Many trillions of dollars in actual cash is going to come to tens of thousands of dollars per person, worldwide. If you have money at all, we will save you money on electricity and cars and heating and cooling your house and shipping for your consumer goods and health and the environment, and creating tens of millions of new and better jobs.
Legend has it that Sen. Everett Dirksen said on TV
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Some claim that he said millions before inflation. He said that he was misquoted in the papers, but he liked the line so much that he never corrected the story.
But there is no question that today it would be trillions, whether in Real Money™, or in Republican BogoBucks.
If you don’t have that kind of money to save, we will contribute to lifting you out of poverty and giving you an income at that level. Various other facets of the Green New Deal are also aimed at that goal. That holds even if you are one of the multitude that isn’t reading this diary because you couldn’t go to a school that didn’t exist in your village, but your children will be able to because of rooftop solar and wireless and mobile phones and cheap computers and free digital textbooks and growing local economies.
The moldy old lie that renewable energy will destroy the world economy is still circulating among Republican politicians and Fox, um, whatever-they-ares. Because of course it will destroy fossil fuel fortunes, which apparently are the only things that count as “the economy” in their estimation.
In particular, they are all shrieking to whoever will listen that the Green New Deal will cost at least two grillion dollars (HT Douglas Adams and Zippo Bibbox 104).
OK, they only said $93 trillion on Fox, and on the RWNJ side of Congress. That includes their bogus figures for Medicare for All and other programs, which would also, in the reality-based world, save us all Real Money™. They got it by adding the maximum back-of-the envelope estimates for made-up versions of programs that are only suggested in the Green New Deal resolution before Congress.
A 23-Year-Old Went on Fox News and Schooled Their Hosts on the Green New Deal
The bogus number at the center of the GOP’s Green New Deal attacks
The number originated with a report by a conservative think tank, American Action Forum, that made huge assumptions about how Democrats would implement their plan. But the $93 trillion figure does not appear anywhere in the think tank’s report — and AAF President Douglas Holtz-Eakin confessed he has no idea how much the Green New Deal would cost.
In addition, those are investments, not “costs”, but with no consideration given to Return on Investment, ROI, which Run Government Like a Business Republicans pretend to be hot on.
However, in the fact-based world of Real Money™,
Quick Transition to Renewables & Electric Vehicles Could Save Planet & Trillions of Dollars
Diary by SouthernLeveler
Rapid transition to clean energy and electric cars could not only save the planet, but could save the global economy $160 trillion USD by 2050.
That’s more than $5 trillion annually, on average, in the first 30 years, including installing enough wind and solar to replace all coal, gas, and oil used for generating electricity, and going to all-electric cars and trucks and trains, and to hybrids with electric batteries and carbon-neutral fuels for aircraft and shipping, and a lot more.
Part of this is because falling battery costs will soon make EVs as cheap as new gas-powered cars at point of purchase (not just over time).
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (link below) has been trying to forecast the crossover point where EVs are cheaper than gasoline-burning cars for several years now. Each year when they try to run the numbers, the result gets to be a year or so earlier. Now they are saying 2022 in Europe, and not long after for everywhere else. My interpretation of the trend of their predictions is that it will turn out to be in 2021.
It is now cheaper to build new solar plants or wind farms than to run existing coal plants—and renewables are closing in on natural gas. So the economics of transition are lining up with the environmental necessity. Further, every dollar invested in renewables or “deep electrification” pays $7 in profits (and health savings, etc.). Such a rapid transition would create 11 million new jobs globally, but there would have to be help for the jobs lost in the old energy sectors of coal, oil, and natural gas.
Oh, many more jobs than that.
Renewable energy sector employs 10m people
The Solutions Project at Stanford predicts a net gain of more than 24 million green jobs.
Greening buildings, investing in mass transportation, making cities bike friendly, add extra dimensions to the transition. “Meat” grown in labs could be a major answer to the methane problem of corporate farming/ranching—as well ending starvation and animal cruelty.
I’ll wait until I see it on the market, but that’s fine if it works. It could greatly reduce the strain on our farmland from growing animal feed, and from polluting runoff and gaseous emissions, among other things. Like making room for reforestation.
A final step in the puzzle is to see how much carbon we can actually remove from the air. One answer might be to create carbon sinks with massive reforestation, but this could have its own drawbacks in terms of the amount of water and land needed that would be diverted from human consumption. Of course, such reforestation might also have added dividends such as increasing biodiversity and water production.
Yes, indeed. Another Friday, for sure. Also adding carbon to soils, de-desertification and much more.
Engineering attempts to remove carbon also show some promise. One hopes similar plans could be made for removing methane.
That’s reacting CO2 with basalts or olivines or serpentines to make stable carbonate minerals, by the tens of gigatons each year, the same scale as carbon extraction up until now. We know that it works, and that the materials are readily available. The questions are scaling these processes up, and funding them. Well, maybe we can use free or negatively-priced electricity resulting from surplus wind and solar when the weather is good. More than one Friday, I promise you.
The window of opportunity is narrow, but our hope for stabilizing the planet is real. However, much depends on ending the Trump presidency and getting a progressive (green committed) Democratic POTUS with a Democratic Congress (and the end of the filibuster). We simply cannot afford another 6 years of a Trump presidency. We already have to clean up for the damage done so far. Notice, for instance, how much of Sen. Warren’s plans for public land protection and ending drilling, restoring the methane rule, etc. is simply reversing Trump rules. That’s not the whole of her plan, of course, using public lands for solar and wind generation is another feature, but it shows that we won’t be starting from where Obama left us, but from further in the hole.
Actually, the entire world is making good progress. Several of the best US states for wind and solar are deep Red politically—until you start talking about Real Money™, as indeed we are. For example, Texas is #1 in the US in wind. We could have done a bit more, of course, but we soon will do much more than that.
We can save the planet, end hunger and create millions of jobs around the world at the same time—but we have no time to waste doing so.
Yes. People are dying of needless wars, diseases, hunger, and other causes, all of which can be helped with cheap electricity and access to information made available even in the poorest and most remote villages, and with the other economic and social advances that they enable.
Energy and the environment are basic to the Green New Deal. It also includes economic and social transformation throughout the US to enable our economy and institutions to work for everybody.
Links
Here are the document links for the information we started with.
IRENA: Global energy transformation: A roadmap to 2050 (2019 edition)
Annual ENERGY-RELATED CO2 EMISSIONS in the REmap Case decline 70% below today’s level. An estimated 75% of this reduction can be achieved through renewable energy and electrification technologies; if energy efficiency is included, then this share rises to over 90%.
The report shows that emissions would need to be reduced by around 3.5% per year from now until 2050, with continued reductions after that time. Energy-related emissions would need to peak in 2020 and decline thereafter.
We are talking here about when we can achieve Peak Carbon, which we cannot yet predict with any precision. We are past Peak Coal, but not in sufficient decline yet, while oil and gas, and thus carbon overall, are still increasing. The key to Peak Gas and Peak Oil is batteries, where there has been excellent news.
According to current and planned policies, the global energy sector will see cumulative investments of USD 95 trillion over the period until 2050. The transition towards a decarbonised global energy system will require scaling up investments in the energy sector by a further 16% (an additional USD 15 trillion by 2050). In total USD 110 trillion would be invested in the energy system, representing on average 2% of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year over the period.
But wait! That’s more than the bogus Republican numbers for everything, isn’t it?
Yes. But it is also much less than the cost of replacing coal-fired power plants with more coal-fired power plants in the Republicans’ preferred Business as Usual plan. In other words, this too is a saving that will put money in the pockets of business, consumers, and government.
The types of investments will change, with a shift in the composition of investments away from the fossil fuel sector towards energy efficiency, renewables and enabling infrastructure. Crucially, the additional investments that are required are 40% lower than was estimated in the previous analysis (IRENA, 2018a), due largely to rapidly falling renewable power costs and the potential for further cost reductions, as well as the emergence of electrification solutions that are getting cheaper and more efficient.
ThinkProgress: Bloomberg: Plummeting battery prices to make electric cars cheaper than gas cars in 3 years
Batteries have been getting smaller and cheaper so much faster than expected that the experts at Bloomberg NEF (BNEF) have had to revise their own projections for electric vehicles every year.
BNEF projected in 2017 that “the crossover point when electric vehicles will be cheaper upfront than a combustion vehicle” would be 2026 (nine years), BNEF energy analyst Nathaniel Bullard tweeted last week.
But things have changed quickly since then and the timeframe has narrowed significantly: in 2018, it was 2024 (six years), and now, in 2019, BNEF projects the crossover point will be 2022 — just three years away.
Achieving parity for upfront, initial cost means that the buying decision for electric vehicles (EVs) is about to become a no-brainer. And that means decarbonizing much of the transportation sector is also becoming a no-brainer.
Similarly for grid storage replacing peaker gas plants, and ever-cheaper wind and solar replacing even the cheapest combined-cycle baseload gas generation.
We started looking at batteries a few weeks ago.
Renewable Friday: Grid Storage
The news has gotten considerably better since then. More to come.