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Earth911 Conscious-Shopping Guide: Best Solar Panels

by anunturigratuiteautoro Posted on May 14, 2019

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Technological advances have transformed the solar energy industry in recent years. Solar panels are significantly more efficient, producing more power in the same amount of space. Meanwhile, prices continue to fall, reducing the cost of solar electricity.

But with the introduction of new technologies comes uncertainty. Which solar panels are the most reliable and durable? What technology creates the least amount of pollution in the manufacturing process? Let’s explore some of these critical issues in the pursuit of the best solar panels on the market.

Solar Panel Considerations

Efficiency

Solar panels have become significantly more efficient in recent years. And the more efficient a solar panel is, the more energy can be generated in a given space. Space becomes more critical when there are constraints due to the size or your roof or property. Unfortunately, more efficient panels typically cost more. If space isn’t an issue, efficiency becomes less crucial. For installations limited by space, panel efficiency is an important consideration. It is also important to consider the long-term efficiency of solar modules.

Long-Term Power Generation

Like most other things, solar panels degrade over time. They become less efficient in turning sunlight into electricity. This is important because solar panels can last 30 years and you want your solar system to be churning out a lot of energy a couple of decades from now, even if someone else owns the home.

Solar panel manufacturers offer a power production guarantee to ensure a certain level of output over a given time. Many solar panel manufacturers provide a guarantee of 90 percent production for 10 years and 80 percent for 25 years.

Some manufacturers differentiate themselves by offering stronger warranties. SunPower, for example, leads the industry by offering a 92 percent performance guarantee for 25 years. The higher the value of the 25-year production warranty, the more power the panels will generate 25 years down the road.

Product Warranties

Product warranties cover defects and failures. Solar panel warranties vary a lot by the manufacturer. SunPower, LG, and Solaria all offer a 25-year warranty, whereas Trina offers just a 10-year warranty. The longer the warranty, the lower the investment risk. In many cases, a more extended product warranty means higher solar panel prices.

Environmental Performance

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) is dedicated to a safe and sustainable solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. They produce a solar scorecard that rates manufacturers on extended producer responsibility, supply chain, workers rights, emissions reporting, module toxicity, greenhouse gas emissions, conflict minerals, and water use. The companies with the highest ratings are the most sustainable.

Solar Panel Module Testing

Look for DNV GL test results. The company tests solar panels for reliability and durability for common degradation mechanisms. Solar panel performance has a huge impact on the solar electricity of an array over time. Such testing helps ensure high-quality panels, reducing financial risk.

DMV GL produces a list of top-performing PV panels that lead in product reliability.

Manufacturing Location

Most solar panels are manufactured in Asia, Europe, or North America. Modules that are made in the United States tend to be more expensive. But some solar shoppers want to support domestic manufacturing. Many companies produce panels in two or three countries. For example, SunPower products are made in the United States, the Philippines, and Mexico. Keep in mind that the manufacturing location and the company’s headquarters are not necessarily the same. Also, the manufacturing location isn’t necessarily an indication of quality. Panels that are manufactured closer to the installation site might have lower emissions related to transportation of the product. 

Top Solar Panels Comparison Chart

We compared the efficiency, warranty, environmental performance, and more of the following solar panel models in the comparison chart below. 

  1. SunPower X22
  2. Trina Solar TSM
  3. Hanwha Q CELLS Q.Peak Duo
  4. REC Solar N-Peak
  5. LG Electronics NeON R
  6. Solaria PowerXT
  7. Adani Solar ASP-7-AAA

To view our printable comparison chart of top solar panels on the market, click the image below.

A Dynamic Industry

At times, supply delays and surpluses have plagued the solar industry. For example, China slashed solar subsidies for domestic solar installations in May 2018. This move created a lag in demand, causing a surplus of solar panels and falling prices across the industry. Thankfully, this surplus supply has helped offset the impact of the U.S. solar tariff that was recently enacted.

Because solar panel technology is advancing, the market is very dynamic. New products are frequently being released as others become obsolete. The most efficient solar panels on the market today will probably not seem so efficient in a decade as the technology matures. Companies that are relatively unknown could capture a larger share of the market.

 

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Earth911 Conscious-Shopping Guide: Best Solar Panels

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Trump’s Tax Cut Plan Will… Pay… For… Itself!

by TabathaMilam Posted on April 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Back during Steve Mnuchin’s confirmation hearings for Treasury Secretary, he said he was surprised that IRS staffing had gone down. This just reduces the number of audits they can perform, and therefore the amount of tax revenue they collect from high earners. Just think about it. If you increased hiring, it would pay for itself!

It was très adorbs. But Mnuchin is a quick learner, and he never brought that subject up again. Instead, he’s now talking about a much more acceptable kind of plan that pays for itself. The subject, of course, is tax cuts:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the economic growth that would result from the proposed tax cuts would be so extreme — close to $2 trillion over 10 years — that it would come close to recouping all of the lost revenue from the dramatic rate reductions. Some other new revenue would come from eliminating certain tax breaks, although he would not specify which ones.

“The plan will pay for itself with growth,” Mnuchin said at an event hosted by the Institute of International Finance.

The Congressional Budget Office will have a very different take on this, and their take is the only one that matters. So why does Mnuchin even bother with this tired old charade? Maybe so that Donald Trump can yell and scream about how the CBO is rigged when they say that his tax plan is a deficit buster? Maybe to give congressional Republicans an excuse to fire Keith Hall and install a new CBO director who will give them whatever numbers they want?

Who knows? Maybe it’s just reflex. While we wait to find out, however, here’s a chart showing income tax receipts following the five most recent big changes to tax rates. You can decide for yourself if tax cuts pay for themselves or if tax increases tank the economy.

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Trump’s Tax Cut Plan Will… Pay… For… Itself!

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Donald Trump Knows Nothing About His Own Businesses

by PreciousBlubaugh Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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With only 14 days left before Election Day, it hardly feels worth it to highlight Donald Trump’s latest public declaration of ignorance, but I have another point to make about today’s Trump Follies. Here is Donald on Obamacare:

Well, I don’t use much Obamacare, I must be honest with you, because it is so bad for the people and they can’t afford it. And like, for instance, I’m at Trump National Doral in Miami, and we don’t even use Obamacare. We don’t want it. The people don’t want it, and I spend more money on health coverage, but we don’t use it.

The obvious point to make is that Trump obviously has no idea what Obamacare is. He’s apparently under the impression that it’s some kind of option that employers can choose as group insurance for their employees. Ha ha. What an idiot.

And that’s true enough. But did you notice something else? Once again, Trump has made it clear that he has no idea how his own businesses are run. This is hardly the first time, either. As near as I can tell, Trump’s job as CEO of the Trump Organization is to (a) watch a lot of TV, (b) appear on a lot of TV, (c) make command decisions about what kind of marble to use in the bathrooms, and (d) threaten to sue people who get in his way. Beyond that, he appears to play no real role in running things.

This explains, for example, his promise last year to release his tax returns. He made that promise because he had no idea what was in them. It was only later, when someone on his finance team apparently pointed out what they contained, that he reneged on his promise. It also explains his frequent business failures. He was in love with the Plaza Hotel but had no idea what it was worth or how to run it. He loved the idea of owning an airline but had no clue about the shuttle market. He loved the casino business, but was entirely ignorant about casino operations. He loves to play golf, but doesn’t understand the business of golf. Etc. He’s spent his whole life diddling around in businesses that seemed interesting, but without knowing anything about them or understanding how to run them.

His presidential campaign is the same thing. He thought it sounded neat to run for president but had no interest in how campaigns are actually run. If he ever became president, it would be more of the same. He’d run the country the way he runs his golf courses: making windswept exits from helicopters to deliver grand statements, and then quickly losing all interest. At best, things would toddle along without catastrophe if he picked decent people to run things. At worst, he’d pick fellow con men who would embroil him in endless scandals that made Teapot Dome look like a child’s lark.

Luckily, we’ll never have to find out.

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Donald Trump Knows Nothing About His Own Businesses

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Donald Trump Promised to Release a List of His Creditors. We’re Still Waiting.

by JoanW10cgjdlk Posted on October 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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During the first presidential debate, moderator Lester Holt asked Donald Trump about his refusal to release his tax returns, explaining that part of “the reason nominees have released their returns for decades” is so voters can determine if a potential president’s debts reveal any conflicts of interest. “Don’t Americans have a right to know if there are any conflicts of interest?” Holt asked. Trump brushed the question off, saying that “you don’t learn that much from tax returns.” (As the New York Times reported this weekend, just a few pages of Trump’s tax records from 1995 reveal that the GOP nominee may not have paid federal income taxes for 18 years.) He claimed that the personal financial disclosures he had already filed with the Federal Election Commission provided a more detailed overview of his finances, though those records do not reveal income, tax rates, charitable donations, and loan interest payments. “But,” Trump told Holt, “I could give you a list of banks, I would—if that would help you, I would give you a list of banks. These are very fine institutions, very fine banks. I could do that very quickly.”

Mother Jones has been trying to determine Trump’s full roster of creditors, so we immediately contacted his campaign to request the list Trump offered. A week later, we’re still waiting.

Even without the release his tax returns—a standard practice for presidential candidates since the Nixon era—it is clear that should he reach the White House he would face significant conflicts of interest due to his complex business interests. His personal financial disclosure report provides an incomplete view of his finances. Filed in May, the form lists 16 loans that are valued in vague ranges that make it impossible to determine the total amount he owes. For instance, five of Trump’s loans are valued at $50 million or more (the FEC doesn’t require anything more specific). According to this disclosure, Trump owes a minimum of $315 million. But the real amount appears to be much higher. A search of property records throughout the United States shows that those 16 loans are valued, conservatively, at $675 million.

His financial disclosure forms likely do not reveal the full scope of his intricate finances. As the New York Times reported in August, Trump has invested in partnerships that owe nearly $2 billion—loans, including one from the Bank of China, that are not identified within his personal financial disclosure. Trump’s representatives told the Times that Trump would not be liable for those loans, but because he is an investor in the buildings used as collateral for these loans, his investments are certainly linked to the loans.

And Trump’s most recent financial disclosure is already out of date. For instance, Trump reported to the FEC in May that he owed UBS Real Estate, a subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant, between $5 million and $25 million in connection with a loan for commercial property at New York City’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. But Trump no longer has this loan. According to New York City property records, the loan was for $7 million, and his company paid it off with a new $7 million loan from a much smaller lender named Ladder Capital Finance. Trump’s history of failed deals and repeated bankruptcies has made him persona non grata with many of the world’s top banks, forcing him to rely on smaller institutions such as Ladder Capital. According to public documents, Trump currently owes Ladder Capital at least $275 million.

Ladder Capital specializes in packaging loans into larger portfolios that are eventually sold off to other lenders. This is significant because it would be important to know exactly who owns Trump’s debt—a potential source of leverage over a commander-in-chief. Tax returns would reveal to whom Trump is paying interest. It would be a small step forward in transparency, if the Trump campaign issues a list of his creditors. But the full scope of his finances—and his creditors—will not be known unless he releases his tax returns.

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Donald Trump Promised to Release a List of His Creditors. We’re Still Waiting.

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Minimalism 101: 5 Ways to Simplify Your Life

by MarianaG59 Posted on September 18, 2016

Do you try to keep extraneous items and clutter to a minimum? Do you avoid purchasing new items unless you absolutely need them? Do you focus on quality over quantity and believe that every item you own should be used regularly and have a proper place and purpose in your life? If so, you may be a minimalist.

Minimalism is a big trend among health and wellness gurus, and its catching on throughout the world. In a nutshell, minimalists livewell, minimally. They believe in owning only completely necessary possessions, decorating lightly and purchasing consciously. However, theres more to minimalism than simply clearing out your closet.

You can apply the tenets of minimalism to many different aspects of your life. Here are a few areas where you may want to consider downsizing:

Finances

Its trueyou can be a minimalist with your finances. In fact, embodying minimalism in the financial sense closely resembles spending the way everyone did about 60 years ago: with cash. To simplify your finances, make sure to avoid using credit cards. Pay for everything with cash or your direct debit account, thereby ensuring that you can afford everything you buy. Bonus: This will also have the effect of ensuring that you buy LESS, which will help you keep extraneous clutter at bay.

Applying this in a broader sensemeans saving to buy things like cars or home appliances, rather than taking out lines of credit. It means consolidating the debt you already have so you can make one or two monthly payments, rather than many. And finally, it means balancing your checkbook the old-fashioned way (or usingan app or digital budget tool) so you track your spending and curb it appropriately.

Transportation

Why deal with oil changes, gas purchases, detailing, car cleaning and tire replacement when you could simplify by going car-free? Obviously, depending on where you live, this may or may not be an option. But youd be surprised to see how much going car-free, or even just driving less, can change your life when you opt to walk, participate in a car-share, take public transit or carpool to work.

Not only will this save you from the bills and time spent on car payments and maintenance, it will also help you get into better shape thanks tothe extra physical effort it takes to live a car-free lifestyle. Hello savings on gym memberships!

If you dont live in a walkable city, you can still simplify your transportation options. Do you and your spouse really need two separate cars? Could you potentially leave a little earlier and carpool to work? Perhaps you have a coworker who lives nearby whod let you chip in for gas in exchange for a ride. Think about slashing your car-associated fees in half and it may look like an increasingly attractive option.

Food

Yes, you can practice minimalism with your food purchases! And no, it doesnt mean eating out every day rather than buying kitchen supplies. Get in the habit of eating meals that can easily be combinedi.e. one protein, one vegetable side and one grain. This means you can pick up a few filets of salmon or blocks of tofu, a few fresh veggies and bulk brown rice or quinoa and thats literally all youll need for at least one weeks worth of dinners.

Do you have frozen foods crowding up your freezer space? Get rid of them! Purchase (or grow!) simple, fresh foods that will keep you healthy and full all week at a low price.

Finally, meal prepping on Sundays can be a huge minimalist-friendly time saver. All you need to do is cook your weekly meals in one two- or three-hour sitting on Sunday, and then distribute them onto five plates, covering with plasticwrap or tinfoil. Now, your meals will be perfectly proportioned and ready to heat up throughout the week, cutting down on weeknight prep time as well as food waste.

Memberships and Subscriptions

Do you have subscriptions to magazines, gyms, clubs and programs? Give some thought to what you REALLY need. Sure, maybe your gym membership is actually minimalist-friendly if you use it regularly and it keeps you from purchasing workout equipment to clutter your home. But if you dont really use it, its just weighing you down.

Magazines and newspapers are now almost always published digitally as well as in print. Checking out your favorite publication from your laptop, Kindle or iPad will mean that you dont have extra papers and clutter lying around your home. Plus, itll save a bunch of trees from certain peril in the process.

Social Engagements

Theres nothing wrong with maintaining an active social life, but if you find yourself getting stressed out by the hustle and bustle of your schedule, you may need to employ some minimalism to your social engagements. Learn to say no to events that wont bring you joy and only cause you stress.

For example, if you truly look forward to your girlfriends weekly Thursday night card game, by all means, dont give it up! But if those after-work happy hours with your coworkers feel more like an obligation than an indulgence, skip themgo home and take care of the things youd rather be doing instead. Learning to say no to work and social pressures is increasingly difficult in our society, butlearning to do so is dire.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Brexit could have serious repercussions for the climate

by WillaAbercrombi Posted on June 24, 2016

Brexit Stage Right

Brexit could have serious repercussions for the climate

By on Jun 24, 2016 10:41 amShare

Britain has voted to leave the European Union by a 52–48 margin. Environmentalists and climate hawks are worried about what that might mean.

Many green leaders had called on voters to oppose a British exit from the EU — or Brexit — arguing that the EU has raised environmental standards in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. They noted that environmental problems are international in nature, so international cooperation is necessary to fight them effectively.

Outgoing United Nations climate head Christiana Figueres also warned against Brexit, saying earlier this week that the U.K. increased the ambition of European climate negotiators before and during the Paris climate talks last December.

So now what happens?

With respect to the climate, the short-term effects of Britain’s decision could potentially be positive. Economists have predicted a Brexit-driven, economy-wide slowdown, which almost certainly implies a drop in Britain’s carbon emissions. During the 2008 recession, for example, global emissions fell by about 1.5 percent. Already today the British pound fell to its lowest level since 1985, and global financial markets have taken a big tumble.

It’s unclear how Brexit will affect energy markets. Oil prices plummeted on Friday. Businesses and investors planning new energy developments in the U.K. — renewable energy projects and fracking projects alike — may postpone them, Politico notes. In the EU emissions trading system (ETS), carbon prices have already fallen more than 15 percent.

Another big unknown is how this will affect the Paris climate agreement. Britain’s climate-action pledge was included in the EU’s pledge. “From the point of view of the Paris agreement, the U.K. is part of the EU and has put in its effort as part of the EU, so anything that would change that would require then a recalibration,” said Figueres. As it sorts out what to do without the U.K., the EU will likely see a slow-down in its ratification process.

Climate hawks are also concerned that a new government in Britain could be less committed to climate action. Prime Minister David Cameron pushed for the Paris Agreement, but he won’t be around for much longer. He had led the failed “Remain” campaign, and on Friday morning, after the results of the referendum came in, he announced his intention to resign in October. At that point, another member of the Conservative Party will become prime minister. Many of the conservatives who had campaigned for Brexit are also climate deniers, and they will likely have more power in a new government.

The impact could go beyond the climate. Farming minister George Eustice, a notable Brexiteer, previously announced his desire to get rid of EU environmental directives that protect birds and habitats. He and other campaigners have advocated for a new, more flexible approach to environmental protection, but opponents of the Vote Leave campaign are skeptical that such an approach will be equally effective.

“Don’t tell me that a new Brexit-led British government is going to put environmental regulations at top of its pile on June 24,” Stanley Johnson, co-chair of Environmentalists for Europe, told the Guardian late last month. “It is not going to happen.”

Other energy experts, though, point to Britain’s leadership on clean energy and climate action and argue that the vote will ultimately be good news for the climate. Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, called the referendum a “historic opportunity to loosen the ties that bind” Britain to Europe’s “anti-innovation bias.”

Britain’s exit from the EU won’t be immediate; first comes a two-year exit negotiation process. As the U.K. cuts and restitches ties to Europe, the world will be watching to see if the nation emerges as a climate leader.

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Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

by CindyParkhill Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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I was musing the other day about something or other, and for some reason it occurred to me that there are several subjects near and dear to progressive hearts that I flatly disagree with. I’m not talking about, say, charter schools, where there’s a robust, ongoing intra-liberal debate and both sides already have plenty of adherents. Nor am I talking about things like Wall Street regulation, where everyone (including me) thinks we need to do more but we disagree on technical issues (Bernie wants to break up big banks, I want to double capital requirements).

I’m thinking instead of things that seem to enjoy something like 90+ percent liberal support—and which I think are basically a waste of liberal time and energy. So if I write about them, a whole lot of people are going to be pissed off. Something like 90+ percent of my readership, I’d guess. Who needs the grief? After all, for the most part there’s usually not much harm in spending time and energy on these things (though there are exceptions).

But let’s give it a go anyway. Maybe this will be the first entry in a periodic series. Maybe I’ll discover that I’m not quite as alone on these issues as I think. Here’s my first entry.

Campaign Finance Reform

Liberals love campaign finance reform. Citizens United is our Roe v. Wade, and it’s become an even more central issue since Bernie Sanders began his presidential run last year. As near as I can tell, Bernie—along with most liberals—thinks it’s the key foundational issue of modern progressivism. Until we seriously reduce the amount of money in political campaigns, no real progressive reform is possible.

I’m pretty sure this is completely wrong. Here are seven reasons that have persuaded me of this over the years, with the most important reason left to the end:

  1. Half a century has produced nothing. Liberals groups have been putting serious effort into campaign finance reform for about 40 years now. The only result has been abject failure. Ban union donations, they create PACs. Ban hard money, you get soft money. Ban soft money, you get Super PACs. Etc. None of the reforms have worked, and even before Citizens United the Supreme Court had steadily made effective reform efforts harder and harder. What’s even worse, the public still isn’t with us. If you ask them vaguely if they think there’s too much money in politics, most will say yes. If you ask them if they really care, they shrug. After nearly half a century, maybe it’s time to ask why.
  2. Other countries spend less. Most other rich countries spend a lot less on political campaigns than we do. Are they less in thrall to moneyed interests because of this? Some are, some aren’t. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that there’s much of a correlation.
  3. Billionaires are idiots. Seriously. The evidence of the last decade or so suggests that billionaires just aren’t very effective at using their riches to win elections. This is unsurprising: billionaires are egotists who tend to think that because they got rich doing X, they are also geniuses at Y and Z and on beyond zebra. But they aren’t. This stuff is a hobby for them, and mostly they’re just wasting their money.
  4. The small-dollar revolution. Starting with Howard Dean in 2004, the internet has produced an explosion of small-dollar donations, accounting for over a third of presidential fundraising in 2012 and 2016. This year, for example, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $288 million (including money raised by outside groups). Bernie Sanders has raised $208 million, all of it in small-dollar donations averaging $27. Ironically, at the same time that he’s made campaign finance reform a major issue, Bernie has demonstrated that small dollars can power a serious insurgency.
  5. Money really is speech. Obviously this is an opinion, and a really rare one on my side of the political spectrum. But why should political speech be restricted? My read of the First Amendment suggests that if there’s any single kind of speech that should enjoy the highest level of protection, it’s political speech.
  6. We may have maxed out anyway. There’s increasing evidence that in big-time contests (governors + national offices), we’ve basically reached the point of diminishing returns. At this point, if billionaires spend more money it just won’t do much good even if they’re smart about it. There are only so many minutes of TV time available and only so many persuadable voters. More important, voters have only so much bandwidth. Eventually they tune out, and it’s likely that we’ve now reached that point.

    In the interests of fairness, I’ll acknowledge that I might be wrong about this. It might turn out that there are clever ways to spend even more; billionaires might get smarter; and Citizens United has only just begun to affect spending. Maybe in a couple of decades I’ll be eating my words about this.

  7. Campaign spending hasn’t gone up much anyway. I told you I’d leave the most important reason for the end, and this is it. It’s easy to be shocked when you hear about skyrocketing billions of dollars being spent on political campaigns, but billions of dollars aren’t that much in a country the size of the United States. In 2012, Obama spent $1.1 billion vs. Mitt Romney’s $1.2 billion. That’s about 1 percent of total ad spending in the US. Hell, in the cell phone biz alone, AT&T spent $1.3 billion vs. Verizon’s $1.2 billion. If you want to look at campaign spending, you really need to size it to the growth in GDP over the past half century or so.

So here it is. These two charts show our skyrocketing spending on presidential campaigns as a percent of GDP. Data for the chart on the left comes from Mother Jones. The chart on the right comes from the Center for Responsive Politics. Total presidential spending is up about 18 percent since 2000. I supposed I’d like to see this reduced as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to see it as the core corrupter of American politics. It’s a symptom, but it’s really not the underlying disease. There really are problems with the influence of the rich on American politics, but campaigns are probably the place where it matters least, not most.

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Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

by AnnetteGalindo Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The United States leads the world in the number of electric vehicles on the road, but the count is still tiny: about 350,000. That’s less than 1 percent of all passenger cars and trucks in the country. Recent market research suggests that number will climb steadily over the next several decades. But will it climb fast enough? When it comes to fighting climate change, that could turn out to be one of the most important questions of the next few years.

On April 22, world leaders gathered in New York City to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, in which they vowed to keep global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a limit the world is already more than halfway toward exceeding. Meanwhile, energy experts have begun to map out the fine-grain details of what meeting that goal would actually require. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that electric vehicles have a indispensable role to play.

It turns out that one of the most immediate societal changes for average Americans in a climate-savvy future would likely be the electrification of just about everything. In other words, the hope of the planet could like in a force—electricity—we’ve known about for hundreds of years.

That might sound strange, given that electricity production is the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Coal- and gas-burning power plants are still our main sources of electricity, and in some parts of the country the power grid is so dirty that electric vehicles might actually cause more pollution than traditional gas-guzzlers.

But thanks to the explosive growth of solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies, electricity is getting cleaner all the time. Over the last decade, the share of total US electricity production from renewables (including hydroelectric dams) rose from about 9.5 percent to more than 14 percent, with year-to-year growth getting faster all the time. So there’s a good case to be made for phasing out the other types of fossil fuel use in our daily lives—particularly gasoline for cars and oil and gas for heating buildings. We should be using electricity instead—even if that means using more electricity overall.

That’s a key finding of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, an international consortium of energy researchers that produced a detailed technical study of how to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2050—the change necessary if Americans hope to do their part to stay within the two-degree limit. The report found that it’s technically possible for the US to meet that target, at an annual cost of about 1 percent of GDP, without sacrificing any “energy services.” That is, the report assumes we’ll still drive and have houses and operate factories the same as we do today. But to do so will require a major boost in electrification—which will in turn require that the US produce about twice as much electricity as it currently does—while reducing the carbon emissions per unit of energy down to just 3 to 10 percent of their current levels. In other words, at the same time we’re electrifying everything, we need to continue to clean up the electric grid and double down on energy efficiency, especially in buildings.

“You can’t get to a level of emissions that’s compatible with 2C or less unless you do all three of those things,” said Jim Williams, one of the report’s lead authors and chief scientist at the private research firm Energy and Environmental Economics.

We get energy from fossil fuels in two basic ways: Either burning it in a power plant to create electricity that gets used elsewhere, or by burning it directly where it’s needed—i.e., your car’s internal combustion engine or a gas-fueled stove. Williams’ basic idea—which has also been advanced by other leading energy economists, particularly Stanford’s Mark Jacobson—is to axe that second category as much as possible, while simultaneously “decarbonizing” the electric grid by replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other renewables.

Williams’ model doesn’t assume that all fossil fuel consumption goes completely to zero. A small portion of electricity could still come from natural gas plants; some oil and gas could still be used for manufacturing and industrial purposes; and airplanes, freight trains, and ocean liners may still rely mainly on petroleum. But by the middle of the century, the total “budget” for fossil fuels will become so small that they need to be limited only to uses that are absolutely unavoidable. Everything that can run on electricity needs to do so. Cars and buildings are low-hanging fruit. And despite gradual fuel efficiency improvements in cars over the last few decades, Williams said, there’s ultimately no way to make an oil-burning internal combustion car engine efficient enough to fit in the tiny fossil fuel “budget.”

“At some point you can’t continue to do direct combustion of fossil fuels, even if it’s efficient,” he said. “There is a point where you have to get out of direct fossil fuel combustion to the maximum extent.”

Ending direct combustion of fossil fuels would take a massive bite out of greenhouse gas emissions: Put together, buildings, transportation, and industrial uses account for more than half of the country’s carbon footprint.

In practical terms, the most important element of that transition would be bringing electric vehicles off the sidelines and into the mainstream. The charts below, from the report, illustrate what that transformation would look like. It’s important to note that these charts are not a projection of what the authors think will happen, but rather a prescription for what they think should happen. In the left chart, you can see that starting in the mid-2020s, sales of gas-powered cars (blue) fall off dramatically in favor of hybrids (red) and fully electric vehicles (gold). On the right, you see that by the mid-2030s, there are more electric cars and hybrids on the road than gas-powered cars:

DDPP

At the same time as this transformation is happening on the road, your gas stove will be swapped for an electric one; ditto the gas furnace in your basement. Gas stations will close and be replaced by charging stations. Machinery in factories that uses oil and gas will be largely replaced with electric equipment. Your propane or charcoal grill could be replaced by a George Foreman…you get the idea.

These are big shifts, but Williams said they probably won’t actually be very noticeable to most people. How much do you really know about what’s under your hood? Would you really notice if your basement held an electric heat pump instead of a gas furnace?

“The carbon aspect is in the guts of it that people don’t really look at,” he said. “The good news is that even if we continue to live like we’re living, we have the technology, we have what it takes to quit emitting so much CO2 to the atmosphere.”

Still, we’re not yet on pace to meet the goals laid out in the DDPP report. In a recent market forecast from Bloomberg New Energy Finance of global electric vehicle sales—a realistic picture of what the future actually holds, given current policies—global sales of electric and hybrid vehicles in 2040 are still only 35 percent of total car sales, instead of close to 100 percent in Williams’ model.

How do we get on track? Williams argues that policymakers need to start spending less energy worrying about fuel efficiency for oil-powered cars and focus instead on speeding up the transition to electric vehicles. That’s something the Obama administration has only scratched the surface of, so it could be an area of focus for the next president. Power grid operators, too, need to start planning for a future in which there could be major demand for electricity in sectors (i.e., electric cars, home heating, etc.) that are small now.

“We’re not used to having a whole lot of our electricity being used by sectors that currently don’t exist,” Williams said. “We need to already be thinking about that. If we don’t start planning now, we’ll run into dead ends.”

Have more questions about electricity? We’ve got your answers in this special podcast episode with our engagement editor Ben Dreyfuss:

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

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Are Wall Street Profits Fundamentally Based on Consumer Laziness?

by LoreenDavidson Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brad DeLong:

It used to be that we collectively paid Wall Street 1% per year of asset value–which was then some 3 years’ worth of GDP–to manage our investment and payments systems. Now we pay it more like 2% per year of asset value, which is now some 4 years’ worth of GDP.

He is responding to a post by Noah Smith that, when I click on it, turns out to be a response to me. My question was simple: finance is a very competitive industry, so how has it stayed so astronomically profitable for so long? Smith suggests that part of the answer is lending to households, but another part is asset management fees:

Asset-management fees are middleman costs that all kinds of players in the finance industry charge to move money around….The amount of wealth in the U.S. economy has soared since 1980 — just think of the rises in the housing and stock markets over that time — meaning that the middlemen in the finance industry have been taking their percentage fees out of a much larger pool of assets.

….But why have profits from these middleman fees stayed so high? Why haven’t asset-management charges gone down amid competition? In a recent post, I suggested one answer: people might just be ignoring them. Percentage fees sound tiny — 1 percent or 2 percent a year. But because that slice is taken off every year, it adds up to truly astronomical amounts. So if people are just ignoring what middlemen skim off the top, because each fee seems small, investors could be handing significant fractions of the country’s GDP to the financial sector out of sheer carelessness. That would certainly keep profits high; if many investors pay no attention to what they’re being charged, more competition can’t push down those fees.

So a combination of rising asset values and unchanging management fees can explain a large part of both finance’s growth and its continued profitability.

James Kwak has more here, basically suggesting that lots of people pay high fees for actively-managed funds deliberately. They figure that the higher price means better performance, just as a higher price usually means better performance in most areas of the consumer economy.

If Smith and Kwak are right, it means the enormous profitability of the financial system is based primarily on products sold to consumers (mutual funds, home loans), not to services offered to the rich or to the rest of the industry. Is this true? To find out, someone would have to break out industry profitability by product line (so to speak) and figure out where most of the money is coming from. Has anyone ever done that?

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Are Wall Street Profits Fundamentally Based on Consumer Laziness?

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The US May Finally Give Puerto Rico a Financial Lifeline. Here’s What’s Happening.

by ZenaidaNeblett Posted on December 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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After months of pleading by the governor of Puerto Rico and the island’s representative to Congress, lawmakers have introduced legislation in both the House and Senate that would offer tangible help for the island’s debt crisis. On Wednesday, the Republican chairs of three Senate committees proposed $3 billion in cash relief, a 50 percent payroll tax cut for Puerto Rico residents for the next five years, and the creation of an independent “assistance authority” that would help the government of Puerto Rico with its short-term and long-term budgeting process.

A separate House bill introduced Wednesday by Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) would permit the island’s cities to restructure mounting debts through bankruptcy reorganization, an option available to cities in the United States but not in Puerto Rico. The legislation comes as the US territory grapples with ballooning debt payments on roughly $72 billion in borrowing that the island’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, has said the island cannot pay. According to Bloomberg, Puerto Rico is in danger of defaulting on $957 million in interest payments that are due on January 1.

The Senate proposal comes from a trio of Republicans who chair committees with various oversight responsibilities for Puerto Rico: Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

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The US May Finally Give Puerto Rico a Financial Lifeline. Here’s What’s Happening.

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