Dire predictions about renewable energy were all wrong
Image: Matt McClain/The Washington Post
David Von Drehle
Twenty years ago, former vice president Al Gore was traveling the world narrating a slideshow about the perils of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; in 2006, the presentation reached far more people through the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth.'
Audiences would have been hard-pressed to imagine headlines from two decades later. Such as this one proclaiming, 'Solar is EU's biggest power source.' For the first time, in June, the European Union - one of the world's largest economies - produced more electricity from solar power than from any other source. Three-quarters of E.U. electricity in June came from nonfossil fuel sources.
According to energy think tank Ember, solar power accounted for 22 percent of the European Union's electricity output for the month, barely more than Europe's nuclear plants. Natural gas and coal combined did not match either of these. More electricity was generated by wind and water combined than by fossil fuels.
Or this headline stating, 'Clean energy just put China's CO2 emissions into reverse.' During the first quarter of this year compared with the year before, again for the first time, total carbon emissions from the industrializing giant fell not because of an economic recession but thanks to rapid advances in renewable technology, especially solar.
Analyst Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, published the findings in Carbon Brief: 'The reduction in China's first-quarter CO2 emissions in 2025 was due to a 5.8 percent% drop in the power sector. … Increases in solar, wind and nuclear power generation, driven by investments in new generating capacity, more than covered the growth in demand.'
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Headlines are not as sunny for the United States, where government enthusiasm for tackling the greenhouse problem is less consistent than in much of Europe. But even here, progress in recent years is striking. Consider: In March 2005, 27 percent of U.S. electricity consumption was supplied by nonfossil fuel sources.
Fast-forward to March of this year: 42 percent of U.S. consumption was supplied by nonfossil fuel sources. Solar power, a negligible resource 20 years ago, has surpassed hydroelectric, while wind turbines supply more than twice the power of dams. And the Trump administration's hostility to some renewables is partly offset by its supportive attitude toward next-generation nuclear power plants, without which the world has little hope of getting its arms around the emissions problem.
Total consumption of electricity in the U.S. was more than 15 percent lower this March than in the same month of 2005, yet during the past two decades the size of the U.S. economy more than doubled. That's another first: The timeless link between rising wealth and rising energy consumption has been broken; we've proved economies can grow robustly without using more power.
I am not suggesting that these headlines add up to Mission Accomplished on the climate. Far from it. Humans continue to create far more carbon and methane emissions through our agriculture, industries, transportation and homes than the atmosphere can store without trapping additional heat. The resulting rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases will have predictable and unpredictable consequences that will challenge humanity for generations.
What the headlines clearly show is that progress is not only possible - it is happening. Dire predictions that changes to the global energy supply would destroy economies and plunge civilizations into reverse have been proved wrong. Europe is three-quarters of the way to a green electrical grid. China is, quite possibly, coming down from peak carbon. In neither place have these achievements noticeably disrupted modern life.
We're making progress through countless innovations: cheaper solar panels; safer nuclear generators; better batteries; more fuel-efficient cars, trucks and airplanes; smarter appliances; more productive farming; reforestation; and other modes of carbon capture and storage.
And we have good ideas for further innovations - the best of which is a tax on emissions to make the hidden costs of greenhouse pollution plainly visible to the marketplace, thus stirring further innovations.
Impossible? It seems so now. But so much seemed impossible in 2005 that now has come to pass. A carbon tax has strong bipartisan support because it is a far more efficient way to encourage the next burst of progress, compared with doling out government subsidies and incentives. Greenhouse gas pollution is not free. It comes at a price. Make that price plain to the irresistible engine of American capitalism and watch what the market can do. The heartening progress of the past 20 years will be just a prelude to an explosion of invention and discovery.
This is no time to be discouraged.
David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Post and writes a weekly column. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including 'Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year' and 'Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.'
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