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A letter from Bill Nussey on Earth Day 2022

I didn’t start out as an environmentalist. But I became one.

My journey into renewable energy first began when I stumbled onto the crazy fast decline in solar and battery costs. The emerging business opportunities were enormous, and I had to be a part of the industry. Freeing Energy was born. I read hundreds of papers and thousands of articles. I interviewed hundreds of brilliant people. From all that, I learned two essential things that changed my life.

First, many of the environmental concerns I was learning about were not exaggerated. The damage from fossil fuels to our land, water, and the air is more consequential than I could have imagined. Second, unlike so many of the problems facing our world, fixing our energy systems would actually be more profitable than propping up the current, outdated, and broken system. And not just in a long term, society-gets-better kind of way, but in an actual real-people-save-real-money-today and tens-of-millions-of-new-jobs way.

Source: Joel Pett, Cartoonist

As my book coalesced around the business side of the transition to renewables, I assumed that the sheer power of economics would be enough to drive governments into aggressively transitioning to renewables. I was wrong. I underestimated the resistance to change, even by well-intentioned people. The writer Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” As the largest industry on earth, fossil fuels (est $6 trillion per year) support a lot of salaries. 

So, I decided to add my voice to the climate impact of fossil fuels.  I embraced my inner science nerd and took a look at the atmospheric data. What I found is pretty simple:

In the months leading up to Earth Day 2022, atmospheric concentrations of both CO2 and methane (the main ingredient in natural gas) have both hit the highest recorded levels in human history. This data is supported by many groups. The last time there was this much CO2 in the air, temperatures were 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea levels were 75 feet higher than today (even a 10 foot rise floods or impacts most of the US East Coast). Yes, the earth has natural cycles, but this is different. The rate of CO2 increase has been 100 times faster than anything that has happened naturally. Ten thousand years of change in a hundred–it’s the difference between slamming on the brakes to avoid a wall or crashing right into it. 

The consequences of clinging to fossil fuels are evident even today. The frequency and severity of droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires are on the rise. Physical waste products from mining and burning fossil fuels continue to build up, sticking future generations with hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-up costs.

The world needs our help. The Freeing Energy Project was created to educate and inspire people toward a new and faster path to renewable energy. In recognition of Earthy Day 2022, our team is proud to share, for the very first time, a Freeing Energy video called Join The Revolution.

If you’d like to watch the video and learn more about the #LocalEnergyRevolution, check out https://FreeingEnergy.com/LocalEnergyRevolution.

Thank you to everyone in our community for your support and encouragement.

Bill Nussey and the Freeing Energy team

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