{"id":25661,"date":"2017-09-14T18:50:30","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T23:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25661"},"modified":"2017-09-14T18:50:30","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T23:50:30","slug":"100-percent-wishful-thinking-the-green-energy-cornucopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25661","title":{"rendered":"100 Percent Wishful Thinking: the Green-Energy Cornucopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

100 Percent Wishful Thinking: the Green-Energy Cornucopia<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
\n

At the People\u2019s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people, the atmosphere was electric. But electricity was also the focus of too many of the signs and banners. Yes, here and there were solid \u201cSystem Change, Not Climate Change\u201d \u2013 themed signs and banners. But the bulk of slogans on display asserted or implied that ending the climate emergency and avoiding climatic catastrophes like those that would occur a few months later\u2014hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the mega-wildfires in the U.S. West\u2014will be a simple matter of getting Donald Trump out of office and converting to 100-percent renewable energy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The sunshiny placards and cheery banners promising an energy cornucopia were inspired by academic studies published in the past few years purporting to show how America and the world could meet 100 percent of future energy demand with solar, wind, and other \u201cgreen\u201d generation. The biggest attention-getters have been a pair of report<\/a>s published in 2015 by a team led by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, but there have been many others.<\/p>\n

A growing body of research has debunked overblown claims of a green-energy bonanza. Nevertheless, \u00a0Al Gore, Bill McKibben (who recently expressed hope<\/a> that Harvey\u2019s attack on the petroleum industry in Texas will send a \u201cwakeup call\u201d for a 100-percent renewable energy surge), and other luminaries in the mainstream climate movement have been invigorated by reports like Jacobson\u2019s and have embraced<\/a> the 100-percent dream.<\/p>\n

And that vision is merging with a broader, even more spurious claim that has become especially popular in the Trump era: the private sector, we are told, has now taken the lead on climate, and market forces will inevitably<\/a> achieve the 100-percent renewable dream and solve the climate crisis on their own. In this dream, anything\u2019s possible; Jacobson even believes that tens of thousands of wind turbines installed offshore could tame hurricanes<\/a> like Katrina, Harvey, and Irma.<\/p>\n

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

100 Percent Wishful Thinking: the Green-Energy Cornucopia At the People\u2019s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people, the atmosphere was electric. But electricity was also the focus of too many of the signs and banners. Yes, here and there were solid \u201cSystem Change, Not Climate Change\u201d \u2013 themed signs and […]<\/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":[141,5493,1406,15996,15995],"class_list":["post-25661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-climate-change","tag-counterpunch","tag-green-energy","tag-paul-cox","tag-stan-cox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25661","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=25661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25662,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25661\/revisions\/25662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}