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Peter Droege: Climate for Peace

Holiday Message
&
WCRE/EUROSOLAR Campaign
for 2015

 

Holiday Message

As we look back on an eventful year 2014, we ready ourselves and our communities for what lies ahead: political stabilization and return to the road to energy reason. This is the time of year many of us spend with families and friends, a time of hope and renewal at the turn of the year. The need to use renewable energy is a long established fact and is being turned into reality worldwide: from African villages to the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. This progress is unstoppable, despite the attempts of some established industries and their supporters that are bent on reversing progress and keeping humanity in the fatal grip of fossil fuel combustion and radioactive contamination.

Dear solar industry colleagues -

 

"There are days of late when the solar revolution seems to be an inevitability, and an imminent one. ….But then there are days when the vehemence of the incumbency’s rearguard action is so daunting that one wonders if Big Energy can delay the solar revolution, maybe for years, or even derail it."

 

That's how my latest column for Recharge magazine, on the two somewhat contrasting narratives of the shale boom and the solar revolution, starts. You can read the rest here http://www.jeremyleggett.net/2014/11/frackings-mythology-is-single-biggest-threat-to-the-solar-revolution/.

Dear All,

A momentous article appeared in The Telegraph yesterday. In brief, if you missed it: fossil-fuels are the new sub-prime, heading for mass stranding, billions of dollars will be wasted; meanwhile a solar revolution rushes up on us under the radar, standard-bearer of a transformative green industrial revolution that can no longer be avoided.  Written by international business editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, it comes from the Conservative party's newspaper of choice. The Prime Minister, The Chancellor, and many of their advisors will no doubt have registered it. It sits very uncomfortably with their vision of a UK fracking its way to prosperity, and with much else about the energy incumbency's current set of narratives.

My latest blog, on The Elders website, offers some thinking congruent with all this. It positions SolarAid's breakthrough in solar-lighting-versus-kerosene as an example of a bite-sized first step to replacing other entire categories of fossil-fuel use, a process that can realistically be accelerated in these days of investors beginning to wake up to the potential risk of wasting capital expenditure in an expanding carbon bubble.

The two short reads, taken together, offer me hope that once-almost-inconceivable transformative change is possible, leading to much social good, if we can manage the transition. I hope you too.

Happy weekend!

Dr. Jeremy Leggett
Founder and Chairman, Solarcentury & SolarAid
Chairman, CarbonTracker & Firefly Clean Energy

 

Jeremy Leggett, WCRE Member of Chairpersons Board
July 11, 2014

Dear EUROSOLAR and World Council for Renewable Energy Members, Colleagues and Friends -

Rising tensions reveal a deep crisis of government and the integrity of political leadership. Needed as never before – and sorely lacking are forward looking statesmanship, and a keen concern for ethical stewardship, of private responsibility and public accountability. Seen from central Europe this need for – and paucity of - this kind of political leadership is glaring. Around the world fossil-fuel enhanced and nuclear power driven ethnic, political and military tensions abound, with global complicity in the form of energy interest and investment collusion evident in the manifold upheavals that grip the world from the Ukraine to the China Sea.

No Rooftop Left Behind Future Vision

"...Imagine a time when every rooftop in the world has a solar panel on it. Looking at Google Earth, all the rooftops you see would have panels. Panels would provide power or heat, or both. I am calling this vision "no rooftop left behind." That phrase may ring familiar to Americans who recall the "no child left behind" legislation in 2001, which mandated educational standards for children - everyone is included, no one left out. Let's think the same way about rooftops. Let’s adopt this phrase into our common lexicon. Let’s make this a rallying call for the future of our planet ...


Please follow the article link to the full article and to more information on this initiative:
No Rooftop Left Behind

Dr. Eric Martinot
Senior Fellow, IASS-Potsdam
Senior Research Director, Institute for Sustainable Energy Politics, Tokyo
Senior Policy Advisor, Japan Renewable Energy Foundation

 

WCRE Member of Chairpersons Board Eric Martinot
calls for "No Rooftop Left Behind"

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