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Besides the coronavirus plague now attacking the entire human race, we have another crisis coming at us for we which we are unprepared and for which too many leaders have refused to prepare adequately for with up-to-date preventive and protective measures. We are seeing right now what happens when leaders don’t believe and act on the warnings of experts or people who listen to experts. Life gets disrupted, upended. People prematurely die. Many leaders, including of course the one in the White House, are not serious about preparing for the climate crisis just as they weren’t about this raging virus, and the result is going to be much more far-reaching than COVID-19 whatever its ultimate toll. When we can leave home regularly again, we’ll need to get on this. The Green New Deal still offers an excellent outline to a positive outcome. Here’s one immediate aspect for a GND to tackle come January.
Robert Pollin is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. At The Nation, he writes—Wanted: Shovel-Ready Projects for a Green New Deal:
In advancing a Green New Deal for the United States under current conditions, it is important to take seriously issues around how best to time the launch various components of the overall project. The point is to ensure that we maximize both their short-term stimulus benefits in addition to their longer-term impacts. I know how important such matters are from personal experience working on the green investment components of the 2009 ARRA stimulus program, in which $90 billion of the $800 billion total had been allocated to clean energy investments.
The principles underlying the green investment components of the ARRA stimulus were sound. But the people who worked on the program in its various stages, including myself, did not adequately calculate the time that realistically would be required to get many of the projects up and running. We knew then that it was critical to identify “shovel-ready” projects—i.e., ones that could be implemented on a large scale quickly so that they could provide an immediate economic boost. But relatively few green investment projects were truly shovel-ready at that time. One important reason for this was that the green energy industry was then a newly emerging enterprise. The backlog of significant new projects was therefore thin. It is only moderately less thin today.
This means that we need to identify the subgroup of green investment projects that can realistically roll into action at scale within a matter of months. One good example would be to undertake energy-efficient retrofits of all public and commercial buildings.
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QUOTATION
“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”
~~Gen. George S. Patton
What about when coping with the unforeseeable is complicated by the supposed leader of coping being what’s unpredictable?—MB
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—A Fatal Mischance:
Yesterday, hope for a miracle deep beneath the mountains of West Virginia was extinguished as the bodies of the last four miners were found. The cause of the explosion that took the lives of 29 men has not yet been determined, but from the nature and strength of the explosion, it seems likely that it involved both a build up of methane and an accumulation of coal dust—both of which should have been prevented by adequate supervision and implementation of safety regulations.
The CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, is even more wealthy than [Coal Company magnate Bob] Murray. He donates huge amounts to conservative causes, has funded a good chunk of the Tea Party movement in West Virginia, famously spent over $3 million to get a friendly judge elected to the state Supreme Court, and donated another $3 million in an attempt to fund a Republican takeover of the state legislature. Blankenship regularly engages in calling Democratic leaders "the crazies" and has said that any move to regulate pollution is the first step toward communism. Grist named Blankenship the "scariest polluter" in the country.
Now that Blankenship's disregard for safety has cost the lives of 29 men, what should we expect?