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Green New Deal Bill Aims To Move US To 100 Percent Renewable Energy, Net-Zero Emissions (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday morning, NPR posted a bill drafted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) advocating for a Green New Deal -- that is, a public works bill aimed at employing Americans and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the face of climate change. A similar version of the bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The House bill opens by citing two recent climate change reports: an October 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a heavily peer-reviewed report released in November 2018 by a group of U.S. scientists from federal energy and environment departments. Both reports were unequivocal about the role that humans play in climate change and the dire consequences humans stand to face if climate change continues unchecked.
The bill lists some of these consequences: $500 billion in lost annual economic output for the U.S. by 2100, mass migration, bigger and more ferocious wildfires, and risk of more than $1 trillion in damage to U.S. infrastructure and coastal property. To stop this, the bill says, the global greenhouse gas emissions from human sources must be reduced by 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and we must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. [...] The Green New Deal specifically calls for a 10-year mobilization plan that would "achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers" by creating "millions" of high-paying jobs through investment in U.S. infrastructure. Specific kinds of infrastructure aren't listed, but general categories or works projects are outlined. Adaptive infrastructure tailored to communities, like higher sea walls and new drainage systems, would be included. NPR notes that the language is classified as a non-binding resolution, "meaning that even if it were to pass... it wouldn't itself create any new programs. Instead, it would potentially affirm the sense of the House that these things should be done in the coming years."
Surprisingly, the bill doesn't mention fossil fuels at all. "In a draft version of the Green New Deal that had been circulated in December, a Frequently Asked Questions section did not preclude eventually calling for a tax or a ban on fossil fuels, but it noted that this was not what the bill was about," notes Ars Technica. "Simply put, we don't need to just stop doing some things we are doing (like using fossil fuels for energy needs)," the FAQ notes under the Green New Deal draft language. "We also need to start doing new things (like overhauling whole industries or retrofitting all buildings to be energy efficient). Starting to do new things requires some upfront investment."
The bill lists some of these consequences: $500 billion in lost annual economic output for the U.S. by 2100, mass migration, bigger and more ferocious wildfires, and risk of more than $1 trillion in damage to U.S. infrastructure and coastal property. To stop this, the bill says, the global greenhouse gas emissions from human sources must be reduced by 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and we must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. [...] The Green New Deal specifically calls for a 10-year mobilization plan that would "achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers" by creating "millions" of high-paying jobs through investment in U.S. infrastructure. Specific kinds of infrastructure aren't listed, but general categories or works projects are outlined. Adaptive infrastructure tailored to communities, like higher sea walls and new drainage systems, would be included. NPR notes that the language is classified as a non-binding resolution, "meaning that even if it were to pass... it wouldn't itself create any new programs. Instead, it would potentially affirm the sense of the House that these things should be done in the coming years."
Surprisingly, the bill doesn't mention fossil fuels at all. "In a draft version of the Green New Deal that had been circulated in December, a Frequently Asked Questions section did not preclude eventually calling for a tax or a ban on fossil fuels, but it noted that this was not what the bill was about," notes Ars Technica. "Simply put, we don't need to just stop doing some things we are doing (like using fossil fuels for energy needs)," the FAQ notes under the Green New Deal draft language. "We also need to start doing new things (like overhauling whole industries or retrofitting all buildings to be energy efficient). Starting to do new things requires some upfront investment."
1. Expire all tax exemptions, tax exclusions, tax incentives, and tax depreciation for all fossil fuel infrastructure of any type.
2. Use funds from 1 and any tarrifs on China to fund US built solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and tidal energy capital investment (not operations, only construction) nationwide, including territories.
Problem solved.
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The funding would come from taxes, especially on the very wealthy who benefit from being able to do business in a climate that isn't being destroyed by mankind.
Matt Walsh's comments on this:
If I may, I would like to suggest a few additions. This is my New Green New Deal or Green New New Deal:
1. A free ice cream machine for every American (vegan ice cream, of course, because Cortez is killing all the milk cows).
2. Every sidewalk in America converted to a moving walkway.
3. Every staircase converted to an escalator.
4. Every escalator converted to an elevator.
5. A big bridge connecting North Carolina to Morocco, with, like, refreshment stands and stuff along the way. Also, like, there should be probably little cabins or something for people to sleep in.
6. A free blimp for every man, woman, and child.
7. A dog for every person.
8. A foot bath for every dog.
9. Essential oils for every foot bath.
10. No diseases (will cutdown on healthcare costs).
11. Universal joy.
12. A constantly refreshed selection of cereal in every pantry.
13. A lion that can tell me stories and grant wishes.
14. Immortality.
15. A computer type thing like from The Matrix where you plug in and learn how to do karate in five minutes.
16. Bananas that never rot.
17. No more loneliness.
18. Free consensual pony rides.
19. A kind of like robot thing that, like, lifts you out of the bed in the morning and puts on your pants for you and brushes your teeth.
20. All remaining student debt converted into tacos (one dollar of debt equals one taco).
According to my estimates, this plan is extremely affordable so long as we tax everyone at a moderate rate of 6,000 percent. We'd also need to consult with a team of highly-trained genies. I assume Cortez has already assembled that team if she's planning to provide a livable income and paid vacations to every single person in the country.
And here's the good news: most Americans will die anyway after Cortez tears down all of our homes and kills our livestock. This will thin the herd (pardon the pun) and make it much easier to provide for the small band of survivors who remain.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
We're going for a record 100 repeals that do nothing.
For one year, cut the military budget in half.
Spend that on renewables.
The problem with GND is that there are a lot of tankies and brogressives trying to make it a vehicle for an anti-capitalist manifesto. Which is dumb and will ensure it goes nowhere.
This version is a silly, short, vague kitchen sink plan without any substantive policy or realistic projections. They also throw in a bunch of unrelated wishlist stuff about a jobs-for-all plan and universal healthcare.
We could use real market based energy policy reform. Carbon tax- (Which correctly prices carbon emissions better than any other plan and works inside our existing infrastructure). Power grid improvements to pave the way for decentralized power grids with local power storage and electric vehicles. Solar, wind, nuclear.
The people pushing this GND are nuclearphobes and don't want to acknowledge that any real energy form will be market driven. Transition away from coal and to natural gas have seen massive reductions in non-carbon pollution and that's been entirely market driven.
Well, this suggestion comes from someone who actually wants the taxes to reflect the expenses instead of another unnamed party that has the habit of removing taxes for the richest while increasing the spending and thereby the deficit to an extent that just paying interest now exceeds what "free" healthcare would cost.
You want to know what could fund this completely? Not allowing fossil fuel to externalize the cost of cleaning the mess up.
Another thing that could fund this would be to remove subsidies for businesses that runs the environment.
The tax cuts added a trillion dollars to the debt and nobody blinked.
Dubya's foray into the middle east cost us $7 trillion
I think we can manage this small outlay
This is keynesian economical stmimulus, smarter version. Spending money on changing processes to reduce greenhouse gas will create jobs and yield economical growth. And it will help making the planet a reasonable place for humans to live in the next century.
Me thinks the point of the 100 Percent Renewable Energy, Net-Zero Emissions bill is not to be realistic, but to just introduce legislation that is written in the permanent record and officially begin to turn the tide against what has become a very environmentally destructive administration and party, and towards the future.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
The only current human technology that has any hope of putting a dent in global climate change is nuclear weapons.
First, the resulting fatalities from a global thermonuclear war will significantly reduce the human population and as a consequence reduce the need for all the polluting technologies that are required to sustain Earth's current human population.
Second, the resulting nuclear winter brought on by a global thermonuclear war will greatly reduce the solar insolation that would heat up the planet thus reducing global temperatures.
No other human technologies have any chance at all as the Earth's human population continues to grow exponentially and hence the energy needs to operate the technology required to support the ever-growing population continues to grow.
Vote Global Thermonuclear War 2020!
Since the bill contains no appropriations and changes no existing laws and is non-binding it really can't be a revolutionary leap forward in anything nor will anything be required to pay for it. Nothing is risked and there will be no benefit other than political grandstanding.
I mean, for now. But eventually solar energy should be used to make solar panels. And eventually, to mine the materials. There may be by-products of creation (e.g. slag from ore refinement), but there's no logical reason we cannot get to 100% renewable energy. With enough energy we can recycle materials from older panels too, so we can start limiting those by products.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Grandstanding? It's not news that Republicans don't give a shit about the environment, so what's the goal here?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, converting military bases to renewable energy is a great way to build resiliency from attack, as you don't have to defend supply lines as much, and this reduces the actual operating cost of the military at the same time. There are a number of mil programs in action doing just this. Just accelerate it.
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This could be a revolutionary leap forward in several technologies, job creation and American infrastructure.
It is important to get the ordering correct. It is better to develop the needed technology, and then build the infrastructure based on it.
It would be better to spend $50B on R&D rather than $500B on deployment. Once the tech is good enough, no government deployment spending is needed, because profit-seeking capitalists will do it for us.
Like my grandpa used to say: If you have two hours to chop down a tree*, spend the first hour sharpening your ax.
Disclaimer: *I am not advocating the destruction of trees.
When a barista tries to be a lawmaker, this is what you get. Every single bullshit talking point crammed into one idiotic bill. There's no "wage gap". There's no such thing as "healthy food". There is "healthful food", but not "healthy". Trump is already creating "millions of jobs" and "stopping the transfer of jobs overseas", and "enacting border protections", and there is no way to "provide all people of the United States with [...] housing".
it's been around for ages. It's also, if the 97% of climate scientists are to be believed, necessary if we're not going to have mass disasters, drought and food shortages in the next 20 years. The oil companies knew about this since the 70s. Seriously, google it. Instead of fixing it so we had renewables (which would devalue the resource they own) they spent billions burying it.
AOC isn't a dingbat. She's young, and occasionally makes mistakes, but at her core she knows what's going on and what we need to do about it. And as for ideas penned by a 12 year old, dude, look at Bush Jr. Two fucking terms. Look at how Clinton addressed towns. Look at what happened to Obama every time he talked to the electorate like an adult. Remember "You didn't build it?". That was a)not exactly what he said and b) true. Almost cost him the election as folks went nuts because they didn't understand the difference between "You didn't build the roads you use to get to your little business" and "You never did anything worthwhile in your whole live you god damned loser"...
You can't talk to the electorate as a whole as if they're intelligent. What's the old line? A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky animals.
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Maybe we should balance the budget first and fix the wasteful spending first
Speaking of wasteful spending: America spends $200B annually on oil imports, mostly from countries that are hostile to our interests. Europe (which would also benefit from any tech developed) spends even more on oil, and buys a lot of gas from Russia. America spends about $80B keeping Middle East shipping lanes open and secure.
Overall, Americans spend about $1.5T on energy, about 7% of our economy. If we could produce that energy more efficiently, that money could be spent on other things ... such as balancing the budget.
I don't agree with AOC on much, but investing in developing better green tech is a no-brainer. We need better panels, smarter grids, and (most importantly) better/cheaper batteries (storage is key).
What outlay? There's no appropriations in this bill.
Dubya never had an annual deficit over a half-trillion dollars, Obama rarely had an annual deficit less than one trillion dollars.
So the ten-year 'cost' of Trump's tax cuts is $1TN, so what? That's $100BN/yr, and it stimulated the economy. Obama pushed through a one year, one trillion dollar stimulus package of 'shovel-ready' and 'green energy' jobs that barely moved the economic needle.
Ken
Thank you for demonstrating the worthlessness of an economics degree from Boston University.
Wrong. There aren't processed jet fuel supplies being made at every base, nor bunker fuel, etc.
Bases were not originally built to export energy, but to store it for redistribution. One of the reasons the military is going to renewables is modern combat is becoming fairly electric-based, and it's hard enough getting supplies in for the fossil fuel based stuff, but many drones and most infantry and other units draw a lot of power.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
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Those are the key words here. This is not a bill as such, it is a collection of ideas. Personally I would be highly skeptical of these kinds of grandiose plans. Here are a few choice quotes:
“Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.” - Every building. In the entire United States. All of them. The quote mentions "replace" so I presume they are willing to demolish buildings that don't meet the standard.
“Build out high speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary” - Maybe we should check in with our friends in California and see how the rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles is coming along: https://www.latimes.com/local/...
At last count the cost has ballooned from the original $6B to $10.6B - almost double.
Keep in mind this is 119 miles of train line, not the 10's of thousands of miles of train line we would need to make air travel "unnecessary". How are you going to get to Hawaii? Or New York to London? Build a train line across the ocean?
Don't trains also pollute? Or maybe Elon Musk going to build solar trains and solve all of that for us.
Look, I'm all for a cleaner environment but this woman is a complete wingnut.
The real question, of course, is how much will this boondoggle actually cost to which Ocasio-Cortez admits, “even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient.”. In other words, astronomical not to mention completely impractical.
All is not lost though. I hear that Venezuela is having some trouble and could use a helping hand.
The top 1% have 50% of the wealth. Why would you think they should pay less than 50% of the taxes? To ever get us back to even a remotely reasonable wealth distribution, the 1% have to own far less than 50% of the wealth. We don't have many ways to remove a disgusting excess of money from a tiny percent of the population other than taxes.
What is your solution to fix this community and culture-destroying wealth inequality that doesn't involve taxing the hell out of the 1%?
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here's no logical reason we cannot get to 100% renewable energy
Sure there is, material demands.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
For the same energy output nuclear takes far less materials than wind, hydro, geothermal, and especially solar. There is not enough mining in the world to meet the kind of material needs to switch to 100% renewable energy. We aren't going to get there any time soon either as we are talking not about a doubling or tripling of output but orders of magnitude difference. Nuclear takes no more materials than coal for the same energy. We can switch to nuclear without any kind of "green deal", we only need a government willing to issue licenses for their construction and put an end to the subsidies on wind and solar that drive them out of the market.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The Constitution allows for funding the Army or the Navy - but says nothing about an Air Force, the FBI, or the ATF. But no Randian or "strict constitutionalist" ever complains about that. Ever. It's almost like you're partisan hacks looking for excuses to rag on things you don't like, and aren't arguing on any kind of principle.
How do you hold those massively contradictory positions without snapping your spine in six different places? Nuclear energy wouldn't even exist as a concept without massive government investment. It would never have existed in practice without hundreds of billions in taxpayer backing. Backing that extends to dealing with the waste for millennia.
Capitalists would happily see the whole world burn and every last human die if it meant continued quarterly profits. You talk about defense but don't think the government should do anything to defend people from catastrophic climate change.
There's no point in crippling the United States' economy when India and Asia are going to make CC happen anyway
First, it's not clear that it would actually cripple the economy. The price of renewables is already low enough that private industry is installing it without incentives. The problem is they're not moving fast enough to avert the worst problems.
Second, the best way to get "Asia" on board is to have the technology to sell to them. How else do you plan to "get them off coal"?
Sitting on our hands while pointing fingers at other countries accomplishes nothing in the short run, and in the long run it means those other countries get to develop the technology and get most of the jobs.
People said the same thing about Paris, and Kyoto, and many other efforts. Yet here we are, countries making major, sustained efforts to do something about climate change.
This is how politics work. You build up support, get people discussing the issue and making proposals, pushing from different angles. A non-binding agreement acts as a foundation for binding ones, justification for changes to rules and future policies.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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