For instance, how much are you allowed to eat to “be real”, and which types of farming aren’t “wild?”
I’m sorry, i assumed you were interested in being serious. Carry on.
The US only spends about ~$50 billion on renewables a year. I think I mentioned upthread (can’t remember) that an additional $50 billion would probably push total investment up to $200 billion or so due to the multiplier effect. Private industry and individuals who normally wouldn’t invest in renewables would if tax credits, subsidies, etc. were larger.
$50 billion a year isn’t that much on a national level (about 1/4 of 1% of national GDP) but it could quadruple our spending on renewables.
So depending on how big a scale a green new deal needs to be, its possible for us to spend far more than we are spending now.
Fine, it is okay for politcians to sound as dumb as a stump–as long as they are on your side.
“I mean like, all those cows? In the really big farms? That’s so wild. So don’t eat hamburger three meals a day–keep it real.”
You may think that is code-switching, dumbed down for the podcast audience. I think it is an accurate reflection of just how deeply AOC doesn’t actually think about the issue.
Fair enough. I think it’s a reflection of what happens when you get your news from a shit rag like the New York Post instead of actually listening to the podcast yourself. Context actually matters. And yes, factory farming is a gigantic, important thing.
If by ‘Green New Deal’ you mean implementing everything in AOC’s dream journal masquerading as a policy document, the answer is, 'Everything you have." Because the Green New Deal would absolutely destroy the economy.
Remember TARP, and ‘too big to fail’? The Green New Deal essentially requires the entire fossil fuel industry to fail. And fast, before we could compensate. I don’t think people have a good grasp of just how much of our infrastructure is absolutely tied to the existence of fossil fuels. Not just the oil companies, but our rail systems, energy distribution networks, gas stations, tanker trucks, all the companies that make the hardware that go into it all, the factories that need on-time deliveries of fossil fuels and electricity, the road networks, gas furnaces, the companies that make the gas furnaces… Then there’s the airline industry, all the aircraft manufacturers, the boating industry, all the companies that make hardware for those industries…
If Ocasio-Cortez said we just have to replace fossil fuels in ten years it would still be an impossible dream. As in, flatly impossible. Adding to that the conversion of every building in America to modern energy efficiency standards is insane. But while we’re doing that, we’re somehow supposed to come up with the billions of tons of concrete and steel it would take to make a network of high speed trains so dense that we could do away with airplanes - concrete and steel being about the most energy-intensive materials to make. Oh, and then we’re going to do away with ‘combustible engine’ cars. Again, Remember TARP? Remember the economic disaster that was supposedly avoided when we bailed out GM? Well, now we’re going to intentionally kill GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, Toyota… And we’re going to do this while somehow coming up with the money to do all those other things. Because those companies cannot possibly convert to all-electric vehicles in ten years. We don’t even know HOW to do all-electric work trucks, because their energy needs are just too high. A modern car platform can take a decade to build.
Also, the average age of the auto fleet is about 12 years. Older semi-trucks are not destroyed, but routed into the ‘secondary’ markets that can’t afford new ones. Destroy them, and you’ll seriously harm a lot of farmers and small businesses. Heavier equipment like graders and bulldozsers can stay in the ‘primary’ industries for 15 years before being sold off into secondary industries like farming where they can remain and be useful for many more years.
When it comes to energy intensive industrial equipment like blast furnaces, power hammers and the like, some of this equipment was built in the 1800’s and still in use today. Converting factories to all-electric power would require a lot of them to be completely rebuilt from the ground up - a process that can take decades before the new plant is completely efficient. And who is paying for that? The company? There will be lots of bankruptcies and lots of products leaving the market because they are now too expensive to make. A product leveraging a fully-amortized factory that’s been around for a hundred years may be completely uneconomical if it requires a hundred million dollars of capital investment before it can be made. At the very least expect price hikes across the economy on pretty much everything, which will drive down our standard of living.
I was going to ask where the tens of millions of workers were going to come from that would be necessary to build all the new solar and wind farms and insulate all the houses when you have full employment, as the U.S. does now. But the Green New Deal will create so many unemployed people that the problem will solve itself. I’m sure all those auto workers and oil industry workers will be ecstatic in their new jobs as weatherstripping installers. And if we’re going to pay them the same wages they got before, this project just got WAY more expensive. And I guess somehow we’ll manage to train all these people in a new field and somehow still get it all done in ten years.
And if that weren’t enough, while we’re doing all this we’ll also find the money to create a universal income, free health care, and free education - each one of which on its own would be a budget buster. And I can hardly wait to see how many people wind up on ‘basic income’ after the Green New Deal destroys the economy.
This isn’t just unrealistic. It’s so jaw-droppingly stupid that it could only have been the work of an absolute economic illiterate. It’s unworkable and impossible at every level. Even if the MMT money fairy came down with trillions of printed dollars that somehow don’t cause inflation or a collapse in foreign investment, we don’t have the manpower or the raw materials to do all these things in ten years, or twenty years, or thirty years. It can take a decade to stand up a single new utility scale solar power plant. You would need thousands of them.
As a guess I’d say that if this started today, you might, just might get through the lawsuits, injunctions, and environmental impact statements in ten years, after you’ve submitted designs for the new projects, which will also take years. And those won’t start until you have the enabling regulations, which will take a few years after the initial legislation is passed, which clearly can’t happen unless the Democrats win all three branches of the government while also purging all their moderate members.
So call it three or four years until legislation is passed, a couple more years for the bureaucracies to write the rules, then two or three more years for designs to be done. We can just get started on those lawsuits and environmental impact statements in six or seven years from now. Sixteen years from now we might be ready to start building something. The first utility scale solar projects might start coming online 25 years from now. That is, until the state lawsuits start coming in, because not every state is going to be on board with a ‘fundamental re-design of our entire economy and infrastructure’.
Except… Remember you want to build thousands of these things at once. Just how many bottlenecks in the legal process will that take? How many environmental scientists and lawyers and such do we have to graduate so that these types of reviess can get done in a timely manner? And since it takes about half a decade to educate such people, what does that do to your timeline? Unless of course the environmentalists are willing to grant waivers to every Green New Deal project. Sorry, Snail Darter - your land is going to be occupied by a wind farm, so it’s okay if you go extinct.
Oh, and then you have all the issues of eminent domain - an awful lot of land is going to be needed for all those ‘green’ projects, and since the owners of the land know that this is ‘crisis’ time, the price will go up accordingly. That’s what happened in California with High Speed Rail, and that’s what will happen everywhere unless you just start expropriating property. But then there’s that pesky Supreme Court, which might have a problem with all this - which is why AOC also wants to pack the court.
The whole thing is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy that deserves nothing more than laughter and derision. That so many Democratic politicians have signed on to this makes me weep for the future. That so many people think it’s a reasonable plan or even a good opening negotiation makes me weep for the state of education.
Or, more cynically you can look at it this way: This was an exercise in pushing the ‘Overton Window’ for green policy hard to the left, to make the actual policies they want sound more reasonable. Soon someone will come out with ‘Green New Deal Lite’, and claim that it’s the ‘conservative, common-sense alternative’ because it only wants to reduce carbon by 50% in ten years and doesn’t include high speed rail for ‘sound fiscal reasons’. It’ll still be a radical, impossible document, but next to the Green New Deal the authors will sound sane and reasonable. Repeat until you’ve re-conditioned the expectations of people and they finally vote for something that would be seen as nuttery if it were voted on today.
Or, as most people would put it, politics as we know it throughout American history.
This is why I proposed before that a generous subsidy must be available for those specific cases.
Uh, let us not forget here that you followed(and still follows, as I notice) a lot of misinformation from climate change deniers or right wing sources to think that.
Are you also going to give a generous subsidy to all the businesses that make the engines, transmissions, and other equipment that goes into those vehicles? How about all the rural gas tankerage facilities?
Oh, and can you point to a design, even an experimental one, for an electric powered combine or industrial scale tractor? How about an electric tractor with the capability of, say, a Case 1070, which would be a typical small tractor on a farm? Bear in mind that during harvest these vehicles are required to run almost 24 hours per day. Tilling a large field (something I’ve done many times) can take hours of pulling heavy equipment. The power takeoff may need to drive all kinds of high-energy implements being towed behind the tractor.
Cars are just becoming usable on electric power now, and one of the ways we did it was to make them very aerodynamic, use regenerative braking, low rolling resistance tires, etc. At 55 mph, a car only needs something like 10-30 hp to maintain cruise, depending on the vehicle. And even the best electric cars can only maintain that for 5-8 hours. A tractor pulling a cultivator requires 5.5-6 hp per foot. So a standard 28 ft cultivator requires 154-168 CONSTANT horsepower.
These are light-duty industrial vehicles. Get back to me when you’ve figured out how to make an all-electric paving machine that has to keep asphalt hot, or a road grader that has to run all day and all night. or a Caterpillar D11 bulldozer, which has 770 HP and weighs 230,000 lbs.
By the way, if you’re going to ‘subsidize’ replacement of them, be aware that those things cost about 2.2 million dollars each. But that’s moot, since we can’t replace them. We have no idea how to electrify a huge portion of our powered industrial infrastructure.
https://electrek.co/2016/12/05/john-deere-electric-tractor-prototype/
Of course your reply does not show any awareness of how you need to clean, not your emissions, but the sources you continue to use.
I’ve looked at that prototype. The battery takes up the entire engine space, and is 50% bigger than the largest Tesla battery. Even so, they quote the range as 34 miles ON THE ROAD, pulling nothing, then requiring a 3 hour charge. So, at 30 mph, on flat road, this thing can run for about an hour.
Now do it in the dirt, pulling a 28 ft cultivator. Let me do that for you - a section of land is a square one mile on a side. With a 28 ft cultivator, you will run that tractor about 188 miles to cultivate that field. If we say that the combination of dirt and a cultivator cuts the range in half (wildly optimistic), we can go 17 miles on a charge. So we’re only going to have to charge our tractor 11 times to cultivate that field. That’s 33 hours of downtime during which the tractor is non-productive. For one section of land. But I think the range will be even lower than that - a 28 ft cultivator again requires maybe 160 HP all on its own.
That tractor is just an experimental concept vehicle, meant to test out electric propulsion concepts and show them off. It’s about as ready for market as GM’s turbine Corvette. John Deere itself says that it’st just a showcase for what might happen in the future. My guess is that heavy equipment is far more likely to run diesel-electric or hybrid electric, with efficiency gains from using electric power for the power takeoff, provided by electricity generated from a diesel which also charges the batteries for an electric power train.
But you aren’t going to see any of these in service in any kind of numbers within 10 years.
And this is light duty industrial. And you still need combines, grain trucks, augers, yada yada - all of which runs on gas today.
Ah, the good old ad-hominem argument. If you can’t refute what someone has to say, you make sure to tell everyone that he’s not to be listened to. You do this constantly.
Yes, of course. So of course you said the same thing about Trump’s wall, right? When he said he was going to build a wall across America and get Mexico to pay for it, did you say the plan was nuts, or did you say, "Oh, don’t worry, that’s just a gambit to move the Overton Window so that when he says he just wants a big fence and we’ll pay for it, people will say, “Oh, Trump is actually sane!”
The Green New Deal is so far out in batshit crazy territory that it makes Trump’s 5 billion dollar wall look like an afternoon project.
The problem with this, btw, is that there are MILLIONS of these ‘special cases’. Last year I spent $22,000 for high-efficiency gas furnaces for my house. I guess those have to go into the trash now? How about gas ranges? All headed for the landfill, along with every gas and oil furnace in America? Are you going to pay for all of those too?
And how fast do you think industry can adapt to the massive, almost instant changes the Green New Deal demands? Let’s take GE. How is GE supposed to survive? GE makes gas turbines. Shut those factories down. GE makes gas stoves. Shut those assembly lines down. GE makes aircraft engines. Sorry, no more aircraft. Or at least, greatly shrunk demand for new aircraft. GE makes nuclear power plants. Sorry, no nuclear. And while it’s taking all these massive hits to its core businesses, it also has to rebuild all its factories that use any form of petroleum energy.
GE is just one of many such large industrial firms. Caterpillar would be driven out of business, because they make nothing but large industrial machinery that runs on fossil fuels, and for which there are currently no electric replacements.
This is a recipe for bankruptcy. Oh, you say, but they’ll make so much money selling new electric equipment! Except that it takes years to stand up new assembly lines and get them running efficiently. Assuming they can get the power to run them.
Now, you might say that the ‘Green New Deal’ is worth all of this dislocation and economic damage. The thing is, politically this makes it totally unfeasible. You start shuttering large companies in various states, and you’ll have a state revolt on your hands if you keep it up. If not, the people will vote out all of the Green New Dealers as fast as they can, and elect people who promise to undo the mess.
But hey, maybe at least you can get California to go along, right?
San Bernardino County Rejects New Solar Plant
A solar plant in the Mojave desert has been blocked because of its impact on bighorn sheep. You can’t build a solar plant in the freaking Mojave desert because a progressive government blocked it, imagine trying to build thousands of them across the country, including in the ‘Red’ states that want nothing to do with them at all. Good luck.
The point was that you are assuming already that your replies have a lot of validity when in reality they are years behind of what it can be done now. Everyone else can notice that you were absolutely sure that there were not even prototypes of electric farming equipment.
Nope, in reality that is your argument, after all everyone can see that on even that you are only doubling down on noticing that you are missing a lot thanks to the sources you rely on.
Correction:
Nope, in reality that is your argument, after all everyone can see that on even that you are only doubling down on not noticing that you are missing a lot thanks to the sources you rely on.
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/innovative-solutions/solar-energy
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/innovative-solutions/solar-energy/concentrated-solar-power
It depends if that was in the red area of east San Bernandino or the barely blue one of West San Bernandino. In any case, those mostly conservatives in California are not opposed to solar in their homes or big projects elsewere, they are only complaining about big solar projects in protected areas or the ones deemed environmentally essential. Other projects continue so I have to point at that as the usual contrarian spin that one gets also in mainstream media that misses a lot more of what is going on.
http://cms.sbcounty.gov/lus/Planning/RenewableEnergy.aspx
So, yeah, even in places that still have a lot of conservatives they are not telling us that they “want nothing to do with them at all.” Lucky us.