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Green New Deal
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The EU’s green deal is a colossal exercise in greenwashing | Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler
The EU’s green deal is a colossal exercise in greenwashing
But things are far worse than that. Whereas the €4.2tn for the financiers was new, actual funding, the €1tn that Von der Leyen has promised across 10 years in her green deal – €100bn annually – is mostly smoke and mirrors.
Contrary to Von der Leyen’s pledge to deliver a “green investment wave”, the green deal is largely composed of reshuffled money from existing EU funds and reheated promises to mobilise private-sector capital down the road. In total, the green deal will generate just €7.5bn in new budget commitments, stretched over seven years. By way of comparison, the commission is set to spend €29bn – almost four times more – on “unnecessary” and environmentally destructive gas projects, according to a recent study. So much for a lunar landing.
The EU’s green deal is a colossal exercise in greenwashing
But things are far worse than that. Whereas the €4.2tn for the financiers was new, actual funding, the €1tn that Von der Leyen has promised across 10 years in her green deal – €100bn annually – is mostly smoke and mirrors.
Contrary to Von der Leyen’s pledge to deliver a “green investment wave”, the green deal is largely composed of reshuffled money from existing EU funds and reheated promises to mobilise private-sector capital down the road. In total, the green deal will generate just €7.5bn in new budget commitments, stretched over seven years. By way of comparison, the commission is set to spend €29bn – almost four times more – on “unnecessary” and environmentally destructive gas projects, according to a recent study. So much for a lunar landing.
... if everyone who came in the door had insurance - because everyone is insured... hm...
Climate Politics Capitol Light (43) - Resilience
Labor’s problem with Sanders can be summed up in three words—Green New Deal (GND). Sanders’ own plan builds on the GND and calls for a ten-year, nationwide mobilization that would eliminate the nation’s carbon footprint by 2030. Workers in the oil, gas, and coal industries hear and read those words as a pink slip. Biden—being the moderate he is—speaks of making the transition by 2050.
In fairness to Sanders, his plan, like the GND, makes provision for a just transition to a carbon-free (or neutral) economy. Elements of a just transition include retraining programs, the provision of grants for low- and middle-income families to weatherize their homes and businesses. Undertaking the transition would, Sanders and his supporters say, create 20 million new jobs in industries of the 21st century. A claim that many economists corroborate.
So, what’s the problem? The problem, according to Phil Smith, director of communications for the UMW, bluntly states–The whole notion of a ‘just transition’ for workers simply does not exist. There has never been an example of a just transition in this country.
The IBEW is not the only union that has swung to Biden in recent weeks. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), representing around 200,000 workers, announced its endorsement of Biden just before the Iowa caucuses. The union endorsed Sanders in 2016. The move to Biden took place after it polled its members.
Labor’s problem with Sanders can be summed up in three words—Green New Deal (GND). Sanders’ own plan builds on the GND and calls for a ten-year, nationwide mobilization that would eliminate the nation’s carbon footprint by 2030. Workers in the oil, gas, and coal industries hear and read those words as a pink slip. Biden—being the moderate he is—speaks of making the transition by 2050.
In fairness to Sanders, his plan, like the GND, makes provision for a just transition to a carbon-free (or neutral) economy. Elements of a just transition include retraining programs, the provision of grants for low- and middle-income families to weatherize their homes and businesses. Undertaking the transition would, Sanders and his supporters say, create 20 million new jobs in industries of the 21st century. A claim that many economists corroborate.
So, what’s the problem? The problem, according to Phil Smith, director of communications for the UMW, bluntly states–The whole notion of a ‘just transition’ for workers simply does not exist. There has never been an example of a just transition in this country.
The IBEW is not the only union that has swung to Biden in recent weeks. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), representing around 200,000 workers, announced its endorsement of Biden just before the Iowa caucuses. The union endorsed Sanders in 2016. The move to Biden took place after it polled its members.
d21mike
Active Member
And if Sanders wins then IBEW will switch to Trump. GND is simply a bad idea. Remember when Hilary Clinton said “We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” How did that work out for her? We can revisit this in 2021 to see how it turns out but Trump is looking pretty strong.
Warren Buffett Has Started The Biggest Energy Revolution
The Historic Solar Farm That Will Produce the Cheapest Solar Power
Last September, Warren Buffett’s NV Energy company signed a deal with Los Angeles’ government to build America’s biggest solar farm. Last month, the project was also green-lit by the Trump administration.
The farm will span 7,100 acres in the desert outside Las Vegas. It will be backed by the world’s largest battery and power 6–7% of LA’s electricity needs.
Stunning scale aside, the most jaw-dropping thing is the price of its electricity. The plant will produce energy at a cost of $20 per megawatt hour of electricity—plus $13 for storage.
In all, the plant’s power will cost $33 per megawatt hour. That's half the estimated cost of power from a new natural gas plant!
And at $13 per megawatt hour, the storage cost is 35% below the MIT scientists’ threshold for the world to go 100% solar. Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford professor and one of the most vocal green energy advocates, tweeted on the news: "Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear."
The Historic Solar Farm That Will Produce the Cheapest Solar Power
Last September, Warren Buffett’s NV Energy company signed a deal with Los Angeles’ government to build America’s biggest solar farm. Last month, the project was also green-lit by the Trump administration.
The farm will span 7,100 acres in the desert outside Las Vegas. It will be backed by the world’s largest battery and power 6–7% of LA’s electricity needs.
Stunning scale aside, the most jaw-dropping thing is the price of its electricity. The plant will produce energy at a cost of $20 per megawatt hour of electricity—plus $13 for storage.
In all, the plant’s power will cost $33 per megawatt hour. That's half the estimated cost of power from a new natural gas plant!
And at $13 per megawatt hour, the storage cost is 35% below the MIT scientists’ threshold for the world to go 100% solar. Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford professor and one of the most vocal green energy advocates, tweeted on the news: "Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear."
Global study links daily exposure to ozone pollution to increased risk of death
Cleaner air ROI = lower mortality.
Cleaner air ROI = lower mortality.
Interesting new book about a grassroots approach to the Green New Deal
Grassroots Rising (Excerpt) - Resilience
Ready to organize and do your part to prevent ecological collapse? Grassroots Rising by Ronnie Cummins is your shovel-ready instruction manual for fixing a broken climate.
We need to scale up best practices, not just marginally better practices, on a critical mass of the world’s four billion acres of croplands, eight billion acres of grazing lands, and ten billion acres of forests. To do this requires that we carry out a thorough and ongoing global mapping (i.e., locating and publicizing) of the best farm and land management practices that currently exist. The good news is that these best practices are potentially applicable to billions of acres, appropriate to different ecosystems, traditions, and farming conditions around the planet, and at the level sufficient to get us out of the predicament we face.
Given that we have twenty-two billion acres of croplands, rangelands, and forested areas to regenerate, along with several billion acres of wastelands, it is clear that we can reach our goal of sequestering five to twenty billion tons of carbon annually if we scale up best practices, especially agroforestry, silvopasture, and forest polycultures in the tropical and subtropical areas of the Global South, combined with regenerative organic agriculture and holistic livestock management in the Global North.
The primarily low-tech, shovel-ready, affordable solutions that we need already exist in every nation and region. Millions of farms are already utilizing the traditional best practices of forest agriculture and forest gardens, organic and agroecological methods, holistic grazing, and soil conservation practices, augmented by recent innovations in permaculture, agroforestry, silvopasture, and landscape restoration. We don’t need to invent new techniques. We simply need to identify, publicize, replicate, and scale up currently existing best practices utilizing farmer-to-farmer education and training, with major support and funding from the public and private sectors.
Grassroots Rising (Excerpt) - Resilience
Ready to organize and do your part to prevent ecological collapse? Grassroots Rising by Ronnie Cummins is your shovel-ready instruction manual for fixing a broken climate.
We need to scale up best practices, not just marginally better practices, on a critical mass of the world’s four billion acres of croplands, eight billion acres of grazing lands, and ten billion acres of forests. To do this requires that we carry out a thorough and ongoing global mapping (i.e., locating and publicizing) of the best farm and land management practices that currently exist. The good news is that these best practices are potentially applicable to billions of acres, appropriate to different ecosystems, traditions, and farming conditions around the planet, and at the level sufficient to get us out of the predicament we face.
Given that we have twenty-two billion acres of croplands, rangelands, and forested areas to regenerate, along with several billion acres of wastelands, it is clear that we can reach our goal of sequestering five to twenty billion tons of carbon annually if we scale up best practices, especially agroforestry, silvopasture, and forest polycultures in the tropical and subtropical areas of the Global South, combined with regenerative organic agriculture and holistic livestock management in the Global North.
The primarily low-tech, shovel-ready, affordable solutions that we need already exist in every nation and region. Millions of farms are already utilizing the traditional best practices of forest agriculture and forest gardens, organic and agroecological methods, holistic grazing, and soil conservation practices, augmented by recent innovations in permaculture, agroforestry, silvopasture, and landscape restoration. We don’t need to invent new techniques. We simply need to identify, publicize, replicate, and scale up currently existing best practices utilizing farmer-to-farmer education and training, with major support and funding from the public and private sectors.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Germany didn't really spend anything and sparked the current phase of renewables growth and their cost basis for technology was 5-10x where we are today.
Nobody needs a "green new deal", just set tight rules, brutally beat back corruption, and let the market handle it.
ladysbff
Member
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Simple FERC rules and simple DoE loan guarantees would get it done.
All Germany did was create a market opening with two simple rules.
1) Renewables have grid priority. Always. They get to sell first, then utilities fill in the remaining demand with other wholesale supply.
2) Renewables at the point of grid interconnection are guaranteed a rate of return for 20 years. That kind of financial certainty create a massive flood of demand so powerful they needed to purposely lower the payback enough to slow adoption or the grid would overload.
Our needs are obviously varied and different, but the same rigid setup would get it done. And since what we're working towards is cheaper than status quo, it pays for itself.
IIRC, Germany also instituted uniform, national rules for installation, inspection, permitting, etc. The US is a hodgepodge of municipalities, states, and jurisdictions. Installations that may pass inspection in one location may not in another. All of this adds huge soft costs (balance of system) that often exceed hardware costs. The US would be much farther ahead if it followed Germany in that respect. Total costs matter and if the US could remove $0.50-$1.00 per watt due to stupid stuff like permitting and inspections, then we could see a doubling of installations this year.
The European Green Deal will bypass the poor and go straight to the rich
The European Green Deal will bypass the poor and go straight to the rich | Daniela Gabor
The European Green Deal is the European commission’s proposed €1tn plan to finance the transition away from fossil fuels to decarbonising Europe’s economy. But the commission quietly dropped the word “new” from original US plans for a green new deal, which of course echo Franklin D Roosevelt’s Depression-era economic New Deal.
Losing that “new” is a signal that the commission does not seek system change through ambitious green macroeconomics and tough regulation of carbon financiers. Rather, it takes a politics as usual, third-way approach that seeks to nudge the market towards decarbonisation.
The macroeconomics of the European Green Deal remains trapped in the black zero logic of austerity. Instead of ambitious green fiscal activism, it mostly reshuffles existing European funds through a logic of seed funding to mobilise private sector money. Public money will be used to take risk out of private business activities and finance a “just transition” mechanism that promises to protect groups like Polish miners after their coal mines close through retraining and reskilling programmes.
Those outraged by Borrell’s dismissive remarks about Greta Thunberg’s generation should note that the real political battle is to ensure that the European Green Deal does not morph into the first greenwashed social pact between regulators and carbon financiers, between Brussels and local elites, exporting greenwashed finance standards to the rest of the world.
The European Green Deal will bypass the poor and go straight to the rich | Daniela Gabor
The European Green Deal is the European commission’s proposed €1tn plan to finance the transition away from fossil fuels to decarbonising Europe’s economy. But the commission quietly dropped the word “new” from original US plans for a green new deal, which of course echo Franklin D Roosevelt’s Depression-era economic New Deal.
Losing that “new” is a signal that the commission does not seek system change through ambitious green macroeconomics and tough regulation of carbon financiers. Rather, it takes a politics as usual, third-way approach that seeks to nudge the market towards decarbonisation.
The macroeconomics of the European Green Deal remains trapped in the black zero logic of austerity. Instead of ambitious green fiscal activism, it mostly reshuffles existing European funds through a logic of seed funding to mobilise private sector money. Public money will be used to take risk out of private business activities and finance a “just transition” mechanism that promises to protect groups like Polish miners after their coal mines close through retraining and reskilling programmes.
Those outraged by Borrell’s dismissive remarks about Greta Thunberg’s generation should note that the real political battle is to ensure that the European Green Deal does not morph into the first greenwashed social pact between regulators and carbon financiers, between Brussels and local elites, exporting greenwashed finance standards to the rest of the world.
A Post-Growth Green New Deal - Resilience
A truly transformative Green New Deal cannot simply be about returning to a welfare capitalist order of days of yore. It must move beyond capitalism’s growth imperative. This is not only because there is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures anywhere near the scale needed to deal with the ecological crisis, but also because such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future. At least in affluent countries, therefore, a downscaling of production and consumption should be in order. But to ensure social well-being and equality in the face of a contracting economy, we need to develop a suite of post-growth policies.
Climate change is class struggle as it forces us to rethink the material conditions of everyday life: how we move, what we eat, how we supply energy and heating to our homes. The decarbonization of these basic services should entail their decommodification: removing them from the market logic and subjecting them to the logic of the commons.
To summarize, from a post-growth perspective a Green New Deal must pursue three distinct but interrelated goals: decreasing energy and material use, decommodifying the basic necessities of life, and democratizing economic production. Any Green New Deal proposal that does not address head-on the drivers of economic growth is doomed to fall short of the challenge of steering away from the worst scenarios of ecological breakdown
A truly transformative Green New Deal cannot simply be about returning to a welfare capitalist order of days of yore. It must move beyond capitalism’s growth imperative. This is not only because there is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures anywhere near the scale needed to deal with the ecological crisis, but also because such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future. At least in affluent countries, therefore, a downscaling of production and consumption should be in order. But to ensure social well-being and equality in the face of a contracting economy, we need to develop a suite of post-growth policies.
Climate change is class struggle as it forces us to rethink the material conditions of everyday life: how we move, what we eat, how we supply energy and heating to our homes. The decarbonization of these basic services should entail their decommodification: removing them from the market logic and subjecting them to the logic of the commons.
To summarize, from a post-growth perspective a Green New Deal must pursue three distinct but interrelated goals: decreasing energy and material use, decommodifying the basic necessities of life, and democratizing economic production. Any Green New Deal proposal that does not address head-on the drivers of economic growth is doomed to fall short of the challenge of steering away from the worst scenarios of ecological breakdown
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
This is my new all time favorite TMC post, gold star for you!
Germans wouldn't stand for such nonsense in the first place, but the govt also baked in rules to protect homeowners. A permit in Germany can be anything regional authorities want, however it MUST fit on one piece of paper. Ha!
In the US we basically monetize corruption in the form of soft costs and that(plus the coinciding annoyance) keep people from installing solar. Utilities and fossil interests purposely create complexities and confusion, then sales teams for solar installers are all too happy to stir the pot since they pocket most of those soft costs.
You'll see me on here soon talking about my new company that addresses these issues for residential solar. We're creating an online information and sourcing platform to cut out all that nonsense and bypass the typical solar sales process.
Tesla has already taken huge steps in this direction. I like to think our posting here has had at least some influence on their sales process which is now all exclusively online with set product pricing. When Powerwall prices come down on Battery Day as I expect and Tesla corporate refocuses on Energy.......look out!
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Monied interests seem to have just recently given up on fossil investment. It'll be interesting to see how the next phase shakes out. I've been of the opinion it almost doesn't matter how renewables are deployed, you simply can't hoard sunlight and wind in the way you can physical fossil fuels.
They'll certainly try to maintain centralized control, but it should turn out to be impossible.
Buffet has been pretty successful in Nevada killing residential solar while installing large solar that he profits from. I expect that will be a model for utilities.
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