Noah Smith says Green New Deal should have very large focus on subsidizing lower carbon tech, because that effort will reduce carbon globally not just in our country:
The first pillar of an alternative Green New Deal would be green technology. If the U.S. can discover cheap ways of manufacturing cement and concrete without carbon emissions, and of reducing emissions from agriculture, it will give developing countries a way to reduce carbon output without threatening their economic growth. To this end, the U.S. should pour money into research. The budget of ARPA-E, the agency charged with leading this research, should be increased from about $300 million to $30 billion per year.
The second way to move green technology forward is to encourage the scaling of these technologies. As companies build more solar power, batteries, smart grids, low-carbon building retrofit kits and other green technologies, the costs go down. To that end, the government should provide large subsidies to green-energy companies, including solar power, batteries and electric cars, as well as mandating the replacement of fossil-fuel plants with zero-carbon plants.
Technologies developed in the U.S. need to spread quickly to other countries. All ARPA-E breakthroughs should be freely transferred to other countries, through the offices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or other agencies. Subsidies should be increased for companies that export their emissions-reducing products. The plan should also include offers of favorable trade relations for countries that reduce their use of fossil fuels, as well as tariffs on the carbon content of imported goods.
This alternative Green New Deal has similarities to Ocasio-Cortezâs version, but also has key differences. By focusing on technological development and international assistance, it would tackle the all-important problem of global emissions. By avoiding huge open-ended commitments like a federal job guarantee or universal basic income, and by including progressive tax increases, it would avoid the threat of excessive budget deficits. Ultimately, this plan would represent the U.S.âs best shot at fighting the looming global menace of climate change while also making the country more egalitarian in a safe and sustainable way. It would be a worthy successor to the original New Deal.
I excerpt the first couple pages of the intro just to goose everyoneâs existential panic:
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isnât happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the ânaturalâ world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of our environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true. But letâs begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planetâs phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years â perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries â all the millennia â that came before.
This is why basically all effort needs to be made into 1) nuclear and 2) exotic energy. Lumping all possible exotic technologies into that one (fusion, microwave, high energy, vacuum energy, ect).
The problem is that energy = work, and basically literally. The reason we arenât all farmers is because of the ability to convert mechanical work into food, and the reason we have mechanical work available is because of the ICE. The reason we have stuff from all over the world is because of transportation, why we have electricity and computers and cell phones and everything.
Thereâs no going back from energy. That energy use graph is a straight line. Thereâs also basically no limit to our need for energy. Make energy free, and thereâs no reason we canât have grav lev trains to every point on earth, no reason you canât travel from Australia to Canada to India and back again for fun whenever you want, no reason each person canât be running thousands or tens of thousands of watts per home doing⌠whatever you can imagine youâd do with all that energy.
If we want to save the world weâre either going to have to have a social revolution - which, as a side effect, will lead to de-globalization, since âliving, eating, and traveling locallyâ has the side effect of isolating people again - or we invent a lot of new sources of energy.
The great irony is that the very reason weâre in this mess is because of the side effect of industrialization, the spread of Enlightenment political philosophies. The reason there were forests at all in England for centuries was because many of the relict forests were declared to be royal estates, to be preserved from the riff raff after the Conquest. 16th and 17th Century monarchies would have no trouble telling people what to do. In the modern world itâs political suicide in a Democracy to tell your voters that what theyâre voting for is a dramatic reduction in their prosperity, their health, and standard of living. Especially when youâre in a prisonerâs dilemma where a nationâs neighbors might have absolutely no reason to go along and weaken themselves at the same time.
Or we cross our fingers for the zombie apocalypse. Thereâs nobody to blame and no problematic decisions that cost you money in that one.
In 100 years an old man will be sitting on his porch in a rocking chair, bible gripped firmly in his hands. A rolling wave of death approaching caused by the neglect and denial over his past century. In his mind wonât be we could have prevented this if we acted but the approaching apocalypse is what the bible told him and he will die a happy man.
Some scientists even began embracing alarmism â particularly with that United Nations report. The research it summarized was not new, and temperatures beyond two degrees Celsius were not even discussed, though warming on that scale is where we are headed. Though the report â the product of nearly 100 scientists from around the world â did not address any of the scarier possibilities for warming, it did offer a new form of permission to the worldâs scientists. The thing that was new was the message: It is O.K., finally, to freak out. Even reasonable.
This, to me, is progress. Panic might seem counterproductive, but weâre at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable, for several reasons.
Darwinism in its purest form (from the above-linked article):
In December, a national survey tracking Americansâ attitudes toward climate change found that 73 percent said global warming was happening, the highest percentage since the question began being asked in 2008. But a majority of Americans were unwilling to spend even $10 a month to address global warming; most drew the line at $1 a month, according to a poll conducted the previous month.
Another block that I felt is so true, and is making me feel like I am half drunk lately:
I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades from now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now. That is how hard it is to shake complacency. We are all living in delusion, unable to really process the news from science that climate change amounts to an all-encompassing threat. Indeed, a threat the size of life itself.
I believe it was this thread where it was mentioned earlier, but I donât think Democracies are up to this task. We need not only a President, but a majority of both houses of Congress to tell people we need to make very painful changes and sacrifices if we donât want to go over a cliff. And they need to somehow get elected when going up against opponents who are offering tax cuts and casting doubt on whether thereâs even a problem or if thereâs anything we can do about it. That then needs to be replicated across the world.
Politically, Iâm convinced weâre not going to be able to address this in a meaningful way until the catastrophe is already staring us in the face and by then the problem is going to be so much harder to solve and involve a lot more suffering. if scientific breakthroughs donât happen in energy and carbon capture, weâre hosed.
Iâm just glad I donât have kids to worry about when Iâm gone.
Overpopulation is also a huge factor, one that liberal / progressives really have no answer for. You / we / they / whoever has to go to the third world and say âStop Having Kidsâ, and who wants to say that? Who wants to tell a bunch of wretchedly poor people in semi-Democratic or authoritarian regimes they suck for having kids? How is that fair? Much of the neo-liberal understanding (sometimes unspoken, sometimes not) of globalization is a massive uplifting of the poor around the world, at the cost of your lower classes at home. But that just means more resources, more energy.
Honestly the solution is a single unified world government that can fairly and sanely create worldwide policies, along with massive reductions in population (8b to 1b?) and dramatic increases in nuclear+ energy. Thatâs what Climate Change is going to compel, either through wisdom or naked necessity. (A speculative sci-fi silly solution is mass eugenics + genetic engineering. A planet where everyone has an IQ of 150 might well be more willing to make complicated, long term decisions than one we have now.)
If we had a proposal that would work and cost 10 dollars a month Iâd give them a year in advance right now.
But the question, tacking a fee to the utility, Iâd be curious how many Americanâs trust that if we gave the utility that money it would actually be spent on what they say it would be spent on. Those answers might be a little less simple than implied because itâs specific to a utility bill.
The answer is to empower women in developing nations. More complicatedly, rising economic status lowers birth rates, sometimes dramatically (see Japan, much of Western Europe, and now the US.) If you mean lower the number of human beings currently alive? No one has an answer for that. Although if no one is willing to do anything about climate change, that problem will take care of itself.
Edit: I should add, over consumption at this point in time is arguably more of a problem.
Itâs easy for the progressives to go after people they think are rich with houses and yards. They arenât willing to take the blowback theyâll get if they tell someone with 8 kids to stop having kids, or you know, even 3.
You donât tell people to stop having kids. You education and empower women and they decide not to have eight kids (because really, few women want to have that many kids.) Besides as Gordonât chart illustrates, right now the developed world accounts for a far larger carbon footprint than say Africa.
I think so. Just recently transportation in the US accounts for the largest contributor for GHG.
