{"id":23106,"date":"2017-03-05T14:09:13","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T19:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23106"},"modified":"2017-03-05T14:09:13","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T19:09:13","slug":"how-renewable-energy-advocates-are-hurting-the-climate-cause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23106","title":{"rendered":"How Renewable Energy Advocates are Hurting the Climate Cause"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0How Renewable Energy Advocates are Hurting the Climate Cause<\/a><\/h3>\n
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In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the proliferation of misinformation on social media is finally getting the attention it deserves. Or so I thought.<\/p>\n

Scrolling through my Facebook news feed recently, I stumbled upon an\u00a0article shared by Climate Central<\/a>, a nonprofit news organization focused on climate science. \u201cThe World\u2019s Renewable Energy Capacity Now Beats Out Coal,\u201d read the headline from Co.Exist. I clicked. \u201cThe tipping point marks a major milestone in the transition to cleaner power sources,\u201d the subhead declared from atop an aerial photo of a wind farm.<\/p>\n

And so went most of the coverage of a new\u00a0report on renewable energy markets<\/a>\u00a0by the International Energy Agency, a well-respected source of global energy statistics. Outlets\u00a0big<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0small<\/a>,\u00a0reputable<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0lesser-known<\/a>,\u00a0specialized<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0general<\/a>, adopted similar headlines, subheads and ledes, accompanied by photos of wind turbines and solar panels.<\/p>\n

The problem is twofold. First,\u00a0capacity<\/em>\u00a0is a highly selective way to measure electricity, especially in the context of emissions and climate change. Capacity is defined as the maximum electric output a generator can produce under specific conditions at a moment in time \u2014 for example, how much a solar farm can generate during a sunny summer day or a wind farm when it\u2019s really windy. But, of course, the sun doesn\u2019t always shine or the wind always blow.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstalled capacity is not really a useful metric for a lot of purposes,\u201d Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University who studies renewable energy, told me. \u201cWhen you\u2019re asking, \u2018how much is this supplying, how much is wind supplying versus coal?\u2019 you want to look at the actual energy delivered.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s commonly called\u00a0generation,<\/em>\u00a0and is defined as the amount of electricity produced on average over a period of time, such as a year. Sure enough, if you look at generation numbers,\u00a0coal still beat out renewables<\/a>\u00a0in 2015 by a significant margin, 39 percent to not quite 24 percent.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0How Renewable Energy Advocates are Hurting the Climate Cause In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the proliferation of misinformation on social media is finally getting the attention it deserves. Or so I thought. Scrolling through my Facebook news feed recently, I stumbled upon an\u00a0article shared by Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization focused […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[141,6513,14955,674],"class_list":["post-23106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-climate-change","tag-ensia","tag-paul-mcdivitt","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23107,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23106\/revisions\/23107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}