Modern Infrastructure A Must for Climate Change

Answering the Kennedys Call

World Economic Forum

There is something we can do as a country to mitigate the catastrophic changes that global warming is already wreaking on whole populations. Accelerate development of a modern for-the-22^nd Century infrastructure. It will create badly needed jobs, energy efficiencies that mitigate greenhouse gases, and better manage the international conflicts already arising from massive droughts and rising oceans.

That infrastructure must include new digital pathways, such as 5G networks, modern energy grids, modern transportation systems, and better planning for uncertain outcomes to changing climates. This is turn will assist in resolving conflicts that are sure to pop up when populations are pressured to move, as they have in just the last decade.

There is actually no alternative. We are already seeing the rise of populist, anti-democratic governments in Europe, Africa, and the United States. Scared native populations are building walls and fences to protect themselves from the influx of darker-skinned strangers ousted by unlivable climates from the poorest regions.

The World Economic Forum has said, “A global focus on sustainable infrastructure can boost growth, reduce poverty, improve air quality and create jobs, while building low-carbon, climate-resilient economies. This transition could entail economic gains worth $26 trillion over the next 12 years compared to business-as-usual, according to a report by the New Climate Economy.”

The New Climate Economy was commissioned in 2013 by the governments of seven countries: Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Norway, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom. “The Commission has operated as an independent body and has been given full freedom to reach its own conclusions. Lead by its global commission, it has disseminated its messages by engaging with heads of governments, finance ministers, business leaders and other key economic decision-makers in over 30 countries around the world,” said its website.

And what has been proposed by other countries is now reaching our shores. The Green New Deal resolution by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is already being denounced by so-called ‘moderate’ politicians and pundits as too draconian. Columnist David Brooks has characterized it as a massive government takeover of the private sector; socialism in its most extreme form that has been a failure in competition with modern capitalist-based economies.

Yet, why must it be an either/or proposition? The various reports on climate change mitigation maintain it will take centralized planning to create a necessary private/public partnership—yes, central planning in some form—to coordinate the incredible complexities that must be navigated in modeling multi-factor planning that takes into account many different outcomes. It’s playing three-dimensional chess with the survival of our planet at stake.

Then what kind of Central Planning? It has to resemble Roosevelt’s New Deal that brought us out of the Great Depression and enabled the U.S. to turn the tide in WWII. Global warming as a result of climate change is just such an emergency. And the longer governments wait to mitigate its affects, the more expensive it becomes—both in financial and geopolitical terms. The U.S. Pentagon has said it now poses a danger to our national security.

The critics of better coordination between the private and public sectors obviously miss the point. It is what is lacking from any suggested solutions to the climate crisis, because it entails massive improvement in the social structures as well, as is envisioned in the Green New Deal—such as some form of more universal health care, better labor laws, and a much improved social safety net that would mitigate much of the red-vs-blue states’ conflicts that have stymied bringing infrastructure improvements into this century, much less planning for the next.

“Even with these caveats in mind, a global climate action scenario prepared for this (New Climate) Report using the E3ME model that combines a range of opportunities including the wide scale use of appropriate carbon prices and phasing-out fossil fuel subsidies, seizing energy and industrial energy and resource efficiency gains, halting deforestation and restoring degraded lands, accelerating the penetration of electric vehicles, and integrating intermittent renewables into the power system—was found to deliver significant benefits. Transitioning to this low-carbon, sustainable growth path could deliver a direct economic gain of US$26 trillion through to 2030 compared to business-as-usual, according to analysis for this Report,” says the Guardian.

There is no reason that such complexities might overwhelm the planning process, in other words. Even AI will contribute in some form. If IBM’s Big Blue and newer iterations can win chess matches and defeat a top S. Korean champion in the ancient game of go, then we know Artificial Intelligence will be needed to help overcome those complexities.

Shouldn’t saving our planet take precedence over going to Mars, a barren planet and prime example of what could happen on earth? North America and all countries will suffer greatly from the looming climate crises, if we aren’t able to perfect our union in some way.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What Green New Deal?

Popular Economics Weekly

The Green New Deal resolution introduced in the House by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as H. RES.____ is really the vision of what a fully-realized United States of America could look like, if its social and economic ills were remedied. But what Markey and Ocasio-Cortez propose will take at least a generation to accomplish, which a majority of Americans say they support, in the best of circumstances.

That’s because much of the current voting public is older folk suspicious of change; and doubtful the dire predictions on climate change are true. So it must be the Octavio-Cortez’s in generations coming of age that want a better future for themselves than is currently the case.

Markey and Ocasio-Cortez want to change more than environmental laws and regulations in order to eliminate greenhouse gases. They want to make democracy work for everyone in H. RES.____:

“…to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘‘frontline and vulnerable communities’’).

Much of the business community will also be alarmed by the reversals in pro-corporate policies implemented since the Reagan era that tilted the economic playing field towards Big Business by allowing monopolistic behavior in many business sectors and weakening labor laws.

The Green New Deal wants to strengthen labor laws by “(G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition.”

Let’s first understand where the phrase “Green New Deal” comes from. NYTimes’ Thomas Friedman declared in a 2017 Op-ed that a Rooseveltian, big government New Deal was needed to revive the American economy from its doldrums since the Great Recession, and save Earth from the dire effects of climate change that even the U.S. Pentagon predicts could be catastrophic for world peace.

Friedman summarized its goals as: 1. Zero-net energy buildings: buildings that can produce as much energy as they consume. 2. Zero-waste manufacturing: stimulating manufacturers to design and build products that use fewer raw materials and that are easily disassembled and recycled. 3. A zero-carbon grid: If we can combine renewable power generation at a utility scale with some consumers putting up their own solar panels and windmills that are integrated with the grid, and with large-scale storage batteries, we really could, one day, electrify everything carbon-free. 4. Zero-emissions transportation: a result of combining electric vehicles and electric public transportation with a zero-carbon grid.
The Green New Deal uses Friedman’s suggestions as a blueprint. Their resolution says:

“The October 2018 report entitled ‘‘Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 of Celsius’’ by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the November 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment report found that among other things—a changing climate is causing sea levels to rise and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life, healthy communities, and critical infrastructure”

Furthermore, “…global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause— (A) mass migration from the regions most affected by climate change; (B) more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100; (C) wildfires that, by 2050, will annually burn at least twice as much forest area in the western United States than was typically burned by wildfires in the years preceding 2019.”

The U.S. Pentagon first raised similar alarms on global warming in a 2015 report to the Senate Appropriations Committee, because of the possibility of global conflicts caused by the struggle for depleted resources.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', wrote the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of n-planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

“The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies.
The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents,” according to the Observer and Guardian newspapers that first broke the story.

We should be debating how to achieve those goals, not whether it is desirable. The first step must be to eliminate our reliance on non-renewable, carbon-based fossil fuels that is endangering national and international security, as our planet warms while becoming ever more overcrowded.

The truth is it cannot be achieved without a more perfect union, rather than the conquer and divide mentality of certain segments of our current political and economic elites.

The Green New Deal resolves to revive our democracy so that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from it.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen