“Beneath the bad climate headlines, a business and technological revolution is taking place,” says an article in The Wall Street Journal’s series “Experts look back on 2023.”
The expert is Jon Creyts, CEO of RMI (the Rocky Mountain Institute) a non-profit energy think tank.
“If you read the headlines from the past year about wildfires in Canada and Maui, hurricanes in Mexico, and the United Nations telling us we are way off track to meet climate targets, you may assume it is game over for the planet,” he writes.
“From my vantage point,” Creyts says, “it’s game on.”
“There is a shift happening across the economy, accelerating markets for clean-energy solutions. Thanks to economic and technological innovation — alongside the push for greater energy security — we are seeing exponential growth in clean-energy technologies in diverse parts of the world driven primarily by markets and smart business decisions,” he says.
For example, RMI research shows that clean-energy technologies like solar power and batteries are on growth paths that will transform the electricity sector this decade, Creyts says. Solar and wind already are the cheapest form of new energy for 85 percent of the world, and RMI expects their costs to continue falling, if trends continue, by another 25 to 50 percent by 2030.
The Inflation Reduction Act “is the single largest commitment any government has yet made to vie for leadership in the next energy economy,” says Creyts. “And while it is still early in implementation, the legislation has already yielded a massive private response, rallying more than $300 billion in new manufacturing commitments.”
This fall, the International Energy Agency noted that the transition to clean energy will cost $12 trillion less than a “business as usual” scenario, meaning that saving the planet is cheaper than destroying it, Creyts says.
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