On Thursday morning, Bernie Sanders announced a plan to get to 100% renewable energy by 2030, and complete Carbon Neutrality by 2050, a plan that is intended to pay for itself in 15 years. This speech announces that fact and hits some highlights, but isn't even a broad sketch of all of the details.
A much more detailed outline of the plan is up on Bernie's campaign Web site. (The outline of the outline is quoted below.)
Passing over the paywalled NYT and WaPO (Boo! Hiss!) we have Gizmodo: Bernie Sanders' $16 Trillion Climate Plan Is Nothing Short of a Revolution
You can hear his voice in everything as it spits hot fire about prosecuting the fossil fuel industry, uplifting workers, and creating a whole swath of new public works programs and infrastructure. It also calls for 100 percent renewable energy for transportation and electricity sectors by 2030 while eschewing nuclear power and demilitarizing the world, setting a goal that’s somewhere between wildly ambitious and out of reach.
Out of reach, eh? We'll let the markets be the judge of that.
We do not do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard!
JFK
How Hard Is It?
Too hard!? Of course it's hard. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.
A League of Their Own
Everything worth doing is as hard as possible, but no harder.
Me
Based on market and technology data, with no political change, I put 100% renewable electricity in the 2030s, maybe, in a Diary in April.
I believe that we will get to 100% years before 2050, possibly before 2040.
That was before the IPCC told us that we had to do it by 2030. OK, I'm down with that. We know how to speed up the process, mainly by funding the necessary investments (not expenses), bypassing the Denialists, and educating a multitude of governments, from towns in the US to every other country on Earth.
You can help.
Homework
A tiny piece of Bernie's plans, mentioned last night in an interview with Chris Hayes, is replacing all diesel school buses in the US with electrics that save hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes. This is where you can come in, because there are about 480,000 school buses in thousands of cities, towns and counties, and about 95% of them run on diesel.
Talk to your local authorities and candidates about electric school buses. Let us know here what they tell you. We are going to get our first electric school bus here in Columbus IN, in deep Red Kentuckiana. More liberal Indianapolis has bought several, and has plans for more.
The Republic: BCSC [Bartholomew County School Corporation] to pilot all-electric school bus with grant
Suggest to your children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews that they organize in their schools to demand electric school buses. With safety belts. And no asthma-inducing pollution and carcinogens. There are several organizations of mothers working on this. (Yes, there will be much more on another Renewable Friday.) I mentioned electric school buses in
Renewable Friday: Electric Buses
We have research that shows that children who understand Global Warming and its solutions are more effective than anybody else at changing their parents' minds. The right is freaking out about that, calling it the worst kind of Librul "Warmunist" propaganda. How do you think riding electric buses will affect this equation?
This video is from Québec, where the electricity is all hydro. But these buses save carbon emissions anywhere, because electric transport is several times more efficient than diesel, for fundamental reasons of thermodynamics. No matter how much Denialist Concern Trolls duckspeak ButWhatAboutTheCoal?! Yes, that's my answer under my other name.
(Yes, lots more Renewable Fridays. Isn't it wonderful?)
Now, Where Were We?
Oh, yes.
Similarly, before the latest IPCC warnings, Bernie and most others had much less ambitious climate plans that I quoted in Renewable Friday: Inslee's Got a Plan, and Beto's Got a Plan, and All God's Chillun Got Plans.
Combat Climate Change and Pass a Green New Deal
- Pass a Green New Deal to save American families money and generate millions of jobs by transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels to 100% energy efficiency and sustainable energy. A Green New Deal will protect workers and the communities in which they live to ensure a transition to family-sustaining wage, union jobs.
- Invest in infrastructure and programs to protect the frontline communities most vulnerable to extreme climate impacts like wildfires, sea level rise, drought, floods, and extreme weather like hurricanes.
- Reduce carbon pollution emissions from our transportation system by building out high-speed passenger rail, electric vehicles, and public transit.
- Ban fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure and keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground by banning fossil fuel leases on public lands.
- End exports of coal, natural gas, and crude oil.
Not bad, but the new plan is hugely better.
The New Green New Deal
Bernie, to his great credit, wants to meet the IPCC goal in the US and around the world, and has taken excellent advice on how to do it. That alone is a good reason to think that it will, in fact, come much sooner than anyone thought.
I can't do justice to all of this today. It is exhausting just to read Bernie's list of goals. :<þ
Until you remember that it will be many millions of people tackling each point, and that we can enlist the entire next generation, a billion strong, in the project, with rooftop solar and computers that cost less than textbooks and universal broadband and, as I was just saying, electric schoolbuses all around the world.
Renewable Friday: Our Most Important Renewable Resource is Children
Look forward to lots more Renewable Fridays where we dig in to these various issues and recommendations, and the responses from the other candidates and whomever. But not the Denialists. It is enough to say that they will attempt to trot out more lies that we can safely ignore, like their claims that the original Green New Deal would cost $93 trillion, or that Greenwashing Republicans have better ideas. (Renewable Friday: AOC and the Green New Deal)
Now, the New and Improved Bernie:
First,
The cost of inaction is unacceptable. Economists estimate that if we do not take action, we will lose $34.5 trillion in economic activity by the end of the century. And the benefits are enormous: by taking bold and decisive action, we will save $2.9 trillion over 10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over 80 years.
Got that? Many terabucks in direct savings, on top of investments with excellent returns.
Renewable Friday: TBucks in Real Money™ for All
Here is Bernie's list of goals.
- Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050 at latest – consistent with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals – by expanding the existing federal Power Marketing Administrations to build new solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources.
- Ending unemployment by creating 20 million jobs needed to solve the climate crisis. These jobs will be good paying, union jobs with strong benefits and safety standards in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants. We will also create millions of jobs in sustainable agriculture, engineering, a reimagined and expanded Civilian Conservation Corp, and preserving our public lands.
- Directly invest an historic $16.3 trillion public investment toward these efforts, in line with the mobilization of resources made during the New Deal and WWII, but with an explicit choice to include black, indigenous and other minority communities who were systematically excluded in the past.
- A just transition for workers. This plan will prioritize the fossil fuel workers who have powered our economy for more than a century and who have too often been neglected by corporations and politicians. We will guarantee five years of a worker’s current salary, housing assistance, job training, health care, pension support, and priority job placement for any displaced worker, as well as early retirement support for those who choose it or can no longer work.
- Declaring climate change a national emergency. We must take action to ensure a habitable planet for ourselves, for our children, and for our grandchildren. We will do whatever it takes to defeat the threat of climate change.
- Saving American families money by weatherizing homes and lowering energy bills, building affordable and high-quality, modern public transportation, providing grants and trade-in programs for families and small businesses to purchase high-efficiency electric vehicles, and rebuilding our inefficient and crumbling infrastructure, including deploying universal, affordable high-speed internet.
- Supporting small family farms by investing in ecologically regenerative and sustainable agriculture. This plan will transform our agricultural system to fight climate change, provide sustainable, local foods, and break the corporate stranglehold on farmers and ranchers.
- Justice for frontline communities – especially under-resourced groups, communities of color, Native Americans, people with disabilities, children and the elderly – to recover from, and prepare for, the climate impacts, including through a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund. And providing those frontline and fenceline communities a just transition including real jobs, resilient infrastructure, economic development.
- Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States’ leadership in the global fight against climate change.
- Meeting and exceeding our fair share of global emissions reductions. The United States has for over a century spewed carbon pollution emissions into the atmosphere in order to gain economic standing in the world. Therefore, we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialized nations meet their targets while improving quality of life. We will reduce domestic emissions by at least 71 percent by 2030 and reduce emissions among less industrialized nations by 36 percent by 2030 — the total equivalent of reducing our domestic emissions by 161 percent.
- Making massive investments in research and development. We will invest in public research to drastically reduce the cost of energy storage, electric vehicles, and make our plastic more sustainable through advanced chemistry.
- Expanding the climate justice movement. We will do this by coming together in a truly inclusive movement that prioritizes young people, workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and other historically marginalized groups to take on the fossil fuel industry and other polluters to push this over the finish line and lead the globe in solving the climate crisis.
- Investing in conservation and public lands to heal our soils, forests, and prairie lands. We will reauthorize and expand the Civilian Conservation Corps and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Corps to provide good paying jobs building green infrastructure.
- This plan will pay for itself over 15 years. Experts have scored the plan and its economic effects. We will pay for the massive investment we need to reverse the climate crisis by:
- Making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies.
- Generating revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Authorities. Revenues will be collected from 2023-2035, and after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.
- Scaling back military spending on maintaining global oil dependence.
- Collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan.
- Reduced need for federal and state safety net spending due to the creation of millions of good-paying, unionized jobs.
- Making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share.
The cost of inaction is unacceptable. Economists estimate that if we do not take action, we will lose $34.5 trillion in economic activity by the end of the century. And the benefits are enormous: by taking bold and decisive action, we will save $2.9 trillion over 10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over 80 years.
We cannot accomplish any of these goals without taking on the fossil fuel billionaires whose greed lies at the very heart of the climate crisis. These executives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars protecting their profits at the expense of our future, and they will do whatever it takes to squeeze every last penny out of the Earth. Bernie promises to go further than any other presidential candidate in history to end the fossil fuel industry’s greed, including by making the industry pay for its pollution and prosecuting it for the damage it has caused.
And most importantly, we must build an unprecedented grassroots movement that is powerful enough to take them on, and win. Young people, advocates, tribes, cities and states all over this country have already begun this important work, and we will continue to follow their lead.
I could suggest a few more points to add, and let nobody doubt that I will on other Fridays. But no nit-picking today. Well,
more frequent and severe weather
LOL. Audible chortling, anyway. That's supposed to be Uncle Joe's territory.
Remember that each of those statements is just a jumping-off point. Below that list on Bernie's site is a more extended discussion of details, funding, bills, Presidential actions, international initiatives, and much more on each part of the program. Then you can follow up in as much detail as you can stand.
Bernie is a great person, but has not been my favorite candidate. This is a big plus for him. Not only is it good on Global Warming, but it shows that he is wokening on all of the other issues that he neglected in 2016. Social Democratic economics is great, but you have to show people how you mean to deal with all of the other forms of systemic oppression where the linkages are not instantly obvious, and not suppose that they will all figure out the implications on their own. Don't just say that they will get better health care and free college tuition and more money while neglecting systemic racism and the rest.
MLK explained the whole of politics to one of his jailers in Birmingham.
Jailer: What do You People want?
MLK: Respect.
Yes, even the snowflake White Supremacists think the the whole problem is that they don't get no respect. I tell you what, boys, you're going to get genuine respect and like it. Or, if you turn it down, then your children will.
Good News Thursday: The Best of Everything
Their own children will, by the millions every year.
So, Bernie and the rest of you, show every segment of our coalition, and our laughable enemies, too, not only what you are going to do for them economically, and in terms of human rights and saving the world, but how we are going to break down the rest of the barriers between all of us. It isn't just AGW and other science denial, or economics denial, but humanity denial.
Just tell them!
Star Wars
As I said, I cannot do justice to the whole plan in one Diary. Go read it, comment here, and start spreading the word. Then you can come back several other times for more.