What will keep the lights on?

Look into the future — it’s a very sparse and dirty place. It might also be very dark.   The few remaining humans will all live at the tops of major mountains, trying to grow things in the rock. Some made it to the Arctic, but it’s hard to live in such extreme latitudes where the sun doesn’t even shine for months out of the year. The remaining humans can’t figure out exactly what happened. So many animals and plants have gone extinct, there is little to eat and no medicine, no electricity and no power. There has been a great culling of humans and animals on planet Earth and along with them went the ability to communicate over distances. There are no governments, and no countries remain. Borders are meaningless. After the final resource wars, countries descended into chaos and humans scattered over the horizon . . . .

This is our potential future unless we get a handle on global warming very soon.  That’s not likely without strong national leadership. So, I’m hoping that President Obama will talk about climate change and new energy and green jobs in tonight’s State of the Union speech. We had such high hopes that he would act decisively on global warming, and it’s been a year already!

Alternative energy like wind and solar are making big development strides, but are not being implemented fast enough.  The U.S. needs a huge infusion of stimulus money and work into building new transmission lines.   The news on wind overall is good though:

Issuing its end-of-year report, the American Wind Energy Association said the industry installed nearly 10,000 megawatts of new capacity during the year, growing at an annual rate of 39%. The U.S. now has a total of 35,000 megawatts of wind energy installed, enough to light and power 9.7 million homes and the equivalent of removing 62 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and taking 10.5 million cars off the road.

Though the industry avoided a predicted 50% decline in domestic wind turbine manufacturing because of the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus and the Obama administration’s commitment to clean energy job creation, AWEA CEO Denise Bode said a stronger federal policy on renewable energy is needed to keep manufacturing robust.

From Climate Progress.

Where does Bill Gates come in?

Science magazine dropped this bombshell today, “Bill Gates Funding Geoengineering Research,” which perhaps illuminates everything Gates has said and done:

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has been supporting a wide array of research on geoengineering since 2007, ScienceInsider has learned. The world’s richest man has provided at least $4.5 million of his own money over 3 years for the study of methods that could alter the stratosphere to reflect solar energy, techniques to filter carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and brighten ocean clouds. But Gates’s money has not funded any field [...]