Small business owners want our country to transition to a clean energy economy. That was the overwhelming response we heard from the small businesses we contacted up and down the South Carolina coast during our sea level rise education project (South Carolina Businesses Acting on Rising Seas, SCBARS.org).
In a national poll of small business owners released last year by the American Sustainable Business Council, 63 percent said that they would support a national Renewable Energy Standard mandating that 20 percent of electricity come from clean sources by 2020.
So how is the nation doing in the area of renewable energy?
According to data released this past Friday by the U.S. Department of Energy, in the first six months of 2014 almost 12% of the domestic energy production came from renewable sources. Energy from solar, wind and hydropower was up seven percent from two years ago.
Not bad….but not good enough.
The petroleum and coal industries keep telling us that renewable energy can’t meet our country’s energy needs. But that’s just talk to protect the profits of those industries.
The reality is that much of our energy needs can be met with renewable energy. We’re heading in the right direction but we would get there sooner if we invested more in building the new energy sources of the future instead of continuing to throw money into the drilling and mining of yesterday’s carbon polluting oil and coal.