I am a huge fan of Tony Seba’s writings and work, primarily because I am an engineer, and I simply cannot accept that the situation with the impending climate catastrophe is hopeless. Engineers are eternal optimists. Not everyone will be happy with the nature and orderliness of the burgeoning solution to the crisis (or lack of it), but some are.

Bloomberg Financial, not exactly a bunch of left wing Commies, gives reason for hope, too. This stuff is in play, dynamic, and there is not a lot anyone can do to stop it. It’s an evolving system of partial differential equations, if you will. Inexorable. Therefore, it’s good. The questions of concern, to me, are not about it but how soon it will come to fruition, and whether that is fast enough to keep ourselves from damaging the climate too much. 2030 is not that far away. (And for those who doubt the severity of the problem, I have no interest discussing it here. I refer them to the piece by Archer and Brovkin and simply ask them to seriously think about the implications of that.) Nevertheless, with the political machinery controlling the richest 400 million people on the planet in some kind of paralysis over what to do, barring, of course, a miracle during COP21 in Paris in December, this technology-driven, rapid, disruptive and emerging process of creative economic destruction appears to me our best hope, even if, as all such processes, it will be cruel, to shareholders of fossil fuel companies, and to people whose many jobs are founded on their continued existence and stability.

Come Tuesday, Dedham TV will stream a program live dealing with the invasion of a natural gas pipeline installed by Spectra Energy, approved by U.S. FERC, approved by Massachusetts state regulatory authorities, yet fiercely opposed by local residents, including, potentially, Dedham Board of Selectmen Chair, Mike Butler, who, in an act of civil disobedience against the pipeline, was arrested trying to stop its initial installation in Dedham. I will be on the panel as well, and will present a short brief on the healthy business disruption which the technologies of solar PV and electrical energy storage will cause to residential energy and electric utilities as well as natural gas, based upon Seba’s insights and those of others.

Tune in. The panel will take questions from the studio audience. I’m happy to take additional ones here.

Due to technical problems with my slides at Dedham TV, I will not be on the program as I was expected. What I intend to do is to record an audio accompaniment to the slides I would have otherwise presented, and place that talk online. That podcast is NOW available below.

(An interview with Tony Seba below.)

13^th July 2015

Buffett project’s record low cost part of pricing ‘trend’, says First Solar

15^th July 2015

Podcast of my slides on this matter are now available and linked above.

Also, NPR Morning Edition from KCRW on 14^th October 2015 titled “When will the Sun be the motor of the world?”

And the suit by the Town of Dedham to stop Spectra Energy constructing their pipeline was dismissed:
DedhamDismissed–Spectra20150714

(nearly the) 16^th July 2015

Reality recap:

And on the new Bloomberg report.

22^nd July 2015

A nice guide to solar PV on homes.

23^rd July 2015

With or without the science of climate change … there is by now an unstoppable, irreversible technology and energy system trend.

That’s from Christiana Figueres, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Be there or be square.

19^th August 2015

Maybe the dismal record Massachusetts has for small business is why Texas is a better place to do this stuff. And it’s not at all about taxes! And these evaluations are from an organization which considers environmental regulations simply an impediment to business growth.