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from the did-you-check-to-turn-the-lights-off dept.
Germany's economy nowadays emits as much carbon dioxide as it did in the 1950s, when it was 10 times smaller.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), carbon dioxide emissions trends for 2019 suggest clean energy transitions are underway. Global power sector emissions declined by some 170 Mt, or 1.2%, with the biggest falls taking place in the advanced economies of the European Union, Japan and the United States. There, CO2 emissions are now at levels not seen since the late 1980s, when electricity demand was one-third lower.
In these advanced economies, the average CO2 emissions intensity of electricity generation declined by nearly 6.5% in 2019. This is a rate three times faster than the average over the past decade.
This decline is driven by a switch from coal to natural gas, a rise in nuclear power and weaker electricity demand, combined with the seemingly unstoppable growth in renewables. These now constitute over 40% of the energy mix in Germany (wind power +11%) and the United Kingdom, where rapid expansion in offshore wind power generation is happening.
The bummer lies with the rest of the world.
There emissions continue to expand with close to 400 Mt last year. About 80% of that increase is happening in Asia. Coal demand here continues to expand, accounting for over 50% of energy use.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 14 2020, @03:16AM
In a word, it's influence peddling. They write the laws to benefit monied interests that are the 1%/Deep State/[insert whichever term you prefer]. If they control the party machinery, they control all down-ticket races too. So they don't want populists like Bernie upsetting the apple cart. It's bad for business.
We can expand on that at length, but I hope that suffices.
Most registered voters are independents now. More have been walking away from the Democratic Party since they lurched to the intersectional Left. (I am one of them, incidentally) At some point their network decoheres and the party falls apart. It has happened before. Last time it was the Whigs that died. It's time for the Democratic Party to die.
The Green Party and Libertarian Party are not very strong alternatives, in my opinion. The Green Party is perpetually trapped in the purity spiral that is killing the Democratic Party now. The Libertarians are too ideological, being too far from the lived experience of most people.
My personal preference would be for a reprise of the Progressive Party of 1912 (the "Bull Moose Party"), whose party platform of that year reads like it could have been written yesterday in how it diagnosed the ills in our society and the common sense remedies it proposed. In fact those remedies comprise the social reforms considered the best of the 20th century, from child labor laws to the 40-hr work week to the FDA. It was populist and pragmatic.
Sadly, the solid, honorable term "progressive" has been irretrievably tainted by what the Democratic Party has devolved into; it is freighted with overtones of transgenderism, victim hierarchies, and toxic veganism. Far from being the rallying cry for regular Americans who want their government to work for them, it is a shrieking, gibbering freakshow that sane people would rather euthanize than listen to.
Washington DC delenda est.