I am quoting here. I always try to stay positive and I know regular readers find that hard to believe because I have been saying for awhile that Human’s will go extinct. Still I like to think that my Stepson Gus, and my nieces and nephews like Taylor and Cory will have pleasant lives of their own. I hope that their kids will too. So here is an article that spreads some of that positivity.

This article is from last year but, spread the old news, same as the new news.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1042973/climate-change-action-progress-clean-energy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Some Good News On Climate Change – We’re no longer totally f$%@ed. appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

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Go There or be square. More next week.

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The post Springfield Announces Earth Awareness Fair – I have mixed feelings appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.envmatters.org/loc/Mar_15_2019_Youth_Climate_Strike.html

Youth Climate Strike

March 15, 2019

(Pictures Below!)

While the government and a majority of the adults piss away the future reveling in their short-term goals and lives, the youth are protesting and striking the prospects of a very bleak future left as legacy by mainly the powers that be who have ignored the climate crisis for over 50 years.  Scientists world-wide have warned us and warned us that now we have only about 11 years left to truly embark on a road to zero carbon emissions because of the very real threat of global warming, death to species and oceans, and permafrost melting, leading to the release of many ancient diseases and the heat up of the atmosphere leading to crop failure, sea level rise, and billions of deaths in our near future and a collapse of the ecosystem that supports all life on this planet.

What the youth demand is at least a Green New Deal or an honest effort by the leaders to truly take on the problem of global warming.  The need to do so has never been more urgent.  There are also some among us adults that stand with our youth and are in solidarity with their efforts to strike from going to school until the leaders listen to the truly educated.

Chicago Youth for Climate Action

NBC News on US Youth Climate Strike March 15 2019

Youth Climate Strike US

Sunrise Movement

Extinction Rebellion Chicago

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Go there and look. Pictures only. More next week.

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The post More About Our Wonderful Children – Complete with pictures appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez

The Green New Deal, explained

An insurgent movement is pushing Democrats to back an ambitious climate change solution.

If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.

The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party claims to accept and understand it.

It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change.

Their last big plan — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — passed the House in 2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since then, there’s been nothing to replace it.

Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution — renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.

Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND) — a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s — and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past few months:

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Go there and READ. More next week.

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The post Green New Deal Kicks Ass – Young Dems strike early and strike hard appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Construction-begins-on-largest-utility-scale-12507169.php

Construction begins on largest utility-scale solar project in Texas

By Ryan Maye Handy

Updated 10:15 am CST, Friday, January 19, 2018

California-based 174 Power Global is breaking ground Thursday on the largest utility-scale solar project in Texas, the company said.

The project is on 1,500 acres of private land in Pecos County, in West Texas, and area that has become a hub of utility-scale solar projects. It’s 236 megawatt capacity can power 50,000 homes a year, and all of its power will be sold to Austin Energy, a utility for the city of Austin. The project will cost $260 million.

174 Power Global is a subsidiary of South Korea’s Hanwha Energy.  174 Power Global has focused on developing solar projects on land without competing interests. The project in Pecos County, for instance, has not oil and gas development and the salinity of the property’s water prevents it from being used for livestock or agriculture.

RELATED: Solar power emerges where oil and gas once dominated

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post 50,000 Homes Powered By Solar In Texas – If we would have done this this 30 years ago appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

The post Nothing Struck Me This Week – So I am taking this week off appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

Home

So here is one version of the story.

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2018/01/96772-residents-move-americas-first-solar-powered-town

“Families are starting to move into what is being called America’s first solar-powered town,” announces John Dickerson for CBS This Morning on Jan. 16. “Babcock Ranch, about half an hour northeast of Fort Myers, Florida, is supposed to produce more energy than it consumes once it’s finished.”

Developer Syd Kitson is building 20,000 homes for a projected 50,000 people, states Dickerson in the newscast video accompanying the article.

There are more than 300,000 solar panels spread across 440 acres there, producing enough electricity not only for the town, but also the surrounding areas, reports CBS News’ Manuel Bojorquez.

One critical energy element lacking in the solar-powered community will be adequate energy storage to allow the city to be truly self-powered:

The town doesn’t run on solar power all the time. At night, when the sun is down, it has to draw from the traditional electrical grid. Kitson says the technology for storing all that surplus energy the solar cells generate during the day is still too costly.

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Go There. I mean literally go there if you can. If not go there and read. More next week.

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The post Life Without Fossil Fuels – This is what it looks like appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.thelocal.ch/20170521/swiss-vote-for-gradual-nuclear-phaseout-preliminary-results/

Swiss vote for gradual nuclear phaseout

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post The Swiss Endorse Renewable Energy – If a land locked mountainous country can do it appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

http://www.caranddriver.com/best-hybrid-electric-cars

Hybrid and Electric Cars 2017-2018: The Best and the Rest

• Starting at

  $21,035

  Take the uninspired underpinnings of the Toyota Yaris and mix with it an even less powerful version of the Prius hybrid powertrain and you get the Prius C.

• 

  Honda CR-Z

  The Editors’ Rating summarizes a vehicle’s overall degree of excellence and is determined by our editors, who evaluate hundreds of vehicles every year and consider numerous factors both objective and subjective.

  Editors’ Rating
• Starting at

  $21,130

  The CR-Z is an ambitious attempt at making a sporty hybrid, but its performance doesn’t match its adventurous styling.

• 

  Hyundai Ioniq

  The Editors’ Rating summarizes a vehicle’s overall degree of excellence and is determined by our editors, who evaluate hundreds of vehicles every year and consider numerous factors both objective and subjective.

  Editors’ Rating
• Starting at

  $23,035

  Sharing its underpinnings with the Kia Niro, the Hyundai Ioniq is a hybrid in many flavors.

• 

  Mitsubishi i-MiEV

  The Editors’ Rating summarizes a vehicle’s overall degree of excellence and is determined by our editors, who evaluate hundreds of vehicles every year and consider numerous factors both objective and subjective.

  Editors’ Rating

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Go there and think. More next week.

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The post Environmentally Friendly Cars – I suppose it depends on what you mean by friendly appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-extinction-is-not-the-problem/

Rethinking extinction

by Stewart Brand

The idea that we are edging up to a mass extinction is not just wrong – it’s a recipe for panic and paralysis

The way the public hears about conservation issues is nearly always in the mode of ‘[Beloved Animal] Threatened With Extinction’. That makes for electrifying headlines, but it misdirects concern. The loss of whole species is not the leading problem in conservation. The leading problem is the decline in wild animal populations, sometimes to a radical degree, often diminishing the health of whole ecosystems.

Viewing every conservation issue through the lens of extinction threat is simplistic and usually irrelevant. Worse, it introduces an emotional charge that makes the problem seem cosmic and overwhelming rather than local and solvable. It’s as if the entire field of human medicine were treated solely as a matter of death prevention. Every session with a doctor would begin: ‘Well, you’re dying. Let’s see if we can do anything to slow that down a little.’

Medicine is about health. So is conservation. And as with medicine, the trends for conservation in this century are looking bright. We are re-enriching some ecosystems we once depleted and slowing the depletion of others. Before I explain how we are doing that, let me spell out how exaggerated the focus on extinction has become and how it distorts the public perception of conservation.

Many now assume that we are in the midst of a human-caused ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ to rival the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But we’re not. The five historic mass extinctions eliminated 70 per cent or more of all species in a relatively short time. That is not going on now. ‘If all currently threatened species were to go extinct in a few centuries and that rate continued,’ began a recent Nature magazine introduction to a survey of wildlife losses, ‘the sixth mass extinction could come in a couple of centuries or a few millennia.’

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Quick not: He favors Nuclear Power

Go there and read. More next week.

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