[A-List] Solar grand plan ?

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Crossposted from PEN-L


Gar Lipow


I'm with Shane on the money. 480 billion sounds more like an annual
budget than a multi-decades budget. However don't count on hydrogen as
a storage or transmission media. Really efficient Plugin hybrids with
a 100+ mile electric range could reduce emissions by as much or more
than a hydrogen car.  Pure electric cars with a ~200 mile range could
meet all the needs of a great many people. And in terms of future
technology, we are a lot closer to massive improvement in battery
technology than we are to economical hydrogen.  (Bear in mind also,
that most hydrogen advocates support deriving hydrogen from natural
gas or coal during the "transition".)

However he is right in advocating putting huge money into
decarbonizing the grid - deploying massive amounts of wind, solar and
other renewable technology , along with solar for low temp needs like
space heating almost everywhere. We should also put large amounts of
money into mass  transit also driven by renewable electricity. (I
would also add to this tough, enforced efficiency standards for
buildings, vehicles, and appliances.)

When it comes to industrial technology, neither regulation nor public
works can do as much as we'd like to phase out fossil fuels. I mean
given the tens of thousands of differing technologies, and
deployments, and alternative goods that provide similar services, how
do you measure? Emissions per what? This is what ultimately convinced
me that you also have to put a price on carbon. Elasticity is low, but
not zero.   And since you have too many problems of leakage if you try
to put that price on just one sector, that means putting a price on
all carbon. (Any way the best place to put a price on carbon is
upstream - when fossil fuels are extracted, imported or refined.)  You
can compensate for the regressive nature of such carbon pricing by
refunding the revenue directly to the people - cutting checks on an
equal per capita basis.

Doyle, I think this may be a better issue for left organizing than you
think. Global warming, and environmental problems in general are a
fundamental problem with highly inegalitarian systems. (Yes I know
former communist nations had many of the same problems. They were
inegalitarian in their own way -- more economically equal, but with
extreme political inequality.

There are many ways extreme inequality leads to environmental damage.
One is that whether that inequality is of the type we have in the U.S.
or the type they had in the former Soviet Union, it allows decisions
makers to impose costs of their decisions broadly, while reserving
most of the benefits for themselves and their allies. Another is that
keeping a large part of your workforce down, keeping them under
control, also undercuts many of the types of communications that could
compensate for the atomization that is required by specialization. We
can't avoid specialization; nobody can know how to do everything. But
there are all sorts of means of compensating for the problems that
come with specialization, of making information internal to
organizations widely available throughout those organization,
encouraging whole systems thinking. Under either capitalism, or
dictatorships that may or may not be socialist (depending on how you
define socialism)  there is tendency to discourage too much
communication, over and above that required by short term job
performance. There are fads, like the TQM that existed a decade ago,
that try to compensate for it -- but various policing methods that
exist to keep the people on top on top, prevent them from being very
effective on a large scale. (And yes there are small exceptions. This
is a tendency, not some sort of iron law.)