A Less Devastated World Is Possible (with Update)

Further responses to the Green New Deal, from John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

Of the stated goals:

"Despite these reservations, [Jonathan] Koomey [a special adviser to the chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute] and [Robert] Pollin [ professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has helped design a number of Green New Deals for individual states, including New York and Washington], as well as a number of other researchers I spoke with, said the drafters of the Green New Deal were perfectly right to urge large-scale action across many parts of the economy,and they emphasized the technological opportunities that now exist to meet many of the environmental goals that underpin the proposed legislation, if not the exact timetable it lays down. " 

These goals include the end to greenhouse gas emissions using clean energy.

“Right now, we have about ninety per cent or ninety-five per cent of the technology we need,” Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, told me.

Common to the Green New Deal and similar plans "is converting the electric grid to clean energy by shutting down power stations that rely on fossil fuels and making some very large investments in wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal facilities. Jacobson said this could be completed by 2035, which is only five years beyond the target set out in the Green New Deal. At the same time, policymakers would introduce a range of measures to promote energy efficiency, and electrify other sectors of the economy that now rely heavily on burning carbon, such as road and rail transport, home heating, and industrial heating. “We don’t need a technological miracle to solve this problem,” Jacobson reiterated. “‘The bottom line is we just need to deploy, deploy, deploy.”

Update 3/5: “Facing a showdown vote as early as this month over the embattled ‘Green New Deal,’ Senate Democrats are preparing a counteroffensive to make combating climate change a central issue of their 2020 campaigns — a striking shift on an issue they have shied away from for the past decade,” the New York Times reports.

As science-based or practical action reports like the first one above remind us, addressing the climate crisis is not--and should not be--primarily a political issue. The only thing that makes it political to the current extreme extent is the rigid intransigence of the Republican party, which has made climate crisis denial a dogma.  Excommunication along with trolling, harassment, abuse and threats of violence, not to mention political defeat in party primaries, would instantly follow if any congressional or presidential candidate Republican even whispered doubt about this dogma.  So the only way to enact the big programs that are now necessary to save civilization is now through electoral victory of those who will enact it, and by default they will be Democrats.  The Republican party has abandoned the real world, the real future, for the excessive self-interest of a relative few.