Publications

- November 1, 2016; Vol. 3, Number 11

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Taking Nuclear Power Offline: How fear of fission is hurting the environment and clean energy revolution

by Michael Shellenberger

Have you heard the news? We are in a clean energy revolution. And where I live in Berkeley, Calif., it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up, and new electric cars in driveways. Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar, and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar than we have in California, by the year 2022.

Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback. Bill Gates is in China working with engineers, where 40 different companies are working together to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste, that cannot melt down and is cheaper than coal.

The first thing is that electricity from clean energy has been increasing over the past 20 years. But when you look at the percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources, it has actually declined from 36 percent to 31 percent. And if you care about climate change, you have got to go in the opposite direction to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy s

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