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In February, the Obama administration announced its so-called Clean Energy Investment Initiative, a program that was seeking to generate $2 billion in commitments from the private sector to help spur clean energy innovation.
Just four months later, it seems, investors have willingly answered the call twice over amid rebounding interest in renewable energy.
The Obama administration said today that a collection of philanthropic groups, universities, and for-profit institutions have committed $4 billion to invest in clean energy. These are investments that might not fit in the average investor's portfolio. Instead, the money will fund things like solar, wind, and fuel cell technology, the type of potentially transformative innovation that all too often never sees the light of day because funding dries up.
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by Nesh on Thursday June 18 2015, @07:32AM
That's why fuel prices in europe are so much higher than in us, and that has been the case for decades.
While individual ICE are cleaner and leaner, this hasn't led to decreases in total emissions, on the contrary.
Traffic volumes just go up and up and up ..
Switches to alternative energy sources for transportation are still rare.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday June 18 2015, @02:52PM
I would argue that it is working; technology is catching up.
The major distinction is that Europe heavily taxes transportation fuel. This encourages more fuel efficient vehicles, or alternate energy vehicles. Both of these attributes are relatively popular in Europe compared to the USA. There is additionally more mass transit options - although mass transit beyond buses is a massive government undertaking that I would argue can only be started by a population lacking cars inherently - a different conversation.
Europe does pay more for electricity; however the nature of utilities does obscure my original argument, and I'm not particularly knowledgeable on Europe's electricity makeup. Off the top of my head I know France pulls a lot of power from nuclear power, while Germany for years lead the world in solar innovation (recently outpaced by China, and government subsidies are a large factor).