Renewable Energy Is Trouncing Fossil Fuels [View all]

[jpak]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/renewable-energy-fossil-fuels_us_56b3770de4b04f9b57d899c8

The United States has to reduce greenhouse emissions to less than a quarter of what they were in 2005 to meet its commitment under the Paris climate agreement.

Getting to that goal will depend on a huge number of factors, but a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows renewables are a large, and growing, majority of energy projects in the U.S., and that the American economy is getting more and more energy efficient. The report also found that the incremental amount of investment needed every year over the next 15 years to keep the U.S. and the rest of the globe below 2 degrees Celsius of warming is less than the current annual volume of U.S. auto loans. In other words, completely manageable.

First, here's new U.S. electricity capacity by type. Renewables made up 68 percent of new projects in 2015.

Second, the long-term trend is that the U.S. economy is less and less a machine that ingests oil and coal and spits out GDP. In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economic growth and energy use have been decoupled since about the mid-1990s. Part of that is the shift away from manufacturing, and there is noise in the year-to-year trends (especially on a global level, where emissions fell in 2015 but have probably not peaked). But the path for the U.S. is clear and has been for more than a decade: emissions and the economy don't necessarily move together.

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