Not Enough

Technically, until after our next Presidential election, the United States is still a signatory to the Paris climate accord, although we know that the Trump administration is going the other way. Back in 2015, the Obama administration promulgated the Clean Power Plan, well before the recent scientific revaluations of the speed at which global climate change has accelerated. Even that plan has stalled in federal court.

While conservatives have excoriated the “Green New Deal,” most-associated with New York’s activist freshman House representative, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the reality remains that some of our nation’s worst droughts, coastal erosion, massive storm systems and flooding are disproportionately impacting red states. Globally, climate change-related disasters and human displacement have gotten significantly worse. And that certainly includes the U

nited States.

Our fossil-fuel-friendly leadership would take a chunk out of Obama’s energy rule (Trump’s  newly-proposed Affordable Clean Energy rule): “The new rule takes the narrowest approach possible by forcing minor tweaks to burn coal a bit more efficiently, which are expected to net only paltry reductions in carbon emissions—up to just 1.5 percent.” MotherJones.com, June 21^st. The world will not survive without major death, destruction and chaos – even within our lifetimes – if this pernicious climate peril is not contained with a dramatic new effort. Unfortunately, even Obama’s modest Clean Power Plan is hopelessly out of date.

“With hindsight, it’s clear that the Clean Power Plan was not ambitious enough. Even without going into effect, carbon pollution from the power sector has come down 28 percent from 2005 levels, which isn’t so far off, and is well ahead of schedule, of the plan’s goal of cutting pollution 32 percent by 2030. In the last nine years, 290 coal plants have shuttered or set retirement dates, and about 50 have done so since Trump took office. Coal has simply been unable to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewables. ‘The power sector has been moving away from coal. There’s huge increase in renewables and a big increase in the deployment of energy efficiency,’ says David Doniger, climate and clean energy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. ‘All those things have led the carbon-sector power emissions down.’ 

“The NRDC says the pace of progress suggests that any new, updated Clean Power Plan should look past the Obama administration’s vision and set a more ambitious goal of cutting nearly twice as much pollution—60 percent by 2030. The NRDC says such a reduction would, because of advances in technology, cost less than the original rule was estimated to while saving more than 5,000 lives by reducing illness related to burning coal in 2030 alone.

“The Clean Power Plan suffered an enduring limbo thanks to the courts… Until Trump’s rule [in mid-June], the Obama plan, even though strung up in court, was officially on the books. If environmentalists’ lawsuits convince the courts to throw out Trump’s new rule, Obama’s could revert to being the law of the land. If Trump’s remains in effect in spite of legal attacks, a future White House would have to go through the normal administrative steps of repealing and replacing it.” MotherJones.com. Most of the Democratic candidates would favor reinstating and continuing Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which is simply going to leave rising generations of Americans in an environmentally decimated country. Not enough.

What about that Green New Deal? It’s about refocusing our priorities and creating massive numbers of new jobs to implement the program, which is long on ambition and goals but short of details and implementational plans. It is also being proposed in a era where our recent massive tax cut for the rich has amped up our federal deficit to red alert spending warnings.

Writing for the February 15^th PopularMechanics.com, David Grossman explains: “Alternative energy, climate change, and other environmental issues were thrust back into the forefront of the American political dialogue in February with the arrival of the ‘Green New Deal.’

“The term, which first entered the vernacular in 2007 when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested the idea, has become a watchword for Democratic star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her allies, who are echoing the language of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in proposing a sweeping new program to transition America's energy economy and, they hope, create a slew of jobs in the process…

“For starters, the plan proposes generating 100 percent of electricity through ‘clean and renewable’ sources in the next ten years… ‘Clean’ is a tricky word in conversations about energy, since people use it to describe sources that very much are not. In this case, the word ‘clean’ is doing a lot of work, essentially removing nuclear energy and carbon capture technology from the Green New Deal's ambitions. While both of those technologies can reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they produce other troubling by-products [e.g., nuclear waste]…

“Instead, energy sources like wind, hydroelectricity, and solar would likely play large roles here, with geothermal energy possibly assisting as well. Of course it's not just as easy as swapping things out; building a grid that can provide consistent output using nothing but renewable sources that can be quite variable is a large engineering challenge that requires smarter wind turbines and better battery technology, and the materials necessary to build it all, to say the least. And a whole lot of money.

“Taken at face value, the plan would go a long way toward reducing America's carbon footprint. Fossil-fuel combustion is America's biggest source of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Currently every kilowatt hour generated in the U.S. produces ‘an average of 0.954 pounds of CO2,’ according to the University of Michigan, and coal is the worst offender, releasing 2.2 pounds for every hour…

“According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, America's infrastructure currently earns a school grade of D+, with perhaps the brightest spot being rail. The Green New Deal proposed today would want to radically expand that bright spot, with a call to ‘build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.’ Other transportation sectors are mentioned as well, including electric cars: The Green New Deal wants to ‘totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing’ and ‘build charging stations everywhere.’… Transportation is America's second-largest producer of GHGs, producing 28 percent of the country's total.”

The real question is how to balance economic growth and fostering legitimate business interests against what is eventually going to be a matter of human survival. Kicking the can down the road assumes that there will still be a road. How exactly will future generations look back on this historical moment, when mankind finally realized the scope of the issue, and simply did way too little way too late? Think of all those lovely post-apocalyptic movies you’ve seen over the years. Time will tell how accurately they predicted the future.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and if the United States could turn the Soviet first launch of an orbiting satellite in 1957 (Sputnik) into American men landing on the moon by 1969 (Apollo 11), you would think we could actually deal effectively with climate change.