grist: "When the normally conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) agrees with both the middle of the road IPCC and more ... progressive voices like mine, it should be time for the world to get very serious, very fast on the clean energy transition. But when the media blows the story, the public and policymakers may miss the key messages of the stunning new IEA report, Energy Technology Perspectives, 2008. You may not have paid much attention to this new report once you saw the media's favorite headline for it: "$45 trillion needed to combat warming." That would be too bad, because the real news from the global energy agency is: Failing to act very quickly to transform the planet's energy system puts us on a path to catastrophic outcomes; The investment required is "an average of some 1.1% of global GDP each year from now until 2050. This expenditure reflects a re-direction of economic activity and employment, and not necessarily a reduction of GDP," in fact, this investment partly pays for itself in reduced energy costs alone (not even counting the pollution reduction benefits); The world is on the brink of a renewables (and efficiency) revolution."
Meanwhile, from The Denver Business Journal: "Both the Democratic and Republican national conventions will be powered by wind and solar energy, utility company Xcel Energy Inc. announced Monday...Xcel said its Windsource program will provide enough power to offset the estimated 3,000 megawatt-hours that the conventions will use. The Windsource power will come primarily from Xcel's Ponnequin Wind Facility near the Colorado-Wyoming border and from a wind farm in southwestern Minnesota. A solar installation at the DNC venue, the Pepsi Center, will generate 10 kilowatts."
Matt Frost (via The American Scene): "I remain unconvinced that it's possible to mitigate climate change with any tools at our disposal, and I don't think we'll bring the next generation of energy sources to market by making fossil fuels more expensive in relative terms. Such an approach is especially fragile in an inflationary and increasingly zero-sum world economy, so I tend to agree with Indur Goklany and Tom Schelling that the best way to solve the problem of climate change is by applying the brainpower that only a wealthier developing world can deliver. The political consensus, however, is for getting a head start on direct mitigation, and emissions trading might be the least-bad way to do so."
Andrew Sullivan for the link.
"cc"
5:50:09 PM 
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