Ireland Is Set to Become the First Country to Completely Stop Funding Fossil Fuels
"At this stage, the bill still has to be signed into law after review. If it passes, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund would have to drop all investments in fossil fuel companies over the next five years.
This means public money would stop going towards energy juggernauts like Exxon. It would also bar the country from investing in fossil fuel companies in the future."
So I am ok with the Irish savings the world and making the Americans look bad, but the Aussies?!?! What's it going to take to shame us into figuring out how find behind we have fallen?
What the US can learn from Australia's innovative approach to grid transformation planning
Australia leads the world in distributed energy resource adoption. With a national average of 15% rooftop solar PV penetration, Australia’s consumers are more than twice as likely to have rooftop solar as the country with the second highest rooftop solar penetration rate (Belgium, 7%). Australia’s electric power industry is therefore likely to require regulatory and business model transformation much earlier than most other regions of the world. However, Australia is fortunate to have national agencies and trade organizations that were foresighted enough to sponsor a very thorough and deliberate process to make sure the grid adapts to these changes in a manner that is fair, minimizes costs to consumers, allows for more choice and control, and enables deep decarbonization.
Wait...a glimmer of hope? A bipartisan recognition that our economic future rests on the clean energy economy and not the fossil fuel economy? Is this our country? Has someone punked us?
Bipartisan Group of Governors to President Trump: Renewable Energy Is an ‘American Success Story’
"A coalition of eight Republican governors and 12 Democratic governors sent a letter to the White House yesterday, asking Trump to 'strengthen America's energy future' by extending government support for offshore wind, R&D, grid modernization and improved permitting for utility-scale renewables.
They pointed to the hundreds of thousands of jobs created in their states across the country -- from Arkansas to Kansas to California -- as evidence that renewables are providing a direct economic boost."
Unfortunately, this looks more like the America I know. Where in order to maintain the quality of life of one person, we have to sacrifice the lives of others.
From Appalachia To Standing Rock, Water Is Life
"Here in Appalachia, where our streams have been ravaged for decades by coal mining, we were eager for the same basic, common-sense water pollution protections that the rest of the country takes for granted. The Stream Protection Rule had been in the works for eight years, but in wiping it off the books last week using an arcane maneuver that the New York Times described as a 'legislative cudgel that has rarely been used,' Trump and the GOP again chose to side with polluters over people."
Sometimes, quite literally.
Cheap Eats, Cheap Labor: The Hidden Human Costs Of Those Lists
"This view of people of color as sources of 'cheap' labor bleeds into our restaurant culture: Immigrant food is often expected to be cheap, because, implicitly, the labor that produces it is expected to be cheap, because that labor has historically been cheap. And so pulling together a 'cheap eats' list rather than, say, an 'affordable eats' list both invokes that history and reinforces it by prioritizing price at the expense of labor."
Happy Friday!
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