Over the past decade, carbon-free energy production has exploded. In 2012 alone, total global solar-generating capacity ballooned by 43.3 percent, and capacity for wind-generated energy grew by 18.9 percent. The stats and charts seem to imply that carbon-free power is gaining a larger piece of the pie, and will start to whittle away at so-called dirty energy like coal and oil, guiding the world to less carbon output.
But a graph from Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, paints a somewhat different picture. The graph charts the proportion of carbon-free energy consumption to total consumption, and shows that the carbon-free slice hasn't grown for the last 15 years. In fact, the proportion of green-to-dirty energy has shrunk slightly since 1999.
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