It was suggested that I post this as a diary to get these ideas out, it's a slow news Sunday afternoon, here it is. I've run it up the flagpole, let's see if anyone salutes.
This is basically a set of recommendations for what a President and Congress who actually wants to solve the problem can get going while a program with long-term fixes is put together; something to do for the first "100 days".
Some of you may already have seen this or portions of this, these are some ideas that have been cooking in my head for a while and I decided to put them together and see how people react. There are a lot of things
What I propose here is not THE solution but I'd settle for a decent starting point to stabilize the situation while we work on the long-term answers.
Also note that the best jobs program the Obama Administration can possibly create would be a serious crash program of the sort described here to transition off fossil fuel, creating jobs across the occupational and educational spectrum.
Put real money into this and we go from labor surplus to labor shortage which will reduce the need for aid programs for individuals.
Our choices are to do this or watch America disintegrate over the next generation. This is really the main issue on which historians will decide a generation from now whether Obama should be compared as a President to FDR ... or George W. Bush. If Obama fails this test, those historians will be in the EU and Asia, because there won't be an economy capable of supporting higher learning in what used to be the USA.
It's already crunch time, and we still have to wait for Bush to leave office to get started.
Here's what a workable program might look like for cutting our carbon footprint in a hurry.
The first step is to get a President willing to make like FDR in a willingness to take on the Richistani and the Fortune 1000... i.e. to save our system despite itself. If Obama proves not to be that man, forget about greening America, it's time to take your passport and go.
The second step is to stop wasting Federal money on expensively stupid shit like Iraq (IMO, we need to pull them out as soon as we can organize the logistics, not wait for some mythical point of stability) and the current broken health care non-system.
If these happen, investment banks might still be willing to keep on buying our T-bills on the basis that the problems that increasingly made America look like a money pit are being solved and they'll find ways to profit off the new greentech. I doubt they'll be willing to keep funding K-Street-driven business as usual no matter who the next President is.
Now that we have some inkling of how to come up with the trillions of dollars we're going to need to get serious about fixing global warming. . .
1. Telecommuting. We need to push it hard NOW.
Here's a four point program:
- BLS needs to revise their Occupational Outlook Handbook to provide "Telecommute - OK" "Telecommute - unworkable" for each job title/description. Examples: construction laborer, plumber, field service tech would be unworkable. OK? Almost any office job except on-site receptionist.
- A tax break per telecommute position for companies who fill "telecommute -OK" jobs with American telecommuters. (either employees based in America or American expat nationals)
- Carbon tax and road usage taxes assessed against employers per position deemed suitable for telecommuting where employers force people to show up in person based on an "average" commute in a metro area.
- Tax deductions for employers who pay for employee public transit
If we can get rid of even
half of daily auto commute trips, we've bought ourselves some time. A look at
Summary of Travel Trends - 2001 National Household Travel Survey says that 27% of VMT (vehicle miles traveled) says that 1/2 of this would be 13.5%, given how much commute time is spent idling and in start-stop commute traffic, i.e. the least efficient way to use an auto engine, I think we'd save a lot more than 13.5% of fuel consumption via 1/2 of commute trip replacement with telecommuting.
2. Electricity
- Banning incandescents in favor of CFL/LED/etc has already happened, it simply hasn't taken effect yet. It probably should be accelerated to make the phase-out of incandescent start NOW. We might also want to look at banning anything less efficient than the superefficient Luxim plasma lights or high-efficiency (some aren't all that efficient) LEDs for street and parking lot lighting.
- We need to ramp up wind and solar NOW, starting with getting some wind turbine and solar panel factories in the USA capable of handling the demand an aggressive wind and solar electrification program. This would be a first step towards Scientific American's Solar Grand Plan. IIRC, we can get to about 30% of power from intermittent sources before we start running into load-balancing problems because of them, we're a long way from that point.
- We can also get to work on starting to replace the regional power grids with the national smartgrid the Grand Plan envisions... we can plan it for hydro or compressed air storage and if the ultracap electric energy storage is ready in time, we can use it instead of more conventional storage.
3. Building Energy Efficiency
- In areas where the electricity has been greened, we can mandate electric heat for new building construction, that oil-based building heating where used be replaced only with electric heating and provide incentives to do this before oil heaters actually wear out.
- We need anti-NIMBY Federal legislation that says essentially if state / local / HOAs can't prove that a proposed environmental energy-related project has a tangible and real negative environmental impact, that they MUST approve permits and that any specific local laws that prohibit such a project are null and void.
- We also need to find a way for all US building codes to require "best practices" energy efficiency for all new building construction and a way to encourage retrofitting for existing construction.
3. Transportation
- We need new CAFE standards that can't be met by anything but electric, gas-hybrid, diesel, or alternative combustion technologies and a program that will make existing gas vehicles disappear from the roads as soon as they're turned in as trade-ins... something like the current buy-back programs some states have.
- We need a law requiring biofuels to be carbon-neutral or better with an EROEI of 2+ and be environmentally sustainable to qualify for government subsidies, and that they be certified as such by a government agency or designated NGO. Palm oil is climate neutral until one considers the slash and burn method of preparing land for palm crops by turning the local vegetation into CO2. Corn/soy ethanol would fail the EROEI test. Using ag waste as biofuel feedstock instead of plowing it back into the soil has a long-term negative effect on soil fertility. I'm fairly certain that sewage-based algae biofuel feedstock can be made to work, but the problems are difficult and the measures discussed will buy us time to get them fixed.
Well, that's the low-hanging fruit.