Sunday, October 23, 2011

Americans Don't Care About Climate Change—And That's OK - Environment - GOOD
But while there’s no excuse for people to deny the dangers of climate change, it’s important to keep in mind that public opinion on the subject matters less and less. The deniers may be winning the battle for Americans’ hearts and minds, but they’ve lost the true war: The market is tipping in favor of renewable energy, leaving them behind.
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Whether you believe in climate change or not, the electricity you use to power your home will increasingly come from solar panels...Eventually, it will be cheaper for everyone to buy rooftop solar panels than pay for energy from the grid, providing a pretty good incentive even for climate change deniers to choose the renewable option.

After our homes, cars constitute the next-largest energy demand, and, admittedly, progress toward sustainable options is moving more slowly in that arena: Almost all of our cars will continue to run on gas for the foreseeable future. But it isn’t a skeptical public that’s holding us back, it’s supply. Dealers can’t keep up with demand on the Toyota Prius or the Nissan Leaf.
2010: Solar Power Generation: Boon or Boondoggle
While there is a good bit of truth in the story regarding solar power, we find, as usual, that the devil keeps getting into those details. We might question why — in light of solid public support, years of subsidized development, dozens of taxpayer-financed pilot plants, media hype, and political grandstanding — solar electricity only increased from an invisible 0.014 percent of the electricity generation in the United States to an unnoticeable 0.021 percent over the period 1998 to 2008, the last figures available.

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