to keep our inner grouchy uncle in check but even the old grump might end up acknowledging that some happenings are sunnier than expected. So gather around because here comes the cook with an amuse-bouche: news that, in the first half of 2025, and for the first time ever, renewables produced more energy than coal.
Dethroning King Coal is no small matter. As archaic as it sounds, coal burning remains the world’s biggest source of carbon pollution. When renewables overtake coal, “[w]e are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, one of the analysts at Ember, the thinktank that crunched the numbers and announced the good news.
Actual power generation is the crucial measure, but if you look at installed capacity, the picture is even more striking.
Wonkier, but perhaps even sunnier news: solar and wind are growing so quickly that they outpaced all the growth in electricity demand this year. Which means they started eating into fossil fuelled power, leading to a modest but significant drop in fossil generation and a small decline in global CO2 emissions from the power sector. Fossil generation dropped in both China and India.
“Yes, but…” protests the inner grump, unable to savour the moment. “That’s only electricity generation and renewables are only, barely, covering the growth in electricity demand, not the whole spew.” The old grouch is annoyingly accurate sometimes.
But it is also true that most people, and even most energy pros, have not kept up with the exponential rate of change in clean energy. And, to rectify that, we can turn to a veteran guide through climate science, climate movements and the quest to replace fossil fuels. Bill McKibben is a veteran, even among veterans, having written the first book about climate change for a lay audience, The End of Nature, in 1989.
McKibben is a particularly useful guide, not only for his long perspective, but also because he isn’t a pasteurised, techno-utopian. He’s someone who understands that the drive away from fossil fuels will have to navigate the mucky human world, all while outmaneuvering the powerful polluters with all their wealth and incumbency.
He was not only the first journalist and chronicler of our climate predicament, but also among the early........© National Observer
