It's 2022. The Energizer bunny is finally running out of batteries...
Time to rethink everything.
Sustainable energy. A hot topic on a hotter and hotter planet.
And yet how many of us truly know what that means, and what it would take to realize it so that we don’t lose our transportation, our phones and computers, our comforts of home and hearth?
How many of us even know where our energy comes from?
The NYtimes made a handy state-by-state breakdown that might surprise you.
Check it out.
If you click it, you’ll still see a huge amount of coal.
Let’s be honest. From just a standpoint of energy, coal is remarkable.
This concentrated black sooty stuff from thousands of years of compressed life matter has powered whole generations and economies. It's how we make most of our steel, how whole swaths of people have survived harsh winters, has even been known to make a mean piece of New York pizza...
Of course, it’s also toxic to people to ingest, pollutes our environment when burned, releases huge amounts of CO2 and is most definitely not a sustainable source of energy. Moreover, it’s extraordinarily taxing to mine— landscapes are literally torn apart in the process, destroying entire ecosystems and clearcutting forests... then once all the coal is taken, there’s nothing left to do but move on to the next deposit, leaving whole communities who relied on the economy coal supported left in the lurch. And yet for much of our country’s history and even today in places here and across the world, it’s how most things have been powered.
Easy enough to say coal’s bad and we should ban the stuff, right? Especially easy if it’s not an industry our families rely on to put food on the table— but to actually be able to keep up with our voracious power demands and not create economic sinkholes, we have to be creative, and have viable dynamic options to transition toward what's next.
That’s why this month we are highlighting
the Just Transition Fund!
