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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

23 points·vegetablepotpie··6 comments

Meanwhile California progressives are attacking rooftop solar, which provides 25 years of near-free clean energy, because utilities want some of the action. [1]

[1] https://www.hammondclimatesolutions.com/blog/nrdc-enables-mo...

>Still, the firm found that U.S. emissions in 2021 remained 5% below 2019 levels.

While I agree that fighting climate change should be a top priority and probably no country is currently doing enough to get to net-zero CO2 fast enough, I don't think the comparisons to a crisis year like 2020 are all that helpful.

Seeing the problems is important, but seeing successes is important as well in order to prevent everyone from loosing hope.

If it's 5% per year we should be 10% below 2019, not 5%.

> Still, the firm found that U.S. emissions in 2021 remained 5% below 2019 levels.

15GW of coal plants will retire in the US in 2022 [1]. 79 percent of new electrical generation or supply capacity in 2022 will be solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries (per the US EIA) [2].

Sure, there's still about 10GW of natural gas coming online, but if natural gas price volatility/price stays high, that'll rapidly drive uptake of low/no carbon generation tech and batteries. And in the interim, that natural gas is cleaner than coal.

Follow along as global electrical grids decarbonize at https://app.electricitymap.org/map?wind=false&solar=false

[1] https://www.power-eng.com/coal/coal-to-represent-85-of-elect...

[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/10/solar-expected-to-be-...

Between Germany shutting down its nuclear and "crypto", I'm not very optimistic about reducing global CO2 emissions.

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