Solutions

See our newest pow­er­point on waste and ener­gy solu­tions, with some great news on solar and wind becom­ing cheap­er than fos­sil fuels!

No Such Thing as “Tran­si­tion” Fuels: Why we don’t believe in “tran­si­tion” fuels / technologies

• Where Our Ener­gy Comes From
• Con­ser­va­tion and Efficiency
• Wind Pow­er
• Solar Pow­er
• What About When the Wind Isn’t Blow­ing… (Grid Sta­bil­i­ty and Ener­gy Storage)
• Trans­porta­tion and Heating

We can meet all of our elec­tric­i­ty needs and near­ly all of our trans­porta­tion and heat­ing sec­tor needs with­out burn­ing any­thing: through the use of con­ser­va­tion, effi­cien­cy, wind, solar and ener­gy stor­age.  The only sec­tors where select burn­able fuels might be nec­es­sary are in planes, boats and cer­tain indus­tri­al heat­ing applications.

A Decem­ber 2012 study from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware has deter­mined that wind, solar and ener­gy stor­age could eco­nom­i­cal­ly ful­ly pow­er a util­i­ty scale elec­tric grid with 99.9% reli­a­bil­i­ty by 2030 — cheap­ly and with­out gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies, if the prop­er mix is imple­ment­ed. See the press release or the full study.

The poten­tial for 100% clean ener­gy has also been doc­u­ment­ed world­wide for all ener­gy (elec­tric­i­ty, heat­ing and trans­porta­tion) in 2009 and 2011 stud­ies out of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, which you can find in more detail here. State-by-state plans avail­able at the Solu­tions Project.

These stud­ies say it can be done by 2030, but with enough polit­i­cal will and a shift­ing of sub­si­dies from dirty ener­gy and mil­i­tarism to clean solu­tions, it can like­ly be done much sooner.

When it comes to mate­ri­als man­age­ment, the sim­pli­fied solu­tion can be summed up as the three R’s — Reduce, Reuse, Recy­cle. These are in pri­or­i­ty order.  See our Ener­gy and Waste Tech­nol­o­gy Hier­ar­chies chart to see this fleshed out.

The equiv­a­lent in the ener­gy world is:

Con­ser­va­tion, Effi­cien­cy and Clean^* Renew­ables

^*Clean means tech­nolo­gies which don’t cre­ate pol­lu­tion while gen­er­at­ing energy

These solu­tions have the poten­tial to fill all of our ener­gy needs, with­out need­ing nuclear pow­er, fos­sil fuels, biomass/incineration, or even large hydro dams. The tech­nol­o­gy exists, and the mon­ey exists (yet it’s being used to sub­si­dize dirty ener­gy and wars to prop up our addic­tion to these dirty ener­gy sources). What’s miss­ing is the polit­i­cal will to enact the solu­tions. We need politi­cians with­out con­nec­tions to dirty pow­er indus­tries so that we can direct pub­lic and pri­vate invest­ment dol­lars towards clean ener­gy solu­tions, rather than a con­tin­ued reliance on dirty, unsus­tain­able ener­gy sources.

Please use the infor­ma­tion on this page, and our plat­form to influ­ence any­thing in your pow­er, from the ener­gy choic­es in your home, school, work­place or local gov­ern­ment to the ener­gy poli­cies in your state or on the nation­al level.

Here is a broad out­line of the pol­i­cy solu­tions as we see them:

1) An Ener­gy Con­ser­va­tion and Effi­cien­cy Law that reduces ener­gy demand by 50% in 20 years, across all three ener­gy sec­tors (trans­porta­tion, heat­ing and elec­tric­i­ty), and then in half again with­in 50 years.  This would nec­es­sar­i­ly include many solu­tion pieces, from appli­ance effi­cien­cy stan­dards to seri­ous mass tran­sit invest­ments and much more.  See our plat­form for some more detail.

2) A Clean Ener­gy Port­fo­lio Stan­dard that meets the demands of the remain­ing ener­gy needs by phas­ing out our cur­rent reliance on coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro­elec­tric, biomass/incineration, and bio­fu­els, and phas­ing in wind, solar and ocean pow­er (and per­haps some small-scale micro hydro or closed-loop geot­her­mal), using ener­gy stor­age strate­gies and decen­tral­ized ener­gy pro­duc­tion to make the sys­tem sta­ble and efficient.

3) Shift the $74 bil­lion in annu­al dirty ener­gy sub­si­dies plus at least half of the mil­i­tary bud­get (a major oil and gas sub­sidy) to clean solu­tions, mak­ing the above shift possible.

4) Set a nation­al “zero waste” pol­i­cy, start­ing with a nation­al 75% waste reduc­tion, recy­cling and com­post­ing goal.  Min­i­miz­ing waste can reduce 37% of U.S. green­house gas emis­sions and will save huge amounts of ener­gy in man­u­fac­tur­ing and avoid­ed resource extraction.

5) Adopt a cli­mate-friend­ly sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture pro­gram, focus­ing on mak­ing all food organ­ic, local­iz­ing food pro­duc­tion sys­tems and encour­ag­ing eat­ing low­er on the food chain.  This can reduce over 20% of green­house gas emissions.

Not polit­i­cal­ly real­is­tic?  No effec­tive leg­is­la­tion is cur­rent­ly polit­i­cal­ly real­is­tic at the fed­er­al lev­el so long as cor­po­rate inter­ests con­trol our polit­i­cal process.  To be able to win any effec­tive changes at the fed­er­al lev­el, our first pri­or­i­ty must be clean and fair elec­tions.   We must unshack­le our democ­ra­cy from cor­po­rate con­trol and polit­i­cal bribery.  Clean ener­gy needs clean elections!

With­out wait­ing for fed­er­al pol­i­cy action, we are focus­ing where the peo­ple pow­er is: at the grass­roots lev­el, win­ning vic­to­ries and build­ing pow­er to advance the poli­cies and projects from the bot­tom up, as we reshape entire ener­gy and waste indus­tries one com­mu­ni­ty at a time.  This is what good, well-net­worked, grass­roots orga­niz­ing has been doing for decades: shut­ting down and pre­vent­ing pol­lut­ing facil­i­ties from com­ing online at the source while cre­at­ing vibrant real solu­tions right at home.