Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse have all collectively published the following in quite a fe online blog and news sources, America must not back down on sustainable energy. It is important because we need to keep talking about alternatives even amongst the seemingly dire news about our environment and the news that neighboring Countries are attempting to thwart our environmental standards.
If you read just the headlines these days, you might think renewable energy in America is going the way of Solyndra. Don't take our word for it: A recent headline from Fox News declared "ENTIRE Solar Industry on Brink of Collapse."
We cannot allow long-time opponents of renewable energy to focus the discussion only on Solyndra (whose higher-priced panels could not compete as solar costs came down) when we should be thinking about competing with China to win the next energy revolution. Why? Because the race is on to put the right policies in place so hundreds of thousands of new, well-paying renewable energy jobs will be created here, and not in China. With Bloomberg New Energy Finance reporting that for the first time ever, global investments in renewable electricity have exceeded investments in fossil fuel power plants, the question is not whether renewable energy is creating jobs; it is which country is going to lead the clean energy jobs revolution. We want it to be America.
The truth is we can win this race. The American solar energy industry is thriving, as is the renewable energy industry more broadly. Just look at the facts: We have doubled the number of solar jobs in America since 2009, and today more than 100,000 Americans work in the solar industry, at more than 5,000 companies in every single state. These include manufacturing, installation, and supply chain jobs.
Last year, we installed nearly 1,000 megawatts (MW) of solar power in the United States, more than double the amount installed in 2009. With the solar industry growing at a rate of 69 percent annually, it is one of America's fastest growing industries, and is creating jobs all across the country. The cost of solar panels has fallen 30 percent over just the last two years, continuing a long-term decline in the price of solar.
more at Grist
And there is a good reason to be optimistic, innovations keep coming when it comes to solar energy...
Breakthrough could double solar energy output
A new discovery from a chemist at the University of Texas at Austin may allow photovoltaic solar cells to double their efficiency, thus providing loads more electrical power from regular sunlight.
Not only that, but it’s way cheap. Chemistry professor Xiaoyang Zhu and his team discovered that an organic plastic semiconductor could double the number of electrons harvested out of one photon of sunlight. Yep, plastic.
An issue with regular photovoltaic panels is that much of the energy delivered by sunlight comes in the form of “hot” electrons, which are too high-energy to be converted to electricity in silicon and are instead lost as heat. For that reason, the max insolation-to-electricity efficiency of a silicon solar cell used today is considered to be about 31%. Capturing those hot electrons could boost it to 66%.
Now this most certainly is not my expertise but I do know that this is not the first breakthrough to grace the pages of Daily Kos. And just recently there have been other interesting pieces about solar and its capabilities to power our planets energy needs.
Could the desert sun power the world?, probably not, but it could power a great deal of the areas energy and if done properly, be in collaboration with the region's people rather than exploitive.
We need to keep fighting for jobs, for innovation and for sanity, fighting the naysayers at every turn. We need more leaders like Jerry Brown who is not afraid to call the insanity out for what it is. Sure, the manufactured denial is convenient for some and then you have the true believers, those who have bought the propaganda as gospel.
Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown kicked off his high-profile climate conference Thursday with a blistering attack on libertarians, the Republican party and others who deny that climate change is under way, despite overwhelming scientific consensus that sea levels are rising and the Earth is warming.
Brown convened about 250 business and energy policy leaders to "Extreme Climate Risks and California's Future," a one-day conference at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The conference focused partly on how the state can prepare for the economic and human affects of climate change.
In his opening remarks, Brown ripped Republicans in Congress for inaction on national climate change legislation.
"We have an entire political party who has a doctrine of absolute denial," said Brown, who was wearing a green tie. "All the denial in the world doesn't change the facts that greenhouse gases are building up. The main thing we have to deal with in climate change is the skepticism, the denial and the cultlike behavior of the political lemmings that would take us over the cliff."
We need to keep talking, we must push back on the stupidity and we have to support Politicians that support renewable energy. American jobs that puts the old thinking out to pasture, we can take solar and wind to a new level, create jobs, cut our dependency on dirty fossil fuels and at the same time save millions on health care costs, pollution and all the other by products of a carbon based energy system.
And what about our ailing energy grid? Imagine how many people we could put to work in upgrading our infrastructure in order to support this new energy?
Thank you to the senators willing to speak out on behalf of Solar and Brown for calling out obstructionist for delaying important legislation that could be moving us forward rather than keeping us stuck in the 1980's when Reagan declared that, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles".