Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "PBS Terra" channel.

It’s an interesting question. Around the world - that is, everywhere outside the United States - pretty much all the private equity is in renewables. This is no longer just because of regulation. It’s because the profit margins are more favourable and they can be up and running in weeks, rather than decades. The great bogeyman of pollution, China, has actually been by far the greatest installer of renewables in the world and a lot of those coal fired power stations are being overtaken. Many of them were being built to replace old and out-of-date facilities that were no longer fit for purpose. t’s possible that many of the new ones will never turn a wheel in anger. It doesn’t take a lot of research to see that it is entirely possible to move away from reliance on fossil fuels and I think you will find that even in the United States, power generation companies will simply move to renewables and away from coal and gas. The new model is renewables and firming, taking advantage of smaller and more flexible renewable power stations being plugged into the grid. This makes the grid much more decentralised and flexible. If solar panel were cheaper in the United States, more people would be using them because they massively reduce energy costs. The large power companies can take advantage of this because it can be fed back into the grid and stored in batteries to balance demand.
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@everythingmatters6308 Errr… my understanding of what Rees was saying was that we don’t have enough resources in place now to limit climate change before it reaches a catastrophic 3 degrees. Not that we don’t have enough resources at all. He may be right about that. The acceleration is proving to be faster than the modelling predicted ten years ago. I’m not convinced that Rees is right. I think a lot of those people - while right about many things - have missed the movement of consumers away from the energy grid.
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