If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Renewables outpace fossil fuels despite US policy shift: IEA (Laurent Thomet and Catherine Hours, 11/12/25, AFP)
Renewable energy is still expanding faster than fossil fuels around the world despite policy changes in the United States, with oil demand possibly peaking “around 2030”, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
Economics trumps ideology.
There’s a $10 Trillion Antidote to Trump’s Climate Backlash (Laura Millan, November 4, 2025, Bloomberg)
Annual energy transition investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, more than double the rate in 2020, according to research by BloombergNEF examining the deployment of net zero-aligned technologies and infrastructure.
Investment between 2014 and last year totalled $10.3 trillion, though the scope of the analysis has been widened since 2020 to capture additional categories. Spending on renewable energy alone hit a record in the first half, jumping 10% on the same period a year earlier.
Additions of clean power generation like solar and wind farms are finally beginning to catch accelerating demand for electricity, meaning carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector — the most significant man-made contributor to global warming — may have peaked last year and already be in decline, BNEF analysis suggests. That outlook could be challenged, however, if forecasts of continued stronger-than-anticipated demand for coal, oil and gas prove correct.Road transport emissions are on track to peak around 2029, and one in every four passenger vehicles sold this year will be a plug-in hybrid, a range-extended electric, or fully electric, the BNEF data shows. China, the source of almost 30% of all global emissions, has potentially already begun to lower its climate footprint from this year, after pollution growth slowed to less than 1% in 2024.
In a new assessment ahead of COP30 negotiations that begin Nov. 10, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change made its first ever forecast for total global emissions to decline, projecting a 10% reduction from 2019 levels by 2035.
Election Day Was a Win for the Climate (Sophie Hurwitz, 11/08/25, MoJo)
In races from New York to Georgia to Washington, voters backed funding renewables, reining in energy costs, and building out mass transit—and the people promising to deliver those policies. On the whole, the results suggest Americans are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back climate action.
“This election was a decisive rejection of the Trump Administration’s ban on clean energy, multimillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts for expensive dirtier energy sources like coal, and other ineffective proposals that will make costs go even higher,” Sara Schreiber of the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.
Don’t Tell Donald Trump, but Texas Is Deep Into Wind and Solar Power (Arcelia Martin, 11/05/25, MoJo)
Solar power has generated 45 terrawatt hours of electricity so far this year—50 percent more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021.
The availability of solar generation in ERCOT also has reduced the need for gas-fired generation during midday hours, according to the EIA. This energy production comes despite attempts by some Texas lawmakers earlier this year to restrict renewable development across the state.
For Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, ERCOT’s growing share of renewables shows that it’s the preferred resource type when an energy market is open, like Texas’ deregulated market.
“People are going to build solar and wind, and now battery storage, essentially as quickly as they possibly can,” Wamsted said. “It’s economic—it is what customers want.”
Renewables Are a Global Economic Engine, Not a Culture War Threat: Energy companies are learning this lesson faster than Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. (Mitch Andersonon, Sep 29, 2025, DeSmog)
While leaders like Premier Smith and President Trump may try to engage in a futile culture war in favour of fossil fuels, a more compelling force is simple economics. According to Ember, 91 percent of wind and solar installations deployed last year were cheaper than equivalent fossil fuel options. Even in the U.S. – currently riven by divisive politics – over 80 percent of new electrical capacity added in 2025 was solar with three quarters of those installations built in states that voted for Trump.China also sees this transition as a way to reduce strategic vulnerabilities to foreign oil imports, a sentiment that could soon become contagious around the world. Four fifths of the global population lives in countries that import fossil fuels. Replacing oil, coal and LNG imports with locally produced clean energy is not only cheaper but avoids risky supply chains that are expensive and challenging to defend.
For years oil enthusiasts have predicted that the Global South would provide the engine of future demand. China is upending that agenda by providing cheap reliable renewable technologies to countries like Mexico, Pakistan, and Malaysia. Almost two thirds of developing countries now use a greater proportion of renewables than the U.S. Imports of Chinese solar panels in Africa soared by 60 percent in the last year.
Will political rhetoric overpower economics around a new bitumen pipeline from Alberta? B.C. Premier David Eby is betting not, stating he is not categorically opposed to a privately funded project through his province – apparently confident that it will not happen given the pace of the global energy transition.
“There’s no money for it,” Eby told the CBC, clarifying that his opposition is against public funds being shoveled at a money-losing oil pipeline when many renewable projects are good to go. “We have major projects with private proponents, cash on the table, ready to go to hire people and build — let’s focus on those.”
The authors of the Ember report concur with Eby’s dim assessment of oil pipeline economics, warning, “For petrostates and others committed to expanding fossil fuel extraction, China’s clean energy progress raises questions about the long-term viability of fossil fuel expansion-led development plans.”
Economics trumps ideology.
Solar-powered electric plane unofficially sets new altitude record (David Szondy, August 26, 2025, New Atlas)
Another air record has been (unofficially) broken as a prop-driven solar/electric aircraft reached the highest altitude yet for its type. On August 12, 2025, a modified Elektra One reached 31,237 feet (9,521 m) in the skies over Switzerland.
How Big Agriculture Mislead the Public About the Benefits of Biofuels: Michael Grunwald on the Cascading Impact of Ethanol Production on Climate Change (Michael Grunwald, July 21, 2025, LitHub)
Searchinger’s spidey-sense kept tingling, though. His father, another question-everything guy, liked to quote H. L. Mencken: “For every complex human problem, there’s a solution that’s clear, simple and wrong.” That’s what ethanol felt like. And the more he thought about the study, the less he understood its conclusions.
Yes, corn soaked up carbon as it grew. But it soaked up just as much carbon whether it was grown for fuel or food! Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?
That led back to his original concern: If more corn was diverted from food to fuel, how would the lost food be replaced? Presumably, Midwest farmers would plant more corn, converting more wetlands into farmland that would get blasted with more chemicals. Again, he wasn’t focused on the climate impact, just the environmental impact of losing habitat and increasing pollution. But he had a hunch the Argonne researchers and their spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.
Has Maine learned how to make heat pumps lower electricity costs for all? (Sarah Shemkus, 14 May 2025, Canary Media)
Maine has been an aggressive adopter of home heat pumps in recent years. In 2019, the state set the goal of deploying 100,000 heat pumps by 2025, a target it blew by two years ahead of schedule. The state now aims to get another 175,000 heat pumps up and running by 2027. Maine is also a member of a five-state coalition that is collaborating to boost heat pump adoption, lower prices, and train installers throughout New England.
The state’s new energy-efficiency plan is geared toward continuing this progress. It is centered largely on the idea of “beneficial electrification,” a somewhat jargony term that refers to switching from fossil fuels to electricity wherever the move would save money and cut emissions. There are plenty of opportunities to make that swap in Maine, where roughly half of households keep warm with heating oil, which can be pricey and inefficient.
Over the next three years, the incentives in the plan are forecast to support 38,000 new whole-home residential heat pump systems — including 6,500 in low-income households — and weatherization for 9,900 houses. A low-income household can get rebates of up to $9,000 for heat pump installations, and homes at high income levels qualify for up to $3,000. The incentives do not offer any money for residential fossil-fuel-burning equipment.
This strategy should decrease annual heating costs by more than $1,000 each for homes that switch to heat pumps from oil, propane, or electric baseboard heat, but it is also expected to lower electricity prices across the board, Stoddard said. Efficiency Maine Trust estimates the plan will suppress electricity rates by more than $490 million over the long term.
Driverless freight trucks begin barreling through Texas (Abhimanyu Ghoshal, May 02, 2025, New Atlas)
The next time you spot a long-haul truck on the I-45, crane your neck to see if there’s anyone in the driver’s seat. If it’s empty, it’s all thanks to Aurora.The Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle tech startup has just launched its self-driving trucking service in Texas, starting with deliveries between Dallas and Houston. The company’s driverless tech suite has already covered more than 1,200 miles (1,930 km) on public roads.
Farmers are making bank harvesting a new crop: Solar energy: In California’s water-stressed Central Valley, farmers are fallowing land and installing solar, providing financial stability and saving water (Matt Simon, Apr 30, 2025, Grist)
Around the world, farmers are retooling their land to harvest the hottest new commodity: sunlight. As the price of renewable energy technology has plummeted and water has gotten more scarce, growers are fallowing acreage and installing solar panels. Some are even growing crops beneath them, which is great for plants stressed by too many rays. Still others are letting that shaded land go wild, providing habitat for pollinators and fodder for grazing livestock.
According to a new study, this practice of agrisolar has been quite lucrative for farmers in California’s Central Valley over the last 25 years — and for the environment. Researchers looked at producers who had idled land and installed solar, using the electricity to run equipment like water pumps and selling the excess power to utilities.
On average, that energy savings and revenue added up to $124,000 per hectare (about 2.5 acres) each year, 25 times the value of using the land to grow crops.