Latest news with #AnInconvenientTruth
IOL News
22-07-2025
- Business
- IOL News
Dire predictions about renewable energy were all wrong
The High Mesa Solar facility is seen on Oct. 10 in Garfield County, Colorado. Image: Matt McClain/The Washington Post David Von Drehle Twenty years ago, former vice president Al Gore was traveling the world narrating a slideshow about the perils of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; in 2006, the presentation reached far more people through the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Audiences would have been hard-pressed to imagine headlines from two decades later. Such as this one proclaiming, 'Solar is EU's biggest power source.' For the first time, in June, the European Union - one of the world's largest economies - produced more electricity from solar power than from any other source. Three-quarters of E.U. electricity in June came from nonfossil fuel sources. According to energy think tank Ember, solar power accounted for 22 percent of the European Union's electricity output for the month, barely more than Europe's nuclear plants. Natural gas and coal combined did not match either of these. More electricity was generated by wind and water combined than by fossil fuels. Or this headline stating, 'Clean energy just put China's CO2 emissions into reverse.' During the first quarter of this year compared with the year before, again for the first time, total carbon emissions from the industrializing giant fell not because of an economic recession but thanks to rapid advances in renewable technology, especially solar. Analyst Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, published the findings in Carbon Brief: 'The reduction in China's first-quarter CO2 emissions in 2025 was due to a 5.8 percent% drop in the power sector. … Increases in solar, wind and nuclear power generation, driven by investments in new generating capacity, more than covered the growth in demand.' Video Player is loading. 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Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading Headlines are not as sunny for the United States, where government enthusiasm for tackling the greenhouse problem is less consistent than in much of Europe. But even here, progress in recent years is striking. Consider: In March 2005, 27 percent of U.S. electricity consumption was supplied by nonfossil fuel sources. Fast-forward to March of this year: 42 percent of U.S. consumption was supplied by nonfossil fuel sources. Solar power, a negligible resource 20 years ago, has surpassed hydroelectric, while wind turbines supply more than twice the power of dams. And the Trump administration's hostility to some renewables is partly offset by its supportive attitude toward next-generation nuclear power plants, without which the world has little hope of getting its arms around the emissions problem. Total consumption of electricity in the U.S. was more than 15 percent lower this March than in the same month of 2005, yet during the past two decades the size of the U.S. economy more than doubled. That's another first: The timeless link between rising wealth and rising energy consumption has been broken; we've proved economies can grow robustly without using more power. I am not suggesting that these headlines add up to Mission Accomplished on the climate. Far from it. Humans continue to create far more carbon and methane emissions through our agriculture, industries, transportation and homes than the atmosphere can store without trapping additional heat. The resulting rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases will have predictable and unpredictable consequences that will challenge humanity for generations. What the headlines clearly show is that progress is not only possible - it is happening. Dire predictions that changes to the global energy supply would destroy economies and plunge civilizations into reverse have been proved wrong. Europe is three-quarters of the way to a green electrical grid. China is, quite possibly, coming down from peak carbon. In neither place have these achievements noticeably disrupted modern life. We're making progress through countless innovations: cheaper solar panels; safer nuclear generators; better batteries; more fuel-efficient cars, trucks and airplanes; smarter appliances; more productive farming; reforestation; and other modes of carbon capture and storage. And we have good ideas for further innovations - the best of which is a tax on emissions to make the hidden costs of greenhouse pollution plainly visible to the marketplace, thus stirring further innovations. Impossible? It seems so now. But so much seemed impossible in 2005 that now has come to pass. A carbon tax has strong bipartisan support because it is a far more efficient way to encourage the next burst of progress, compared with doling out government subsidies and incentives. Greenhouse gas pollution is not free. It comes at a price. Make that price plain to the irresistible engine of American capitalism and watch what the market can do. The heartening progress of the past 20 years will be just a prelude to an explosion of invention and discovery. This is no time to be discouraged. David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Post and writes a weekly column. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including 'Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year' and 'Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.'
Washington Post
21-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Dire predictions about renewable energy were all wrong
Twenty years ago, former vice president Al Gore was traveling the world narrating a slideshow about the perils of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; in 2006, the presentation reached far more people through the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Audiences would have been hard-pressed to imagine headlines from two decades later. Such as this one proclaiming, 'Solar is EU's biggest power source.' For the first time, in June, the European Union — one of the world's largest economies — produced more electricity from solar power than from any other source. Three-quarters of E.U. electricity in June came from nonfossil fuel sources.
The Herald Scotland
30-06-2025
- Health
- The Herald Scotland
We must address the problem of over-management if we are to succeed
The same applies to nurses and teachers. We have improved the ability to diagnose illnesses and also the difficulties our children face with ADHD and the like. Whilst this is great news we haven't adapted to handling these new workloads and our nurses, police and teachers are struggling to cope. We are under-resourced at basic level whilst being way over-managed. We have also removed the power of people to make decisions without a fear of being sued, sacked or accused of some 'ism' or other. Private industry has similar challenges but is much more efficient and makes quicker decisions, especially as they are usually accountable to shareholders. The recent fiasco at Dundee University is a good example of something that would be very unlikely to happen in a PLC. All politicians need to address this massive problem of over-management if we are to retain our best workers and get the most for our cash. John Gilligan, Ayr. Read more letters Tree planting fall is shameful Picking up on the news the other day that tree planting in Scotland had predictably fallen away after funding was cut, it is useful to put another year of failure in context. I first became aware of tree planting targets in Scotland in 2006, with an ambition to plant 15,000 hectares of trees a year until 2040, which would have given us 25 per cent woodland cover. The objectives then were to increase our timber supplies, create more woodland habitat, and get people out and about walking in woodland to help the NHS by getting them fitter. The following year, after the film, An Inconvenient Truth, we started hearing about carbon and climate change mitigation as well. Since then, the target has only been achieved in one year, and the accumulated deficit (I know, I keep a spreadsheet of it) is now 152,000 hectares, or 305 million trees if planted at an average of 2,000 per hectare. The accumulated failure is colossal. That is, trees that agreed policy suggested that we should plant, but we did not. The responsibility for this rests completely with the Scottish Government for (1) not making sufficient funding available, and (2) not having processes and mechanisms in place which would allow us to efficiently license this additional woodland area. What this tells us is that the environment in Scotland is not important to our politicians, regardless of what they say about it. I hope people remember that next time we are subjected to their virtue signalling on climate change mitigation. They are not even starting to get the basics right. Victor Clements, Aberfeldy. We need Scottish National Degrees Now that the new Education (Scotland) Bill has passed the final stage of debate, anyone reading it will wonder why they bothered since it seems a charter for maintaining stasis. The new agency, Qualifications Scotland, will doubtless have the sins of the father handed down to it. Strictly speaking, I take the view that the actual delivery of qualifications is provided by schools and colleges with only the accreditation for their courses being conferred by this new body and this should have been embedded in the new title. In this respect I suggest the new agency should in law have taken steps to address the disparity in values we are stuck with due to a series of historical accidents which split courses which are characterised as purely academic from those with the practical application of knowledge and understanding. As we have seen in many other organisations, the claim of ownership can be a toxic demarcation. In order to attempt to address this issue I feel the new agency should design and offer Scottish National Degrees at a national standard both at general and subject level for delivery within all colleges. For too long we have accepted independence within the university system and an assumed supremacy in educational standards. I fear however that in forming this new Qualifications Scotland body we have missed a golden opportunity to press for one game and one set of rules on the educational playing field. Bill Brown, Milngavie. Lecturer posts should be reduced Several universities in Scotland are in a severe financial position and having to consider redundancies. Part of this is due to a reduction in foreign students paying large fees which in the past allowed high salaries to be paid to university staff. Now these staff are demonstrating against the cuts. After a pay deal, financed by the Scottish Government of £4.5 million of additional funding, lecturers will receive starting salaries of nearly £42,000 from September 2025. Senior lecturers will get more than £50,000. Perhaps those striking could hold up placards saying "I am only getting £42,000 but deserve more" and see the public response. It is the Scottish taxpayers who fund part of the university staff salaries. The public sector and universities should not be closeted from reality and job cuts are obviously needed to balance the books. Clark Cross, Linlithgow. Tree planting targets have been missed (Image: PA) Our NHS can be woeful I was interested to see Andy Maciver remove the rose-coloured spectacles about our 'wonderful' NHS ("Time to talk about debunking the NHS as a national cult", The Herald, June 27). In the last eight years I have been in hospital five times and on each occasion mistakes (some more serious than others) were made in my treatment. Doctors (including consultants) and nurses need better supervision so that patients do not require unnecessary additional hospital visits. Marion Carson, Dunblane. Venice Lagoon or Whiting Bay? Forty million pounds. That's how much the billionaire Jeff Bezos spent on his obscenely lavish wedding in Venice. Maybe the Scottish Government could have persuaded him to buy a working ferry and have the wedding on Arran. Ian Smith, Troon.
Reuters
27-06-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Breakingviews - Why green investors keep getting carried away
LONDON, June 26 (Reuters Breakingviews) - To paraphrase Mark Twain, speculative bubbles don't repeat themselves, but they often rhyme. The green technology boom that has imploded over the past three years is remarkably similar to the alternative energy bubble that inflated prior to the global financial crisis of 2008. Both frenzies were driven by investors' unrealistic expectations about how quickly new energy technologies would be taken up. What is now known as the Cleantech 1.0 boom took off in 2005 after the U.S. Congress enacted tax credits for renewable energy. Former Vice President Al Gore's 2006 documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' raised public awareness of climate change. In early 2007 the venture capital investor John Doerr gave a much-publicised TED talk, opens new tab in which he asserted that 'green technologies – going green – is bigger than the internet. It could be the biggest opportunity of the twenty-first century.' Doerr's firm, Kleiner Perkins, later launched a fund to 'help speed mass market adoption of solutions to the climate crisis.' Many other venture capitalists jumped on the bandwagon. The WilderHill Clean Energy Index, launched in 2004, more than doubled between May 2005 and December 2007. Dozens of startups were launched to invest in batteries, solar, biomass and wind energy. An electric vehicle company, Better Place, established in Silicon Valley in 2007, raised nearly $1 billion to build a network of charging stations. Solyndra, an innovative solar panel manufacturer, attracted a host of big-name investors and later received more than $500 million in loan guarantees from the administration of President Barack Obama. No single factor was responsible for pricking the bubble. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 dampened animal spirits; advances in hydraulic fracturing technology led to cheaper U.S. natural gas; Spain and Germany reduced their subsidies for renewable energy; and American solar companies proved unable to compete with subsidised Chinese competitors. Nearly all the 150 renewable energy startups founded in Silicon Valley during the boom subsequently failed, including Solyndra and Better Place. Cleantech venture capital funds launched during the bubble produced negative returns. By the end of 2012 the WilderHill index had fallen 85% from its peak to around 40. By coincidence, that is where the benchmark currently trades. The recent green tech bubble was more extreme. The WilderHill index climbed from 47 in March 2020 to 281 less than a year later. Whereas U.S. venture capitalists spent an estimated $25 billion funding clean energy startups between 2006 and 2011, Silicon Valley splurged more than twice that sum in 2021 alone, according to Silicon Valley Bank. Market valuations were quite absurd. By late 2020, the battery company QuantumScape (QS.N), opens new tab, which came to the market by merging with a blank-check firm, was valued at more than General Motors (GM.N), opens new tab, despite having no sales. The market frenzy is long past. QuantumScape stock is down more than 95% from its peak, while the WilderHill index has fallen 85%. Several listed electric vehicle companies, including truck maker Nikola, have filed for protection from creditors. President Donald Trump's administration is reducing subsidies for renewables and electric vehicles. Oil giants BP (BP.L), opens new tab and Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab are cutting back their alternative energy investments, just as they did after the Cleantech 1.0 boom. The outcome for green venture capital remains unclear but anecdotal evidence suggests that many funds are now changing hands at steep discounts to their appraised valuations. The common error investors made during both booms was to become entranced by extravagant growth forecasts. In his book, 'More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy', Jean-Baptiste Fressoz criticises the application of the sigmoid function – also known as the S-curve – to predict the course of the energy transition. This model describes the adoption of a new technology as starting out slowly, rapidly gathering pace before eventually levelling off when the market becomes saturated. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has used the S-curve in its projections for renewable energy demand and the accompanying decline of fossil fuels. The S-curve was originally discovered a hundred years ago to describe how the population of drosophila flies changes under laboratory conditions. It was later applied, with varying degrees of success, to project human population growth. The American energy scientist M. King Hubbert was the first to use the S-curve to forecast energy production. In the 1950s, advocates for nuclear energy used the model to predict what they believed was the inevitable transition from fossil fuels towards an atomic-powered future. Hubbert also used the S-curve for his famous forecast that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. Vaclav Smil, a leading energy historian, points out that energy transitions are slow, inherently unpredictable and require extraordinary amounts of investment. Fressoz goes further, claiming that – when energy consumption is viewed in absolute rather than relative terms – there has historically never been a transition. It's true that coal took over from wood as the world's prime energy source in the 19th century, and that later oil and natural gas became dominant. Yet the consumption of all these energy sources continued increasing. The world has never burned more wood than it does today. In absolute terms, coal usage continues to grow. The S-curve has also been used to predict the uptake of various green technologies. As Rob West of Thunder Said Energy, a research firm, observed in a report published last September, both the speed of adoption and the ultimate penetration rate for new inventions are variable. For instance, the demand for refrigerators and television by U.S. households grew very rapidly from the outset, with both reaching penetration rates of nearly 100% in just a few decades. Yet it took more than half a century for gas heating to reach 60% of U.S. households, at which point its market share flatlined. 'It is important not to fall into the trap of assuming that the 'top of the S' is an endpoint of 100% adoption,' writes West. Not long ago, electric vehicles were set to rapidly replace the internal combustion engine, but sales forecasts are now being cut back in developed markets. West anticipates that the eventual market share for battery-powered cars will not surpass 30%. That's a guess. The actual outcome will depend on the state of future technology, which is unknowable. That leaves plenty of scope for green investors to get it wrong again. Follow @Breakingviews, opens new tab on X
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Deaf President Now!' amplifies the birth of a rights movement
The events depicted in 'Deaf President Now!' — a documentary revisiting the 1988 protest by students at Gallaudet University that led to the selection of the school's first deaf president in its 124-year history — may seem, in the scheme of things, like an incremental advancement for representation in the deaf community. But in this stirring telling by co-directors Nyle DiMarco, producer of the Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary short 'Audible,' and Davis Guggenheim, director of the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary feature 'An Inconvenient Truth,' the achievement lands with the force of the first salvo in a revolution. It feels like no exaggeration to compare the Deaf President Now protest, or DPN, as it became known, to Stonewall, the 1969 riots protesting a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar that marked the beginning of a new civil and human rights movement. DiMarco and Guggenheim use archival footage to re-create a ticktock of the week-long protest, which was sparked by the March 6, 1988, announcement that the school's board of trustees had chosen a new president: Elisabeth Zinser, vice chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Of the three finalists, who also included I. King Jordan, then dean of Gallaudet's College of Arts and Sciences, and Harvey Corson, superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf, Zinser was the only hearing candidate. Students, who had sought one of their own at the top, exploded in anger. 'Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world,' Jane Bassett Spilman, chair of the board of trustees, was reported to have said on the night of Zinser's appointment. In an old interview, Spilman, who is hearing, argues that her comment — which she says she can't recall and of which there is no recording — was mistranslated into sign language by her interpreter in the chaos of the moment. In addition to conventional archival footage, the filmmakers use two innovative techniques to immerse viewers not just in the history but in the emotions of the moment. During interviews with the DPN Four, as the quartet of student protest leaders became known, the remarks of Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Jerry Covell, Greg Hlibok and Tim Rarus are not translated into subtitles but rendered by four actors — Abigail Marlowe, Leland Orser, Paul Adelstein and Tim Blake Nelson — in voice-over. DiMarco and Guggenheim also deploy an experimental narrative technique they call Deaf Point of View, which uses expressionist photography and sound design — moments of silence or muffled audio, a flashing lightbulb to indicate an alarm or incoming phone call — that invites viewers into the world and perspective of the protest's participants. As with Guggenheim's 'Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,' which blended standard interview footage, clips from Fox's filmography and staged re-creations using a body double of the actor, it's a radical kind of oral history, one delivered not solely by traditional documentary's talking heads but by the more expressive hands, bodies and faces. 'I usually sign right about here,' says a smiling Covell, tracing the edges of an expansive, invisible box with his hands that almost fills the camera frame to explain his somewhat dramatic way of signing. 'But I move a lot when I get emotional,' he adds by way of preemptive apology. At one point, Covell inadvertently knocks into the filmmakers' boom microphone during a particularly animated answer. It's part of what's great about this film. There are contrasting moments of near-tears and speechlessness as well — the kind brought on by powerful feeling, not an inability to articulate. The message of 'Deaf President Now!' comes across loud and clear: We will be heard. Rather, it is Gallaudet's paternalistic administration that seems slow to listen to the students' legitimate demands, among which, in addition to the hiring of a deaf president, were Spilman's resignation and the reformation of the board to incorporate more deaf trustees. There are echoes here of many other protests, including those that have recently roiled college campuses in the wake of Israel's response to the attacks by Hamas of Oct. 7, 2023. After the DPN protests began and the students locked down the Gallaudet campus, bringing classes to a standstill, Rarus, the fourth generation of a deaf family, recalls his grandfather phoning him on a TTY device — remember, this is before texting — to say, 'Please respect your elders.' Rarus's grandfather later retracted that advice, ultimately telling his grandson he was right to stand up in the face of unfairness. But it's a manifestation of what change makers all too often run into: ears that are metaphorically deaf to the obvious. TV-MA. Available on Apple TV+. Contains brief vulgarity. In English and American Sign Language, with simultaneous interpretation. 99 minutes.
