My Green New Deal and Finance for the Future colleague Colin Hines has a blog out with the Green Alliance:
In the post he describes the QuEST for a Green New Deal.
QuEST stands for quantitative easing, savings and taxation.
I warmly recommend the post. As it is becoming apparent that the climate crisis is becoming ever more urgent so are ways to fund it of increasing importance. We think we have that solution. This blog describes where Colin and I are going with this issue.
We're planning to do a lot on this over the next few years. Someone's got to. It turns out it's us.
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The real beauty of this is that it links MMT and the green agenda, giving the former an opportunity to explain to a much wider audience. The green lobby is a very broad church of largely economic and political semi literates but, crucially in my view, it includes vast swathes of people with no particular ideological stance against the role of the state. Indeed, most scream for state action. You two are perfectly placed to show this sector that money is not the problem, just the political will. Go to it.
We will
Does the ‘Green New Deal’ propose funding nuclear? … ’cause if it doesn’t, it should! Solar and wind aren’t up to the challenge. The following talk explains why.
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewables_can_t_save_the_planet/up-next?language=en
I have spent my life opposing nuclear power
Just go to Sizewell
Think for 2 minutes
And then appreciate the catastrophe that it is going to represent one day
Richard, with all due respect, this strikes me as an ideological position from the past, not as a rational position for the future.
Look at the pros and cons dispassionately and consider the implications of exceeding the temperature increase target. Nuclear has to be part of the broad mix of solutions involved. I think this is self evident.
There is one more thing I would like to say. I have read your recent posts on the TJN and your relationship to it. Also I can see your energy and passion for this topic. What I have to say is that in my experience ‘Green’ politics is one of the easiest bandwagons for insincere politicians to jump on and use as a vehicle to get into power. It is far more popular (and well, trendy) as an issue than Tax Justice, for instance. It is tremendously easy to pay lip service politically to green issues. Greenwashing is rife out there. The damage from insincere Green politicians to progress on environmental matters is huge. From what I can see the setbacks created by them cannot be retrieved. Please take care about who you choose to back.
If you want to kill generations to come support nuclear
This has been my logic since 1971 when I argued this with my father, then working on Sizewell related projects, and has not changed
We took 25 years to start talking again
But he was always wrong
So are you
And I am not jumping on Green issues – I co-wrote the Green New Deal with the likes of Caroline Lucas
Having trained as an engineer, I always thought that nuclear power ought to have a major role to play. However, it has been a succession of massive technological promises that have failed to deliver, accompanied by huge over-runs in cost and time. If anything is clinging to ideology of the past, it is persisting with nuclear. And that’s before mentioning storage, risk, links to defence or any philosophical points.
If a fraction of the money that has been sunk into nuclear had been invested in renewables years ago, we’d be much further ahead. As it is renewables have moved incredibly fast in the last decade, accompanied by a collapse in costs. We’ve not even started on tidal and battery and other storage technologies are moving fast.
Nuclear is a lost cause Im afraid. There are far more effective ways of spending the money. Perhaps some background research. Compact reactors produced in volume to reduce cost and improve safety might have something to offer. However renewables have to be the primary source
Agreed
You might like to look into stable salt reactors –
https://www.moltexenergy.com/technology-suite/
They can use up radioactive waste as fuel, can be built on a much smaller scale, and are much safer because they self-extinguish if there’s a problem rather than blowing up.
Let me be candid: I do not believe that there is any safe nuclear power
That’s because there isn’t
Meanwhile the Tory Climate chief …….. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/were-on-the-brink-of-catastrophe-warns-tory-climate-chief
As I said on Twitter last night, incompetence of that order cannot be made up; it has to happen to be believed
Even by the standards of this government, the gap between the words and the actions on climate change are extraordinary. Permitting new oil and gas fields and a coal mine, when we know that the reserves already identified cannot be fully exploited without busting planetary boundaries.
Whether it’s health, economy, Brexit, crime or anything else, the government is driven by its most extreme elements.
When people talk of the costs of doing something they are ignoring the costs of doing nothing. Economically it will be better to regard avoiding these costs as an asset to be used.
The world is a business that has not taken into account depreciation in drawing up its income and expenditure statement.
WE think that the world is doing well but it only is if you are one of the few lucky ones and you are thinking in the short term and selfishly.
If the world created a “save the world fund” with £10trn it would have the resources to make an impact. Who doesn’t want to save the world?