I have done my share of laughing at the ‘Green New Deal’, but it’s only fair that if you’re going to laugh at someone’s plan, you should be able to explain how it could be done better. And maybe we can brainstorm some ideas, being one of the few places on the internet where the left and right can actually talk to each other productively - sometimes.
So I’m going to start with how I think such a plan should be developed, and what it would look like. Bear in mind that while I work on the periphery of many of these industries, I’m not an expert in power economics, so some of this might or might not be workable. That’s what debate is for.
The Ground Rules
Leave partisanship at the door. Forget about old grudges, ‘gotcha’ posts, snarking about which side is worst, etc. For the purposes of actually accomplishing something, Imagine we’re a bunch of explorers which just landed on a planet locked in bitter rivalries, but none of us have a dog in that hunt, so the partisanship is meaningless. That doesn’t mean that left vs right thinking shouldn’t be involved, just that it should be fact-based and ideas offered in good faith.
Key Requirements
In engineering, one of the first things you do with a new project is scope it out. Decide what’s feasible, order tasks logically, establish requirements, etc. So here are some requirements:
The plan must contain concrete actions that will actually reduce CO2 levels.
The plan must contain elements that are acceptable to both right and left. One of the biggest flaws of the ‘Green New Deal’ is that it seems almost designed to exclude support from one half of the country. That’s stupid. In a Democracy, doing big things requires consensus, and a lot of it. Ramming through massive social changes on partisan boundary lines when you have power is a recipe for civil strife and failure.
The plan has to be realistic in its goals, costs, and methods. Pie-in-the-sky plans to ‘stimulate conversation’ are useless and just eat up all the oxygen in the room, as the GND is doing. Let’s try for something concrete.
A Good Start
Another thing a good plan should do is hit the low-hanging fruit first. Do the stuff that carries the biggest bang for the buck before you go after trivialities or hard problems.
Step 1: Retain nuclear plants. The fastest thing you can do to curb global warming is to NOT do something that will make it worse. We can argue about new nuclear and how much of it we should have, but it should be a no-brainer to stop the de-commissioning of existing, perfectly functional plants around the world. This is something the left can be much more effective at than the right, because the opposition to these nuclear plants is coming from the left, and they generally don’t listen to the right.
So if you want to march to save the planet, start marching with signs saying, “Nuclear power is green power” or whatever. This should be job #1. Germany spent decades building out solar and wind power, then in one panicked moment Angela Merkel undid all that work and then some by hastily ordering Germany’s power plants shuttered. Their greenhouse gas emissions have subsequently gone up substantially. Nuclear plants in South Korea, France, Sweden, Ontario, and other places are under threat from activists. Help stop this.
Step 2: Replace coal with a feasible short term alternative. Coal is the dirtiest energy source, both of normal ground level pollution and CO2. There are about 600 coal plants in the U.S., which collectively are responsible for almost 40% of the U.S.'s energy-related CO2 emissions. The fastest way to get these plants offline is to replace their power with natural gas turbines, which can be stood up quickly, moved when necessary in later stages, etc.
So here’s my first proposal: A project-based carbon tax that would be used to subsidize the investment in natural gas replacements for coal plants, and which goes away when the specific goals have been met. See, a big problem with carbon taxes is that they are supposed to be revenue-neutral and the money should be given back to the community. But there is little support for them on the right, because the right believes (and I think correctly), that governments cannot resist spending carbon tax money on wish list items, so they will actually not do what you’d think but will act as just another tax.
We saw that play out in Alberta, where our NDP government promised that the carbon tax would be revenue neutral, but when pressed after the tax was enacted admitted that their concept of revenue neutral was that they would tax the people, then ‘invest’ the money back in the province as government spending on whatever they wanted to spend it on. The result is that Canadians are revolting against the tax. The same thing is happening in France.
So if you want carbon taxes, the best way to do it is to tie them to very specific projects, and sunset them when the project is over. Next project, new tax. If people realize the tax is going to concrete things that will benefit them down the road, and that tax is temporary, there’s a much better chance of getting the other side on board.
So Step 1, institute a national carbon tax to help pay for the transition from coal to natural gas. You’ll get the frackers on board, and it’ll be an easy sell in places that have natural gas resources.
That one step would cut U.S. energy-related carbon emissions by almost 20%, and it’s something that actually could be done in a decade or less. That already puts this plan way ahead of the Green New Deal.
Bear in mind that this is temporary, while we stand up energy sources that take a long time to build. Once those sources are online, the gas turbines can be moved and re-purposed to help solar, wind, or other energy sources manage fluctuating supply and demand.
I think I’ll stop there, as this is already longer than I’d hoped. Fair-minded criticisms or other ideas welcome. Bear in mind that this is the short-term, low-hanging-fruit plan. Not the permanent solution.
I just want to add: Make serious visible effort to give ‘reparations’ to coal miners. Make it so we can see that such things can be done. And by that I mean retrain them, pay the out of work ones, pay the relatives of out of work miners. etc…sure there will be abuse but thats true of anything.
One big problem to overcome in any serious ‘new deal’ to work: the first step is get past the stigma of Socialism. That’s a huge hurdle cause the term is so politicized.
Oh and in a perfect world screw a carbon tax. Take the GD money out of the insane military budget…
I would say that, one thing we could do is to impede China’s one belt one road policy wrt their funding (very dirty) new coal plants being built in developing countries and, instead, help to build cleaner burning natural gas, or hybrid systems with natural gas, wind and solar if feasible. Pressure China to stop building coal plants in China as well, and to a realistic path to shutting down the dirtiest ones they have and replacing them with something else. Yeah, these are policies that aren’t directly in the US, but I think they would have a huge impact and it’s something the US could do as part of an overall strategy…we’ve seen that a ‘trade war’, while painful, at least gets the CCPs attention, so I think it’s something the US could do.
As far as our own glass house, I think your idea to at least maintain our current nuclear is a step in the right direction. And, as with China, the US should be looking at a short to medium term retiring of our own coal power production facilities to be replaced by either natural gas or, again, by hybrids if feasible. There are places where hybrids make a lot of sense, and places they don’t, so target those that do for hybrids, and target those that don’t for coal plant replacement. Yeah, this is going to cost a lot, but it will be worth it and position us for more down the road, assuming the unicorns and dragons come to pass and new battery tech along with new solar or wind tech (or fusion) comes along.
Right now, I don’t see how it’s politically possible to build new nuclear power plants, but some sort of initiative to at least build ‘experimental’ new designs could maybe happen. Fast track some foreign designs that have worked well, tweak them, and build a handful of new reactors to test them and refine them to a workable, scalable model that can be expanded. We’ll lose some on the front end, but once a design is tweaked and approved, building more of the same will let us scale the investment. In the mean time, fund basic tech research into green initiatives (as well as more into fusion, or more into the European scaled up prototype). There are some promising battery technologies that might bear fruit…fund some research. Hell, put out an X-prize for a small city or town architecture with a large prize if it meets the parameters desired.
I think we are already on track for electric cars, but there are probably some things we could do along those lines to boost the market. It won’t be popular, but we could do what the French tried to do and increase the tax on gasoline or diesel fuels and use that money to pay for some of the other things I listed above. It will push the market in…well, it won’t be a ‘good’ way, per se, but it will be less impactful than the government simply picking electric cars by fiat as the new paradigm. Hell, hydrogen or methane fuel cells COULD still nip in and take the prize…or, maybe the competition will be in the type of framing and battery design (I always thought the skateboard concept for electric cars was a cool idea that should be pursued). We could also fund more into autonomous driving AI, as that has the potential to solve a bunch of birds with one stone.
Another thing might be just as simple as energy efficiency initiatives. A lot of homes (I’d go with the vast majority) aren’t energy efficient. Mine isn’t. Oh, I have solar, but the cost to replace all the windows and fix the insulation problems, replace my heat pump and AC unit are just more than I’ve been willing to spend except slowly, over time…and most people don’t even bother. Give tax incentives to folks who replace single paned windows, say, with double paned ones, or just get an energy audit of their house and a list of mitigation and start tackling the low hanging fruit on the list. We have SO much low hanging fruit we could be dealing with, that we could start with this alone to get real bang for our bucks, instead of pie in the sky…how much could we, as a nation save in CO2 and energy just increasing our homes insulation or energy loss by, say, 20%? Hell, the MONEY that would save really boggles the mind. The problem is, it’s an upfront capital cost to get benefit on the back end, so most people don’t do it.
Anyway, those are some of my random thoughts on this.
Sam Stone is at least trying so this deserves attention more than the sterile partisan pot shotting thread
Reasonable outline.
Yes, indeed, the idiotic decision of Merkel in giving in to the Grunen was a huge step backwards.
The American right has a bolshevik type irrationality in this area and it is impossible to overcome that in my impression.
But the idea of a carbon tax tied to a broad energy infrastructure allocation and allow it for both the spending on the grid modernizations (for the truly national integrated grids and even continental grids to allow the maximum economies of scale and the energy trading), including both the Solar, the Wind and the Gaz, this would
it is the petrol tax, not the general carbon tax although the policy flows through.
It is impractical for the investment planning and impractical for the economic objectives that indeed the free market economists who designed the original idea aimed for.
It is too narrow.
Restate this as broad greener energy infrastructure and technology investment, including the very important grid investment for the national or continental level grids and energy trading to achieve maximum leverage for both the Gaz generation and the renewables.
Then the natural gaz and the renewables interests are more allied and achieve common interest and accelerate away from the dirtiest productions, but it is not trapping investment only in gaz.
but indeed this is practical, it is near term and can achieve the support outside of the green left as the equipmentiers fo
Perhaps Americans can spend less time thinking of telling other countries what to do and just focus on what you actually control yourselves. Yelling at the Chinese is sterile, even if justified.
electric cars are not green.
They are only green when the grid is green.
Making an aggressive transition to the electric cars when your grid has the heavy hydrocarbon basis still is putting the makeup on the same pig.
It is more sensible to put heavy investment in the new technologies like the window-pane solar - the venture capital group in my group has backed something like that and it is going to market…
First industry.
People always think of the homes as they understand the economy via their personal lives, but it is the commercial sector - industry and services where these investments can achieve the greatest scale
the investment in the energy efficiency and the resource efficiencies is a double economic win as it also (when it is being done via the market based mechanisms of regulation and not by directive-regulation) increases the economic competivity of the enterprise sector in the medium term - but needs the medium term incentive for the SMEs to invest (or in the case of the commercial buildings, a market based mechanism to overcome the agency problem between the building owner that does not pay the energy build and the leasers who do).
Too often the green investments are not positioned as good economics and on market - business boosting, but on the anti growth and business position of the green radical left. It is a pity as there is the very good, excellent even, economic arguments to promote this for better efficiency in business.
Which part of “The plan must contain elements that are acceptable to both right and left.” did you not understand? That would never fly in the real political world.
Carbon taxes would be less obnoxious to many on the right than reducing military expenditures by a similar amount. Plus, as suggested, they’d go away.
I might tweak that tax a bit further and not call it a “carbon tax”. I’d call it something along the lines of “pollution mitigation” or something like that, and set it up such that a company’s tax rate is very proportional to their level of pollution emissions, and then set it up such that carbon emissions are weighted heavily. That way, it will differentially impact companies based on their carbon emissions, and mitigation efforts will directly affect their tax rate. Maybe even go so far as to assess it quarterly to allow companies to realize more immediate benefits from those mitigation efforts. Also maybe even let the tax go negative if the company is carbon-positive- they start getting credits or something.
The problem is intractable because it is a massive coordination problem. If the US cuts its emissions to zero and the rest of the world keeps emitting the effect on global warming will be almost zero. This is true for every country, they only see the benefits if most of the other countries cut their emissions too. While the costs are definite the benefits are uncertain, and any country that does nothing while other countries cut their emissions will get all the benefits and pay none of the costs.
The usual solution for coordination problem is government style force to punish free riders and slackers. That won’t work in this case because it is obvious that no one is going to war with China or India over global warming or even stop trading with them. Attempts to have agreements without force such as the Paris Accords have been proven worthless.
The only hope is technology. Clean energy types of technology are great but will not be enough to do anything in time. What needs to be developed is carbon capture technology. Each country that cares about global warming should set a goal for an amount of carbon and offer to pay for that amount of carbon to be captured. The drawback is the the price of carbon will be somewhat arbitrary at least at first and could end up wasting alot of money if set too high or being too slow if set to low. However, it can be adjusted. Have the funding come from a dedicated carbon and border adjustment tax.
Without meaning to sound too dismissive, are we assuming that “the right” in this scenario is, as an institution, several points more rational than it actually is?
Because right now, there is no solution to climate change that is acceptable to the right, because to “the right”, climate change is not a real issue. And to the degree that it is, the solutions proposed are utterly unpalatable exercises in socialism. And I don’t just mean the “green new deal”; I’m talking about something as innocuous as a carbon tax - essentially the free-market solution to the problem, and a half-measure at that. And yet:
…Bolding mine.
“The right” is hostile to accepting the existence of climate change. Even if they aren’t, they’re hostile towards any kind of government action to solve the problem - including the method of simply pricing in the cost of carbon via a carbon tax, which would be a free market solution (in an actual free market where property rights were respected, companies like Exxon-Mobil would be sued out of existence).
This cartoon published in The Nib is pretty excellent, and makes the point quite succinctly.
(The answer, as it turns out, is no.)
Look, I know you said at the outset “no partisan sniping”, but realistically, what could you possibly do to get people like James Inhofe on board with the idea that we need to take serious government action on climate change? “The Right” is not going to get on board. At best, we can take this as “actions that won’t alienate moderates and [del]centrists[/del] independents (centrists don’t really exist any more in any meaningful number)”, which is fair and does far more to explain exactly what a fucking mess we’re in.
Let’s say we simply instituted a flat “externality fee” on all goods that was calculated based on their carbon footprint and the expected costs of ongoing global warming. Do you think the right would get on board with that? It seems like the absolute most basic implementation of “solve global warming” that could possibly fit within their values. That’s literally just taking the free market seriously and solving a serious externality. Can you imagine a single denialist senator (that’s most of 'em on the right) even considering it? I mean, for fuck’s sake, the Trump administration is actively attacking green energy and subsidizing coal!
Looking at your solutions… Yeah, let’s pump up nuclear power. That’s definitely part of it. Implement a carbon tax, sure, let’s do that too - and let’s do it at a level that actually makes sense, i.e. “calculate the cost of continued emissions and apply that”. Does either of this get us to “zero emissions” by 2030? If not, we need to think bigger. And if “think bigger” means we lose the support of some people… Well, then they become part of the problem, because we don’t really have a choice here - it’s do or die time.
I welcome the attitude. It’s a serious subject. But. (You knew there was going to be a but.)
Your Key Requirements are wrong because you apparently don’t understand the current discussion.
There is no need to start such examining technical possibilities. That has been going on for decades. It has been put into practice for decades. The rate of rise in CO2 has been slowed. Green energy is coming down in price and being more widely adopted. This all has public acceptance. A majority of Americans approve of most green technology and initiatives.
So what has changed? The realization that none of this is nearly enough. Getting to enough is not simply a technical issue. It is actually a thousand technical issues, working along a spectrum from removing CO2 from the atmosphere to lessening CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to remediating the effects of climate change, itself a vast field from reducing the perennial flooding in Houston to building seawalls along the Atlantic.
These are political issues as much as technical issues. There must be political will to get people to change their lifestyles and where they live and how they live and what they spend their money on. As with every other political change ever, some people will benefit more and some people will see pain of various sorts. Getting the amorphous mass of the former to win out over the specific and identifiable losses of the latter is the art of politics.
I have no interest in getting involved in a technical discussion. I’m not a technical expert and I suspect none of you are either. I’m a historian so I’m prone to historical analogies. The closest one I see is the civilian commitment to total war during WWII. People were forced to make drastic changes in virtually every aspect of their lives. They did so because there was overwhelming support for doing so at first. But the effort wore after years of deprivation. So the government led a massive program of cheerleading and exhortation to remind everyone everyday that any small sacrifices today would lead to a better future. That pervaded the culture. I’ve become fascinated by the ad campaigns that promised people a better, brighter tomorrow after the war. Pam-Am gasoline offered transportation of the future. So did Timken Axles. I have more of these in the queue.
Getting political will requires making pie-in-the-sky promises. Small rewards do not inspire. Technical issues do not inspire. Something like the GND inspires. It is a first step, not a final draft. The only opposition to it as inspiration is political.
The opposition comes from one side. It is deliberate. It has repressed progress. It demonizes people who call for change. It rewards the rich and penalizes the many. It is irrational. It must not merely be overcome but stomped into the ground and made so ugly that no one can speak of it without consequences. I did not make the comparison with civil rights lightly. If that’s too ugly to face, then the more recent change in attitudes toward gay rights will do. No legal coercion was involved. But certain once-common statements and opinions are now reviled and the change took place in a historic blink of the eye.
Therefore, despite your good intentions the fact that your postulates are false destroys any chance of a successful outcome. If you think that the GND is fatally flawed, come up with a better manifesto. But do not think for a second that by reslogging this well-beaten technical path you are making a contribution.
If I was an alien, I’ve cover the world in nuclear power plants (preferably with alien tech) and vaporize anyone who stepped out of line. You’re never going to find a solution that everyone agrees on. Impossible.
No, no no to ‘reparations’. Industries rise and fall all the time, and we shouldn’t be in the habit of paying people off because they have been ‘harmed’.
instead, I would support programs to actually lift them up and help them retrain and move on - not as ‘reparations’, but as simple good policy that should apply whenever large disruptions occur that affect large groups of people. They should be offered job training, relocation assistance, unemployment insurance, welfare to those who qualify like anyone else, and in the case perhaps of people too old to start over again and who were near retirement, early retirement benefits to cover a short gap until their pensions kick in.
And the minute you start talking about taking money from the military, or paying ‘reparations’, you start to shrink the political coalition you need to get anything done. If you want the military smaller, fight that battle separately. Do NOT tie military funding to climate change policy. That’s a dead end.
President Trump and many Republicans really love that dead end, specially for emergencies that they think are important but have little evidence in their favor. For them, a climate emergency will never be considered, even if there is plenty of evidence to lead one to ramp up on the solutions that are already available.
Well said. I would think this would be a good discussion to be had, but already the OP has put forward several talking points there that I’m aware are not quite as he claims.
One of the biggest obstacles to actually getting somewhere on climate change will be peoples greed. The push for constant growth in every business is unrealistic and has lead to the consumer culture that is killing the planet.
Also, if you are talking about Green on a global scale, I don’t think the conversation goes anywhere without also talking about cattle. Cows are methane producing machines and methane is supposed to be worse than CO2.
The next section of my plan was to deal with the international situation, and I’m very close to where you are on that, but with a difference: I would start a concerted push to aid Africa and other second and third world countries with an aid package that includes small modular nuclear reactors, which can be secured against proliferation concerns or have fuel cycles which do not create such concerns.
The problem with solar and wind in places like central Africa is that these huge installations would need constant guarding and constant maintenance. Building surface power stations and then leaving them to the people is a sure-fire way to create gutted and broken power stations. There’s just too much valuable stuff lying around.
Now, solar and wind DO have a serious role in third world countries, to power remote small villages, pumps and other remote industrial hardware that can’t be built because of the lack of grid power, etc.
But a small nuclear reactor can be brought on site, buried under the ground, and a small steam turbine built on top of it in a small industrial building. With a footprint of maybe an acre or two, it could be easily fenced and guarded. If anyone tried to steal the reactor it would require days of heavy equipment use just to get at them - which means we could find out in plenty of time for an intervention.
A small modular reactor like this would provide clean green power to 50,000 people. It could help them jumpstart the whole problem of grid infrastructure and bring them directly into the 21st century. Not only that, but it would help replace a perfidiious Chinese presence with a western presence.
This is the kind of project that would make a huge difference in the world and could easily get bipartisan support. The right would like it because it expands U.S. influence in the world, because it uses nuclear power, and because it allows them to do something about climate change without ruinous changes at home. The left should love it because it redistributes wealth to poor people and allows them to rise up without increasing global warming. It would not be all that expensive as such projects go. Bill Gates has been pushing something like this for some time, and he’s no right-wing Trumpist.
The real elephant in the room that the Green New Deal doesn’t even touch (and in fact makes much worse) is that the U.S. is not the biggest problem when it comes to climate change. The U.S. is currently only responsible for about 1/3 of the carbon being emitted, and its carbon emissions are going down. The real problems are with China, India, and the other emerging economies. China already greatly surpasses the U.S. in CO2 emissions.
Remember when I said the U.S. has 600 coal plants? Well, there are currently 1,600 NEW coal plants being constructed right now in other countries around the world. This is the real problem for global warming - not the mature economies which are rich enough to spend time and money on energy efficiency and higher cost energy, but the rising nations who need the absolute cheapest power they can get, and today that’s still coal for most of them. Until we do something about that, building bullet trains and weatherstripping houses in North America would change global warming predictions by little more than a rounding error, but at great cost.
My short-term solution was to add natural gas to the mix as much as possible. Natural gas turbines are relatively cheap and quick to stand up (compared to other power sources), have fewer regulatory burdens, etc. So doing that would have immediate impacts for a limited price.
But the ultimate solution for the large power stations is to convert them to something else. Again, getting back to bipartisan cooperation we can’t just say 'use nukes everywhere." So I’d go more for an all-hands-on-deck approach, and I’d limit NIMBYism by making each state responsible for its own choices. So if California wants to go wind and solar (and both make a lot of sense in California), do that. Putting Nuclear power near fault lines and coast lines might not be the smartest thing to do anyway. So California can go solar, places that have expandable hydro sources can do that, and places where it makes sense can go nuclear. We can make this happen with a national mandate that prevents construction of new coal plants, coupled with a carbon tax used to subsidise new construction of zero-greenhouse power plants, without specifying the exact type.
Along with that, the U.S. should work hard to streamline the regulatory morass that has made nuclear so expensive. Start by type-certifying reactor designs so that they can be built in multiple places without having to re-start the regulatory review process. Come up with even simpler rules for the new, safer ‘small modular’ reactors.
The fastest way to change the public perception of nuclear power would be to get major figures on the left and in the green movement to support it. Republicans can’t do it, because they’re preaching to their own choir.
And so long as the left and the global warming movement ignore nuclear power, I will not take them seriously when they say ‘drastic’ action is needed immediately. There needs to be a sea change in attitudes on the left and in the green movement before the population as a whole will climb on board.
I am a big fan of prizes to stimulate R&D, as opposed to direct funding of large R&D projects. And if nothing comes of it, the prize money goes unclaimed and it costs taxpayers nothing.
Carbon taxes and gas taxes are experiencing heavy pushback just about everywhere they’ve been implemented. The Canadian provinces other than Alberta and BC are currently fighting Ottawa to stop a national carbon tax. In Alberta, our government instituted a carbon tax and spent all the money on government buildings and other general revenue bullshit, and they’re about to be thrown out of power. There have been riots going on for weeks in France that started over a new carbon tax.
Politicians notice these things. I wouldn’t count on a lot of political support for carbon taxes in the future, unless they are tightly constrained.
That’s why I support a project-based carbon tax, similar to an airport upgrade ticket tax. Taxes get much more support when people know exactly what they are being used for, that the money won’t be diverted into general revenues, and that the tax will end when the project does. So I can imagine a state announcing construction of a 3 billion dollar green energy plant, and taxing carbon directly to pay for it. Send people a statement at the end of each year showing their carbon tax contribution, progress on the project, an estimate for when it will end, etc.
Also, we shouldn’t eliminate the use of gas or Diesel. There are some engine breakthroughs going on that promise to raise the fuel economy of small gas engines even more. If we said any car must get the equivalent of, say, 100 mpg that could mean electric, gas hybrid, fuel cell, Lightweight high efficiency gas only, or other novel concepts we haven’t even thought about.
Set a goal for what a car can emit, and remain agnostic on the technology.
I don’t think the results of these initiatives are anything to write home about. and residential energy only accounts for 18% of U.S. energy consumption in the first place. If you could reduce that by 10% (which would be an amazing feat, as the 18% includes everything having to with residential energy including appliances, lighting, heating, computers, etc), it would take a national project, huge expenditures, and would reduce U.S. energy consumption by a whopping 1.8%. In terms of bang for the buck, I’m not sure it makes sense.
That said, having small incentives to push people towards buying high efficiency furnaces and such when the need to buy arises isn’t a terrible idea, and I could go along with that in the spirit of bipartisanship.
Again, not much. Of that 18% of energy used by households, about 40% of it is used in space heating. Air conditioning is about another 6%, but since the temperature gradient between an air conditioned house and the outdoors is typically much lower than the gradient involved in winter heating, making the house more efficient has much less bang for the buck. So heating all the houses in America costs about 7.2% of the energy used. But most places are heated either electrically or with natural gas. If the electricity comes from green sources like hydro, wind or solar, no gain in CO2 emissions will be had at all by making them more efficient. If they are heated with natural gas then improving their efficiency has only about half the effect on CO2, because natural gas only emits about half as much CO2 per BTU of heat as other fossil fuels.
And you will never get a national 20% improvement in energy efficiency in homes. Not everyone will comply, some places will be too expensive, a lot of people live in newer homes, apartments and high rises that are already pretty efficient compared to older single family dwellings, etc. So let’s say 10% improvement instead. You’ve just reduced America’s energy needs by .72%. And Co2 output will change by even less.
Again, if we’re not stupid about it, there’s lots of like in here if we drill down even farther. Houses built after 2000 are already really efficient - leave those out. Houses in warmer climates do not need as much energy - leave those out. Attack the old homes in colder climates only, and the bang for the buck will go way up. But it still won’t make a dent in CO2 emissions.
Sometimes you’ll save money, sometimes you won’t. Replacing glass in a house is very, very expensive. And Low-E glass has a lifespan of maybe a decade or two before seals fail. That’s what’s happened in our house - we have triple pane, low-E glass, but many of the panes have failed seals, allowing the argon to leak out and moisture to creep in. So now we have some windows that are perpetually fogged and have lost a good chunk of their insulating capability. The cost to replace them? Probably $50,000. We simply can’t afford to do it, even with the tax incentives our province offers. I did replace our furnaces with high efficiency furnaces, and that cost us $22,000. These things are just not cheap.
Solar power in Alberta, which the government is heavily pushing, is idiotic and will never be cost effective, even counting the government rebates which are substantial. This is just not the right place for solar power.
So I guess we have to go to the Pit if we want to [del]call each other[/del] cleverly insinuate that others are poopheads.
Sigh
I believe a carbon tax is more attainable than some might think. Even the big O&G companies know that things need to change (and will change / are changing.) ExxonMobil (among others) is pushing for more market-driven carbon reduction like this. Now plans come in many different flavors; I haven’t examined theirs to see how helpful it would actually be.
Vehicle charging infrastructure is facing a classic chicken/egg dilemma. I would tolerate some government encouragement/subsidization here. Right now I cannot feasibly own a plug-in vehicle, and many are in the same boat. Of course the devil is always in the details.
Support for carbon taxes was a lot higher in the past than it is now on the right, and I think that’s largely because the carbon taxes have NOT been revenue neutral as a rule, and have not had much visible impact on carbon consumption.
The other thing the right is leery about is that the left is trying to use global warming as a ‘crisis’ they can use to force a lot of standard left-wing policies that have nothing at all to do with global warming. The Green New Deal probably set back support of global warming policy on the right by a good margin, because it validated everything they feared. People fighting for global warming should be furious about that. But don’t blame just the Republicans. You can also blame people on the left trying to shoehorn policies that are anathema to the right into global warming deals that need the support of the right to succeed.
See, it’s just this kind of sweeping, never-ending, vague use of a carbon tax that is increasing the resistance to it. We need to be specific and stop hand-waving about ‘grid modernization’, and say exactly what needs to be done, what effect it will have, why people should want it, how much it will cost, and how much tax is necessary to pay for it.
I would vote against a carbon tax designed for ‘various things that will help the environment or global warming’, but I would vote for one that said, “We need to install the equipment necessary to allow feed-in of private solar installations, which will then allow people to profit from excess energy they might create. This will require the retrofit of 72 power substations in the state. To do this, we estimate a cost in the state of 2 billion dollars, and the project will take two years to complete. To pay for it, we will institute a carbon tax that raises half the revenue, and the other half will be contributed by industry and local governments that benefit the most. The tax will end when the project is finished.”
The other problem with vague generalities justifying taxes is that it opens the door to diversion of funds, corruption, crony capitalism and all the rest. Politicians will and have used carbon taxes as their own little slush fund to buy favors and support. To paraphrase Larry Summers, a carbon tax should be timely, targeted, and temporary.
No, but you CAN out-compete them, and you can make life painful for them if they don’t play ball.
For example, China is currently trying to pull parts of Africa and Asia into its sphere of influence, in part by helping them to construct coal plants. This works against global warming, and it works against the free world’s interests. So let’s beat them with tech and offer small modular reactors to these countries, along with infrastructure support and other incentives to do things a better way. And let China know in no uncertain terms that, although we have no control over what they do domestically, their foreign policy will be opposed wherever it threatens to make global warming a bigger problem.
That’s something you should be able to get the right and left behind. And it would be a much better solution for Africa than having a bunch of dirty coal plants that require a large Chinese presence for maintenance and operations.
I’m very wary of new startups promising world-changing solar breakthroughs. There are often tradeoffs or engineering difficulties they don’t like to talk about. Solar roadways were always a joke, but they are stil getting governments to give them money.
I have been hearing about solar windows for a long time, but when I just did a search for them I found a few companies with large ‘investor relations’ tabs on their pages and lots of nice graphics and such, but not a single technical data sheet. The only thing I found which even mentioned their power output was that a window could provide enough power to ‘charge a smart phone several times through a day’. No mention of the size of the window, under what conditions, etc. And that sounds like the output of the window or system or whatever isn’t more than a few watts, since a smart phone battery has typically about 5-6 watt hours of capacity.
Now, if this film is dirt-cheap, and acts as a heat block on sun-facing windows anyway, and you have a whole wall of floor to ceiling windows, you might get a little energy. But if a window only generates, say, an average of 10 watts when the sun is shining, then in an 8 hour sunny day with the windows perfectly placed a window would generate about 80 watt hours of electricity.
If you have ten such windows, that’s 800 watt hours. Let’s round it up to 1 kwh. Depending on where you are in the country, that will save you something like 6-12 cents per day in energy, or somewhere around 20-30 bucks per YEAR. If the stuff has a lifetime of ten years, and it costs you more than 300 dollars to install it on all your windows, you’re losing money.
It’s true that industry is a bigger consumer of energy, but companies are pretty good at minimizing losses where it’s cost effective. Not always, and sometimes capital requirements get in the way. I think you’d really have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. There may be some real low-hanging fruit out there, but we first have to find it.
I am always skeptical of the claim that this or that regulation will actually improve the profitability of the industry to be regulated. Generally, businesses don’t leave a lot of profits lying around on the ground, and they are better at identifying profit sources and sinks than a government bureaucrat or a think tank. The true market failure here is externality, not hidden profits undiscovered by industry but known to government.
I’m under no illusion that eliminating the externalities of CO2 emissions will raise the cost of business. It pretty much has to, because internalising a cost is obviously more expensive than dumping it on someone else.
The claim for a Pigouvian tax, which is what a carbon tax is supposed to be, is that it will make the taxed industry more efficient overall by capturing and correcting for the costs dumped on third parties, but that benefit goes mostly to the 3rd parties, not the taxed businesses.
I think we can come up with a way to implement global warming policy without unduly harming the economy. And in fact, we HAVE to, because the only way you’re ever going to get global compliance is to make it competitively advantageous to switch to low or zero CO2 sources. Countries always act in their own best interest, so calling for shared ‘global sacrifice’ is not going to work. Much better to say, “You can stay with those old coal plants if you want, but we’re going to eat your lunch with cheaper, better sources of energy.” Make it in their own interest to change, and you’ll get change. Shaming, ‘climate resolutions’ or appeals to their ‘better nature’ are a waste of time.
Now, one way to get compliance is with carbon tariffs, to be applied to countries with higher CO2 footprints per GDP than others, to try to stimulate a race to not be one of the worst. But maintaining a global tariff regime against the world’s largest producer of goods and services, and against the interest of major oil and gas producing nations, sounds difficult, and also raises the risk of war.
Given the presque zero implementation of any actual such taxes and the ideological bolshevism in the North american right, I find this assertion ridiculous.
Bon the façade of the discussion is revealed with the reasonging à l’Iraq. I leave you to the various sterile ideological exchanges entre north americans
A big problem is that unilateral action reduces the need for action from everyone else. The social cost of carbon without the U.S.'s contribution to the planet is lower than with it. In addition, if the U.S. adopts higher cost energy to mitigate climate change it will give countries with cheaper power a comparative advantage, which not only will attract more industry to the worst power sources, but will make it much harder to bring them into compliance since they would lose that advantage.
Nuclear power can certainly be the answer here. We keep hearing how ‘expensive’ it is, but the proof is in the pudding - France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear, and has some of the cheapest power in Europe. Sweden gets 40% of its power from Nuclear, and it also has below-average electricity prices. Ontario used to have lots of nuclear power, and they had very cheap power. Now they have lots more wind and solar, and their power prices are the most expensive in Canada.
Not only that, but efficiency isn’t just about cheap power - it’s also about reliable power. A grid that fluctuates or has rolling brownouts raises the costs of every business connected to it.
A wholesale move to modern, safe nuclear reactors would result in a grid containing clean, stable, scalable power. And after the construction costs are amortized out, nuclear becomes by far the cheapest energy source around.
Let’s talk about what could be done with nuclear power in the ten year time frame. Modern nuclear plants are designed to be constructed in about five years… These reactors cost between 3 and 5 billion dollars for 1,000 MW.
If you spent the equivalent of the TAARP plan (780 billion), you could build maybe 150 such reactors, providing 150 GWe of power. If you used that money as loan guarantees or subsidies with substantial industry contribution, you could double or triple that. At a 93% duty cycle, which these modern plants are designed for, that’s 1,222,020 gWh of power per year, which could just about replace every coal plant in the country and reduce CO2 emissions by around 20% in maybe 5-10 years.
Now there’s a plan I could get behind. Loan guarantees and subsidies for nuclear plants to the tune of $70 billion per year for 10 years, to be paid for by a carbon tax. The promise at the end of that is that the states who implement it will have the cheapest, most reliable power in the country.
The U.S. has about 4% of the world’s population but about 15% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions; thus the U.S. is polluting close to four times its fair share. Thus the U.S. has a moral obligation to cut its emissions to no more than 4% of the world’s–and since the U.S. is a rich country it should do substantially better than that.
No, it does not reduce the need for action from everyone else since even if the U.S. were to go to 0% but the rest of the world doesn’t take action it would only delay catastrophe for a relatively few years.