By Paul Homewood
Bjorn Lomborg puts the hype about renewable into perspective:
The world is mostly run on fossil fuels (81%). Nuclear makes up 5%, with 14% from renewables. Solar panels and wind turbines contribute 0.8%.
When you hear 14% renewables, you will likely think ‘wow, things are going pretty well with the switch to renewables’. But these renewables are not the ones you hear about. The biggest contributor is humanity’s oldest fuel: wood.
4.91% is known as biomass as we also burn food (ethanol) and energy forest (trees or woody shrubs) in the rich world. This is, for instance, the American forests, cut down and shipped across the Atlantic to be burnt in European power plants to be called green and CO₂ neutral – of course, that is only true when the new woods have grown up in 50-100 years.
4.93% of its use takes place in the poor world where people still use wood (dung, cardboard, etc…) to cook and keep warm. This leads to terrible indoor air pollution – it is actually the world’s deadliest environmental problem, killing some 4.3 million people each year. We should definitely hope the poor will have to use less polluting wood in the future.
The other main contributor of renewables is 2.5% hydropower. In total, that makes up 12.4%. The last 1.6% comes mostly from geothermal energy (0.57%) and wind turbines (0.61%) along with solar heaters in China, tidal power etc. (0.26%) and solar panels (0.19%).
Contrary to the weight of news stories on how solar and wind is taking over the world, solar panels and wind turbines really make up a very small part of the global energy mix. (I started out coloring solar panels yellow [see graph below], but the thin sliver at the top became invisible.)
Read the full post here.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
February 21, 2018 at 04:43AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 