My friend Helen Taylor who works at Ecotricity just texted me that their electric sports car, a very sexy looking black batmobile type thing, called the Nemesis, has just broken the land speed record. That will be the UK electric car land speed record - not the petrol headed one. The Nemesis clocked in at 148 miles an hour this morning. Not bad for a car run on wind.
News about the Nemesis came on top of the recent announcement that Total SA's Chief Executive, Christophe de Margerie will not be letting his company drill for oil in the Arctic. The article written in the Financial Times by Guy Chazan, delivers a great piece of news. First because all the other oil majors can't wait to rip into that pristine wilderness that sits atop our globe. Second, because by not joining in the plunder, Total's resistance highlights how morally and ethically void the rest of big oil is.
I don't know if you saw the much talked about article Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone this summer. In it he explained with great clarity why we needed to see big oil as an enemy. His point was that these huge fossil fuel behemoths are destroying our future for short term profit and they need to be called out for it. Monsiuer de Margerie's reasons for pulling out, as stated in the FT, are that that the risk of an oil spill was too high and that any accident would mean a PR disaster for his company. Smart man.
The only reason Shell and the others can even think about drilling up there is of course because the sea ice has melted. As we know the ice has melted because we are burning too much oil. The idea that we want to destroy our environment to dig up more oil to put more carbon in the atmosphere the effect of which will be to destroy more of our environment is Hannibal Lecter crazy.
Which leads me to my third piece of good news. In case, like me, you missed it, start smiling because Germany is now capable of generating 50% of its electricity from renewables. That means all those critics who have said solar and wind energy will never go to scale can officially put a cork in it. And anyone who says, of course they can do that because renewables are heavily subsidised in Germany, tell them 'damn straight'. We should be subsidising every industry that is invested in keeping our planet spinning towards a happy healthy future for us all. Thanks for the good news, guys.