In an article entitled RENEWABLE ENERGY 101, National Geographic magazine wrote: "Even without climate change, fossil fuels are a finite resource, and if we want our lease on the planet to be renewed, our energy will have to be renewable." Planet Earth is our home. Most of us do want to continue the lease and keep our house open. To do that, among other things, we must switch how we generate energy from fossil fuels to renewables.

Skeptics denounce the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, as a globalist government scam intended to take away our power and our tax money. But in reality, the IPCC employs hundreds of independent scientists from all over the world. They now say that we have at most 20 years to avoid the tipping points past which global warming becomes unstoppable, thus turning our home into Hothouse Earth for thousands of years. That means we only have that long, at most, to shift to renewable energy.

So what are the renewable energy sources, and how do they work? For this summary essay I use the article cited above as one of my sources.

Solar energy has the most potential. Photo voltaics have become cheaper and now are more cost efficient than fossil fuels, even apart from subsidies. Much more of it needs to be built. Concentrated solar power or CSP is also an alternative, especially for utilities. Newer CSP plants are more efficient than the first one at Ivanpah, and kill far fewer birds. Putting panels on our rooftops is expensive, but with tax incentives it is cheap enough for those who own homes, and in states like CA new homes are required to include them. That adds cost to the new homes, but this is a small fraction of what homes cost in CA now. If we had a government that represents the people, instead of the Republican-controlled federal government that we have now, costs for solar panels would be subsidized enough so that everyone can afford them. CA already provides climate credits. Utility companies are also supplying more renewable energy through the grid, which you can tap into by switching to local clean energy companies.

Because less solar energy is generated at night, batteries are being deployed to store it. Because less solar energy is generated in winter, when the days are shorter, the grid can be expanded so that energy is distributed from south to north. There is enough solar energy everywhere to meet our needs many times over, but northern regions will need to export it from the south. Utility solar plants do take up space, but being situated in hot desert areas and raised above ground, I don't consider that species living there are harmed.

Wind energy helps make up for less generation of solar energy in the winter and at night. This renewable resource has expanded faster than solar power, and is usually supplied to the grid. More needs to be built, and technology is being developed to mitigate bird deaths from turbine collisions. Indentiflight is one of many such methods where software is used to locate birds and turn turbines off before they hit them. An article from the Audubon Society describes these developing methods. Offshore wind turbines is a huge growth area, but turbines there are more expensive.

Critics of these energy sources mention the metals that have to be mined to make them, but research is ongoing to find ever-better and more-renewable sources of necessary elements to make these tools.

Other renewable sources include hydropower. Most turbines to capture and generate energy from the flow of water are built at dams. There are still many such sources generating energy today, and this also helps supply energy to northern areas. But dams damage river ecosystems. Smaller micro hydropower plants are less damaging and are now being built. Tidal is another new source to generate energy from ocean waves. Geothermal power is available at all times in some places. Some nations use quite a bit of biomass, such as sugar in Brazil, but often such sources compete for land with food and raise prices, and burning wood emits greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power is another alternative, since it emits none. Existing plants will increasingly remain open to act as a bridge until more renewables are built. New nucs are safer to locate in some places than in others. In California, though, they are being closed because the danger of fires and earthquakes here might damage the plants. Nuclear plants can't be built cheaply or quickly, so they alone cannot keep the lease option open on our Earth House. They everywhere must be built close to water too, where floods are a danger. So as climate change worsens, nuclear plants become more of a problem. If such earth disasters cause a meltdown, wide swaths of land might have to be abandoned. The war in Ukraine has recently highlighted the dangers posed by human misbehavior as well. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, and is a legacy of nuclear power that I do not favor, however small scale it is. If nuclear waste is recycled, however, it can help supply the needed source-- which is otherwise not renewable. Uranium should not be obtained from places where trailings endanger the local people, as it frequently does on or near native American reservations. I am also skeptical of how much industrial installations would be needed to harvest uranium from the ocean.

Climate breakdown and disaster is on the ballot. Although market forces work, they don't work fast enough to prevent the tipping points coming soon or already commencing. We must elect better rulers than we have done these last 40 years. We must be climate voters. We must keep our house open.