Category: ECONOMICS_CN

Clean energy funds are dirt. They’ve slumped roughly 30% this year after losing almost 5% of their value in 2022 and a whopping 23% in 2021. The renewables industry has been battered by rising interest rates, which have been especially damaging for new solar projects, and disappointing earnings, caused largely by higher capital costs and lower profit margins.

Fighting climate change increasingly comes down to money — who has it, who doesn’t and who has the levers to help the world’s developing countries withstand the ravages of climate change.

a county named for its coal deposits — a power company is building hundreds of wind turbines. In Mingo County, W.Va., where many small towns were once coal towns, the Adams Fork Energy plant will sit on a former coal mining site and produce low-carbon ammonia.

Since the International Energy Agency was founded five decades ago, it has compiled data on the government research and development budgets devoted to energy in its 31 member countries. This lets us take a detailed look at how energy-conscious developed countries have prioritized research over time.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is eliminating its longstanding program promoting nuclear safety and cleanup as donors focus on the climate crisis….

Heat, drought, flood and famine. Evidence of climate change is all around us. If the planet is to avoid even more severe consequences from global warming, the world’s leading energy agency says, consumption of oil, coal and natural gas needs to be reduced much more rapidly, and clean energy sources like wind and solar power need to expand at a far faster pace.

As climate change makes extreme weather events more intense and frequent, the world must spend hundreds of billions more a year — 10 to 18 times more than it currently spends — helping vulnerable people adapt to mounting devastation, United Nations experts said Thursday.

The Louisiana wildfire that upended Katie Henderson’s life was barely a blip on this year’s string of catastrophes. On August 24, just after she’d brought her 7-year-old son home from school, she spotted a red band of flames speeding across the treetops, crackling like static on the world’s largest television.

President Joe Biden’s clean energy plan is facing an unexpected threat: banking regulators. Biden is trying to funnel federal money to clean energy projects using billions of dollars in tax credits. The renewables industry relies heavily on large lenders to finance those developments: Banks and other backers invested $19 billion last year in projects like solar and wind power in return for the credits and other benefits.

The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.