Here Comes the Sun (continued)

Revisiting the Al Gore article in Rolling Stone and its section on solar energy: after noting the faster than anyone expected progress in technology (including battery storage) he described the response by the Koch Brothers and others whose investment in the fossil fuel grid is threatened by decentralized clean energy.  They're pouring money into the states--and into their made men in office--to impose extra taxes on solar panels, for instance.  They've had some success in their puppet state legislatures.  But according to Gore, not so much with voters:

But here is more good news: The Koch brothers are losing rather badly. In Kansas, their home state, a poll by North Star Opinion Research reported that 91 percent of registered voters support solar and wind. Three-quarters supported stronger policy encouragement of renewable energy, even if such policies raised their electricity bills.

In Georgia, the Atlanta Tea Party joined forces with the Sierra Club to form a new organization called – wait for it – the Green Tea Coalition, which promptly defeated a Koch-funded scheme to tax rooftop solar panels.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, after the state's largest utility, an ALEC member, asked the public-utility commission for a tax of up to $150 per month for solar households, the opposition was fierce and well-organized. A compromise was worked out – those households would be charged just $5 per month – but Barry Goldwater Jr., the leader of a newly formed organization called TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar won't be Killed), is fighting a new attempt to discourage rooftop solar in Arizona. Characteristically, the Koch brothers and their allies have been using secretive and deceptive funding in Arizona to run television advertisements attacking "greedy" owners of rooftop solar panels – but their effort has thus far backfired, as local journalists have exposed the funding scam."

Clean energy has already spurred innovation, and as Gore and President Obama keep insisting, clean energy is the global industry of the future.  It can no longer be strangled in the cradle as for years it seemed it was going to be.  It's too far along all over the world, and all across North America.  It's going to look like computer tech does now--unimaginable a few decades ago, now unimaginable to be without it.  Economic as well as moral leadership are at stake right now.

Enough raw energy reaches the Earth from the sun in one hour to equal all of the energy used by the entire world in a full year, Gore writes, and I just heard something similar on Cosmos.  If we recover just a fraction of that energy for use, civilization can have all the energy it could ever need without polluting the atmosphere.

Update: News of a "breakthrough in solar panel manufacture that could promise cheap energy within a decade."  Another story about it here.

Getting to that point--producing abundant energy without greenhouse gas pollution--while pursuing innovative solutions to the problems resulting from the effects of the climate crisis, and ramping up even more ways to address the causes of the climate crisis with clean energy tech, maybe carbon capture etc.--will drive the economy of the future, starting now.

Those who claim that addressing the causes and effects of the climate crisis are only economic burdens and drains on the economy, are merely repeating truisms that are no longer true.  Even relatively conservative changes that would result in lower greenhouse gases pollution would grow the world economy, according to a new report by the World Bank.  Not exactly a far left organization.  

As this article in the Guardian notes, there are plenty of studies showing how economically devastating it would be to NOT address the climate crisis, or to significantly delay addressing it.  Now studies are emerging that make a positive case for economic growth from addressing it.  This is even before the true economic costs and benefits are added to the conventional and unreal assumptions of economics that never figures in the costs in health or environmental degradation and hence the future support for human life and civilization.