The Green New Deal: The enormous opportunity in shooting for the moon. Decarbonizing with massive electrification will bring about a new American abundance. Saul Griffith, Feb 20, 2019 The conversation about a Green New Deal is bold, timely, and necessary. The most important component of the Green New Deal as currently drafted is its commitment to complete decarbonization. That is the destination, the …
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is being built
Is it possible to come up with a solution to the climate crisis, the economic crisis, and the global crisis, all at the same time? New Consensus aims to find out. By Zoya Teirstein, in Grist, on Mar 12, 2019 In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, a progressive group called the Justice Democrats jumped into action. If the liberal establishment had …
We CAN afford the Green New Deal and the technology and expertise is available
The Good News About a Green New Deal, The New Yorker, March 2019 Last month’s rollout of the Green New Deal, a fourteen-page legislative resolution, sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, that called for “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” through a ten-year “national mobilization,” has sparked a good deal of controversy. The resolution was larded with goals not directly tied …
What the Climate Strikers Want
First, the Youth Climate Strike sees the Green New Deal (GND) as the pivotal mechanism to enact climate action. (If you need to refamiliarize yourself, here’s the full text of Congress’ Green New Deal Resolution, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.) The Youth Climate Strikers want: An equitable transition for marginalized communities that will be most impacted by climate change An equitable …
It’s 2050 And This Is How We Stopped Climate Change
March 11, 2019, Heard on Morning Edition of NPR.org When NPR interviewed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February about her Green New Deal, she said that her goal was bigger than just passing some new laws. “What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination,” she said. Well, we’re unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible …
Calling for a broad anti-capitalist environmental movement based around the following points of unity
Working together is our greatest strength, but we fear that the government will be less willing to negotiate in good faith and more willing to use violent repression against a truly disruptive campaign than is assumed. Capitalism systematically incentivizes environmental destruction, and we worry that the costs of any government initiative to combat climate change will fall on the poor …
3 key traits of good climate policy, tackling the problems we have and making a large, meaningful impact on carbon emissions and climate change
Good climate policy has 3 key traits: It has a large, meaningful impact on carbon emissions and climate change. It specifically tackles the problems that aren’t already being tackled by the market. It actually gets passed into law. All of that is compatible with a Green New Deal. In just the past decade, solar power has gone from being uneconomical anywhere on …
The race is on to build batteries big enough for planes to fly on clean electricity.
Norway announced last year that the country wants all domestic flights to be electric by 2040. Beyond the hardware, electric aircraft stand to change airline business operations. Electric motors can allow for very short — even vertical — takeoff and landing, which means they don’t necessarily need an airport with huge runways. So rather than airlines, these aircraft could operate as …
Zero-Energy Homes: Tunneling Through the (Electrification) Cost Barrier in Cold Climates
RMI found that, in every instance, pursuing ZER homes was more economical than just electrifying space-heating equipment with code-compliant equipment, and in colder climates it actually changed the economics of electrification from being painful to homeowners to being beneficial. ZE homes told a more interesting economic story. Over the resale timeframe, they performed economically in a fairly similar way to …
Beyond Carbon: a grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100% clean energy economy + Closing remaining coal plants by 2030
The Beyond Coal effort helped close more than half the nation’s plants — 285 out of 530 — and replace them with cleaner and cheaper energy, cutting deaths from coal power plants from 13,000 to 3,000 and reducing US GHG emissions by 11%. Now, Bloomberg is expending his support for the effort so we can retire every single coal-fired power plant …