Lane Greene
speaker
61 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 25 Jun
Lane Greene’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Europeans often see air conditioning use as a kind of moral choice.
They mostly agree that first world lifestyles are largely to blame for the world's rising temperatures.
Lane Green is a senior digital editor for The Economist.
But they don't need to be so cautious.
Europe's renewable build-out means that using a bit more aircon won't, in fact, crash the climate.
Let's put some numbers
Some of the southern European countries have the greenest energy mix.
For example, on June 10th, Spain, where I was riding from, had about one-fifth of the greenhouse gas impact of the electricity generated in the state of Georgia in the United States, where I come from.
So that was 86 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour of energy, against a figure of 442 in Georgia.
Those who are curious to look up their own energy mix can check this out on a website, apps.electricitymaps.com.
And you can see that on a hot June day, about half of Spain's electricity comes from solar power, against only about 10% from fossil fuels.
And France does even better thanks to its quite extensive use of zero carbon nuclear
No, but you'd be surprised at where it does and doesn't.
For example, Italy isn't quite so good.
It gets a lot more of electricity from gas powered generation, despite being quite sunny, it doesn't have the solar mix that say Spain and Portugal do.
Poland is still very reliant on coal, so its electricity uh impact on the climate is about the same as that of a lot of parts of the United States.
Britain is a bit better than Italy, which is a laggard, but it's not quite as good as places like Iberia.
Siberia and it depends quite a bit on the weather.
There are also some unexpected bright spots on the map.
You can see that Albania can sometimes get almost 100% of its electricity from its extensive use of hydroelectric energy, depending on rainfall.
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