It’s good to see that you’re here for a serious conversation.
Nobody plans to get all electricity needs by solar; the plan is to use multiple sources including wind, hydropower, geothermal…[some include nuclear, some don’t]
While earlier solar usually referred to rooftop panels currently there is massive interest in utility scale solar farms, so it doesn’t matter that particularly buildings don’t have the room for panels or particular locations don’t get sun.
You can also move the electricity large distances (although at a cost because of energy losses and the cost of power lines).
You can overbuild so while it will be producing more electricity than needed when both the sun is shining and the wind is blowing briskly, the system will usually still be adequate when only one is available.
Finally there is energy storage ranging from batteries to pumped hydro to hydrogen…
Or if you still need a few percent of needs to be met by fossil fuels you can use carbon capture and pull an equal amount of carbon out of the air.
And of course nothing is completely free of environmental and health concerns; it’s a question of magnitude. Coal of course dwarfs all others.
Of course the oil producer shouldn’t pay tax on actual “depletion”, on for example the apportioned cost of its prior investment in oil-bearing land. However UIAM, the depletion allowances provided for U.S. tax purposes to petroleum producers are unrelated to their investment and may far exceed the amounts of their actual investments.
You do realize three of these are serious ideas right?
Well as long as were painting the moon black…let’s set up giant solar power farms there and run a long power cable to the earth
both of your cited examples are integrated from the production (extraction) to the processing (refining etc).
I do not have any knowledge or interest in the specific of American tax policy for extraction, but to make comment about two large integrated energy entities as if extraction is the way to understand the group level tax rate is simply non sequitor.
Also…what are you painting white? You cant paint every roof white of every roof is going to have solar panels. You can’t set up a massive structure in the desert without massively impacting ecosystems.
As always, we gotta look at the net, not gross, disruption.
Yes, it would fuck up a big section of the Sahara if we set up a mega-solar-farm there. Poor goddamn fennec foxes, for real.
But if it meant we could get rid of just 10% of the fossil fuel consumption, what impacts on other ecosystems would that ameliorate? How would the penguins and polar bears respond, not to mention krill and whales and seals and phytoplankton and all the myriad other species impacted by fossil fuel production and consumption?
Technically we could use microwave power transmission instead of having giant jumper cables everywhere.
Also heres an article about the giant space umbrella
Thanks all for the very interesting articles.
If we’re going to build a space umbrella on the moon then…seriously build the solar farms there where they don’t have to worry about sandstorms and dust and I’d think the greatest threat would be micrometeors
The Green New Deal would be an American project funded by American taxpayers. Neither space umbrellas nor solar farms in the Sahara would be part of that. That’s well beyond pie in the sky, we might as well be talking about a Dyson sphere. An infrastructure plan with an emphasis on green energy would be realistic and something I could support. The U.S. accounts for 15 percent of global carbon emissions. Reducing that number by a third, or half, or to zero wouldn’t be a bad idea politically. The part about the “guaranteed” jobs sound implausible, AOC should have just left that part out.
Thisis the best estimate for cost that I have read. It does not add up all the costs but gives a working minimum. It says that it would cost about $6.6 trillion dollars a year. To put that in perspective the total cost to the US of WW2 has 4.1 trillion dollars. So the cost would start at 1.5 world war twos a year for the foreseeable future.
6.6 trillion is what medicare for all, universal basic income & a green new deal would cost combined.
Also that 3.2 trillion for medicare for all is highly misleading. The US already spends something like 2.2 trillion on tax revenue to fund health care. That money would just be rolled into a M4A program. The remaining funds would be diverted from private funds into public funds. I have no problem in paying more in taxes if it means less private spending.
That article is very misleading because it makes M4A sound like 3.2 in new spending on top of existing spending, which was the goal (to mislead people). That makes me question the entire article.
But back to alternative energy.
Where did they get 100k per home? Residential solar is down to $3 per installed watt, and the average home only needs about ~8 kilowatts of solar to be energy independent. Thats $24,000, not $100,000. And that is for residential solar which is much more expensive than larger scale solar projects which are closer to $1/watt. Also as was mentioned, with economies of scale that size, prices will go down.
If you assume you need 8kwh on average per home, and there are 126 million residential homes, and it is industrial scale solar at $1/watt, that works out to $8000 per home and about $1 trillion total, not $1.4 trillion per year for a decade. Of course, who knows if its remotely realistic to install that much solar.
Is there some other aspect of being net zero I’m not seeing? Replacing all the internal combustion cars with electric cars needs to be done too.
That Noah Smith column puts more thought into the Green New Deal than its authors have and much more than it deserves. The Green New Deal is not a plan; it’s a silly wishlist which will not be passed and would cause a massive political backlash if it were. Climate change is a serious issue and deserves much better than this nonsense.
FWIW, California went from 0.5% of their electricity from solar up to about 10% in 2017. Probably higher now. On a sunny afternoon, solar was making up 50% of the electricity in the state. Pretty good for an industry that barely existed 10 years ago.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/images/instate_generation/energy.gif
So massive investments in things like solar are possible and California could serve as proof that meaningful investments in renewable are feasible and affordable. However I don’t know if battery tech is advanced enough yet to handle more than ~20% of electric generation by solar and wind.
Impressive. Only 90% to go. 
Seriously though, what did it cost California to go from .5% to 10%…and how does that scale up? California is ideal for solar, being semi-arid and with a large dense population, by and large, so I wonder…why only 10%? And why are they projecting 25% by the mid to late 20’s. Consider then what it would take to do this across the continent…and how long it would take. 30 years? 40? Never? Of course, we are talking wind as well, which California does a lot of, but how scalable is wind at this point, even in California? Most of the good tier 1 spots are in use already…and those that aren’t, aren’t because they are blocked. Even if all of them were used, and all the tier 2 spots, what’s that scale too? This leaves aside the issue of load scaling when there isn’t wind or sunlight and storage, which is still a pretty big issue if you want to do this whole green thingy right. And leave out nuclear, which seems to be the plan.
I think before you could even start to talk costs (and I haven’t read much about the green new deal except some of what I hope is hyperbole about no more cows and solar energy for everyone, plus a wind turbine in every pot) you would need to actually look at the technical, engineering realities which don’t seem to pan out on any sort of reasonable time scale. I mean, if we are talking 30, 40 or 50 years (or more), well…do we have that kind of time? If they are projecting less (say 10 years or 20), well…I’d love to see the details of the logistics and deployment plan, because frankly it seems impossible to me, regardless of how much money you throw at it. If it IS feasible (:dubious:), then we could talk costs…which I’d also love to see a projection. Hell, I’d love to see how you could just mine all the materials you’d need (and what the impact of THAT would be) to make that many solar panels and wind turbines, and what the projected maintenance and support would look like. This would make the new deal look like a cookie bake sale by comparison…hell, no other engineering project in history even touches something like this. We are talking colony on a planet in anther solar system levels of wow.
Too late to stop global warming anyway. So let’s just keep burning coal; pass around another case of champagne, please. Say, would you ask the captain to steer closer to that iceberg? I wanna take a photo of it.
Got it.
The antipathy against AOC is truly disheartening. We know some of you are right-wingers. Can you at least pretend to be good-spirited right-wingers who care about the future? Is there only one brand of Kool-Aid for sale where you hang out?
George Orwell never studied poli sci, nor did he run for Parliament. Yet his writings inspired millions. Harry Truman was not an intellectual heavyweight; the details of the Marshall Plan were worked out by wise men.
And if American progressives pursue a green agenda they will rely on scientists for their science; the engineering and economic details will be scrutinized by the best engineering experts and economists in the land. Yet AOC’s detractors pretend not to understand even this much. “That dumb 28-year old bartender forgot to dot an I again. Here’s a T she didn’t cross! That means we have to give up on fighting global warming. AOC! AOC! Single-payer health care is dead now because AOC mispunctuated a sentence!”
What do those on the right think? That when Trump is overthrown the first order of business will be to write a personal check to AOC for 27 trillion dollars — “Spend it as you choose”? I hope not, but it’s easy to get that impression from the cavilling.
The cost of solar and wind have been declining massively. In the past the cost of natural gas and coal was substantially cheaper than solar and wind–thus utilities only added solar and wind when they were forced to. Now solar and wind are cheaper or at least competitively priced–and the costs continue to decrease. Thus utilities are massively switching on economic grounds. Business can move very fast when there are strong economic reasons to do so.
Your specific American challenges in building things aside, utility scale solar is now being developed at the gigawatt scale at grid competitive prices sans subsidy and excepting your specific American issues, there is no reason it can not be built as fast as the natural gas plants.
These are the political/social challenges and not the technical.
If you in the USA decide to self-handicap for the non technical reasons, it does not make the actual development less feasible, technically.
the base balancing via the natural gas is a primary fast option, it is not hard except if you are self-handicapping. Of course the nuclear but it does not seem in the USA you can build these for the self-handicapping reasons.
The storage on solar via the molten salts method for example is already a technically clarified approach at okay prices - storage is not merely the battery question which remains still expensive.
The time scale for a large contribution of RE - majority - aside from the odd political hostility to it in the USA - depends on investment scale, but not 50 whatever years, it can be depending on desired replacement speed given the depreciation desired, one to two decades (abstractly depending on ages of the plants existing, etc).
It is not very helpful I think this Big Fuzzy Idea with every wish-list item of the green-Left as it lends to your (wrong) characterization of the colony on another planet which I think undermines the pragmatic and very achievable if challenging investment case for a large movement to the RE for long-term efficiency reasons - that is the economics.
Why? She seems like a sloppy populist who has not very much care for the careful work needed in this area for the real achievements of practical infrastructure and more care for being in a limelight and showing off.
I am not a US right wing, but the stunt that is this announcement seems more likely to hurt progress than to help it.
Yes correct, the economies of scale are beginning now to be achieved and the market investment case sans subsidies is already present in many -but not all - the cases.
It is useful for that to be accelerated even as the economic utility of the Renewable Energy base for energy is quite high, it is once in place a more stable less subject to variation in pricing sourcing unlike the hydrocarbons so besides achieving the touchy feely goals, when it is done at the good economic cost, it’s a general win for the market.
Well okay, that’s great. Where’s your serious proposal that actually addresses the scope of the problem in any meaningful way? Remember, the cost of unmitigated global warming is calculated in the trillions of dollars per year, and any solution involves at the very least writing off $20 Trillion in oil and gas values, as well as drasticly reshaping nearly every element of how we live our lives. So okay - what’s our “realistic” solution? What’s our “serious” proposal to deal with this catastrophic issue facing us? And why haven’t we shown up with one until now?
Say what you will about the Green New Deal, it is the first proposal to actually look at the scope of the problem and propose a solution which even comes close. Nobody else has even scratched the surface. Everyone else seems to be working with their blinders on. Even democrats! To quote Nathan J. Robinson:
There are perfectly fine critiques of the Green New Deal in its existing embryonic form. Any serious plan to address climate change has to have an international dimension, because while the U.S. is the 2nd-largest carbon polluter it is not responsible for the majority of emissions. The GND needs to be part of an effort to get other countries to bind themselves to climate commitments by showing that we take our own seriously. And it’s certainly true that there are going to need to be greater specifics and that the “paying for it” question can’t be dismissed by pointing out that we never ask the military how it’s going to pay for its latest piece of colossally expensive gadgetry. But a resolution is exactly that, a statement of resolve, and critics who are asking for a full policy apparatus are misunderstanding what this part of the process is intended to do, namely state the list of goals as we work on the arduous process of fleshing out workable solutions.
I don’t think anyone should be particularly interested in hearing criticisms of the Green New Deal proposal unless they are constructive criticisms. There’s going to be a lot of crying “That will never pass” and picking out the most wildly transformative thing a GND proponent has suggested, then declaring it proves leftists have their heads in the clouds. As for “it will never pass,” that’s quite obviously silly. Things pass when you build political movements to make them pass, and they don’t when you don’t. I do not want to hear from those who have failed to predict previous drastic shifts in American politics about what “can” and “can’t” happen politically. These are often self-fulfilling prophecies: The boundaries of the politically possible are defined in part by beliefs (“if you will it, it is no dream”!) As for criticisms of the substance of environmentalist plans: We need to demand that those who have objections offer alternatives. The New Yorker‘s Osita Nwanevu said that “no one criticizing the Green New Deal—not a single person—has an alternative plan for transitioning the American energy economy in the timeframe climatologists say we must.” I certainly think he’s right that you hear very few substantive proposals. What’s Nancy Pelosi’s plan? Forming a committee to dither on the problem for a few years before proposing some package of pitiful half-measures? Every politician needs to be faced with those crucial questions: Do you accept the scientific consensus on climate change? If you do, what plan do you endorse? And if they don’t have an answer to #2, they need to be fought. For far too long, Democrats like Pelosi have talked as if they care about climate change, without actually demonstrating that they do. That needs to end, and it needs to be made clear to them that unless they sign on to a comprehensive plan immediately, every effort will be made to oust them from office and replace them. There is a “climate litmus test” in operation, and there are no exceptions to it.
Bolding mine.