In order to overcome Global Warming, we need to continue R&D; to increase funding for solutions, and decrease funding for making things worse; and to increase political will while overcoming denial. These points bear repeating in a new year, with attention to new details. So here we are again.
We are far ahead of nuclear power, too, even dreams of molten salt reactors and fusion energy.
Fusion power is thirty years off, and will always remain so.
Maybe. Probably. But during the period from now to 100% renewables, Zero Net Carbon, and real Carbon Capture (with trees and plankton and minerals, not pumping it down oil wells to increase production), fission and fusion are irrelevant.
How Wall Street reckoned with climate change in 2023
Extreme weather this year carried life-or-death stakes but also economic risks.
A landmark report released by the federal government last month put a price tag on extreme weather events, saying they impose nearly $150 billion in costs for the United States each year.
The largest climate legislation in the nation's history, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, helped unleash a wave of clean energy projects and record sales of electric vehicles, some experts said.
However, a backlash against environmental, social and governance investing, or ESG, brought a decline in financing for funds focused on those issues. Meanwhile, the U.S. produced a record amount of oil, even though the burning of fossil fuels makes up a key driver of climate change, experts added.
Roughly 280 clean energy projects representing $282 billion of investment were announced over the measure's first year, Goldman Sachs found in a report in October. In all, the study said, such projects created about 175,000 jobs.
Countering those costs and getting rid of subsidies would pay for all of the renewables we can build at present, until we have more and bigger factories, and more and bigger power lines.