It’s now cheaper to invest in renewable energy than coal in all major markets around the world—and more than half of existing coal plants are also more expensive to keep running than building new renewables, according to a new report. By 2030, the think tank estimates that new renewables will be cheaper than existing coal plants in all major markets....Milestone.
Native American reservations cover just 2% of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.
Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.
The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership – a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.Fortune
Barclays warned that solar and storage combined is “likely to disrupt the status quo.” It already has in Hawaii, and it expects California, New York, and Arizona to closely follow before spreading to the rest of the United States.
“In the 100-plus year history of the electric utility industry, there has never before been a truly cost-competitive substitute available for grid power,” the bank said. “We believe that solar plus storage could reconfigure the organization and regulation of the electric power business over the coming decade. We see near-term risks to credit from regulators and utilities falling behind the solar plus storage option curve and long-term risks from a comprehensive re-imaging of the role utilities play in providing electric power.”Corporate Knights
As Barron’s reported, “It’s a noteworthy downgrade.” Electric utilities, it added, “make up nearly 7.5 per cent of Barclays’ U.S. Corporate Index by market value.”
What's it take to get conservatives in Tennessee fired up about blowing up mountains? China, apparently.
On Tuesday, the Tennessee Conservative Union, which bills itself as the state's "largest and oldest conservative group," started running anti-mountaintop removal coal mining ads on television throughout the state. Their complaint? The Chinese company Guizhou Guochuang Energy Holding Group announced last year that it is acquiring Triple H Coal Mining, which does mountaintop removal. The Tennessee Conservative Union ad warns that they will become "the first state in our great nation to permit the red Chinese to destroy our mountains and take our coal."
"We're proud that Tennessee is a red state," the ad concludes. "But just how red are we willing to go?"Mother Jones
What did Economists Miss?
Unfortunately, the list is rather long.Our Finite World
