As the image above suggests, the enormity of slowing climate change can feel overwhelming. Yet there is so much we CAN do. In my case, I decided to spend my savings in order to have solar panels installed on my roof. I live in the northern Catskills, NY where winter can be cold and snowy, and the past six months saw the solar panels covered by snow much of the time. Yet looking at the app on my phone showing how much power is being produced, I discovered that in the last six months, my solar panels have saved 1 ton of CO2! Check it out!
If 14 million homes installed solar panels, reducing 14 million tons of carbon in six wintery months, imagine multiplying this reduction by at least three times in the summer. What are the consequences of making this effort?
Our World in Data discusses the enormity of this challenge,
To prevent severe climate change we need to rapidly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The world emits around 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year [measured in carbon dioxide equivalents(CO2eq)].1
To figure out how we can most effectively reduce emissions and what emissions can and can’t be eliminated with current technologies, we need to first understand where our emissions come from.
Even though our individual efforts seem small, a significant contribution of 14 million homes installing solar panels can make a big dent in reducing emissions. We’re all in this together. If we each do our part, we could wipe out the need for fossil fuels in no time.
And here is Greta Thunberg doing much more than most of us, and doing it well.
Penguin House announces The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg
“I have decided to use my platform to create a book based on the current best available science—a book that covers the climate, ecological and sustainability crises holistically,” Thunberg said in a statement. “Because the climate crisis is, of course, only a symptom of a much larger sustainability crisis. My hope is that this book might be some kind of go-to source for understanding these different, closely interconnected crises.”
Getting back to solar and what we can do to help restore a healthy climate, inThe Guardian, an article written by John Vidal quotes Energy efficiency guru Armory Lovins on insulating and using solar energy: ‘It’s the largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest way to address the crisis.’
Temperatures dropped far below freezing this week in Snowmass, Colorado. But Amory Lovins, who lives high up in the mountains at 7,200ft above sea level, did not even turn on the heating.
That’s because he has no heating to turn on. His home, a great adobe and glass mountainside eyrie that he designed in the 1980s, collects solar energy and is so well insulated that he grows and harvests bananas and many other tropical fruits there without burning gas, oil or wood.
Nicknamed the “Einstein of energy efficiency”, Lovins, an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has been one of the world’s leading advocates and innovators of energy conservation for 50 years. He wrote his first paper on climate change while at Oxford in 1968, and in 1976 he offered Jimmy Carter’s government a blueprint for how to triple energy efficiency and get off oil and coal
within 40 years. In the years since there is barely a major industry or government that he and his Rocky Mountain Institute have not advised.
Lovins insists that the answers to climate adaptation come from designing insulation and renewables. Even the war in Ukraine may turn out to be good for the climate by accelerating the switch to renewable energy. Speaking about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Loving said,
“He has managed to bring about all the outcomes that he most feared, but he may inadvertently have put the energy transition and climate solutions into a higher gear. Whether or not we end up in a recession because of the disruption, [Putin’s war] may prove to be a great thing for climate economics.” As it happens, Lovins has family connections to Ukraine: …He has one relative left there; the rest, as far as he knows, were murdered in the 1941 massacre of Tarashcha, when a Jewish population of nearly 14,000 was slaughtered by the Nazis, leaving just 11 people who happened to be off in the woods gathering mushrooms that day.
Loving believes that the climate solution exists in design.
…the problem today is not where to find energy but how to use it better, he says. The answer is what he calls “integrative, or whole-system, design,” a way to employ orthodox engineering to achieve radically more energy-efficient results by changing the design logic.
His home is one example of using design to save over 90% of construction, heat, water and cooling expenses. He also designed a carbon-fiber vehicle.
Lovins’ most spectacular early success may have been his 1991 Hypercar concept, an all-electric, carbon-fibre-body vehicle that could do 300 miles to the gallon. It was dismissed at the time but all carmakers are now moving that way.
He also dismisses nuclear as not practical.
“When you have a climate and energy emergency, like now, you need to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to buy the most efficient solution. Far better to deploy fast, inexpensive and sure technologies like wind or solar than one that is slow to build, speculative and very costly. Anything else makes climate change worse than it needs to be.”
He demolishes the technology with statistics. “In 2020 the world added 0.4 gigawatts more nuclear capacity than it retired, whilst the world added 278 gigawatts of renewables – that’s a 782-fold greater capacity. Renewables swelled supply and displaced carbon as much every 38 hours as nuclear did all year. Where nuclear is cheap, renewables are cheaper still and efficiency is cheaper than that. There is no new type or size or fuel cycle of reactor that will change this. Do the maths. It is game over.”
The most energy-inefficient design of all, he says, may be nuclear power, which is heavily subsidised, costly and pushed by a politically powerful lobby. Using it to address shortages of electricity or to counter climate change, he argues, is like offering starving people rice and caviar when it’s far cheaper and easier to give just rice.
On a lighter note, Lovins states what we all can do.
Only half jokingly he urges a mass movement to knit millions of cheery yellow and blue woolly hats. That, and people turning down their thermostats by two or three degrees would save billions of cubic metres of gas.
Armory Lovins’ voice has a strong message for each of us to make a difference in combatting climate change. The full article is here.
And here is your climate-saving calendar for April.