Recently Elisabeth Rosenthal, an environmental writer, published a chart comparing how much electrical energy was produced by renewable sources in a number of industrialized countries. An amazing 97% of Norway’s electricity comes from renewable sources, mostly hydroelectric. Canada, home of tar sands, produces 63% of its electricity from renewables, again almost all of it hydro power. Denmark produces 40% of its power from renewables, almost entirely wind power.
And the U.S.? 13%, mostly hydro. We should be moving away from oil, natural gas, and especially coal. It doesn’t matter if we have more gas available from fracking, more coal available from removing West Virginia’s mountain tops. Global climate change is here, and it is getting worse each year.
Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, once said, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.” It ended because bronze, and later iron, were discovered.
Oil and coal use is the modern equivalent of the stone age. It is time we moved past it.
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