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from the spoiler-alert-its-the-president dept.
Imagine my surprise while surfing articles on ScienceMag.org site when I discover an article not paywalled, (how unusual). It soon became apparent this was probably because it was produced at tax payer expense.
In the paper, just about all the data that matters is laid out early:
CO2 emissions from the energy sector fell by 9.5% from 2008 to 2015, while the economy grew by more than 10%. In this same period, the amount of energy consumed per dollar of real gross domestic product (GDP) fell by almost 11%, the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of energy consumed declined by 8%, and CO2 emitted per dollar of GDP declined by 18%.
Basically the paper points out that costs of renewable energy is falling fast, from affordable only to experimental projects to competitive pricing in the every day world:
Renewable electricity costs also fell dramatically between 2008 and 2015: the cost of electricity fell 41% for wind, 54% for rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) installations, and 64% for utility-scale PV.
Recovery Act investments and recent tax credit extensions have played a crucial role, but technology advances and market forces will continue to drive renewable deployment. The levelized cost of electricity from new renewables like wind and solar in some parts of the United States is already lower than that for new coal generation.
The paper looks all studious and sciency, with footnotes and charts and citations of all sorts of government publications, scholarly papers from universities, blogs and industrial press releases.
And even an admission at the end that several other "researchers" contributed to the researching, drafting, and editing of the article. All at tax payers expense, of course.
The record safely set straight, the government guy walks off into the sunset, to a retirement and a new career in publishing science papers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @10:06PM
One of the most common criticisms of shadowstats is that they simply substitute their own, much less rigorously researched, benchmarks. At least with the government's numbers everybody knows both their obvious implications and their weaknesses. Shadowstats is often just a blackbox. Literally, as in the guy uses magic numbers in his equations without an explanation of where they come from.