{"id":28287,"date":"2017-11-25T11:36:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-25T16:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28287"},"modified":"2017-11-25T11:36:03","modified_gmt":"2017-11-25T16:36:03","slug":"trump-resists-progress-on-global-warming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28287","title":{"rendered":"Trump Resists Progress on Global Warming\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trump Resists Progress on Global Warming\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Exclusive:<\/strong> Market trends now favor renewable energy as a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels, but President Trump\u2019s resistance to this good news is doing real damage in the fight against global warming, reports Jonathan Marshall.<\/p>\n

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With petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch paying many of the GOP\u2019s bills<\/a> these days, it\u2019s no wonder conservative policymakers are pushing hard to protect dirty fossil fuels against competition from clean, renewable energy. But entrepreneurial capitalists whom conservatives claim to worship are fighting back, slashing costs for wind and solar power to the point where few customers can refuse them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A wind-powered turbine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A remarkable new study<\/a> by Lazard, the venerable New York investment house, concludes that the unsubsidized<\/em> cost of energy from new wind and solar plants now falls decisively below that of nuclear and coal plants, and even below that of efficient natural-gas-fired generation. The gap is widening each year as scale economies and improvements in turbine and photovoltaic technology drive cost reductions.\u00a0Significantly, even cautious modelers at the U.S. Department of Energy\u00a0concede<\/a>\u00a0these trends.<\/p>\n

Even more disruptive is Lazard\u2019s finding that \u201cin some scenarios the full-lifecycle costs of building and operating renewables-based projects have dropped below the operating costs alone of conventional generation technologies such as coal or nuclear.\u201d In other words, it\u2019s often cheaper to shut down those older plants and replace them with new wind and solar projects.<\/p>\n

Where local conditions especially favor renewable energy, the cost advantages of wind and solar have become enormous. Last spring, for example, Tucson Electric Power inked a 20-year deal<\/a> to purchase enough solar energy to power more than 20,000 homes at a price of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. (One kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy needed to light ten 100-watt bulbs for an hour.)<\/p>\n

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

Trump Resists Progress on Global Warming\u00a0 Exclusive: Market trends now favor renewable energy as a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels, but President Trump\u2019s resistance to this good news is doing real damage in the fight against global warming, reports Jonathan Marshall. With petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch paying many of the GOP\u2019s bills these […]<\/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":[4],"tags":[6963,7844,369,7430],"class_list":["post-28287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-consortium-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-global-warming","tag-jonathan-marshall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28287","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=28287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28288,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28287\/revisions\/28288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}