In the current issue, I have a brief story based on an interview with Steven Chu and Yi Cui, now both of Stanford, about advances in the seemingly boring but actually exciting world of battery technology, and why that is essential to lower-carbon, cleaner-fuel power systems.
The discouraging signals in the race for less destructive paths toward growth keep piling up. For instance, the recent charts about air pollution in China*. Yet like every systemic problem human beings have created for themselves and then tried to correct, this is an all-out race, between destruction and creation. On the positive side, we have this brief new report from McKinsey, which is source of the chart at top.
The report (by Sara Hastings-Simon, Dickon Pinner, and Martin Stuchtey) concerns the pace and feasibility of "cleantech" installations, and why they may be more feasible than they have seemed. The main problem with solar, wind, tidal, and other low-carbon energy sources has involved scale. Clean power sources have represented so tiny a share of the world's energy base, and coal's share has been so huge, that even as wind etc have expanded very fast in proportional terms, absolute demand for (and emissions from) coal keep going up fast. These scale realities are why, as I argued several years ago in an Atlantic cover story, developing cleaner coal is not a contradiction but a necessity. Charles Mann has a good new Wired story on the current complexion of the "cleaner coal" debate.