Before Christmas I posted a blog on the Green New Deal to which Joe Burlington posted some responses including a lot of data, which I appreciated. I asked him for sources as I felt that would be useful, and he provided them but I decided not to post them as I felt that their benefit will be lost over the holiday period. I do so now, as a blog in its own right, with thanks to Joe:
You requested sources for my post on Support for a Green New Deal grows:
Climate dangers: The 24th United Nations climate summit comes amid growing warnings about the catastrophic danger climate change poses to the world. In October, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity has only a dozen years to mitigate climate change or face global catastrophe–with severe droughts, floods, sea level rise and extreme heat set to cause mass displacement and poverty. … New studies show global carbon emissions may have risen as much 3.7 percent in 2018, marking the second annual increase in a row
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/scientist_kevin_anderson_our_socio_economic
Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Rebecca Lindsey US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
Stabilisation targets — pages 3 & 4
http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/StabilizationTargetsFinal.pdf
10% produce 50% of emissions and 20% produce 70%: Democracy Now!†@democracynow “We need to focus on the people who are actually emitting,” says scientist @KevinClimate. “That 20% of the global population are responsible for 70% of all global emissions tells us that we need to be tailoring our policies towards that small group.” And
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/11/scientist_kevin_anderson_worlds_biggest_emitters
http://bright-green.org/2017/07/22/as-the-climate-clock-is-strikes-midnight-its-time-to-look-to-the-morning/ and
https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/extreme-carbon-inequality-why-the-paris-climate-deal-must-put-the-poorest-lowes-582545
Extra runways: Professor Kevin Anderson: “ [If] we carry on [flying], that means we're sending a signal to the airports to expand–almost every airport in the world is expanding–to buy more planes. We are buying more and more planes. So we are locking in a high-carbon infrastructure.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/15/scientist_kevin_anderson_our_socio_economic And
[Flying is] probably–emblematically, it's the most important activity that we pursue. The emissions are important. They're 2 to 3 percent of world emissions, about the same as U.K., Germany or California, so a significant amount of emissions. But, actually, when we fly, we are locking in an industry that is very high-carbon, that there are no technical alternatives in the near to medium term to overcome that, so we remain high-carbon. And also, those of us who fly, generally, we also live very wealthy lives. We often use taxis. We live in big homes. We have quite large cars. We drive a lot. We consume a lot of goods. So, almost it's emblematic. It captures the worst excesses in terms of our climate change impacts and also, indeed, border sustainability. And so, I think it's important for people who work on climate change, who think it's a really major issue, that we demonstrate that we believe in our own research by making some significant changes to how we operate our own lives.
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/11/scientist_kevin_anderson_worlds_biggest_emitters
The need for rationing: Imagine in the 1940s if the elite binged on a huge food extravaganza whilst folk around them managed on a tight ration. That's what Boeing are doing here whilst they & their morally bereft business passengers stick two fingers up to the rest of us. Kevin Anderson†@KevinClimate
Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) https://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/teqs/
Housing: My housing figures come from: Letter to The Observer, 16 September 2012
The solution to the housing crisis is not unbridled planning … the root of the housing crisis is inequality. There are 750,000 empty homes in Britain and about the same number of second homes. The top 250,000 households have eight or more rooms per person, while the average figure is 2.22 rooms per person and the median is 1.88. Officially 100,000 people in the UK are homeless (charities place the figure much higher).
Dr Helen Mercer, Business School, University of Greenwich
The need for degrowth:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-21/the-limits-of-renewable-energy-and-the-case-for-degrowth/
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‘Rationing’, e.g. air travel, is one means by which you can link environment impact/sustainability to political/economic fairness.
Currently in the US, air travel is about 1600 km per person per year.
So you might set a target of 1000 km per person per year.
If anyone wants to fly New York London and back (nearly 12,000 km) they would need to ‘buy’ the allowance from 11 other people. Cap and trade at the level of individuals!
This has just been published in Nature and may be of interest:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07845-5
Oh dear – the guy has not got a clue
Government should invest without borrowing and the national debt is a burden on future generations?
heaven help us when Nature publishes such people who are economically clueless
The Nature bloke’s an economist Richard – probably thinks government had nothing to do with coast to coast railway building in 19th century USA. I see our Tories have gone splendidly green in providing £13.7 million for a shipping freight company needing no ships, eliminating carbon-footprint crews and even recycling its website from one discarded by a Chinese chippy. Argentinian conscripts were marched to the front hungry past officers into their third course, so your rationing argument fails by counter-example in the lean Tory mind!
Here’s some Green New Deal data and it concerns the uptake of electric cars:
https://about.bnef.com/electric-vehicle-outlook/
https://www.caradvice.com.au/648088/volkswagen-orders-64-billion-li-ion-batteries/
That may not seem immediately relevant to some people. I would suggest that it is because the projected uptake appears to be rapid and, that fact notwithstanding, it may even be underestimated. So those cars are going to need supporting infrastructure for refueling and for additional clean power generation. Some of that will be down to private business but a lot of it will be government and the private business component will need govt. regulation and support.
The part that most people don’t think about will be the dismantling and retirement of obsolete fossil fuel infrastructure which will be huge. Transition planning for affected workers and towns is just the tip of the iceberg. On that note there is something else that will be huge that no one discusses and that is the broader (global) economic disruption that comes with the retirement of the fossil fuel economy. I know that particular disruption is a necessary thing and will ultimately be a very good thing as well – but it cannot be underestimated.
To begin with a demonstrative example, consider the case of ‘Petrodollars’. In 1973 (or thereabouts) when the Nixon adiministration abandoned the Gold Standard the Bretton Woods accord fell to bits and the world shifted to fiat currency, a new world economic order emerged – the one that is still with us. But the Americans in 1973 were left in a bind. The sudden absence of gold-backed US dollars left a vacuum.
To retain the supremacy of the US dollar (as a reserve currency in world trade) the US did a deal with the Saudi Kingdom whereby the US would provide them with military protection and the Saudis would demand that all of the oil they exported was paid for in US dollars. As number one oil exporter and OPEC leader, the Saudis had the power to do that and the remaining OPEC members followed suit. That’s a simplified explanation but it explains a diplomatic deal, the Petrodollar deal, that has underpinned global economic relations, the power and value of America’s fiat currency, the myriad of fiat currencies that are pegged to it (Asian mostly), as well as the currencies of all those that trade with the US and that trade with the pegging countries, all up – everyone.
My point is that the global oil trade has, to very large extent, underpinned the relative values and the relationship between the world’s fiat currencies. It has also underpinned the economic power of the US in various ways including the fact that many nations buy US govt. bonds to hold as reserves.
So! What happens to that system when virtually nobody is buying or refining crude oil anymore and everybody is driving electric vehicles?
Furthermore, what happens to all those countries that rely on oil exports, and the all the strategic and military relationships that existed in order to ‘secure’ oil supply chains, and for that matter the whole Middle East proxy war balance of power?
Have you ever wondered what was really driving that army of climate denial idiots and their science-hating nonsense? Now you know (if you didn’t already).
And there’s more besides – as net oil-importing nations (most of us) gradually cease importing, almost entirely, the balance of trade relationship between nations (net importers and exporters in particular) shifts significantly as do currency values and our attitude toward currency values. One of the things that defines current preferences for a stronger currency is the fact that it makes petrol cheaper (or should do). Absent of oil imports one major strategic and economic dependency, perhaps the main one, is gone. This shift has already started in the global thermal coal trade.
So, more broadly, a Green New Deal is about more than environment, technology and one part of the domestic economy. It also represents the birth of a new world order and the death of an old one. That’s something that needs to be discussed – and managed.
http://dailyreckoning.com/u-s-saudi-relations-cracking-petrodollar/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimeline
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