Having failed last week to find an April Fool joke in the media (the ‘joke’ stories turned out to be real) I thought I’d found a belated one yesterday. I read that a new US presidential decree will ensure ‘shower freedom’ – the right for citizens to have a shower with good water pressure. Myself, I’d have prioritised clean drinking water across the globe, but that so-called ‘American way of life’ has a powerful grip. Earlier this week I saw the play Kyoto. Astonishingly, it creates a gripping drama out of the early international climate negotiations, with the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol at its climax. It was over 25 years ago, and hope looked different then. The narrator (‘I was there’) is a US lawyer in the pay of the oil lobby, fighting for years to undermine any climate agreement. My take was that he wasn’t convinced one way or another by the actual science – what he was really fighting for was that same ‘American way of life’.
News came out this week that in spite of a record 40% of global electricity generation in 2024 coming from renewables, additional demand for cooling has led to increased fossil-fired generation. Frustratingly, emissions from power generation reached a global high. If you have solar on your own roof you’ll have noticed it really motoring recently! Last month’s sunshine helped the UK break its solar power records. At lunchtime on 1 April, solar PV was providing 12.2 gigawatts of electricity, and over the day, solar PV generated a cumulative total of 87.6 GWh of renewable electricity. This kind of volume is an important step along the path of decarbonising our electricity supply – even if, perversely, we sometimes seem to be going in the wrong direction. HGN member Pomona Solar Co-op, which has been generating clean power in Herefordshire since 2015, has also had a record month. We’ll hear more from Pomona as they celebrate their 10th birthday this summer.
Jackie (HGN Co-Chair)
PS – we’ve started adding the occasional photo of the HGN team, and in spite of Rachel’s careful layouts, the photos pop up wherever they like. Fingers crossed we’ve cracked it this week. If not, celebrate with us when we finally get there!
No comments yet.