California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Climate Change: The Equivalent of a Forest Fire For Which Nothing is Being Done to Put It Out

by John Lawrence, September 20, 2020

In 2016 the Paris Agreement called for the nations of the world to limit temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.That means that the amount of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emitted by the nations of the world would have to decrease year over year. To meet this goal the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said we must cut emissions to net-zero by 2050. What has happened in the meantime? The period since the Paris agreement was signed has seen the five hottest years on record. GHGs have increased each year since 2016. Total GHGs increased by .7 gigatons (billion tons) from 2016 to 2017 and by 1 gigaton from 2017 to 2018. In 2019 total carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry totaled 36.8 billion tons, according to an estimate from the Global Carbon Project. That represents a 0.6 percent increase from 2018, which until now stood as the record for GHG missions. For 2020 global total GHGs could decrease because of the worldwide pandemic. But the dynamics for increased emissions will return once the pandemic ceases unless we convert to renewable energy production ASAP.

So what does the almighty financial system have to say about climate change? When they get involved things usually change. This is from the foreward to "Managing Climate Risk in the US Financial System," a report from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Investors and financial markets are poised to deliver the low-carbon capital and infrastructure that our global economy requires to address climate risk. We know what we need to do and how to do it. We are impatiently waiting for the appropriate incentives and other policies to reduce emissions to be instituted through legislation. Only then will the awesome power of the financial system be able to address at scale this existential threat.

Why am I so passionate about climate risk? The answer is easy. Like others, I see what is already happening—entire regions burned by increasing wildfires, larger storms, more frequent floods, ecosystems under mounting stress, major health impacts, and climate refugees. In addition, I worry about the future my four grandchildren will likely experience in the coming decades, along with the rest of their generation. Our decisions today will have a major impact on the quality of their lives. Those of us who see the danger, recognize the required path forward, and understand the urgency of taking action must muster the courage and clarity of vision to do what is required now to get us on that path.

People are already migrating in response to climate change. Insurance companies are not going to insure houses in fire prone or flood prone areas. Some people have been burned out twice. Will they rebuild in the same area a third time? Fool me once, maybe. Fool me twice? Some areas of the earth are becoming uninhabitable. People living in those areas are going to become climate change refugees. There are already 80 million refugees in the world. The US is abdicating leadership in the world with respect to resolving the world's real problems. The only problem the US seems willing to resolve is to make the world safe for billionaires to accumulate more capital. The US is so out of step with the real problems in the world, is doing nothing to solve them and in fact is only exacerbating them.

Does it take a global pandemic to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? The pandemic will eventually be over. The nations of the earth will go back to increasing GHGs unless renewable energy takes the place of coal powered electricity plants. Developing countries like India are increasing their usage of coal in these plants. China also has many of them. In the US fracking is contributing methane emissions. Methane is a GHG which is worse than carbon dioxide. The US, as the world's second highest GHG emitter needs to assume a leadership role in diminishing GHGs in cooperation with China which is the world's largest GHG emitter.

Off the Top of My Head

China Leads the Way on Electric Vehicle Production

by John Lawrence, September 19, 2020

A Chinese company has developed an electric car that can go 438 miles without recharging. They have developed an infrastructure of charging stations. China surpassed the United States to become the world's largest automobile market in 2009 with a record 13.9 million vehicles sold in the country, compared to 10.43 million cars and light trucks sold in the United States. China leads the world in deployment of electric vehicles. At the end of June 2019, almost half the electric cars and 99% of the electric buses in the world were in China. China reached its goal of 5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020. China is both the largest manufacturer and consumer market for electric vehicles in the world, accounting for more than half of all electric cars made and sold in the world in 2018. China also makes 99% of the world's electric buses. China manufactured and sold about 1.2 million plug-in electric vehicles in 2018, which was more than three times the sales in the US. China has become the fastest and largest growing market for electric vehicles in the world. New electric cars had a market share of 4.2% of new cars sold in China for the entire year of 2018. Big cities like Shenzhen and Beijing are rapidly adopting electric vehicles -- for example, all of Shenzhen's 16,000 public buses are now electric, and soon all of its 22,000 taxis will be electric cars as well.

You see, dear reader, the US needs to play catch up. That's exactly what Joe Biden wants to do. China subsidizes its electric vehicle industry and subsidizes the purchase of electric vehicles by the public which can be purchased for $30 to $40 thousand US before subsidies of $8000 or so making them very cost competitive with gas guzzling vehicles. So China has an industrial policy which is so far anathema in the US. For the US government to have an industrial policy or to subsidize certain industries smacks of socialism. But without Joe Biden's plan or some other plan, the US will fall far behind China in electric vehicle production and for the necessary R&D and infrastructure. China's EV production is also part of their plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They also need to replace their numerous coal fired electricity generating plants with renewables.

The number of EV charging stations in China is growing rapidly. In January 2019, the Chinese Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Agency (EVCIPA) reported 808,000 EV chargers in China (an 80% increase in one year). Of these, roughly 330,000 were public chargers, and 480,000 were home chargers. China has hundreds of auto manufacturers, many of which are owned in whole or in part by provincial or local governments. According to some reports, as many as 200 Chinese auto manufacturers have produced electric vehicles. In 2018, 1527 fuel cell electric vehicles also were sold in China, bringing the country’s total fuel cell electric vehicle fleet to 3428.

But it's not only China's government or SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) that are investing in China's EV market. It's China's private sector as well. In 2019 Evergrande, a Chinese firm believed to be the biggest real estate company in the world and backers of electric vehicle startups like Faraday Future and NEVS, announced a massive $23 billion investment in the production of 1 million electric cars and 500 GWh of batteries per year. With a valuation at more than $100 billion and revenues of over $40 billion, Evergrande is now looking to expand into electric vehicles. After acquiring large stakes in two electric vehicle companies, Evergrande claims to have “acquired key technologies in the sector” and now plans to launch its own production of electric vehicles in China in a big way. So why aren't American corporations making investments like these? They still seem committed to producing gas guzzlers. The Trump administration even has challenged California's attempts to set higher emissions standards. Trump revoked a longstanding waiver that allows California to set higher fuel emission standards than the federal government. The US is going backwards on greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the earth burns and floods.

The waiver revocation is also part of the Trump administration’s longstanding attempt to roll back federal fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks. Californians buy more cars than people in any other state, which means the emissions standards it sets for itself have big repercussions on the US economy as a whole. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have also adopted California’s vehicle emissions rules. So the California waiver was a big impediment to the Trump administration’s larger goal of rolling back regulations that were implemented to combat climate change. As a global warming denier, Trump is committed to dumping more rather than less greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere.

China's economy is a fusion of a socialist and free market economy so it's somewhat unique in the world. Like the US Federal Reserve, the Chinese central bank, the People's Bank of China, can print yuan, the Chinese currency. The Chinese market is more devoted to manufacturing for both internal sales and export while the US economy is now focused more on financialization which means making money off of money or betting in the Wall Street casino. The US is devoted to making money by any means necessary which has led to increasing inequality. The Chinese market is more devoted to making money from sales of actual goods and services and is less financialized. So US capital doesn't go so much into manufacturing as it goes into financial markets. China is more dedicated to decreasing greenhouse gas emissions while the Trump administration doesn't even believe in global warming and is a full steam ahead fossil fuel supporter.

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Biden's Green Deal

by John Lawrence, September 18, 2020

Just as soon as progressives come up with something called a Green New Deal, Republicans set out to demonize it, the name that is. They don't even bother to argue the merits; they just demonize the name. That's their MO. So Joe Biden, not being a dummy, doesn't say that he's for a Green New Deal. He says he's for Biden's Green Deal. That phraseology is not as easily demonizable, but it amounts to the same thing. Here's the thing (as Biden would say): the jobs created by revolutionizing the US infrastructure in such a way that we reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is not only a Green New Deal, it's a big deal for job creation. The "full employment" economy pre-pandemic, which Trump likes to tout as being so great, was like a house built upon sand. 40% of the population could not cover an emergency expense of $400. It was an economy in which there were a few good jobs, but the rest of the jobs were service sector jobs like baristas, tattoo artists, bartenders, servers, nail salon artists and uber drivers. All these jobs didn't even exist when there was a full employment economy consisting of manufacturing jobs in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Now Joe wants to recreate the equivalent of those manufacturing jobs, good paying union jobs recreating American infrastructure in such a way that reduces greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. One of his signature pet projects is the installation of electric car recharging stations on a massive scale. Joe has also committed to carbon free electricity generating plants by 2035. Right now many of these plants are powered by fossil fuels which emit tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Putting electric vehicles on the roads and building pollution free power generating plants will go a long way toward America becoming free of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. So call it what you want - a Green New Deal or Joe Biden's Green Deal, it amounts to the same thing. In reality it's a Big Fucking Deal, as Biden himself once so famously said.

Another BFD is student loan debt forgiveness. Joe is committed to Elizabeth Warren's plan for student loan debt forgiveness. Right now there is over $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. This means that so many young people cannot afford to get married, start a family and get a mortgage on a house. They have to move back home and live in their parents' basement or sleep on their parent's couch (in my case). A lot of this money is money owed to the government which the government is even making a profit on. It's not right. Senators Schumer and Warren have called on President Trump to forgive student loans. He won't do it. Biden will. You can see the proposed legislation here.

There are so many new technologies that can be developed that will not only create solid American jobs (not gig work and tattoo artists), but will also create industries that will stay right here on American soil and not be sent to China like US corporations did with their outsourcing spree starting in the 1990s. Keep those industries here. Keep the jobs here. Keep the manufacturing here. This is what Joe Biden is all about. If this is socialism, so be it.

Off the Top of My Head

Worldwide Greenhouse Gas Emissions Must Decrease 3.33% Per Year To Get To Net-Zero by 2050

by John Lawrence, September 17, 2020

This is just simple mathematics: 30 years times 3.33% = 100%. Instead GHGs have been increasing year over year every year since 1990 with the exception of 1992 (tied with 1991), 1998 (.1 Gt Eq lower than 1997) and 2009. In 2018, the world spewed 51.8 Gt CO₂ eq of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Gt is a billion tons. CO₂ eq includes methane and other greenhouse gasses. That means that on average there must be a 1.72 Gt CO₂ reduction every year from now to 2050 to get to net zero by that date. In 2009 there was a reduction of .5 Gt CO₂ from the year before. That was the only year with a substantial reduction and it does not even come close to 1.72. Meanwhile, in the last 10 years GHGs have been increasing not decreasing. Obviously, radical change throughout the world is required if planet earth is to reach net zero by 2050.

Since China and the US are the two largest GHG emitters, they must cooperate to lead the world in reducing GHGs. Particularly in India which is developing rapidly, coal fired electricity generating plants are increasing GHGs. China also has a lot of coal fired electricity generating plants, but is developing renewable energy rapidly. The US is using natural gas more and coal less, but natural gas, which is methane, is responsible for increased emissions of methane so it's no panacea. There are serious concerns about methane leakage in distribution systems and in fracking. At this point the US is producing more GHGs from methane than from coal.

This is from "All-Electric America":

Transforming the United States' current electricity capacity, which is roughly one million megawatts, will require developing approximately 60,000 megawatts of new renewable capacity a year over a thirty-five year time frame to supply all of our energy needs in 2050. In 2015 China planned to install roughly 40,000 megawatts of new renewable power and by 2030 is committed to add a total of 800,000 to one million megawatts, the equivalent of today's total US electrical capacity. There is no doubt that America can do the same if we decide to.

Joe Biden has a plan to develop the electrical recharging infrastructure equivalent to today's network of gas stations so that electric vehicles can be much more prevalent. There will also be incentives for people to purchase electric vehicles. Hydrogen fuel cells are also a technology that can power trucks, ships and even airplanes. Hydrogen is a renewable energy since when it burns, the only by product produced is water. An all electric train system is also possible if the US is determined to do it.

Solar and wind power can serve all of America's needs. Storage of renewable power is also under development. Tesla's Powerwall is available today. It stores energy from solar panels when the sun is shining and delivers the power when the sun isn't. The problem isn't that renewable energy isn't available. The problem is that fossil fuel energy is cheap and plentiful, but if the earth is to remain a habitable planet, 75% of it must remain in the ground. The notion of a carbon budget is that there is an amount of GHGs that can be deposited in the atmosphere between now and 2050 that, if we go beyond that budget, earth's temperature increase will rise above 2 degrees C. As of 2018, the budget for staying below the 2°C threshold has been calculated at approximately 1170 Gt. Calculating approximately 100 Gt added in 2019 and 2020, we have approximately 1079 Gt left. That means we have approximately 20 years at the current rate before earth's temperature rises above 2 degrees C and all hell breaks loose.

As if all hell hasn't broken loose already. 12 million acres burnt in Australia in 2020; 6 million acres burnt in California in 2020. Major hurricanes landing in the Gulf coast faster than people can recover from the last one. Huge chunks of Arctic and Antarctic glaciers breaking off. The Antarctic glaciers have the potential of raising sea levels by 10 feet. What is President Trump doing? Hiding his head in the sand. He has stripped the EPA of environmental regulations and is a global warming denier. Meanwhile, our carbon budget is being exhausted while the US is literally doing nothing about it. That's why it's so important that Joe Biden is elected. He has promised to get us to net zero by 2050.

Off the Top of My Head

Reparations and Universal Basic Income

by John Lawrence, July 14, 2020

Old Chinese proverb: Give someone a fish, and they will eat for a day. Teach them how to fish, and they will eat for the rest of their life. This is how I feel about cash payouts for both reparations and Universal Basic Incomes (UBI). I am for reparations in the sense of guaranteeing a living wage job for people who are able bodied. If not the social safety net should provide food, housing and medical care free of charge. In kind welfare is always better than cash payouts which can be squandered, gambled away, spent on drugs and alcohol or other foolish items. Besides billionaires and millionaires, black or white, don't need reparations or UBI.

I am for reparations in the sense of affirmative action for minorities and poor people in the sense of providing jobs either in the private sector or by the government as a last resort. I believe government should be the employer of last resort. In Sweden they have a national employment database which tracks every job opening in the whole country. They will do their best to hook you up with one of those jobs. This is not a bad idea. Then if no matches can be found, the government should be employer of last resort. There sure is a lot of work that needs to be done that can only be done by government like infrastructure repair and development, not only in this country but around the world.

China has exported its expertise and workers to the rest of the world to build infrastructure. This creates future trading opportunities for China, but it also guarantees that there will not be an unemployed class in China. China by virtue of its Belt and Road Initiative is a full employment society. The US could do the same. There is much to be done in terms of sanitation, health, education and job development to bring the rest of the world up to even a minimally acceptable standard of living. At the same time everyone, in both developed and developing societies needs to adopt a sustainable standard of living. The New American Dream should encompass not unlimited consumption but reasonable and sustainable consumption. Otherwise, the planet's resources will be rapidly, at least in geological terms, exhausted, and the result will be resource wars, poverty of the majority and over consumption of the few.

There is much work that needs to be done, but the private economy is not concerned with necessary work. It is only concerned with encouraging consumption that produces the most profits. It is not concerned with what is good for the environment. It is only concerned with exhausting resources if that is what produces the most profit in the shortest period of time. We need to be concerned with husbanding the earth's resources so that they are there for future generations. Renewable energy is a must instead of exhausting earth's fossil fuels. The same can be said for agriculture and other consumable items. They need to be harvested in a sustainable way. Forests need to be maintained instead of being clear cut. The environment needs to be protected. Food needs to be grown without being sprayed with chemicals. There are good practices which will sustain, maintain and renew earth's resources in such a way that everyone can be employed and everyone can benefit including future generations.

In the meantime there is much necessary and essential work to be done here at home and around the world in eliminating poverty, building housing along the Habitat for Humanity model, growing organic food, eliminating factory food operations, providing health care. China is building infrastructure, but it is not directly eliminating poverty around the world. That's a niche the US could fill. A good step would be converting the 800 military bases in various countries to hospitals, schools and affordable housing for local and indigenous people, defunding the military and reallocating resources to helping poor countries become developed in a sustainable way rather than exploiting their resources.

Off the Top of My Head

The Essential Economy Should Replace an Economy Based on Consumerism

by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020

The economy is never going back to what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. Brick and mortar stores were already failing. Now their fate is being sealed. J Crew, JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus, Chesapeake Oil, Gold's Gym, Hertz, Tuesday Morning, Diamond Offshore, Whiting Petroleum, Sur La Table, 24 Hour Fitness, GNC, Chuck E Cheese, Lucky Brand, Men's Wearhouse, Pier 1 - the list goes on and on. Many of these businesses were carrying huge amounts of debt even before the virus hit. This huge number of bankruptcies is going to slam the economy, and the economy will be restructured as a result. Brick and mortar stores will never be the same as more people are going online to order goods. More schools and businesses will also be going online and staying online. This is good as it will slow the greenhouse gas emissions from commuter vehicles.

The economy needs to be restructured even if we never had the pandemic. Maybe the pandemic is a blessing in disguise if it forces a restructuring which reduces the market for fossil fuels. There needs to be massive restructuring in this regard in the next 10 years if we are to have a prayer to escape runaway global warming. This restructuring will also allow the next President if it's Joe Biden to address economic inequality and uplift the lower half of family incomes. Joe Biden is calling for a $15.00 minimum wage with no exception for tipped workers. This is a step in the right direction. There needs to be massive hiring in fields which will rebuild American infrastructure in a way that uses renewable energy. Fossil fuel companies that are carrying huge amounts of debt should be left to go bankrupt instead of being propped up by interest free loans from the Federal Reserve.

Medicare for All needs to be implemented and updated to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Both Medicare and Obamacare are currently prohibited by law from negotiating with drug companies to get lower drug prices. Whether Biden calls it Medicare for All or enhanced Obamacare, the health care system needs to be radically overhauled and updated so that the poor and middle class get the same level of care as the rich. This is all predicated on both Houses of Congress being controlled by Democrats. Otherwise, nothing will get done, and the US will continue to go down the path of degeneration.

The current American economy is predicated on 70% consumption. It is predicated on private enterprise and very limited government. The result is immense economic inequality and lack of investment in public health, which the pandemic has made evident, and also lack of investment in infrastructure. Instead, the only government investment has been in a ginormous military establishment which has been used in disastrous wars, the only result of which has been to create millions of refugees. It has done nothing to help the 40% of the world's population that does not even have access to clean water or proper sanitation. This situation has only been made worse by the current President whose only goal has been to make the world safe for white people. He has used economic sanctions with the result that the world has turned away from using the US dollar and turned toward China as an ally. Case in point: China has been helping Iran economically as the US policy of trying to trash Iran's economy has left it no alternative.

Instead of making America Great Again, Trump has absolutely trashed the nation including his response to the pandemic. While other countries have mounted a credible response, Trump has only further trashed the American economy by insisting that opening the economy was the only thing that mattered. "So I said to my people, slow down the testing, please." Exactly the wrong response. Trump said to his people (the Supreme Court) "Slow down the legal process, please." He got his wish there. His tax returns will not become public until after the election if ever. The Supreme Court said it has to go back to a lower court. From there it will probably go to a court of appeals and from there back to the Supreme Court in a neverending circular process that only rich people can afford. Lawyers will make a fortune though. That's why rich people get justice. Poor people can't afford it.

The political system needs to be restructured so that the Senate can never again be captured  by one political party which then stymies any initiatives put forward by the other party. Democrats in the House can put forward progressive legislation, but, as long as Mitch McConnell is leader of the Senate, it will never see the light of day or be implemented. It becomes a joke. The result is that the political process is only spinning its wheels and has been for 40 years. Let's hope a Democratic President and a Congress in which both Houses are controlled by Democrats can implement, instead of just talking about, progressive policies starting in 2021.

Off the Top of My Head

#GreenNewDeal + #BlackLivesMatter = #TheWayForward

Affirmative Action for Blacks, Latinx and Native Americans in a Green New Deal

by John Lawrence, June 29, 2020

Living with the COBID pandemic could be the new normal. Assurances of a vaccine by the end of the year might be meaningless. Here's why: for many viruses including HIV, Ebola, malaria and tuberculosis there are no vaccines available despite years of study and years of effort to develop one. It took 100 years from the first polio epidemic in the US until a vaccine wiped out polio. Just as the Trump administration misled the American people in minimizing the effects of COBID including that things would normalize after we "flattened the curve" and giving dates by which we could "open up", they misled us by raising expectations that a vaccine would be available by the end of the year. Read the book, "Spillover", if you want authoritative scientific information about viruses and how long vaccine development takes if ever.

So, if the pandemic is something we have to live with indefinitely which could well be the case, the economy, in the way it existed before the pandemic, would never be coming back. So how do we create a new economy which works for the American people which, arguably, it was not working before the pandemic despite quasi full employment. Number 1: we refund the CDC and WHO which are the major institutions dealing with viruses and pandemics. Trump tried to defund CDC, and he did defund WHO in the midst of the pandemic. Politifact reported: "As for funding, there’s no question that the Trump administration sought to cut key CDC budget categories. But thanks to Congress, that funding was restored and even increased in bills that Trump ultimately signed." He had better luck and actually did defund WHO.

The biggest thing that could be done to minimize the bad outcomes for this and future pandemics is to get rid of Donald Trump as President of the US. A Democratic President would refund the CDC and WHO. The second thing would be to take a page out of FDR's book by reinstituting the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which financed the New Deal including many infrastructure projects. In fact the Federal Reserve could finance a #GreenNewDeal without even tweaking the law. With the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) it is now resorting to, it is financing debt relief not only for banks but for hedge funds, private equity funds, bankrupt corporations and even rich individuals. It is taking trillions on its balance sheet with quantitative easing. The SPVs require deal making with the Treasury Department. It would be a very small step for the Fed using a SPV to fund a Green New Deal. The US is about $4 trillion in arrears on infrastructure rebuilding and development. Instead of just bailing out bankrupt institutions the Fed could take a more positive role and actually fund productive development. By the way the RFC actually made money on repayment of loans and user fees as opposed to the Fed which just swallows US debt.

If no vaccine is found for COBID in a timely manner, the whole economy should be restructured because many businesses are not coming back. Many including Herz, J. Crew, Neiman Marcus and Chesapeake Oil have already filed for bankruptcy. A Green New Deal could take up the slack reducing the GDP from 70% consumerism to 50% which would be in line with the EU consumption component of GDP while increasing government investment by 20%. That would represent a full employment economy but it would be reoriented from consumption to building green infrastructure.

Minority hiring for a Green New Deal could be along the lines of affirmative action with African Americans, Latinx and Native Americans being hired first. This would go a long way to reduce inequality in America while being a form of reparations in light of the fact that slave labor built much of this country and Jim Crow redlining was responsible for the fact that black families have not been able to accumulate wealth at the same rate as white families. #BlackLivesMatter plus a #GreenNewDeal could help to restore the balance while at the same time creating a full employment economy.

Off the Top of My Head

A House Built Upon Sand: the US Economy

by John Lawrence, June 26, 2020

The wise man built his house on rock, and it withstood the rains and the floods and the wind. The foolish man built his house on sand and it collapsed. An apt metaphor for the US economy in the midst of a pandemic that is only getting worse. Before the pandemic hit, it was a full employment economy in which half the people couldn't survive a $400. emergency. It was an economy built on consumerism. Consumerism was 70% of GDP. About half the economy was small business, but these jobs and this economic activity was vulnerable. Much of it was non-essential. It was bars (by the way you can drink at home); it was restaurants (by the way you can eat at home). It was travel and hospitality (by the way you can sleep at home if you're willing to make your own bed).

The essential parts of the economy continued to operate even when the pandemic hit. It isn't fair that minimum wage workers were more exposed to the coronavirus, but, be that as it may, with some exceptions these workers did not get sick in higher ratios than anyone else. If more of the jobs were essential, productive and less frivolous, there would have been fewer jobs lost and much less unemployment. The economic house was built on sand and when the pandemic hit, it collapsed. At the same time the fault line of black racism and inequality was fully exposed. It's as if the hurricane of the pandemic cut away the underbrush and exposed this situation for what it is thanks to #BlackLivesMatter.

The Homestead Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln which gave free land to white people allowed whites to build equity and wealth while blacks who were promised 40 acres and a mule after slavery were denied even that. They ended up in many cases working the same land as sharecroppers and living in worse poverty than when they were slaves. After World War II the G.I. Bill aimed to help American veterans adjust to civilian life by providing them with benefits including low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans and financial support. African Americans did not benefit nearly as much as White Americans. Historian Ira Katznelson argues that "the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow". In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.

Additionally, banks and mortgage agencies refused loans to blacks, making the G.I. Bill even less effective for blacks. Once they returned from the war, blacks faced discrimination and poverty, which represented a barrier to harnessing the benefits of the G.I. Bill. So whites were able to build wealth through home ownership while blacks were denied that opportunity. Wealth from home ownership is the difference between the middle class and the poor. Home ownership became the means for the intergenerational transfer of wealth for white people. Each generation of black people started out from zero. There was an intergenerational transfer of poverty instead.

Blacks who were able to get manufacturing jobs after the Second World War did fairly well, but those jobs have by and large fled the country. In the financial crisis of 2008, the Great Recession, blacks were screwed as well. While the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks and mortgage companies hundred cents on the dollar, blacks who needed help paying their mortgages did not get it and were foreclosed on. The government could have bailed them out instead, but it didn't.

So now the country is faced with not only a public health crisis but also an economic, financial and racial crisis which would be much less severe if those manufacturing jobs still existed. The economy is not coming back as it was constructed pre-pandemic. There is no way that small business based on 100% occupancy is going to survive based on 50% occupancy. Many of the businesses like professional sports, cruises and even churches are predicated on high occupancy. People will not be comfortable with high occupancy unless a vaccine is found for COBID, but finding a vaccine is not a foregone conclusion. There are some viruses for which a vaccine has never been found including HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

It takes a lot of money to develop a vaccine, and that money has been lacking from US budgets. There are two obstacles to faster progress, said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic. “One is scientific, and one is embarrassing,” he said. The embarrassing part is the lack of investment. It takes 10 years and more than $1 billion to develop a vaccine — a small fortune for a medical advance but a pittance for a weapons system. While defense research is driven by one mega-customer, the Pentagon, vaccine researchers face a confusing hodgepodge of potential backers. In short the US has spent its money on weapons of war instead of protecting its people from pandemics which are far more deadly than terrorist attacks. 405,000 Americans died in WW II. Over half that amount have already died in this pandemic, and it's getting worse due to American foolishness at the top levels.

There is a chance now for America to start out on a new path, and that path would be more or less what Bernie Sanders and other progressives have identified as their agenda: a Green New Deal would create good jobs for millions of unemployed Americans and it could give priority to black people so that they could get started on wealth building. Low cost housing loans and subsidies could give black people the same advantages they didn't get with the Homestead Act and the G.I. bill. At the same time a Green New Deal would be converting the country to renewable energy and rebuilding infrastructure, both of which are necessary if earth is to remain habitable for the human race. Medicare for All would only bring the US up to the level of most other civilized countries.

We have to reset our priorities, reduce the military-industrial complex and make peace and have cooperation with our so-called enemies. We can quibble about Russia's and China's internal affairs or we can cooperate with them as peers to forestall global warming and create a planet worth inhabiting. We can spend our money on war or we can spend it forestalling future pandemics. The solution to many of our myriad problems is clear, and it doesn't require a revolution necessarily. Reform is all that's necessary to implement Medicare for All. Reform is all that's necessary to implement a Green New Deal. But countries that do not do what's necessary and obvious to meet the needs of the people create a situation in which violence may ensue. It's no longer a question of capitalism vs socialism. Most countries of the earth including Russia and China are a combination of both. I started with a Biblical reference so I will end with one: "Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!" God bless the USA.

Off the Top of My Head

Instead of Helping American Workers, the Fed Prints Money and Swallows US Debt

by John Lawrence, June 25, 2020

The Federal Reserve is printing trillions of dollars and buying US government debt. The market for US Treasury bonds is a hard sell these days because they pay so little interest: 1.37% for a 30 year bond, less than the inflation rate. China is dumping its Treasuries. It will probably accelerate the rate of dumping if tensions between the 2 countries continue. China was the US' largest creditor till recently when Japan took over that role. While the Federal Reserve has set interest rates effectively at zero, credit card companies are still charging as much as 30% interest which creates a huge number of Americans debtors especially when you throw in student loan debt which stands at $1.5 trillion. In fact, revolving consumer credit card debt reached nearly $1.1 trillion at the end of February 2020, according to the Federal Reserve G19 Report. Americans were paying as much as $121 billion in interest and fees combined by the end of 2019. That's no surprise since the Federal Reserve reported in February 2020 that the average interest rate on credit cards reached an astronomical 16.61%. While billionaires can borrow money at zero percent interest, average Americans pay 16% and up.

The effect of zero interest rates on savings accounts and Treasury bonds is to force everyone into the stock market which, although we're in a recession bordering on depression, continues to go up. It is totally divorced from reality; it wouldn't go down even in a depression like it did during the Great Depression. The Fed is keeping it artificially pumped up because so much American wealth is at stake there.

The Fed is buying Treasuries and mortgage backed securities (MBSs) to the tune of trillions of dollars. Wolf Street reported:

In March (2020) and April combined, the Fed monetized 100% of the additional Federal debt. Over the two-month period of March and April, the US government increased its debt by $1.56 trillion (most of it in April); and over the same two-month period, the Fed bought $1.56 trillion in Treasury securities (most of it in March) and thereby monetized 100% of the additional pile of debt during the two-month period.

The Fed is just swallowing all kinds of debt which is enriching the richest Americans and foreign banks even more. Problem is this forced feeding of cash by the Fed is not trickling down to the American people. It is not creating jobs. Now the Fed is creating even more ways to monetize debt by creating Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs). These SPVs can buy assets the Fed is not allowed to buy, and they can lend to entities and rich individuals to buy certain assets. Under the arcane Federal Reserve Act, these SPVs require taxpayer backing from the Treasury Department to protect the Fed from losses. The SPVs can buy asset backed securities (ABSs) on a non-recourse basis which means that, if there are any problems, taxpayers take the losses. Indirectly via its Special Purpose Vehicles and its Primary Dealers, the Fed can buy even old bicycles, as long as taxpayers take the losses.

Wolf Street reported:

These ABS can be backed by credit card loans, auto loans, student loans, equipment loans, floor plan loans, insurance premium finance loans, some loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA), and eligible loans on receivables. The loan amounts will be “equal to the market value of the ABS less a haircut and will be secured at all times by the ABS,” the Fed says.

A little history on Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) : At the end of 2010, under orders from Congress, the Fed released data on over 21,000 transactions it performed during the Financial Crisis, which revealed among many other outrageous acts, that the Fed lent to well-connected individuals and all kinds of hedge funds and others under its TALF program so that they would buy certain assets, such as these consumer loan ABS, drive up their prices, sell them to pension funds and others later for a huge profit, and pay back the loans to the Fed.

These well-connected individuals included John A. Paulson, Michael Dell, Christy K. Mack (wife of former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack), Kendrick R. Wilson III (former Goldman executive and top aide to Hank Paulson Jr.), H. Wayne Huizenga (founder of AutoNation and Waste Management), Jonathan S. Sobel (head of Goldman’s mortgage department), etc. Some very wealthy people made a lot of money off the Fed’s bailout programs even as workers and the economy was in deep trouble.

So the Fed is paying John Paulson money by means of an SPV. Paulson is the guy who bet against the subprime mortgage market in 2007 and made one billion dollars in one day. Goldman Sachs had to pay him off, but eventually due to all the legerdemain in the financial markets, it was French and German taxpayers that paid him for his astute bet. That's casino capitalism at its best. Now he has direct access to the Federal Reserve's money printing press. Why? When there are so many poor and unemployed people in the US, why is the Fed intent on only bailing out financial markets, meaning rich people? Suffice it to say that the Fed is able to buy most anything from rich people and monetize their debt. Because of this and the fact that the rich can borrow at zero percent interest, they engage in risky bets. If they win, they pocket the money. If they lose, the Fed bails them out at zero percent interest.

Compare this with how the situation was dealt with during the Great Depression. Instead of force feeding wealthy people with interest free cash and adding trillions to the US National debt, FDR created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The original legislation establishing the RFC did not limit it to lending to financial institutions; it was also authorized to provide loans for railroad construction and crop lands. In other words it created jobs for average Americans. An amendment passed in July 1932 allowed the RFC to provide loans to state and municipal governments. The purpose of these loans was to finance projects like dams and bridges, and the money would be repaid by charging fees to use these structures. To help with unemployment, a relief program was created that would be repaid by tax receipts. Under the New Deal, the powers of the RFC were greatly expanded. The agency now purchased bank stock and extended loans for agriculture, housing, exports, businesses, governments, and disaster relief. The RFC actually made money on these loans.

So the RFC could actually create jobs for average working people (and not just for hedge fund managers) doing constructive things like building houses and infrastructure. Part of the New Deal was the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program which made the federal government by far the largest employer in the nation. A Green New Deal would create money much as the Fed does with a few keystrokes on a computer, but, instead of just providing liquidity to banks, hedge funds and rich people, it would provide money for productive jobs paid for by the government. The government needs to be employer of last resort in order to recreate a full employment economy.

A Green New Deal would convert the American economy from a fossil fuel dependent economy to one fueled by renewable energy. In so doing it would provide good paying jobs for those in American society who have been left out or left behind. The Fed should monetize the $3 trillion backlog in American infrastructure repair and rebuilding. Making the Fed a public bank instead of a bank whose main purpose is to swallow US government debt and give money to rich people in order to provide "liquidity" would go a long way to reducing inequality and bringing the American poor including minorities into the middle class. IMHO the COBID pandemic will insure that the old economy based on 70% consumerism is not coming back. The new normal will be based on government spending to create a Green New Deal or will sputter along at about half its former level.

Off the Top of My Head

The Fed Will Have Given About a Trillion Dollars a Year to Rich People Since 2008 by the End of 2020

by John Lawrence

The Federal Reserve prints money and gives it to rich people. According to CNBC, it will have printed about $10 trillion by the end of 2020. This policy is called quantitative easing. It represents a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for rich people, but so far, despite Andrew Yang's proposal and the Second Great Depression we find ourselves in due to the coronavirus, there is no UBI in the works for the rest of us. In addition the Fed has lowered interest rates to zero for rich people, but credit card rates for poor people still top 30%. So the rich can borrow unlimited amounts of money to buy up all the foreclosures and failing businesses caused by the Second Great Depression.

The economy is not going to bounce back to where it was which was an economy in which consumerism was 70% of GDP. There just is no way when large scale venues and bars operating at 25% capacity will be the norm for the foreseeable future. There is also the possibility of multiple waves or spikes in the number of cases as states and cities try to open too much too soon. Plus people are just not going to feel comfortable going on cruises and going to professional sports venues until there is a vaccine which is not a foregone conclusion that one can even be developed. The economy as it existed pre pandemic was one in which we were entertaining ourselvesr to death. It was an economy built on entertainment, an economy predicated on selling each other lattes. Even though we can still be entertained at home via TV and via the internet, there is still a substantial enough loss of revenues and jobs that the economy will stumble along at half or three quarters speed unless a fundamental change is made in how the economy functions.

Government investment in the economy similar to FDR's New Deal is not only necessary to get the economy working again, it is essential to change an economy of entertainment and titillation to an economy where real and essential work will once again be the norm. We have a multi trillion dollar deficit in infrastructure in the US. This can be addressed by forgetting the defunct economy consisting of selling each other lattes and putting people to work doing real and essential jobs. This will also contribute to a revitalization of the American spirit. America was built by people doing real work whether that was in agriculture or manufacturing and not by people entertaining us to death.

The book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman made the argument very cogently. According to Wikipedia,

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.

Postman was on to something. Entertainment and not religion is the opium of the masses. When people like the Kardashians can make their living by just advocating consumerism and indolence, America has lost its work ethic. A UBI which just allows the consumer economy to reinvent itself would to a certain extent be a missed opportunity for government to create meaningful jobs that the private sector can't create to build a better, more meaningful society, a society built on helping people here and around the world. FDR was on to something. His New Deal can be emulated in a Green New Deal which at one and the same time can address the global warming crisis, build  a stronger and more resilient infrastructure and create meaningful jobs for every American.

Off the Top of My Head

A Jobs Program for Inessential Workers
by John Lawrence, April 30, 2020

Turn inessential workers into essential workers by putting them to work building green infrastructure. This is essential work that is not getting done. Much of the previous inessential work they did is better left undone even in a recovery. It is still inessential. It'll always be inessential compared to what needs to be done in creating and building green infrastructure. Building out solar and wind renewable energy could employ thousands if not millions of people. Repairing roads, bridges, waterways, clean water systems, airports, railroads and all other infrastructure could employ millions. This is essential work that has remained undone despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the US a D rating for infrastructure. High speed rail needs to be built. The widespread adoption of electric cars has to be mandated, and construction of a national electric vehicle charging network to power them has to be built.

Unemployed people still need jobs. Mark Cuban said on CNN this morning that there should be a jobs program similar to that of the New Deal. He is exactly right although he didn't make the necessary connection about the essential work that's still being left undone and the inessential work that doesn't need to be done even in a recovery. Forget Cuban's sports and entertainment enterprises. I hate to tell you that they are basically inessential. What is essential is greatly expanding the public health undertakings of the Federal  government which has been totally behind the curve in this pandemic.

We must ask ourselves what is essential and not go back to a new normal in which all the inessential businesses of the past are brought back just in order to provide employment to the millions who have lost their jobs. The pre-pandemic economy was 70% consumerism. The economy post epidemic should be much less a consumerist economy and much more an investment economy. The four components of gross domestic product are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Of these government spending must be ramped up to provide the essential jobs in infrastructure building as well as in the areas that the pandemic has made clear are indeed essential: health care, education, transportation, agriculture.

Government spending must go up; personal consumption must go down. It's as simple as that. As for business investment, it's a lost cause as business will only do what's profitable for itself as has been made abundantly clear. Investment in fossil fuels and plastics which the big oil companies are making is only destructive to a green economy, not constructive. As far as exports are concerned, the dollar has already been weakened as much as it could possibly be by zero interest rates, so increased exports, although desirable, are not likely to happen any time soon.

Private enterprise knows only one thing in terms of the economy "reopening": get back to consumer spending. It ain't going to happen. People are still afraid of the virus. The pandemic is not over. They will use their money to pay off debts instead of going in debt to the hilt like they are used to. People will save their money instead of entertaining themselves to death. Why? Maybe they have learned their lesson that a high employment economy predicated on the fact that people will always have a job and always have a prepensity to consume is just a chimera. Rather than living paycheck to paycheck, I hope people will understand that there may come a rainy day, and they need to save for that. That lesson has really been brought home by the coronavirus pandemic.

The true heroes are essential workers not the military. The military itself was brought to its knees by COBID-19. There is a lesson there. It's more important to spend our collective money on preparing for the coming pandemic of global warming than on a bloated military. It is more important to house the homeless and guarantee the economic rights of shelter and health care to all Americans as in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is more important to help people all over the world escape from extreme poverty because poverty breeds health crises which then can spread all over the world. It's more important to make peace with our rivals rather than try to control them with military threats and sanctions.

May the next President (and I hope to heaven that it's not Donald Trump) see the light of a more rational, compassionate and humane world, one more concerned about the health and welfare of all the world's peoples. I hope Governor Cuomo's values of being tough, smart, disciplined and most importantly loving spread to every corner of US and world society, and we get on with essential business instead of the inessential business of amusing, entertaining and consuming ourselves to death.

Rooftop Wind Power Might Take Off By Using Key Principle Of Flight

by Andrea Thompson, April 24, 2020

from WhoWhatWhy blog

An artist’s rendering of AeroMINEs along the edge of a roof and combined with solar arrays. Photo credit: Sandia National Laboratories

This story originally appeared in Scientific American and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Solar panels perched on the roofs of houses and other buildings are an increasingly common sight in the US, but rooftop wind systems have never caught on. Past efforts to scale down the towering turbines that generate wind power to something that might sit on a home have been plagued by too many technical problems to make such devices practical. Now, however, a new design could circumvent those issues by harnessing the same principle that creates lift for airplane wings.

Overall, electricity generated by renewable sources has grown in the US in recent years, and wind power has been a major driver of that trend. It accounts for more than 40 percent of electricity from renewables in the US (though only 7 percent of all electricity production). Unlike solar energy cells, which are limited to collecting energy during daylight hours, wind turbines can run all night in any place with the right conditions — namely, in open plains or gentle hills with consistently sufficient wind speeds. But in addition to those requirements, large turbines need open space, which is not always available near towns and sprawling cities. Installing rooftop wind systems on homes and city buildings could help harness more of this resource.

When it comes to wind power, size matters. The amount of energy an individual turbine can generate is proportional to the area its blades sweep — so devices that are small enough to fit on a roof are less powerful. “What’s kept distributed wind from being successful is that most of the systems are basically miniaturized wind turbines,” says Brent Houchens, a mechanical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. The smaller devices do not produce enough energy to be cost-effective. Plus, their quickly spinning blades create noisy vibrations, and their many moving parts are more prone to breakage. Compared with passive rooftop solar panels, wind turbines have the potential to be quite high-maintenance.

Houchens and his colleagues think they have engineered a solution that overcomes these obstacles by borrowing from a fundamental principle of air flight. The curved shape of an airplane wing — called an airfoil — alters the air pressure on either side of it and ultimately produces lift. Houchens’ colleague Carsten Westergaard, president of Westergaard Solutions and a mechanical engineer at Texas Tech University, says he hitched two airfoils together so that “the flow from one airfoil will amplify the other airfoil, and they become more powerful.” Oriented like two airplane wings standing upright on their side, the pair of airfoils directly face the wind. As the wind moves through, low pressure builds up between the foils and sucks air in through slits in their partly hollow bodies. That movement of air turns a small turbine housed in a tube and generates electricity.

Thanks to this design, the device — which the researchers call an AeroMINE (“MINE” stands for Motionless, Integrated Extraction) — can pull wind energy from a larger area (essentially, the AeroMINE’s rectangular face) than its turbine blades could on their own in a traditional setup. Houchens likens such standard turbines to cookie cutters that leave wasted dough behind. The new device makes use of all the available wind, allowing it to extract more energy.

AeroMINEs also do not generate the same vibrations and noise as regular turbines; they are “less noisy than a ventilation fan,” Westergaard says. The relative simplicity of their design means there are fewer moving parts to malfunction. The turbine, which is housed inside a building, would be easier to access if it does need repairs. This arrangement also keeps the blades isolated from any contact with people or wildlife. The team is designing the system so that it could be used in conjunction with rooftop solar panels, plugging into the existing infrastructure to harvest the energy they generate.

“I do think this technology could be groundbreaking” for areas with good wind conditions, says Luciano Castillo, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University, who is not involved in the project but has worked with Westergaard in the past. He also thinks the simplicity of AeroMINEs could make them a good option for developing countries, because the new devices do not require specialized parts or tools and are relatively easy to fix. Castillo and Westergaard both see the potential to use the design underwater to harness tidal energy as well.

Jay Apt, co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, who is also not involved in the project, agrees that the simplicity of the design is attractive. But he is unsure whether the system can be scaled up to efficiently generate energy at a low enough cost in a real-world setting. Houchens says that with suitable wind conditions, he and his colleagues think AeroMINEs can be competitive with the current cost of rooftop solar power.

The team, which has received funding from Sandia and the Department of Energy, has tested scaled-down models in wind tunnels to fine-tune the design. In June the researchers have plans to test a four-meter-tall version of the device on a single-story mock building at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility, part of Texas Tech’s National Wind Institute.

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Sandia National Laboratories.

The Solutions to the Climate Crisis No One is Talking About

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Both our economy and the environment are in crisis. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few while the majority of Americans struggle to get by. The climate crisis is worsening inequality, as those who are most economically vulnerable bear the brunt of flooding, fires, and disruptions of supplies of food, water, and power.

At the same time, environmental degradation and climate change are themselves byproducts of widening inequality. The political power of wealthy fossil fuel corporations has stymied action on climate change for decades. Focused only on maximizing their short-term interests, those corporations are becoming even richer and more powerful — while sidelining workers, limiting green innovation, preventing sustainable development, and blocking direct action on our dire climate crisis.

Make no mistake: the simultaneous crisis of inequality and climate is no fluke. Both are the result of decades of deliberate choices made, and policies enacted, by ultra-wealthy and powerful corporations.

We can address both crises by doing four things:

First, create green jobs. Investing in renewable energy could create millions of family sustaining, union jobs and build the infrastructure we need for marginalized communities to access clean water and air. The transition to a renewable energy-powered economy can add 550,000 jobs each year while saving the US economy $78 billion through 2050. In other words, a Green New Deal could turn the climate crisis into an opportunity - one that both addresses the climate emergency and creates a fairer and more equitable society.

Second, stop dirty energy. A massive investment in renewable energy jobs isn’t enough to combat the climate crisis. If we are going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we must tackle the problem at its source: Stop digging up and burning more oil, gas, and coal.

The potential carbon emissions from these fossil fuels in the world’s currently developed fields and mines would take us well beyond the 1.5°C increased warming that Nobel Prize winning global scientists tell us the planet can afford. Given this, it’s absurd to allow fossil fuel corporations to start new dirty energy projects.

Even as fossil fuel companies claim to be pivoting toward clean energy, they are planning to invest trillions of dollars in new oil and gas projects that are inconsistent with global commitments to limit climate change. And over half of the industry’s expansion is projected to happen in the United States. Allowing these projects means locking ourselves into carbon emissions we can’t afford now, let alone in the decades to come.

Even if the U.S. were to transition to 100 percent renewable energy today, continuing to dig fossil fuels out of the ground will lead us further into climate crisis. If the U.S. doesn’t stop now, whatever we extract will simply be exported and burned overseas. We will all be affected, but the poorest and most vulnerable among us will bear the brunt of the devastating impacts of climate change.

Third, kick fossil fuel companies out of our politics. For decades, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP have been polluting our democracy by pouring billions of dollars into our politics and bankrolling elected officials to enact policies that protect their profits. The oil and gas industry spent over $103 million on the 2016 federal elections alone. And that’s just what they were required to report: that number doesn’t include the untold amounts of “dark money” they’ve been using to buy-off politicians and corrupt our democracy. The most conservative estimates still put their spending at 10 times that of environmental groups and the renewable energy industry.

As a result, American taxpayers are shelling out $20 billion a year to bankroll oil and gas projects – a huge transfer of wealth to the top. And that doesn’t even include hundreds of billions of dollars of indirect subsidies that cost every United States citizen roughly $2,000 a year. This has to stop.

And we’ve got to stop giving away public lands for oil and gas drilling. In 2018, under Trump, the Interior Department made $1.1 billion selling public land leases to oil and gas companies, an all-time record – triple the previous 2008 record, totaling more than 1.5 million acres for drilling alone, threatening multiple cultural sites and countless wildlife. As recently as last September, the Trump administration opened 1.56 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, threatening Indigenous cultural heritage and hundreds of species that call it home.

That’s not all. The ban on exporting crude oil should be reintroduced and extended to other fossil fuels. The ban, in place for 40 years, was lifted in 2015, just days after the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. After years of campaigning by oil executives, industry heads, and their army of lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry finally got its way.

We can’t wait for these changes to be introduced in 5 or 10 years time — we need them now.

Fourth, require the fossil fuel companies that have profited from environmental injustice compensate the communities they’ve harmed.

As if buying-off our democracy wasn’t enough, these corporations have also deliberately misled the public for years on the amount of damage their products have been causing. 

For instance, as early as 1977, Exxon’s own scientists were warning managers that fossil fuel use would warm the planet and cause irreparable damage. In the 1980s, Exxon shut down its internal climate research program and shifted to funding a network of advocacy groups, lobbying arms, and think tanks whose sole purpose was to cloud public discourse and block action on the climate crisis. The five largest oil companies now spend about $197 million a year on ad campaigns claiming they care about the climate — all the while massively increasing their spending on oil and gas extraction.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans, especially poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, already have to fight to drink clean water and breathe clean air as their communities are devastated by climate-fueled hurricanes, floods, and fires. As of 2015, nearly 21 million people relied on community water systems that violated health-based quality standards. 

Going by population, that’s essentially 200 Flint, Michigans, happening all at once. If we continue on our current path, many more communities run the risk of becoming “sacrifice zones,” where citizens are left to survive the toxic aftermath of industrial activity with little, if any, help from the entities responsible for creating it.

Climate denial and rampant pollution are not victimless crimes. Fossil fuel corporations must be held accountable, and be forced to pay for the damage they’ve wrought.

If these solutions sound drastic to you, it’s because they are. They have to be if we have any hope of keeping our planet habitable. The climate crisis is not a far-off apocalyptic nightmare — it is our present day.

Australia’s bushfires wiped out a billion animals, California’s fire season wreaks more havoc every year, and record-setting storms are tearing through our communities like never before. 

Scientists tell us we have 10 years left to dramatically reduce emissions. We have no room for meek half-measures wrapped up inside giant handouts to the fossil fuel industry. 

We deserve a world without fossil fuels. A world in which workers and communities thrive and our shared climate comes before industry profits. Working together, I know we can make it happen. We have no time to waste.

Off the Top of My Head

Maybe the Shut Down of Non-Essential Businesses Should Be Made Permanent

by John Lawrence, March 27, 2020

As long as we have electricity, the internet, clean water, waste water disposal, full grocery markets, pharmacies, excellent health care, gas stations, trash collection and other essential businesses, perhaps the shut down of non-essential businesses is a good thing. Already it has cleaned up the environment and significantly reduced the emission of greenhouse gasses. What about all those unemployed people, you say? Put them to work in the Green New Deal building and repairing infrastructure throughout the country. If this COVID-19 thing lasts till January 20, 2021, I'm hoping President Joe Biden will do just that. And we should help build essential businesses in other parts of the world instead of engaging in military adventurism. Billions of people don't even have clean water, adequate sanitation, the internet, full grocery markets and other essential businesses.

Once these essential needs are taken care of for the entire world's population in such a way that GHG emissions are reduced to zero, then maybe some non-essential businesses could be reestablished. The pandemic goes to show that much of the US economy is based on non-essential businesses and the provision of non-essential goods and services. In fact not only are many of them non-essential, they are downright deleterious. Consider the gambling industry: downright deleterious. The movie and TV industry: about 70% deleterious. The fast food industry: 90% deleterious creating obesity and diabetes. Why isn't the school system educating people about nutrition? Many people have essentially a fast food diet. The food is cheap and ubiquitous, and people don't have time to create nutritious meals any more the way Moms used to when they didn't have to work to pay the mortgage and car payments.

The American way of life including may non-essential businesses is sickness producing. The profit oriented health care industry makes money off of sick people, not keeping people healthy. If everyone were healthy or were encouraged to lead healthy lifestyles, there would be far less sickness. But the stress induced by both spouses having to work leads to unhealthy lifestyles. Some families need 2 or 3 jobs just to make ends meet. The children are also subjected to a competitively oriented style of learning in which they are forced to compete with other children to get good grades so they can get into the best colleges. Instead maybe they should be encouraged to think in terms of what they want to do in their lives which would be a service to society in addition to affording a comfortable living for themselves.

More businesses considered to be non-essential:

Theaters, Salons and Spas, Racetracks, Shopping malls, Bowling alleys, Sporting and Concert Venues, Liquor stores, Bars, Cruises, Golf Courses, Resorts, Hair and Nail Salons.

Highly polluting industries and activities which are non-essential:

Most airline travel, the cruise industry, the travel and tourism industry, most automobile travel (use mass transit instead), most of the trucking industry (use rail instead), the beef industry, the hog industry, agribusiness (encourage small organic farms instead), most military and military-industrial complex, the plastic industry, the fossil fuel industry.

In Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. Mark Lawrence Schrad writes:

America has long equated patriotism with the armed forces. But you can’t shoot a virus. Those on the frontlines against coronavirus aren’t conscripts, mercenaries or enlisted men; they are our doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, caregivers, store clerks, utility workers, small-business owners and employees. Like Li Wenliang and the doctors of Wuhan, many are suddenly saddled with unfathomable tasks, compounded by an increased risk of contamination and death they never signed up for.

When all is said and done, perhaps we will recognize their sacrifice as true patriotism, saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,” as we now do for military veterans. We will give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts, and build statues and have holidays for this new class of people who sacrifice their health and their lives for ours. Perhaps, too, we will finally start to understand patriotism more as cultivating the health and life of your community, rather than blowing up someone else’s community. Maybe the de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.

The same sentiments hold true for teachers and other caregivers. People that take care of people and encourage people to have better lives are the true heroes. The Peace Corps and AmeriCorps should be the preeminent national services not the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines. We need to spread good will in the world by spades instead of bullying the rest of the world with US sanctions. We should develop the equivalent of China's Belt and Road initiative and start building clean water plants, sanitation plants, industries which decrease pollution and plastic trash in the ocean. We need to clean the environment around the world not contribute to dirtying it. We need to help bring home all the refugees in refugee camps and guarantee the safety and security of Latin Americans so they don't become migrants and refugees.

Off the Top of My Head

China Out Capitalizes Capitalist Nations

by John Lawrence, March 23, 2020

Who would have thunk it? China has taken capitalist financial methods to the next level with the result that it is progressing more rapidly in material abundance and a consumer society than the proto-capitalist nations of the world: the US and Europe. Sure, politically, they are an authoritarian nation. But that expedites their development since all institutions are on the same wavelength. In particular their central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBC) funds infrastructure projects all over the world. This keeps China a full employment society. They put all the Chinese people to work building infrastructure which expands the money supply in a very widespread way. Essentially the PBC provides loans for all these projects which means it creates the money just as US banks do when they create loans or the Federal Reserve does when it provides "liquidity" to the markets through quantitative easing (QE).

The Federal Reserve has actually expanded the range of market interventions it can do. It used to be that the Fed could only set interest rates. That was it. Now it can buy corporate bonds, state and local bonds and give money directly to corporations to keep them afloat. In fact it can act more like the PBC which interacts directly in the Chinese economy. The Fed can take debts directly onto its balance sheet where they may remain forever. This is exactly what it did in the 2008 financial crash. It provided cash directly to banks in return for mortgage backed securities and Treasury bonds thus providing liquidity to the banks so that they would not go under. Now the banks are well capitalized, and, since they know that the Fed stands ready to bail them out again, they have no worries. In fact the term "bail them out" is actually a misnomer at this point. It can be replaced with "provide them with cash" as necessary.

There was an interesting interview on 60 Minutes with Neel Kashkari, Obama's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who was in charge of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) during the Great Recession. He noted that TARP, which was supposed to help out actual people with their mortgages did not go far enough. They were too stingy with it, and not very many people got helped. He says that this prolonged the recession. Instead of being stingy as they were, they should have been "overly generous." That is the lesson he learned. So now in the coronavirus recession, his advice is that the Fed should be overly generous in providing relief to actual everyday people and not just to banks. At this time the banks are doing very well, thank you.

It is well known that money is created by the banks themselves when they create a loan which they do with a couple of keystrokes on a computer. Why is this possible? Because money has no relationship to gold or any other precious metal any more. That's why it's called "fiat money." So what bankers and economists are realizing (which has been the secret of China's success all along resulting in their bringing 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years) is that the US central bank, the Federal Reserve can do the exact same thing. It can create fiat money just like the banks do, like Wall Street does. The only concern is that money so created would lead to inflation, but, as Kashkari noted, there was no inflation even after the Fed created trillions of dollars in 2008 most of which went directly to bankers, hedge funds and rich individuals and not to the average American. Now Kashkari, who is President of the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve, is saying that the Fed could provide liquidity to the American people and not just to the banks. How this will probably happen is by Congress passing a bill on the "fiscal side" as they say. Then they will sell more Treasury bonds to cover the increased deficit. Wall Street banks will buy them since other countries are decreasing their purchase of US debt, and then the Fed will provide liquidity (cash) to Wall Street taking the Treasury bonds onto its balance sheet where they will reside forever probably. This is why the national deficits and debt are no problem because the Fed can print money to cover them ad infinitum. It's as if the Fed provided money directly to the US economy, but, by law, they have to do so indirectly.

Ellen Brown understood this possibility long before Neel Kaskari had his "awakening."

America’s chief competitor in the trade war is obviously China, which subsidizes not just worker costs but the costs of its businesses. The government owns 80% of the banks, which make loans on favorable terms to domestic businesses, especially state-owned businesses. Typically, if the businesses cannot repay the loans, neither the banks nor the businesses are put into bankruptcy, since that would mean losing jobs and factories. The non-performing loans are just carried on the books or written off. No private creditors are hurt, since the creditor is the government, and the loans were created on the banks’ books in the first place (following standard banking practice globally).

Precisely! So no need to worry about another Great Recession or Depression. The US could effectively provide a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to its citizens indefinitely as Andrew Yang proposed.

As observed by Jeff Spross in a May 2018 Reuters article titled “China’s Banks Are Big. Too Big?”:

[B]ecause the Chinese government owns most of the banks, and it prints the currency, it can technically keep those banks alive and lending forever.…

It may sound weird to say that China’s banks will never collapse, no matter how absurd their lending positions get. But banking systems are just about the flow of money.

Spross quoted former bank CEO Richard Vague, chair of The Governor’s Woods Foundation, who explained, “China has committed itself to a high level of growth. And growth, very simply, is contingent on financing. Beijing will come in and fix the profitability, fix the capital, fix the bad debt, of the state-owned banks … by any number of means that you and I would not see happen in the United States.”

There is no reason why the US could not emulate China. From an economic point of view QE or a UBI would not be inflationary as long as the dollars provided to the system were either invested in new plants and equipment, infrastructure or consumption. What is needed now is about $10 trillion worth of Green Infrastructure, a Green New Deal funded indirectly by the Fed. This money can be provided to the American people and not only rich billionaires as was done in 2008 and as China is providing directly to its workers who are kept busy building infrastructure in the Belt and Road initiative. It would also ease economic inequality and not induce inflation as long as the money is widely distributed.

Off the Top of My Head

During WW II, Cars and Gas Were Rationed. Would the American People Accept Such Sacrifices in the War on Global Warming?

by John Lawrence, March 10, 2020

Evidently not. Despite warnings that we have less than 10 years to do something before there is runaway global warming, nothing much has been done. Yet the coronavirus has set the world's consciousness on fire in just a few short weeks. Why hasn't global warming gotten the world so up in arms? During WW II everybody had a job; everybody worked, yet there were government mandated limits on consumption. All kinds of things were rationed especially cars and gas. Yet economic activity expanded due to ramping up the war effort. Today the economy is going into a tailspin because large crowds have been proscribed. All the money that has been added to GDP by music events and professional athletics has gone bye-bye. This is not necessarily a bad thing because people might be better off staying home and reading a good book rather than being out at a sporting event. I know. I know this is a very unpopular opinion.

The point is that, during WW II people had the basic necessities, and everyone was employed. They just couldn't have the icing on the cake until after the war when rationing was lifted. Then the economy boomed. Perhaps there is a lesson here for how to mobilize a society to get a handle on global warming.  In the few short weeks that government spokesmen have decried cruise ship and airplane travel, green house gas emissions (GHGs) have actually decreased. If the government proscribed these and other activities such as automobile travel (think gas rationing), GHGs would decrease even more rapidly. Then, if the government went on an investment spree in terms of renewable energy the way it did on planes and battleships during WWII, there would be full employment. People would just be limited temporarily until this war is won in how they could actually spend their money just like in WWII.

Then after a totally green economy is achieved fueled by green renewable energy, the barriers on spending money would be lifted. Could this even work? Some authors don't think so. William Greider writes in "Secrets of the Temple":

World War II was a model of the possible. In theory, if a national consensus of purpose developed, if people would accept temporary limits on their economic choices as well as regulatory controls on wages and prices, the nation could literally rebuild itself, almost overnight. With the right choices, America could practically double the productive capacity of its economy and advance innovation and dramatically multiply new wealth and incomes. These economic choices, however, were really political questions: who would take the sacrifices and who would take the rewards? Whose consumption would be restrained and whose production would be encouraged. All this consigned extraordinary powers to government, perhaps tolerable only in war. No one, including the most ardent Keynesian planners, has ever figured out how to recreate a comparable combination of creative sacrifices in peacetime or how to sell it to a free society.

And that, dear reader is the crux of the matter. How do you sell the necessary war time effort to combat global warming to a free society? Sure the coronavirus has had the salutary effect of decreasing cruise ship and airplane travel with the concomitant decrease in GHG emissions. At the same time the stock market has gone into a tailspin. If the same kind of effort were made in behalf of global warming, we could expect the stock market to go into the mother of all tailspins. Is it worth it or should we consign future generations to the fate of runaway global warming and an uninhabitable planet?

Abraham Maslow wrote a book, "Towards a Psychology of Being" in which he identified a pyramid of needs starting with D-needs. D-needs are the basic needs of food, air, water, housing and clothing. You might throw in medical care.Then, as you ascend the pyramid, higher order needs are revealed once the lower order needs are met. At the top he identified B-needs or self-actualization which might mean developing all your latent higher order capacities such as becoming a great musician. What seems to me to have happened though is that society has intervened in this process to impose superfluous needs on people. Let's call them S-needs. These needs have to do with all the materialistic consumption that a commercial society imposes or tries to impose on people through advertising so that Maslow's higher order needs are really short-circuited. That's why I say that staying home and reading a good book might be more beneficial in and of itself than attending  a professional sporting event in addition to protecting one from the coronavirus.

What an enlightened society would do to combat global warming is exactly what America did during WW II. D-needs were well satisfied due to a full employment society in which certain kinds of consumption were discouraged while making sure that everyone was fed, clothed, housed and had adequate medical treatment. Could in Greider's words a " national consensus of purpose develop" in which people felt it was more important to delay certain kinds of consumption in order to develop the green infrastructure needed to get global warming under control? The world needs America's leadership on this because America is largely responsible for the GHGs already in the atmosphere, and, if America will not have a sense of urgency, why should any other nation which is just starting to develop a consumer culture?

Off the Top of My Head

The Changes Needed in the Composition of GDP

by John Lawrence

The four components of GDP are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Right now personal consumption is 70% of GDP in the US. Business investment is 18%. Most businesses are buying back their stock rather than investing in manufacturing or R&D. Government spending is 17%. More than 60% is military spending. Net exports were -5% since imports (18%) were greater than exports (13%). This represents an oil based economy heavy on fossil fuel pollution. What needs to happen to fend off global warming is a reduction in personal consumption especially in those aspects that are high in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions such as automobile, airplane and cruise ship travel. Government needs to increase its spending in areas of infrastructure rebuilding and spending on renewable energy systems while reducing military spending which is highly GHG contributing as well.

Businesses need to be encouraged to manufacture here in the US instead of importing everything from China and elsewhere because cargo ships are highly polluting. Businesses which help solve the climate change dilemma need to be encouraged while high polluters need to be reined in. We need to become more like Europe where personal consumption is only 54% of GDP. In Europe government spending is 46.5% of GDP. Of this spending on defense amounted to 1.2 % of GDP in 2018. Contrast this with the 60% that the US spends on defense, and you see the difference between a highly militarized nation that has no money to spend on infrastructure much less a Green New Deal and a group of countries that spends more of its money on the welfare of its citizens. Trump has been agitating to get European countries to spend 2% on defense. This would still mean that the US would be spending 30 times as much.

If Bernie Sanders wins the election for President of the US, we can expect radical changes in the current composition of GDP. Certain items of personal consumption need to be reduced, namely combustion engine car travel. The infrastructure for electric automobiles needs to be built out. Government subsidies need to be given to electric car purchasers. Mass transit needs to be built out and encouraged. Military expenditures need to be reduced both to promote peace in the world and so that the money can be freed up for more constructive purposes. Coal fired electric power generating plants need to be replaced with renewable energy electric power generating plants. Frivolous personal consumption needs to be discouraged while consumption based on human needs for all people should be encouraged especially affordable housing, nutritious non-industrialized food production which is affordable for all and universal health care like Europe has.

In short we need to become more like Europe with a reduced military empire and an increased build out of green infrastructure based on renewable energy. Bernie Sanders represents this kind of change for America - a government which invests in its people and takes radical steps to mitigate global warming.

Off the Top of My Head

Bernie Socks It To Them

by John Lawrence, February 25, 2020

The critics have piled on Bernie about how he's going to pay for his proposals for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, forgiving student loan debt and free college tuition. Now Bernie has come out with a detailed plan about how to do it. The obvious answer is how do other countries do it? Most other advanced countries have free universal health care and free college tuition. They take it for granted. I had some passengers from Calgary, Alberta whom I asked 'how do you like the Canadian health care system?'. He replied, "It's free." I said, "Yeah, but don't you have to pay for it in your taxes?" He said, "I guess so." So he wasn't really concerned that he was paying taxes through the nose to pay for "free" health care. He didn't even know what percentage of his taxes went to health care. I suspect that once the tax structure changes here so that rich people pay more and poor people pay less that everything will be like that too.

It will cost $2.2 trillion to make public colleges, universities and trade schools tuition-free and to cancel all student debt over the next decade. It is fully paid for by a modest tax on Wall Street speculation that will raise an estimated $2.4 trillion over ten years. A Financial Transaction Tax has been talked about for years. Bernie is the only one bold enough to actually make it part of his campaign platform. It needs to be done. The financialization of the economy is what led to the 2008 economic debacle in which the banks were bailed out by the American people to the tune of trillions of dollars. So now even though it's years later, let them pay to bail out the American people. It's a good thing.

Bernie’s bill to expand Social Security will increase benefits for low-income senior citizens and people with disabilities by more than $1,300 a year. It is fully paid for by making the wealthiest 1.8 percent of Americans – those with incomes over $250,000 a year – pay the same rate into Social Security as working families. I like that a lot. Right now even though I'm still working and paying into social security, I'm receiving less than $700. a month in social security. Another $1300. a month would bring my social security up to $2000. a month. Why it's even enough to rent an apartment!

Bernie’s proposal to guarantee housing as a human right and to eliminate homelessness will cost $2.5 trillion over the next decade. It is fully paid for by a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of one percent – those who have a net worth of at least $32 million. (Bernie’s wealth tax will raise a total of $4.35 trillion.) A wealth tax on the rich! I love it. Eliminating homelessness and finally implementing the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights - priceless! It's time the millionaires and billionaires paid to eliminate poverty in this country. The wealth tax will also pay for universal child care and pre-school. By the way maybe the Congress should get on board and finally ratify the 1948 Declaration.

The Green New Deal will transform this country and be the first step in saving the planet from ultimate destruction. It needs to be extended to the rest of the world eventually as well. We need to cooperate with other countries to implement it and share renewable energy technology. This means joining China's Belt and Road initiative in terms of making sure everything under development is based on renewable energy and is non-polluting. It goes without saying that the US should rejoin the Paris Accords on climate change, but extend it even further.

All in all Bernie's plans are a wonderful and refreshing change of pace for the US of A and the rest of the world. If they come to pass, i will be proud of my country again for implementing both humanitarian policies and policies which will save the earth from a global warming catastrophe.

Off the Top of My Head

It Must Be Done: Full On Renewable Electrification of the World

by John Lawrence, February 12, 2020

The next President has to mandate the full scale replacement of the current infrastructure with infrastructure supplied with renewable electricity. That means only plug-in cars and trucks allowed on the road. All rail transit is electrified. Planes to be grounded until they figure out how to supply them with renewable energy. All ships must be mandated to use only wind or electric energy supplied by renewables. Mass public electrified transit built out. Only this type of extreme effort is going to save earth from a global warming catastrophe. Forget self driving cars and trucks. The energy and inventiveness has to go into full electric vehicles driven by actual human beings.

Fossil fuels have to be eliminated overnight. How's that for a Brave New World - one which will actually save the planet from a horrible denouement. The next President and Congress have to put the economy at a lower priority than the full scale rejuvenation and renewable electrification of the economy. Economic growth has to take second place to investment in a green economy. Zero fossil fuel emissions have to be accomplished literally overnight as if someone had a gun to our head because, quite literally, a gun is at the head of every human living today and who will be born in the next 10 years - a gun placed there by the greed and ambition of the human race.

But doing this full on attack on global warming in the US is not enough. It must be carried out in the rest of the world in association with global partners. Instead of the militarization of the world by US forces and unending wars, which is the kind of scenario the US has perpetrated on the rest of the world in the recent past, the fight in cooperation with the rest of the world must be on global warming. We must renewably electricfy the rest of the world getting coal fired power plants offline and replacing them with renewable energy resources. This must be mandated, dictated if you will. The future of life on earth is at stake.

If there is an economic slump while this transformation takes place, so be it. At least there will be plenty of jobs. Robots can't do it all. There will be plenty of pick and shovel work. Trinkets and gadgets may be in short supply while this work gets done, but so be it. The US may have to go from a 70% consumption economy to a 70% investment economy - an investment in a renewably electrified future. At the same time clean water and sanitation should be guaranteed as a human right to every person in the world. Instead of reigning destruction on the world community, which is the US' wont, the world community must be salvaged from dirty water and lack of sanitation. A clean non-industrialized food supply must be guaranteed to all. Adequate housing supplied with renewable energy must be guaranteed to all as a human right.

You think there is a lot of work that needs tom be done? You're right. There won't be any unemployment. This Globalized Green New Deal for the world should be all encompassing. There was a well driller from my home town whose motto was "It Must Be Dunn" and that should be the motto for the green electrification of the whole world: It Must Be Done.

Off the Top of My Head

What's So Hard: Progress as We've Known It Must Come to a Screeching Halt

by John Lawrence, December 31, 2019

For the last 200 years the industrial revolution has fueled progress, the American Dream and the dreams of so many others around the world. Just think of the inventions of the 20th century: movies, radio, television, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, computers, the internet, the electric light bulb, electric appliances. Communications, entertainment, labor saving appliances, travel - all these things are harbingers of a world dedicated to the idea of progress, progress based upon fossil fuels, progress based on pumping the waste products of fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Suddenly, the world has woken up to realize that there was a cost to all this progress, a cost that was never taken into account, and that cost was simply the sustainability of planet earth as we've known it. Global warming has finally taken hold as an idea whose time has come at a time when its effects are causing a whirlwind in local weather all over the world. Finally, we are all in it together.

Some of the side effects of modern progress: 90% of children, globally, are exposed to unhealthy levels of particulate pollution; 88% of climate change-related disease burden is projected to be borne by children. The Indian capital of New Delhi has smog so thick that breathing it is the equivalent of smoking at least 25 cigarettes a day. One minister called the region a "gas chamber." The U.N. says about 7 million people die prematurely each year from diseases related to air pollution. The Lancet reports:

Through adolescence and beyond, air pollution—principally driven by fossil fuels, and exacerbated by climate change—damages the heart, lungs, and every other vital organ. These effects accumulate over time, and into adulthood, with global deaths attributable to ambient fine particulate matter  remaining at 2·9 million in 2016 and total global air pollution deaths reaching 7 million.

From now on progress as we've known it needs to come to a screeching halt, and progress must take on a new definition: how much it is saving the earth from global warming. But the underdeveloped world wants to industrialize and countries and private owners that are sitting on billions of dollars of fossil fuels want to sell them. The aspirations of the world's population to "live like Americans" cannot be fulfilled without destroying the earth in the process and making it unsuitable for human life. Those who will suffer the most will be the generation being born today. Education has to prioritize climate change and the mitigation thereof. New thinking and economic commitments have to be concentrated on the environment and not industrialization. The Green New Deal has to be a worldwide concern. Eventually, the goodies and consumer products that all humans seem to want and crave can return under new circumstances as long as they are produced in a manner compatible with a safe and clean environment.

There are so many aspects to the providing of a clean environment that the enterprise is truly mindboggling. Not only must power generation replace fossil fuels by solar, wind and nuclear, but even agriculture, as Ellen Brown points out in a recent article must be reinvented. The military is a huge polluter. Scaling it back would do much to ameliorate climate change. Jet planes pollute a great deal. They must be replaced by high speed rail powered by clean electricity wherever possible. Green infrastructure is a must. Plant based diets which replace meat based diets can save a lot of greenhouse gasses going into the air.

The world's nations must embark on a cooperative enterprise literally to save the planet for future generations, and more advanced nations must help underdeveloped nations to develop in an environmentally friendly manner. It's truly a worldwide undertaking, and, if nations can't put aside their enmity towards one another and cooperate to save earth for future generations, all hope is lost for a salutary denouement of human civilization on planet earth.

Off the Top of My Head

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Increasing Instead of Decreasing

by John Lawrence, November 29, 2019

Last year more Greenhouse gasses were emitted into the environment than ever. This trend is going in exactly the opposite direction that it needs to if planet earth will ever be a safe and welcoming place for our species and many others in years to come. Scientific American reported:

Global carbon emissions reached an all-time high in 2018, an extraordinary watermark in Earth’s history that underscores the need for faster and stronger action to address accelerating climate change, according to dozens of scientists.

A report released yesterday by a consortium of researchers known as the Global Carbon Project finds that global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are likely to have increased by about 2.7 percent in 2018, after a 1.6 percent increase in 2017.

What are we thinking? That the free market system is going to solve this planetary crisis? It is going to take concerted government action and the cooperation of governments around the world to deal effectively with this problem. The Green New Deal is absolutely essential in order the switch from a fossil fuel based economy to a renewable economy. The US needs to lead the rest of the world in this development in cooperation with China and other nations. If the earth is to survive as a livable planet, radical action needs to be taken now although nothing will be done till Trump and his Republican henchmen are out of office. That means that 2019 and 2020 will probably see even further increases in global greenhouse gas emissions. Whatever is happening now in this regard is totally ineffective.

It is going to take the rapid development of India assisted in great part by the US and China in bringing the poverty stricken in that country up to developed world standards in clean water and sanitation. They have to be pulled into the modern world by outside forces and at the same time converted to a renewable energy economy. It is going to take radical changes from a cow based diet to a plant based diet. It is going to take a whole new mindset regarding food, transportation, housing and everything else. The inhabitants of planet earth will either make these radical changes or else future generations, not those living now, will have to live with the consequences or die with them as the case may be.

Sustainability, not economic growth, has to be the bellwether and the keynote. A sustainable economy will be one unlike the economic systems existing on planet Earth now. We will need to consume less not more in an attempt to grow the economy. The economy has to fundamentally change, not grow but become sustainable, plant based and renewable energy based. People will have to radically alter their lifestyles. Consumption will have to decrease. The basics of life will have to be provided for all people. Poverty and war must be eliminated replaced by cooperation if Earth is to survive climate change.

High taxation nations like Sweden are full employment economies because they provide everyone with a job. If they can't find one in the private sector, government creates one by taxing the wealthy to get the money. Very little money is, therefore, spent on unemployment related welfare. This has to happen here with a Green New Deal providing the jobs. Sweden is what social democracy is all about. Bernie Sanders is well acquainted with this form of economy, and that's why he is the best candidate to lead this country and win the election in 2020. We don't need moderate action at this time. We've tried that, and it has failed. We need radical action before the Earth becomes a terminal case destroying the lives of future generations.

Bill Gates's Experimental Nuclear Power Plant Halts Construction in China

from Popular Mechanics

By David Grossman
Jan 2, 2019

Gates cites the Trump Administration's aggressive stance for having to pull out

At least for now, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is pulling back on nuclear power. He hasn't changed his mind on the science—he puts his blame on the Trump Administration's bitter relationship with China.

Gates invested in TerraPower in 2011 with the hope of helping to prove the company's core concept: a so-called traveling-wave reactor (TWR) which would run on depleted uranium, as opposed to the enriched uranium commonly used in nuclear plants. The concept is appealing on several levels—not only would its small design lower the currently rising price of nuclear energy, it would actually consume the trash pumped out by today's modern reactors.

In 2015, the company signed a deal with the Chinese government to be a small demonstration plant to be constructed by 2022. Since then, it has remained relatively low-profile. In 2017, Gates gave a speech at Peking University saying he was developing nuclear energy that was "dramatically safer and substantially cheaper" than what the world has previously known.

From trade to security to environmentalism, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance toward the Chinese government. In October 2018, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said that the United States "cannot ignore the national security implications of China’s efforts to obtain nuclear technology outside of established processes of U.S.–China civil nuclear cooperation.”

The Department of Energy then announced it would deny any new licenses from U.S. companies wishing to work with the Chinese government, and current licenses would not be given extensions. The department cited the indictment of the Chinese state-owned nuclear corporation in 2017 alongside Taiwanese-American Allen Ho, who was eventually jailed for assisting the Chinese state on nuclear issues.

In his year-end letter for 2018, Gates notes that "we had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely."

Pulling out of the project leaves TerraPower's future uncertain. According to company CEO Chris Levesque, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the price of a demonstration reactor is around $1 billion. Having to cancel a project worth such an extraordinary amount would likely be the death knell for most new players in any field. Most new players, however, aren't funded by Bill Gates—still valued by Forbes to have a fortune north of $93 billion.

In his letter, Gates notes that the company "may be able to build ... in the United States" under certain funding and regulatory conditions. He also announced that he would be taking up the mantle of nuclear energy in a more public way this year in actions unaffiliated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change," Gates says in his letter, "because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day." He adds that "problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation."

For now, though, TerraPower's technology looks like it may have to start from scratch.

Source: Wall Street Journal

'A Breath of Fresh Air': Offshore Wind Power Could Produce More Electricity Than World Uses

Published on Friday, October 25, 2019

by Common Dreams

"Let's get going!"

by Eoin Higgins, staff writer

 

53 Comments

Shanghai Donghai Bridge's 100mw offshore wind power project is China's first national offshore wind power demonstration project in the early morning light of morning in Shanghai, Oct. 4, 2019. (Photo: Costfoto/Barcroft Media/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

A new report from the International Energy Agency released Friday claims that wind power could be a $1 trillion business by 2040 and that the power provided by the green technology has the potential to outstrip global energy needs. 

"Talk about a breath of fresh air," tweeted writer Steven E. de Souza.

Talk about a breath of fresh air https://t.co/r2a0bvMXBc

— Steven E. de Souza (@StevenEdeSouza) October 25, 2019

The IEA report looks at the business of wind power and opines that as investment increases and the technology becomes cheaper, the sector could explode. 

The IEA finds that global offshore wind capacity may increase 15-fold and attract around $1 trillion of cumulative investment by 2040. This is driven by falling costs, supportive government policies and some remarkable technological progress, such as larger turbines and floating foundations. That's just the start—the IEA report finds that offshore wind technology has the potential to grow far more strongly with stepped-up support from policy makers.

"Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast," said IEA executive director Fatih Birol.

It would take a major infrastructural commitment to develop wind power to the point that the renewable energy resource could take over the majority of global energy needs, but it's not impossible. As The Guardian pointed out Friday, "if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year."

"This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours," added The Guardian.

Such a change in worldwide energy demand would require a massive investment of "public pressure, business leadership, and political leadership," green group Friends of the Earth said on Twitter. 

350 Action founder Bill McKibben saw no need to wait. 

"Wind turbines in the shallow parts of the planet's oceans can provide more electricity than the planet uses," McKibben tweeted. "So let's get going!"

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Climate Change is Threatening the World's Food Supply

by John Lawrence, August 17, 2019

A new United Nations report details how climate change is making it more difficult for people to be able to feed themselves especially in poorer parts of the world. As diets tend towards more beef, beef cows are replacing land previously used for growing crops. Raising beef uses ten times more resources than poultry, dairy, eggs or pork. Besides that cows belch and fart methane. According to a New York Times article: "Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars."

Fortunately, there are now some alternatives to the beef cow which deliver the same meaty product sans cow - Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Some smart people have figured out how to create a burger which tastes like a hamburger without running a lot of fodder through a cow. Both are plant based products which look, taste and feel like the real thing. If these products become widespread, the beef cow could be eliminated from the planet, and this would reduce carbon emissions. It would also free up many acres of land on which crops could be raised that would more efficiently feed people.

Both burgers are vegan, halal and kosher. It's unclear at this time whether or not the ingredients are organic and non-GMO. Soy is one of the main agricultural products that is genetically modified so that it can be sprayed with glyphosate (Monsanto's Roundup). cnet reports: "The Impossible Burger contains mostly organic ingredients, while the Beyond Burger doesn't. The Beyond Burger is strictly non-GMO, whereas Impossible Foods recently faced backlash about using genetically modified ingredients that contain the pesticide glyphosate." Well then, how can it be mostly organic, and how can the Beyond Burger that's non-GMO not be?

The New York Times article continues: "Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes." Already people are migrating all over the world as they face food shortages and eventual starvation.

“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.

The report said that activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.

And the emission of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

Citizens of planet earth take notice. Unless you change the ways you're conducting business, planet earth is not going to be able to sustain you. Consumer oriented lifestyles must be replaced by lifestyles that are more sustainable. Plant based alternatives to beef are a step in the right direction. More birth control would be another to reduce the population. Conversion to renewable energy on a large scale would be the third. Airplanes and the military are large greenhouse gas emitters. All these steps and more must be undertaken if humanity is to survive on planet earth. Humanity is under threat of extinction from just 120 years of industrialization and fossil fuel development. It is time to change course or the earth will cease to be habitable. Whoever thought that the automobile and the airplane were good things?

Can China Save the Planet?

Published on Thursday, December 13, 2018 by Resilience.org

It now appears that China—while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions—is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future

by Craig K. Comstock

 

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China already has the world's largest installation of wind turbines. (Photo: Sandia Labs/flickr/cc)

Lack of foresight isn’t new in politics. As John F. Kennedy wrote in Why England Slept (1940), that country had snoozed through the rise of, and German rearmament under, Adolf Hitler. Until the European war began, the British government, ill prepared to fight, hoped desperately for peace. (Kennedy’s father was U.S. ambassador there.) Following the Nazi blitz against London, the United Kingdom was rescued after the U.S. got into the war, prompted by the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The illusions entertained by the British government after Munich were minor compared with the behavior of leaders today, leaders who are neglecting and even denying the warning of climate scientists.  So far, the fossil fuel purveyors and their allies in government have prevailed with propaganda about a claimed lack of scientific consensus and about such irrelevancies as cold weather in winter.

Part of the problem is that nearly all of the public doesn’t understand the difference between the usual exaggeration of politicians and the normal professional caution of scientists. Part is that many adults assume climate change will be tolerable in their own lifetime, not understanding the 25-50 year lag between emission of greenhouse gas and its full effects. And part is the widespread investment by individuals in petroleum-powered vehicles, furnaces, and the fossil-fuel-powered electricity reliably supplied to appliances in homes, offices, factories, schools, and stores.

However understandable the lack of foresight is, however, the consequences are unprecedented: never in recorded history has the entire planet been threatened as it is now by the accumulating blanket of invisible greenhouse gases.

It’s hard to think of another disconnect as grave as the one between warnings by scientists and familiar courses of behavior, in this case the continued use of fossil fuels, other sources of dangerous gases, and deforestation.

 

It’s hard to think of another disconnect as grave as the one between warnings by scientists and familiar courses of behavior, in this case the continued use of fossil fuels, other sources of dangerous gases, and deforestation. What can be done to heal the disconnect?

A current book asks Will China Save the Plamet? The author, Barbara Finamore, served as the China representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her story gives first-hand material less for answering this question than for showing how a big country can  move from defensive nationalism to global leadership in starting the transition to a green economy.

A skeptic could say that China was just far-sighted enough to seize a commercial opportunity to become the world-leader in manufacturing objects needed for the transition to a green economy. These objects include solar panels, wind turbines, large batteries, and electric vehicles.

But that country, itself heavily reliant on coal, emitting more carbon than any other, is at least talking about the danger of human-caused climate change instead of denying it, and taking certain initiatives to reduce its emissions. Finamore shows how China made a change between the Copenhagen climate-change conference of 2009 and the Paris accord of 2015. Defensive assertions of national sovereignty were replaced by a recognition of a global challenge.

This change may have been prompted in part  by a desire to escape the international opprobrium of being the world’s  largest emitter of carbon. (The U.S. is in second place in terms of the absolute amount, and in first place only in per capita emissions.)

Since China’s rate of economic growth has become less manic, it has an opportunity to ramp up its transition to green energy and meanwhile to relieve its many large cities of at least some of the air pollution that has been epic. Nonetheless, even if China doesn’t “dig” coal, its coal industry remains huge, with many workers who will need new jobs. Meanwhile, it is exporting some of its coal, which improves the air pollution in China but continues to worsen the global greenhouse effect.

“It now appears that China—while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions—is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future."

 

On the skeptical side, Finamore writes “it now appears that China – while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions – is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future. That said, it also faces major challenges that some believe may be insurmountable.” However, she then deftly tells the stories of several persistent and ingenious Chinese leaders of the energy transition.

For example, she tells about taking a delegation from  Stanford to meet Huang Mung, who started by making solar water heaters and then projected a $740 million center for the manufacture of solar energy deices of many kinds. She tells about Wan Gang who established at his university the Clean Vehicles Technology Center, championed the production of electric cars, and served as national Minister of Science and Technology. She tells about Ma Jun, who worked out an entire program for the financial support of green technology.

Most of all, she reports on what she calls the government’s “war on coal.”  China is fortunate that the fossil fuels that invisibly produce global warming, mainly coal, also quite visibly foul the air of its cities and other industrial regions. Lucky because while people can easily remain unaware of the invisible, the choking result of coal burning is as close as one’s surgical mask on the streets of Beijing and hundreds of places in China. (Well, really much of the country, as two of my siblings witnessed when they toured the Yangtze region, and learned the local euphemism about “heavy fog.”)

Useful as Finamore’s book is as an account of what is going on in China, it also suggests what could be done elsewhere. Our own country is now going in the wrong direction, dismissing as a “hoax” the scientific consensus on global warming, making it easier to produce and burn fossil fuels, and slapping huge tariffs on solar energy devices manufactured abroad.  These policy choices are not criminal, merely tragic.

Finamore’s valuable book offers hope, not the false hope of the British leader after the 1938 Munich conference with Herr Hitler, but the realistic hope of a U.S. environmental lawyer, the author, egging on China to accomplish what her own country is so far failing to do.

© 2014 Resilience.org

New Study Shows Urgently Needed 100% Renewable Transition More Feasible Than Ever

Published on Thursday, November 09, 2017 by Common Dreams

A complete transition from fossil fuels would create millions of jobs and save money while protecting planet from harmful emissions

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

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At the COP23 summit in Bonn, Germany on Thursday, German and Finnish researchers presented a study showing that 100 percent renewable energy is possible by 2050. (Photo: Report cover detail/Energy Watch Group/Lappeenranta University of Technology)

A transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050—or even sooner—is not only possible, but would also cost less and create millions of new jobs, according to new research presented in Bonn, Germany on Thursday.

The German non-profit Energy Watch Group (EWG) teamed up with Finland's Lappeenranta University of Technology to present a study at the COP23 climate summit.

"If we have any hope of preventing absolute civilization challenge and catastrophe, then we need to be bringing down carbon emissions with incredible rapidity, far faster than it can happen just via normal economic transition."
—Bill McKibben

The results of the study, according to a forward written by EWG's president Hans-Josef Fell, show "that a 100% renewable electricity system is an effective and urgently needed climate protection measure. A global zero emission power system is feasible and more cost-effective than the existing system based on nuclear and fossil fuel energy."

To achieve the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting the warming of the earth to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the report argued that "we need a two-fold strategy: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions down to zero and to remove surplus carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A key aspect of this strategy should be a transition to an emission-free global economy, based on 100 percent renewable energy."

Moving to this system through the use of solar and wind power, combined with establishing energy storage systems, would bring the total cost of energy from more than 80 dollars to about 60 dollars per MWh.

Thirty-six million jobs would also be created by 2050 through the transition, compared with 19 million energy jobs in the current economy, according to the research.

In an interview with Deutsche Welle published Thursday, author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben agreed with the study's assertion that a complete shift from fossil fuels is necessary to avoid even more dangerous effects of global warming than those the planet is already experiencing.

"If we have any hope of preventing absolute civilization challenge and catastrophe, then we need to be bringing down carbon emissions with incredible rapidity, far faster than it can happen just via normal economic transition," McKibben said.

While entirely possible from an economic standpoint as the new research shows, the political feasibility of the transition is another story. "That depends entirely on whether we can build movements large enough to break the power of the fossil fuel industry that holds us where we are," said McKibben. "To go further what we need are many people in the streets demanding action and pushing governments to move much, much faster than they're currently contemplating."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Power to the People (Solar Power, That Is)

From the San Diego Free Press, August 24, 2017

(Source: Sullivan Solar Power)

By Mark Hughes

You may have heard the news: San Diego leads the country in kilowatts of solar panels installed, beating out LA and Honolulu — and by a lot. What’s going on? It’s like cell phones all over again. At first, just a few wealthy cranks have them, but before you know it, everyone and their kid has one. Was there a memo?

Maybe this is you now: driving home from work, you can’t resist flicking a glance at the solar panel array on your neighbor’s roof and wonder yet again if they pay SDG&E anything. Or, you’re out for a walk and see that trim, shipshape house you’ve always admired now sports the increasingly fashionable blue/black panels. You put on a brave face, but it’s starting to eat at you: panel envy. The good news is that it’s nothing to be ashamed of and you’re far from alone. Pull up a seat, lie back, and let’s talk.

Sure, you know all the valiant reasons for putting panels on your roof: a heroic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, doing your part to make America energy-independent, and that little thing about helping save the world from the worst ravages of climate change. Yeah, yada, yada, yada. Let’s get real here. After years of paying the highest rates in California — heck, higher than almost anywhere in the country — you long for payback time!

Good. Now that you’ve spit those words out, how about we really let our guard down? Is this thought stirring inside you too: there’s maybe nothing quite so uplifting and airy as that pious feeling you’d get from admiring your very own solar panel array? You’re pulling your weight now, buddy, a CO₂ footprint no bigger than a ballerina’s toe-point.

Let that sink in, relax into it like a warm bath on a winter’s afternoon. Don’t let that pesky voice, for a minute at least, kill the joy. Picture getting a bill from SDG&E just once a year—and smiling because they owe you money. Oh yeah, that’s payback.

Okay, drift down from the fantasy and let that other voice have its say now. The one that says you can’t have your own array because 1) it costs too much; 2) you live in an association with a common roof; 3) your roof faces the wrong way/or you’re an apartment dweller; 4) the project is complicated and daunting; 5) you’re probably not going to live in the house for more than 3 or 4 years; 6) your electric bill is small, meaning long or no payback; 7) other objections here.

Whew, what a list! How many wet blankets does it take to smother a warm, happy feeling? But maybe, just maybe, there are ways to dry those blankets out, fold them nicely, and put them on the shelf. Let’s go through them one by one.

Conversion to Renewable Energy is Going Too Slow to Avoid Catastrophe - Part 4

by Frank Thomas and John Lawrence

Part 3 can be found here

Extremely Slow Progress Converting to Renewables In Face of Huge Increase in CO₂ Emissions: What Are the Trends?

Parts 1 and 2 address the psychological denial mechanisms and economics behind the world’s ingrained obsession with increasing GDP rates, despite their environmentally cancerous impact. Naturally, developing countries want the same material benefits from boundless GDP growth and unlimited resource development that advanced countries have long been exploiting. This abets the idea that, as long as people make money from despoiling the atmosphere and climate, the Market should have its free reins forever. The Market is assumed to be the best arbiter of our planet’s ecological stability, but that is patently false. In reality the Market exploits the environment and now it is becoming clear that increasing population and economic growth fueled by fossil fuels do so as well.

Problem is we humans are collectively so busy polluting and proliferating Earth’s air, land and oceans at a speed and scale unheard of even in geological time frames that we can’t imagine or we are simply ignoring the oncoming train of environmental destruction.

While many positive advances in renewables are being made, rising coal, natural gas and energy demand outweigh any reductions from recent strong growth in renewables in a few countries. Renewables and hydro are still a TINY 9% of primary energy consumption today (Table 5) (9% for China, 7% for India – Table 6). They are forecast to be a TINY 20% of energy consumption in 2030 and no more than 25% in 2040. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts the same weak growth in renewable electrical generation shares reaching a miniscule 22% in 2015 and 25% in 2040.These weak shares explain why EIA and others expect CO₂ emissions to soar ahead from 36 billion tons today to over 50 billion tons in 2050 (Part 2: Table 1).

Part 4 addresses how FAR we have to go to reach a hydro-renewables mix of 70% of global energy consumption by 2050 (Table 8). Cataclysmic global warming can only be stemmed by considerably speeding up practical community-based and disruptive technically-based solutions for sustainable fuels, energy efficiency and lifestyle adaptations (that reduce energy demand) like Scandinavia, Germany, and California are remarkably doing in their own way – without disturbing economic growth.

Tables 7a/7b show Scandinavia already gets 41% of its primary energy use and 65% of its electricity generation from hydro-renewables. When including nuclear, Scandinavia’s primary energy was 56% decarbonized and its electricity generation 88% decarbonized in 2013. Many countries would be pleased to be in this position in 2050! Germany’s electricity was 35% decarbonized in 2013 rising to 44% in 2014. California’s electricity was a promising 35% decarbonized in 2013 … thanks to wind energy. This share can be increased significantly by accelerating solar PV (photovoltaic) applications.

With strong industrial economies, they are showing it’s possible to succeed in uncoupling economic growth from dependence on carbon-intensive fuels. Over past years, these regions have been experiencing growing economic activity, falling greenhouse gases and electricity prices. In 2014, Germany’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and electric power usage declined and wholesale electricity prices fell to a record low while the economy grew 1.4%. Germany’s CO₂ emissions are a small 3% of global emissions vs. 28% for China and 15% for the U.S.

Scandinavia, Germany and California have resisted the temptation to consider renewable energy sources as merely modest and not dominant contributors to energy supplies and energy security. Barring a quick way to bury carbon safely and effectively – a path Germany and Scandinavia feel is reprehensibly risky, if not a geologically impossible solution – these countries have accepted that coal reserves must be drawn down slowly during the 2015-2050 conversion phase to renewables and hydro. Researchers at the University College London have calculated that 88% of coal reserves must stay buried after 2030. This means oil usage must be cut 16% and coal 60%.

Response by the fossil fuel giants? In NO WAY is this ever going to happen.

Recent oil industry commentary summarily dismisses as ‘unrealistic’ any idea hydro-renewables can largely replace 70% of fossil fuels by 2050  and avoid a CO₂ earth-warming spiral and mega environmental disaster. Oil firms are one voice in reassuring investors that fossil fuel reserves will be the dominant energy source throughout the 21^st century. 

• BP’s sustainable report says the concept of unburnable carbon ‘overstates’ the potential financial impact on the value of its oil reserves. In brief, fossil fuels are a necessity and will still be supplying 80% of global energy consumption in 2030 and after.

• Shell’s CEO Ben V. Beurden also asserts that rising energy demand - especially in China and India - will preserve the value of its assets. In his view, “At most, renewables (^i.e. sun, wind, biomass) will be supplying 15-20% of global total energy consumption in 2035.  After all, less than 1% of total primary energy comes from sun and wind sources today.”

• This of course ignores the fact that sun, wind and biomass (excluding hydro) provided 17% of Germany’s primary energy consumption and 21% of its electricity generation in 2013 (Table7b) rising to 27% in 2014; wind provided 39% of Denmark’s electricity in 2014;  California and a few states are generating 10-24% of their electricity from wind and 2-6% from solar energy. Shell’s CEO sees low-carbon natural gas as vital to CO₂ reduction when it begins to replace dirty coal – although gas-fracking does produce very toxic methane leaks. BUT, most forecasts show coal’s 40% share of global electrical generation barely changing in the next 35 years. Thus, Shell’s CEO supports a high carbon tax on CO₂ emissions to make natural gas competitive with coal and speed up technical development of carbon capture and storage.           

• Chevron’s CEO John Watson has recently remarked, “We are going to be in fossil fuels for a long time.”

• Exxon has told investors, “We are now confident none of our fossil fuel reserves are in danger of being stranded”

In short, the oil industry is saying the world cannot survive without a heavy dependence on fossil fuels …  despite worsening climate change taking place as cumulative atmospheric CO₂ levels trend dangerously above IPCC’s 2050 budget of 1.9 trillion tons (Part 2: Table 1).

Coal and oil are about 75% of global CO₂ emissions and 65% of global primary energy consumption. Over 2 billion people in developing countries, many using polluting, unsustainable traditional biomass, will get electricity for the first time in coming decades – electricity produced mainly from burning dirty coal. And these people have contributed the least to causing climate change. This is just another reason why renewables and energy efficiency solutions must be globally shared and installed rapidly on a grand scale – especially in China and India that combined account for 34% of global CO₂ emissions. More than 80% of global energy increase by 2035 will come from non-OECD countries like China and India that are heavily dependent on dirty coal.

When examining Table 8, be aware it took 16 years for renewables to go from 0.5% of primary energy use to a tiny 1.1% in 2006; 7 years to double to a tiny 2.2% in 2013. Now renewables have just 35 years to rise 40 times the 2013 level to 60% of primary energy use in 2050 – as Table 8 dramatically illustrates. The speed and scope of this transformation to renewables are critical in light of the extraordinarily short geological time frame and scale in which human-generated CO₂ emissions and destructive change are occurring. The world is in a stair-step race to convert to 70% hydro-renewables to avoid irreversibility of disastrous climate change and + 4°C temperature rises by 2050.

The obstacles to implementing renewables at this rate seem insurmountable what with oil companies and politicians supported by oil companies bound and determined to exploit to the full measure all the fossil fuel resources in the ground today. As long as GDP becomes the sine qua non of economic development, it's hard to see how oil companies can be persuaded to "keep it in the ground" when so doing would seemingly decrease GDP. However, as Germany and Scandinavia have shown, decreasing fossil fuel usage can actually lead to an increase in GDP. Economic conventional wisdom is on a collision course with the long term survival of Mother Earth particularly a planet that humans could survive on.

Can the Climate Withstand the Onslaught of Capitalism?

Naomi Klein author of "This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs the Climate," has placed her hope for fighting climate change in civil disobedience such as the efforts of the Rosebud Sioux who have called passage of legislation regarding the Keystone pipeline an act of war. In her book she calls this “Blockadia”:

Blockadia also stretches into multiple hot spots in Canada … For instance, in 2013 … a remarkable standoff was playing out in the province of New Brunswick, on land claimed by the Elsipogtog First Nation, a Mi’kmaq community whose roots in what is now eastern Canada go back some ten thousand years. The people of Elsipogtog were leading a blockade against SWN Resources, the Canadian subsidiary of a Texas-based company, as it tried to conduct seismic testing ahead of a possible fracking operation. The land in question has not been handed over by war or treaty and Canada’s highest court has upheld the Mi’kmaq’s right to continue to access the natural resources of those lands and waters – rights the protesters say would be rendered meaningless if the territory becomes poisoned by fracking toxins.

Celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo are also becoming part of Blockadia as fracking impacts on their beautiful estates. In a recent email, Ruffalo stated:

A ban on fracking in Maryland would set a strong example for elected officials around the country, one that promotes informed choices based on sound, independent science and places constituent safety and well-being first. What happens in Maryland impacts all of us.

The time to ban fracking is now.

Note that fracking has already been banned in New York state and there is a movement afoot to get it banned in California and other states as well.

Fossil fuels are not only causing damage by releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. Oil trains transporting millions of gallons of oil are derailing and burning towns and polluting rivers and aquifers. Oil pipelines also are breaking and leaking their effluent into America's aquifers. Will the American people rise up and put an end to this insanity? Time will tell.

Some scientists believe that what happened on Easter Island will happen to life on earth as a whole. Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change. Fenner said that climate change is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

Polynesian people settled on pristine Easter Island around the middle of the first millennium AD. The population grew slowly at first and then exploded. As the population grew the forests were wiped out and all the tree animals became extinct with devastating consequences. Around 1600 the civilization began to collapse, and had virtually disappeared by the mid-19th century.

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said the parallels between what happened on Easter Island and what is occurring today on the planet as a whole are “chillingly obvious.”

Frank Thomas' bio:

A graduate of Bowdoin and Dartmouth colleges, I was an independent management consultant and entrepreneur working with Dutch international shipbuilding and offshore oil/gas contracting firms for many years. In recent years, I have been a trainer for such firms as ING, DSM, Siemens, the Dutch Ministries of Foreign and Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Justice in The Hague and have been a teacher/lecturer at The Hague University and NTI University in Leiden. Training and lecture subjects covered have included: finance, legal writing, commercial law, report writing and presentations, advanced English writing and conversation.

I'm an independent-minded Mainer, a liberal-conservative. Over some time, I have come to loath the mind numbing indoctrination inherent in the "ideological-pure-money-talks" game poisoning our national dialogue and directions on extremely serious structural problems. Such times of striking change call for a fusion of the  "brightest and best" ideas/reforms for prudently balancing legitimate public interests, social concern for the common man's welfare with a thriving market-innovative capitalism.

San Diego Group Gets Award to Expand Solar Power Use at Condos and Apartments

by John Lawrence

Everywhere in San Diego you see solar panels being installed on single family homes and large businesses. But hardly anywhere do you see them going in on the large number of local apartment buildings and condos. Now the Department of Energy SunShot initiative has made a $712,000. grant to San Diego's Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) to study the reasons and do a pilot project to implement solar in such projects. Condos and apartment buildings represent a huge amount of rooftop real estate which could be gathering in the sun's rays to provide energy to the occupants within.

For example, the condo project I live in, of which I'm President of the HOA, has three buildings each of which has approximately 6000 square feet of flat roof on which solar panels could easily be installed. There are 48 units here. In addition there is a smaller building which houses the rec room and laundry which has about 1000 square feet of flat roof. The only things currently up on the roofs are the individual AC units for the individual condos.  These buildings are located in El Cajon where the intensity of sunlight is high with very few cloudy days the whole year.

CSE will supposedly study the barriers to solar implementation by condos and apartments. I can tell you what they are right now since I have been on a quest to have solar installed at our complex to no avail. The way the laws are written, there is no way to pay the upfront costs that solar implementation would entail. It would require approval by every owner within the condo project and a special assessment to each of them to pay for it. This makes it for all intents and purposes impossible. Similarly, a loan from a bank or credit union is not practicable either.

Also, the cost of a solar installation cannot by law be added to the monthly HOA fees since it is a capital project, and monthly HOA fees can only go to certain types of maintenance such as painting, pool maintenance, janitorial costs etc. The state laws and local ordinances are very specific about how monies can be spent in a condominium project.

Most homeowners have a lease option. That means they lease the panels from the company that installs them. The beauty of this arrangement is that there are no upfront costs and the monthly payments on the lease are less than their monthly payments to SDGE. This makes it a no brainer for detached single family homes. Unfortunately, solar installation businesses don't seem to have a leasing option available for condo projects. We've contacted several installers and this is the case with all of them. I have urged them to make one available but so far without much success.

While California continues exponential growth in solar energy with rooftop system installations more than doubling in the past two years, condos and apartments are being left out of the progress in replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables. Originally, we were thinking of just enough solar installation to cover the electricity needed for common area needs such as lighting, laundry area, rec room HVAC, sprinkler system and vehicular gate. We didn't think it possible that we could implement solar for all the individual owners who are billed individually by SDGE. However, CSE is looking into just this possibility which would make solar installation that much more desirable as it would not only save the HOA money but it would save all the individual homeowners money.

This is from CSE's website:

The project’s goal is to expand use of a special utility billing arrangement, called virtual net metering, that allows the “virtual” sharing of energy generation credits from a single solar system among multiple tenant accounts with separate meters, such as apartment buildings, commercial offices and shopping malls. This ability to share the credits while bypassing the need to connect the solar power to every meter greatly improves the value proposition of installing solar for property owners as well as providing tenants with direct utility bill savings.

“Nearly all of the residential solar energy installations in California have been made on single-family housing, yet a third of the state’s residents live in multi-unit dwellings, and in addition, there are tens of thousands of multimeter commercial facilities,” said Ben Airth, a senior manager at CSE. “The regulations that permit virtual net energy metering were put into effect in California several years ago, but for a variety of reasons both solar contractors and property owners have not taken advantage of the potential for energy and cost savings.”

Airth said that CSE estimates there are more than quarter of a million properties in California that could take advantage of shared solar resources, yet less than 100 are doing so now within the service territories of the state’s three large investor-owned utilities.

If the lease option were widely available to condos and apartment buildings, solar energy implementation in California would surge to new heights. This would also provide many new jobs as demand for solar would skyrocket. I have emailed CSE to promote one of their pilot projects at my cond complex in El Cajon. In addition I could chronicle the project right here on the San Diego Free Press. This would help not only to disseminate information regarding solar implementation in multi-unit dwellings, but El Cajon is probably the most sun intensive locale in the whole state of Califiornia.

Currently, many communities are mandating that solar be a part of new developments. Cities like Tucson, AZ, Carbondale, CO and Chula Vista, CA have developed requirements or incentives for new homes to be “solar ready.” Since new apartment buildings and condo projects will probably be a large part of new developments as many college graduates these days are not in a position to buy detached single family homes as a result of the load of student loan debt they are carrying, it makes sense to install multiunit, multitenant shared metering.

CSE has also been active in advising local communities in how to streamline and simplify its permitting procedures for solar installation so as to speed up and reduce the costs of that part of a project. The California Solar Permitting Guidebook addresses provisions of the Solar Permitting Efficiency Act (Assembly Bill 2188) signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown. California cities and counties must adopt streamlined solar permitting processes by Sept. 30, 2015. California is the first state to mandate standardized solar permitting processes.

Incentivising solar installation by means of relevant financing plans for condos and apartment buildings is an important aspect of future solar development. Solar needs to become ubiquitous in San Diego and in California in general. Unlocking practical financing alternatives will help make it so. Let's hope that one of the pilot projects to make this happen occurs right here in San Diego. In particular did I mention that a particular condo project in El Cajon would be ideal?