And free health care.
And they won’t be ion powered. All we lack is the political will to run a tube up the rectum of every cow in America, and run them on methane. A win-win!
Regards,
Shodan, Purveyor of Bold New Concepts in Bovine Flatulence to Power Our Future
Okay first of all, we aren’t just talking about panel costs. To get to zero fossil fuels, you also have to replace every gas furnace in the country with some form of electric heat, I guess. That’s a major retrofit - I just installed new high efficiency gas furnaces in my house, and just that alone cost $22,000.
Then you get to remove all the gas stoves and replace them with electric, at $1000 a pop or so. And don’t forget all those gas water heaters that will be going to the land fill - maybe 50 million of them or so. Add another $1000 to replace the residential heaters - I have no idea how much the giant heaters for apartments, office buildings and factories cost, but it’s going to a lot. Don’t forget we have to convert all the factories and warehouses and other infrastructure buildings as well.
How about windows? The GND calls for retrofitting every building in America for energy efficiency. Replacing the windows in my house with new triple pane glass would easily cost $20,000, and maybe a lot more - I haven’t priced that in quite a while.
Then there’s the problem of electrical infrastructure. Efficient electric heating requires 220V power, and lots of houses are not well equipped with 220V, or with an electrical service that could handle the sudden increase of electrical energy required to power everything that was once gas powered with electric. And if we’re going to use distributed electrical heat, houses will need to be re-wired.
Then there are all the industrial gas heaters, fossil-fuel powered smelters and on-site generators, etc. Manufacturing and other production activities consume about 45% of our fossil fuels, and they are already highly optimized for their power sources. Forcing them all to move to electric may not even be feasible, let alone cost effective.
Another cost would be the rapid loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industry, and in any industry that relies on it. All those gas stations will need to be boarded up and their staff let go. All the people who maintain the current gas powered infrastructure will have to be retrained or layed off.
I could go on all day. The problem with grand plans written by technical know-nothings is that they have no idea how many details they will have to solve, and how much that will cost.
Let me give you a simple example: The switch to corn crops from wheat fields had lots of cost estimates by economists studying the problem from 10,000 ft, but I guarantee you not a single one of them counted the cost of retrofitting every wheat silo with new chutes, because corn is more slippery than wheat and when wheat ramps are used the corn moves too fast and gets pulverized. The ‘experts’ had no idea about this cost, but lots of farmers did.
The devil is always in the details, and when you are talking about the wholesale destruction and rebuilding of an entire nation’s infrastructure, you can be sure that there will be many details. It would be the biggest engineering project in the history of humanity by several orders of magnitude.
Minus, of course, the cost of maintenance and the amortized cost of replacement when the panels wear out or the electronics fail.
The actual way to look at the cost of solar power is to take the up-front cost of the system, then amortize it across the life of the system, including interest. Because one of the problems with Solar is that you have to pay all the money up-front instead of investing it in something else, whereas with gas you pay for it as you use it. The cost of $1 in gas burned 20 years from now is nowhere near $1 today. So to compare apples to apples, you either have to apply time discounting to the cost of the gas, or calculate the cost of your solar installation including the opportunity cost of the money used to pay for it.
No. Not even close. Especially rare earth elements, but even steel and copper and other materials will be in short supply -especially since at the same time we’re building all this stuff we’re also supposed to be retrofitting every building in the country and doing all the other crap in that useless document.
And let’s not forget the energy it’s going to take to build all those new panels, their steel mounting hardware, all that new electrical cable, 50 million new steel water heaters, all those new baseboard heaters or whatever is supposed to replace our furnaces, yada yada. I’m not sure this plan wouldn’t make global warming WORSE in the short term.
Taking productive people out of the economy and giving them a ‘living wage’ to sit on their asses does not reduce your costs - it increases them dramatically. An economy isn’t driven by ‘wages’. It’s driven by its capacity to provide the goods and services the people desire. People who are not in the work force but who ARE drawing wages taxed from other people who are is a net drain on economic productivity.
Forget all those ideas about ‘stimulus’. To the extent that it ever made sense, it only made sense during times of slack demand. When you already have record low unemployment, all the people needed to build the green dream will be people poached from other jobs, presumably where they were adding to the productive capacity of the country. You need to figure in those costs as well.
in addition, you have to figure in the costs of the inevitable hikes in the prices of raw materials, and what effect that will have on every other industry that might need those materials. If the price of steel doubles because of a spike in demand caused by the need to make 100 million electric cars, billions of tons of steel supports for solar panels and windmills, 50 million water heaters, 50 million electric stoves and god knows what else, the price of everything else made of steel will go up dramatically, lowering our standard of living.
In addition, all of the industries that make things like water heaters and stoves are sized to basically produce the amount demanded for replacement of existing stuff. If you are going to junk it all immediately, there is no way those industries could handle the demand - and the spike in material costs will make all of that stuff even more expensive.
Here’s an idealistic plan - I think we should have a ‘WWII-style’ mobilization to cure all disease. All we need to do is send ten times as many people to med school, give unlimited funding to all research on diseases, and there you go. My plan says it can be done in ten years. So shouldn’t we get right to work implementing it? If you don’t agree, you must be a disease denier.
Oh, please. You realize we only have that many cows because the government subsidised the everliving crap put of corn? There’s a reason why America has an obisety problem, and it’s the corn industry. Between high fructose corn syrup and corn fed beef, it’s no wonder Americans are so fat.
We give big agriculture billions of dollars a year so that they can fatten up our children. Enough is enough, we could pay for half of these programs by stopping these massive subsidies to an industry that’s already one of the largest in the nation and doesn’t need government support. We can keep subsidizing small business farms, but currently most of the money goes to the agriculture giants.
Without artificially cheap corn (what happened to the free market?) You’d find a lot less cows in America pretty dang quick.
I remember how conservatives screamed that the incredible shrinking unemployment figures under Obama were meaningless because so many more people were in low-wage, part-time, and no-future jobs. Did all those people get lifetime middle-class employment under Trump when I wasn’t looking?
Conservatives have no plans for the future at all. None. They avert their eyes whenever the subject comes up and change the subject to attacking liberals. Part of the appeal of the GND to liberals is that it offers hope, a vision of a utopian future, via a number of paths and programs that we can start on immediately. That specifics have to be provided, and that no utopia will ever be achieved I stipulate at the beginning. People want hope; conservatives offer only fear. Fear works in the short-term. That term is over.
That fighting global warming is the best and highest use of resources should be a given. The amazing thing is that doing so is the only path out of the current despair over the loss of what used to be called semi-skilled jobs, i.e. jobs that don’t need a college education. (An education, not just the diploma that too many employers use as a marker.) Millions of jobs are needed for all those trades mentioned in GND. (You’ll need millions more to build seawalls as the oceans rise. Trump will want one around Mar-a-Lago. I guarantee it.)
The world will not be changed overnight. Nobody except conservatives building mental seawalls of straw horses think that what’s being proposed is something that won’t stretch over decades. Trillions will be needed, true. Last I looked, we’re already spending trillions, both as a government and a society, without good returns for that money.
Hope. That’s good policy and good politics.
That and because losing weight is really really hard. Seems like every year science is discovering a new reason why its so hard to get the weight off and keep it off. If it were just a matter of ‘ignore hunger, eat less’…pishhhh ez peazy.
Yep – we keep finding out just how addictive the crud that the same agribusiness sector we’re funding so hard is feeding us is. No wonder they’re doing so well.
You quoted me (without attribution) then ranted about right wingers and Trumpists, and I’m supposed to take that as…what? A generic rant, not pointed at me? And this, after several threads where you’d said similar things, the last one getting us BOTH a freaking warning.
Anyway, I responded to Exapno Mapcase post up thread if you want to check it out. Again, I’m asking you to not label me a Trump supporter or some one wearing a MAGA hat. You can, of course, think or believe what you like, but if you aren’t taking me to the Pit please leave that shit out of future posts. Those are, to me, deadly insults that seriously rile me.
(And I didn’t see anything I wrote AS an insult…the opposite. But I’ll be the bigger guy here and apologize for any insult you saw. It wasn’t my intent to insult, but to respond forcefully to labeling me a right winger and a Trumpist…as well as to try and continue my own points in this debate)
This is the kind of meaningless statistic that just pisses me off. The Sahara desert is 9 million square kilometres in area. 1% would be 90,000 square kilometres. Understand the scale of that - a 90,000 square kilometre industrial project covering every inch of the ground with steel and solar panels. And that’s your idea of an example of how EASY this is?
And of course, the Sahara is the best-case scenario for sun energy, and it’s located far away from anyone who actually needs the poweer, so we obviously aren’t going to build power stations in the Sahara.
And once you get away from the best place on Earth for solar power, things look a lot worse. For example, the Sahara desert gets about 6.5 kWh per square meter of solar energy in the summer, and 5 kWh per square meter in the winter. The numbers are close because the Sahara is fairly near the equator.
But let’s take a look at the U.S. Southern California gets about the same as the Sahara in the summer, but drops to about 3.5 kWh/square meter in the winter, because of its higher latitude. but the northern U.S, where major centers of population and energy use are, is much worse. Portland Oregon only gets a max of about 5kWh/m2, and in winter only gets about 2.8 kWh/m2. So multiply your area needs accordingly.
Here in Canada, our idiot left-wing government thinks solar is the way to go, and we’re busy subsidizing the hell out of it. But solar insolation in Edmonton where I live maxes out at about 5, but drops all the way to 1.2 in December. So if we want to build solar here, we’re starting with roughly half the energy the Sahara or Southern California get. And what’s worse, we get almost no solar power in the dead of winter when our energy needs are greatest. To generate 100% of our energy from solar, we would have to overbuild to the point where we have five times as much solar power capacity in the summer than we need.
The Sahara desert factoid is meaningless, other than it was intended to make the problem look smaller than it is. And even then if you look at the actual size they are talking about, you realize just how impossible it would be to do.
More misleading ‘facts’. Tasmania gets a large portion of its electricity from renewables - because they have huge amounts of hydro power. And that is not without its problems:
Tasmanian energy crisis: Hydro Tasmania in uncharted territory as dam levels continue to drop
Tasmania had to force industrial production to cut back energy use, and they also had to import hundreds of gas turbines to make up the slack.
As for Southern Australia, I’m not sure you want to use that as an example.
South Australia has the highest power prices in the world
South Australia is rich in wind resources, and that’s where it gets most of its renewable power. Solar power, despite a major push and huge rebates and a carbon tax and the most expensive electricity in the world, only amounts to about 7.5% of their electricity needs.
Germany has often been held up as an example of how to push renewable energy. Germany also has the highest power prices of any major country in Europe (I think Liechtenstein is slightly higher). Germany is also now having to buy energy from its neighbors and is in the process of building a pipeline for Russian natural gas. Way to put your energy in the hands of Putin, Germany.
Germany is a good example of what happens when you try to force renewables in a place where they don’t make much sense. Germany now has so much solar that on a bright summer day, it can get 100% of its power needs from renewables. And yet on an annual basis, solar only makes up about 6.5% of their energy needs. The reason is because intermittent sources of power need to be backed up with baseload power that can be ramped up when intermittent sources drop offline. So you have to essentially maintain two infrastructures. Not only that, but coal and gas fired energy plants are not as efficient when run at lower duty cycles, which offsets the gains from the renewables.
So if these are your examples of how to do it, I’ll take a pass.
Let’s put a pin in that until they are ACTUALLY at 100%, not just promising to do it. And then let’s see how much people are paying for that.
I’m sorry - I thought we were talking about the Green New Deal, and not Obama’s job creation. And do you think the people that would be needed for high tech industrial construction projects would be drawn from the ranks of Baristas and Wal-Mart greeters? But while we’re at it, it might be useful for you to check out the big ‘green jobs’ program Obama pushed - and how much was spent and how many ‘green jobs’ were created.
Millions of Conservatives have plans for the future. They just don’t have plans for YOUR future. See, people on the right generally believe that economies grow organically as complex systems, and central planning doesn’t work. So why should they have a lot of big plans for how to run the economy?
If that piece of garbage of a plan gives you hope, well, good luck to you. Because what it says to me is, “If this is the left’s idea of how to solve global warming, we’re all doomed.”
This is such a bullshit argument. I can just imagine if the Republicans produced a document that said all taxes would be eliminated in ten years, and a 100 foot high wall would be built around the country to Make America Great Again, and that the government would be completely funded by voluntary donations. You’d call them completely bonkers. And if my response was, “Well, we have to work out the details, but it gives us HOPE, and we can start right away,” you’d think I was an idiot.
And yet, you are perfectly okay with losing a huge amount of political support for doing anything by demanding that it also include a whole bunch of intersectional bullshit like guaranteed incomes and free education for all.
If you honestly think that global warming is an existential problem that we must focus on like a laser beam, you’ll take every leftist who tries to marry it to a laundry list of intersectional goals and take them to the woodshed. Because they are doing far more harm than good by saying, “If you want to save the planet from global warming, you must also abandon everything you believe and become a good progressive.” This is insane. It would be like the Republicans saying that global warming is incredibly important, but if you want to stop it you also have to agree to cutting taxes for the rich, building a 500 foot wall around the country to Make it Great Again, and demolishing the Department of Education. If you heard someone say that, I’m guessing you’d be questioning whether they really cared about Global Warming, or if they were just using it to push what they’ve always wanted anyway.
Since that’s ultimately the war you need to win against those who don’t agree with you, it is crazy to marry the Most Important Issue in the World to a package of plans for which there is much less agreement. Nonsense like that from Ocasio-Cortez hurts the cause of climate change, because it feeds into the worst stereotypes
and fears among the people you need to win over, that Global Warming is at best a legitimate problem but being used by the left as a hammer to foist their idea of society on everyone else, or at worst that it’s a hoax cynically deployed for the same reason.
If you want to do something about global warming while still living in a Democracy, this is a devastating political path.
Sam, I love your admission that conservatives have no plans for how to run the economy. Can we borrow that for bumper stickers?
Coming soon! Many more things that you will scorn!
Since that is a straw man, I could had ignored the rest. And could had been a good enough reply.
However… It was a straw man because I Never said it was going to be easy, hard, but doable. (And as one should notice, your point there is even more “starwmanny” 
when one notices that the author there does not say that it would be easy either) And the point was spectacularly missed regarding what I meant by this being like a “new born baby.”
Suffice to say, even when complaining about other renewables that have issues the overall point stands, the technology to make this possible is available and it is bound to get better once we do gear up most of industry towards that goal.
There is also the fact that you grabbed one headline about the Australia energy and forgot this bit:
Bolding mine. The article indeed is actually more in support of what needs to be done and there should be less of an opposition since solar is getting cheaper and that is good news rather than calling it misleading or meaningless. In fact it supports what I said when I mentioned the “new born baby” the current relative small gain was indeed acknowledged right out of the bat, but it seems that it was better for you to post a point that looked as if that was a personal affront to… something I guess, but it is really silly to dwell on the present as if it change is impossible or not happening, like in Germany:
Decades of discussions on the issue showed to me and many others that the extreme right and corporations with an ax to grind were actively lying to many people on the right and… they still continue with the fearmongering and lies. That many continue fall for it is the really sad part.
We are here because instead of seeing progress, many on the right decided that an ignorant doofus on this issue and in many others would make a great leader.
No, this is just ignoring the elephant in the room, while it stomps on any progress that was made before.
I will have to make one correction there: Make that complaint to be: We do have a problem when ‘many on the right decided that a willful ignorant doofus on this issue and in many others would make a great leader.’
We are talking about political policy and how to build consensus, not who is a poopy head. Trump’s anti-global warming populism is a symptom as much as a cause. He pushes it because it’s a popular position on the right, and part of the reason is because people on the left have tried to use it to advance an agenda that has nothing to do with climate change but IS highly polarizing.
Can you not see the damage that is doing to your own cause? You are basically telling people that if they support climate change policy they must also leave their own tribe and join you on a whole host of other, unrelated issues.
Or put another way, the intersection of a Venn diagram containing all the people willing to vote for global warming policy AND a host of progressive social and economic policies to go along with it is one hell of a lot smaller than just the circle containing people that can be convinced to vote for climate change mitigation.
Imagine if Republicans had a habit of tying, say, the right to own a gun to anti-abortion policy, and told people that if they vote for one they must vote for the other. Do you think that would be a more effective policy for second amendment rights than if they just left out the part about outlawing abortion?
The tribe here is the one that looks at science and not misleading information.
So it was with Prohibition, took awhile, but in the end many did drop a party because it was being nonsensical in the extreme.
Again, you seem more interesting in pointing fingers and blaming Republicans than say, getting something done to help curb global warming.
But to the extent that the left is mostly responsible for the anti-nuclear attitudes in the country and the costly regulations and lawsuits attacking the nuclear industry, and given that they are doing it in ignorance, I’d say that one wrong belief may just doom any kind of effective approach to global warming. Because nuclear is critically important, and the left in Europe, Canada and elsewhere are actively working to not just stop new nuclear construction, but to de-commission existing nuclear plants. That will be disastrous for Co2 emissions.
As someone who is listened to by other people on the left, the most effective thing you could do to help curb global warming would be to insist and argue to your own side that nuclear be a major part of the solution, and that unrelated left-wing dream ticket items like UBI and open borders be strictly isolated from climate policy. In fact, if you want to actually gain support rather than score internet points against your enemies, you’ll work to make sure that carbon taxes are truly revenue neutral, and that you keep social justice completely out of the climate debate.
Unless I missed it, there was nothing in that article about tying abortion policy to 2nd amendment policy. Which makes it a complete irrelevancy.
That will be news to my investment bank, Mr Sam Stone. They are funding the Moroccan developments which with the expanded actual live interconnection to the Spain will indeed be feeding EU grid.
Being critical of this Green New Deal is one thing, being an ideological is another, although it reminds me of your sageness over the Iraq and that wisdom.
the Sahara is not in fact “best case” for the solar in any case. Of course in the investment house i work for, we do not get our analysis from the ideological american right wing sources.
… the Sahara ranges from the eastern sides of the Atlas mountains in the Maghreb, which is the same latiude as the American Carolinas, rarely I have seen them called “fairly near the equator” but if that is your metric then about half of the USA is “fairly near the equator”.
The equator runs through in Africa the Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo which for your north american reference is about 2,500 KM from the southern edge of the Sahara (roughly). Fairly close…
In fact the majority of the Sahara is exactly the same latitude range as the Southern USA approximatley like from the North carolinas to the Florida in span, roughly.
the Sahara reference may be silly but that makes no excuse for completely wrong information and assertions.
**No
**
Germany is an example of where a policy incoherency badly thought through can undercut. The German baseload problem is an incoherency from the German overreaction to the Japanese overreaction and the Grunen anti-nuclear jihad to shut the German nuclear plans.
It is also incorrect to flatly assert that the coal and gas are ineffecient on variable cycles - the coal is and the older gas base yes, but it is not at all true to say this in general.
I suppose I can understand the Left in the USA leaning so heavily to strong assertions on the solar when they are facing the negative arguments based on understandings ten years out of date.
This is a true analysis, but it seems to me that the highly ideological position in the north america - the USA essentially on their right (not at all the same in the Europe) on Denialism is a major contributor, at least as much as any of the Green hard Left pushing.