The Green New Deal

HOW MANY YEARS DO WE HAVE LEFT?
Dr. James Alexander—5 Years Left (This article was written in 2018!)

The IPCC ALWAYS UNDERESTIMATES
Recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report that concluded that we have just 12 years to cut emissions enough to avoid the calamity of a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The problem is that the IPCC was designed to be very conservative in its evaluations and always underestimates because they

1. operate by consensus
2. do not consider tipping points and
3. the summary written by scientists is edited line-by-line by politicians from the 195-member countries.

So instead of having 12 years, we likely have half that number. We believe that the Green New Deal is our last good chance to reign in climate change.

GOOD VIDEOS ON THE GREEN NEW DEAL
The Economics of the GND are actually quite good.  The GND would add jobs that fossil fuel extraction is shedding due to automation.  Mining, for example, is not often done by mountain-top removal, and an entire mine can be run by a dozen or so humans with highly specialized equipment.

A message from the future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows us what a beautiful world we could make in a transition to renewables and an environmental justice.

EXTINCTION
Bill McKibben (author and founder of 350.org) on the Growing Possibility of Human Extinction.  McKibben concludes this article with “This is literally a math test, and it’s not being graded on a curve. It only has one correct answer. And if we don’t get it right, then all of us—along with our 10,000-year-old experiment in human civilization—will fail.” More and more climate journalists are now writing about a possible coming extinction.

Here is a UN report titled One Million Species Face Extinction.

POLITICS
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has undercut the GND by gutting some of the guiding principles:
https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2019/1/7
https://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-change-democrats-are-divided-over-the-green-new-deal?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email

Liquid Natural Gas:
U.S.-based companies are doubling down on LNG ports, pipelines and other fossil-fuel infrastructure rather making a transition to renewables, unlike their international counterparts.

Here are two reports on the desirability of renewables
1 – According to the 2018 US Energy and Employment Report (USEER) jobs in wind, solar, and other clean energy sectors outnumbered fossil fuel jobs by three to one.
2 – A 2019 study on the jobs impacts of a Green-New-Deal style program in Colorado looked at what it would take to achieve a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, the GND goal. It found that roughly 585 non-management jobs would be lost, but with an investment of 14.5 billion a year in clean energy, the state would generate about 100,000 jobs/year. (Dept. of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst)

Greta Thunberg Speech at UN Last Month
Her great-grandfather was the first scientist to study whether growing pollution in the 1890’s might have an impact on weather. When she was 16 she started a solitary daily vigil at the Swedish Parliament that was soon joined by many others. In 2017 there were three large European marches of 10K, 20K and 30K made up primarily of children inspired by her activism. The enthusiasm was contagious—and spread throughout the world, even to Texas. On September 21st there were Climate Strike rallies in Houston, Austin and Dallas, each of which drew about 1000 people—mostly young people.

Greta Thunberg speech at the UN
Greta Thunberg speech at Assemmblee Nationale
Dahr Jamail The End of Ice speech in Seattle in early 2019

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