Skip to footer

Five hopeful signs global energy is getting cleaner

Earth's population is only growing. Can we rein in energy usage and greenhouse emissions while supporting more and more people?

4. Battery power

Al Behrman/AP
Customers check out a new Tesla all electric car at a Tesla showroom inside the Kenwood Towne Centre in Cincinnati.

Wind and solar are great source of renewable energy, but they both have a notable Achilles’ heal: The sun isn’t always shining, and the wind isn’t always blowing.

So at night and on wind-free days, solar and wind power can’t meet electricity users energy needs – unless, that is, wind- and sun-generated power can be stored for later use. And therein lies the appeal of batteries, which can hold that power until it's useful.

Batteries have made serious advances in recent years, especially in electric vehicles. In fact, according to Bloomberg, from 2007 to 2011, electric vehicle battery costs fell about 14 percent a year – and that puts today's battery costs as low as IEA predicted they would be in 2020.

There are also signs that those car battery breakthroughs could soon make their way into homes and businesses, transforming the way ratepayers get – and store – their electricity.

4 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.