California Free Press

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

 

2 Comments

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

 

18 Comments

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?