Here are Representative Ocasio-Cortez’ proposed goals for a Select Committee on a Green New Deal (https://ocasio2018.com/green-new-deal) as part of the resuscitated House Committee on Climate Change:
“The Plan for a Green New Deal (and the draft legislation) shall be developed in order to achieve the following goals, in each case in no longer than 10 years from the start of execution of the Plan:
100% of national power generation from renewable sources;
building a national, energy-efficient, “smart” grid;
upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety;
decarbonizing the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries;
decarbonizing, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure;
funding massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse gases;
making ‘green’ technology, industry, expertise, products and services a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international leader in helping other countries transition to completely carbon neutral economies and bringing about a global Green New Deal.”
Here are UK’s Extinction Rebellion’s demands (https://rebellion.earth/demands/):
“That the Government must tell the truth about how deadly our situation is, it must reverse all policies not in alignment with that position and must work alongside the media to communicate the urgency for change including what individuals, communities and businesses need to do.
“Good intentions and guidelines won’t save the ice caps. The Government must enact legally-binding policies to reduce carbon emissions in the UK to net zero by 2025 and take further action to remove the excess of atmospheric greenhouse gases. It must cooperate internationally so that the global economy runs on no more than half a planet’s worth of resources per year.
“By necessity these demands require initiatives and mobilisation of similar size and scope to those enacted in times of war. We do not however, trust our Government to make the bold, swift and long-term changes necessary to achieve this and we do not intend to hand further power to our politicians. Instead we demand a Citizens’ Assembly to oversee the changes, as we rise from the wreckage, creating a democracy fit for purpose.”
My approach to climate change is
100% renewables ASAP
zero emissions economy ASAP
carbon drawdown ASAP
geotherapy (not geoengineering) ASAP
Resources: http://drawdown.org
https://www.crcpress.com/Geotherapy-Innovative-Methods-of-Soil-Fertility-Restoration-Carbon-Sequestration/Goreau-Larson-Campe/p/book/9781466595392
http://bio4climate.org
http://soil4climate.org
http://solarray.blogspot.com
At least as a thought experiment.
I also believe a solar civil defense is necessary NOW and could be a way to do a solar walk away or electrical utility boycott as an example of solar swadeshi, local production, and a Gandhian, non-violent economic system.
PS: The Sunrise Movement (https://www.sunrisemovement.org) will be lobbying in Washington, DC on December 10 to demand Congress make a real plan to address climate change.
You can join this action by filling out the form at
http://bit.ly/dcregform or
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUxzRB4ZN92BCKispDUzB5bEizMXJ99PaRV5A0_m4BMGmWLQ/viewform
They will also be having a Facebook event on December 9 to Tell Democrats: We Need a Green New Deal
https://www.facebook.com/events/204445147134230/
The problem I have with this approach is that it requires a distinct path to an outcome and elides the real solution: much more — and very much more intense and ongoing — investment in science and engineering.
Science. Science. Science. Engineering. Engineering. Engineering.
In the middle of the last century, between Eisenhower’s call to best the Soviets and JFK’s rallying cry to land men on the moon,, the families of this country responded by sending their sons and daughters to universities to get degrees in math, physics, chemistry and engineering. The problems we had then were not solved by saying “here is the solution we’d like to see.” Not at all. The problems were solved by throwing engineering, math and science degrees at them. Nobody said, ‘we have to go to the moon on a team of horses.’ They said, ‘study and tell us how to get to the moon.’ And so we did.
And, not for nothing, the Soviet Union existed long after its natural expiration date explicitly because it had an equally ferocious cadre of engineers, scientists and mathematicians monitoring the life support system that kicked in around 1968 or so…
The reason the problem continues to exist is that we have not, to date, thrown enough science and engineering at it…
As an ‘approach’ this is more complex than need be: “Carbon drawdown” is subsumed by both “zero emissions economy” and “100% renewables.” As in, it is not necessary to state the one as it is a direct consequence of (either) of the two others.
We may not want to (again) have the debate about whether nuclear is included in the ‘zero emissions economy’ or whether it is a transitory component of the ‘ASAP’ part of any of them… but it’s going to be A) a part of the future… just ask the US Navy (, and China) and 2) at odds with the ‘100% renewables’ part… So, just to prepare you for that… And, if you want to talk about a Solar Civil Defense Corps… Why not a Nuclear Civil Defense Corp? Or some generic “Civil Energy Defense Corps”? There are quite a number of present and former Navy personnel with nuclear experience who, theoretically, could hit the ground running at a pace any strictly ‘Solar Civil Defense’ could not match right away.
‘Geotherapy’ is an approach I endorse and one which springs most directly from an advanced, intense and continuing investment in science and engineering. Someone, somewhere, may someday figure out how to pull massive amounts of CO/CO2 from the atmosphere quickly and cheaply… and, then, figure out how to convert the carbon therein directly to, say, graphene. Whole new industries will, I daresay, spring from that, overnight…
100% renewables will do nothing for active carbon drawdown. It will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere. Likewise with a zero emissions economy. These approaches reduce or eliminate further greenhouse gas emissions but don’t do anything to remove them from the atmosphere.
I don’t want a civil defense corps. I want people to realize that emergency or disaster electricity is available from solar or human energy for about $10 retail today anywhere around the world, that preparing for the next weather disaster is climate change adaptation and that the best preparation also tend to be climate change mitigation, and that it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe climate change is happening to prepare for the next weather emergency or natural disaster.
Geotherapy has much less to do with engineering than it has to do with ecology, biology, hydrology, and soil science. It requires deep systems thinking, something that is in very short supply, especially, in my experience with engineers.
If you read the Geotherapy book, you will understand that we already know how to draw prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere quickly, affordably, and even profitably but the methods are agricultural and forestry which are not particularly interesting for most technoscientific salvationists.
Nuclear as presently constituted is currently priced out of the market and would take too long to ramp up to do much good, according to everything I’ve read and seen.
It’s not at all clear that by ‘carbon drawdown’ you mean ‘removal of carbon from the atmosphere.’ And, in fact, inclusion of ‘geotherapy’ signaled (to me, at least) the process of removal of carbon from the atmosphere. I took ‘carbon drawdown’ to mean ‘going to 0% use of carbon,’ which would, in fact be a result of going to 100% renewables and/or zero emissions.
Planting a great number of trees or other carbon sinks and with sequestration are maybe good ideas, in and of themselves. Yet doing so is at odds with A) both planting a great number of windmills and an even greater number of solar panels as they take quite a lot of space and 2) industrialization. It really is a direct challenge to industrialization. So why not just go ahead and call it ‘de-industrialization’? I’m all for it –don’t get me wrong– but I suggest that fancy new branding and calling it ‘innovative’ (and disparaging others with ridiculous terms like ‘technoscientific salvationists’) is hardly likely to either win friends and influence people or eventuate in success.
No it isn’t. Wind turbines have a remarkably small footprint. And, According to a 2008 analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, supplying all of the United States’ electricity needs with photovoltaic solar energy would require roughly 0.6 percent of America’s total land area or 1,948 square feet per person.. Even if you double that to allow for storage [sun doesn’t shine at night, hur dur] and for transmission, you’re talking 1.2% of America. And, if you include the full electrification of heating and transportation, you need about 65% more electricity per year, so you’re at… 2.0%.
Know what fraction of US soil has trees growing on it? About one-third. Know what fraction of the ocean surface has trees growing on it? zero-thirds.
We can fully power all American energy needs with on-shore wind, off-shore wind, solar photovoltaic, transmission, and storage, and take up less than 2% of America’s land area, including essentially 0% of our forests.
Well, at least, you forbore with the sesquipedalian invective…
Zero point six percent of America’s total land area remains a large amount of land area and the more discontiguous the the total land area is, the more separate individual installations raising cost and complexity, especially if you want to grow forests and create other widespread carbon sinks. And as we’ve seen with Cape Wind, offshore siting isn’t as simply as point and place because there are competing interests, some of the valid some of them not so, involved if you want to do that concurrently.
I’m not the enemy. I’m just telling how it is. I mean, the argument boils down to ‘well if you just let us at the problem we’ll solve it.’ It might be true. You might know how to solve it. Given enough resources you might even be able to accomplish it. The truth is that there is nobody to let you do it: the problem is unconstrained and multi-domain and the resources are even less coherent. If you think it easy to just make dedicated use of 0.6 percent of total land mass (never mind 2%), while expanding forests and creating a number of possibly large other carbon sinks, and placing wind turbines willy nilly across the oceans you’re going to find you’ve bitten off much more than you can chew… which is all I’m saying.
I hear stomv pulling us back from the polarization implied by your comment. I don’t hear him claiming that it’s easy, I instead hear him saying that whatever we do for wind turbines is not in conflict with other approaches.
It does not have to be a rigidly zero-sum game. Wind turbines and solar panels are not synonymous with de-industrialization.
According to my few minutes of research, there are 8 billion square meters of suitable roofs for solar in the USA which is about 13% of the land area of the USA. I could be wrong but that should give you an idea of what kind of real estate is available. As the price of solar panels and home energy storage through stand-alone or electric vehicle batteries drops, this become an increasingly attractive alternative.
If you take a look at the Geotherapy book or watch some of the videos available on geotherapeutic techniques at http://bio4climate.org you will see that it is a naive conception to think of geotherapy simply as “Planting a great number of trees or other carbon sinks.”
About a third of ALL cropland could be equipped with solar panels placed above the growing crops as research shows that production is not reduced when a third of the insolation available is shaded. The Japanese have been working with this concept for at least a decade and I learned on Thursday that UMass Amherst and a local solar company are developing software and protocols to speed the adoption of this idea, for a variety of crops.
In the Midwest, there are many wind installations which are on cropland so successfully that farmers there talk about having two crops, the ones from seed and the other from wind.
Finally, net zero building standards (where a building produces all the energy it uses) are being included in building codes in the EU and CA starting now and by 2030 ALL buildings including ALL building renovations will be required to be net zero there. The rest of the world fill follow, especially since, even today, net zero energy building techniques are practical and affordable for everything from skyscrapers to low income single family homes.
It is my firm belief that the future is much higher efficiency needing less energy than we consume per capita now although I know few agree with me.
First you misread “carbon drawdown” in a way that I no way meant it and that it is not, to my knowledge, usually taken. Such things happen, words on a page are tricky and require not only someone to write but also someone to read and they both may have very different ways of looking at the same words.
Then you take my phrase “tecnoscientific salvationists” as referring directly to you, not something I meant. In fact, the person who epitomizes that frame of mind, the idea that there is a single technological solution available for every problem without dealing with the underlying system or human nature (such as it is), for me is David Keith, the Harvard physicist who indefatigably promotes the idea of geoengineering. It is always amusing for me to remember that the same week I read about Keith’s method of CO2 capture at the smokestack costing about $200 per ton in a pilot program and might be economic at $100 per ton I also read about a German study which showed that planting jojoba trees in Africa would sequester carbon from the atmosphere at a price of $80 per ton at the date of publication.
I suspect that once again you will take my words in ways that I can’t imagine and again blame me for your own idiosyncratic interpretations. Have fun with the straw man you confuse me with. Nothing I can do to stop you. To each his own.