Wind, Solar Surpassed 10 Percent of US Electricity In March, Says EIA (thehill.com)

According to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, wind and solar produced 10 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. for the first time in March. The Hill reports: The Energy Information Administration's (EIA) monthly power report for March found that wind produced 8 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. that month, with solar producing 2 percent. The two sources combined to have their best month ever in terms of percentage of overall electricity production, EIA said. The agency expects the two sources topped 10 percent again in April but forecasts that their generation will fall below that mark during the summer months. Due to the way geographic wind patterns affect the generation of electricity, the two sources typically combine for their best months in the spring and fall. Annually, wind and solar made up 7 percent of electric generation in 2016, EIA said.

Comments

Cause capitalism so far has done such a great job

[presidenteloco]

reducing global warming.

The problem is, capitalism optimizes toward what people perceive and value. If people en mass cannot perceive the problem due to its scale and complexity, and if the time scale of the problem is that it will harm your unborn grandchildren (or more likely, someone else's grandchildren halfway round the world) and the harm you will personally feel will be quite dilute if any, and also unattributable in the particular case to the cause, due to the complexity and scale and stochastic nature of the mechanism, well... Then you won't value the solution will you.

No, this is the kind of problem that needs to be identified and fixed by competent, highly educated experts and generally intelligent leaders, through government policy. It's kind of too bad that mocking experts and "lefty science" is the meme of the decade at least in American populist political culture, and also too bad that the leader of the country that needs to make the biggest change is a bird-brained tweeter (with apologies to intelligent bird species).