"…Why come down to Nashville, specifically, for this rally?
I'm going to speak briefly — only for a few minutes, I think — to make the point that it's a bad idea for TVA to lock in gas power for decades. Fifteen years ago, people said gas would be a bridge fuel from coal to the renewable era. That seemed like a reasonable argument at the time, because it releases less carbon dioxide than when you burn coal, but two things have happened since. We learned that a lot of gas escapes into the atmosphere during the fracking process, and it traps way more heat than carbon dioxide by about 80 times more heat. A leak rate of more than 2 percent makes it worse than coal; we're finding 5 percent leaking at fracking fields. Second, the price of renewable energy — sun, wind and batteries to store that power — has dropped by 90 percent. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The combination of those two things means that fracked natural gas is not a bridge after all, and we don't even need a bridge, because we're already across to where we need to be. The only reason for using gas is to benefit the people who own the supplies of gas…
https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/bill-mckibben-interview/article_8b73ea96-0ca0-11ef-992a-6fd6aa0b5de7.html==
All About the Gas
Will the planet turn to the sun in time?
"It’s going to come down to gas.
I’m writing this as I sit in a ‘listening session’ conducted by the Tennessee Valley Authority in Nashville, hearing arguments about how the giant utility should power the region for the next few decades. But I could be almost any place on the planet and the argument would be pretty much the same: do we build out gas to replace coal for producing electricity, or do we go straight to sun, wind, and batteries? It’s the argument that will decide how much our earth overheats..." Bill McKibben
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