If we were fighting climate change like a war we would be winning
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/kevin-drum-climate-change-reseach/
We Need a Massive Climate War EffortNow
Only major spending on clean energy R&D can save us.
KEVIN DRUM
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 ISSUE
Ill take a wild guess that you dont need any convincing about the need for action on climate change. You know that since the start of the Industrial Revolution weve dumped more than 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and were adding about 10 billion more each year. You know that global temperatures have risen 1 degree Celsius over the past century and were on track for 2 degrees within another few decades.
And you know what this means. It means more extreme weather. More hurricanes. More droughts. More flooding. More wildfires. More heat-related deaths. There will be more infectious disease as insects move ever farther north. The Northwest Passage will be open for much of the year. Sea levels will rise by several feet as the ice shelves of Greenland and the Antarctic melt, producing bigger storm swells and more intense flooding in low-lying areas around the world.
Some of this is already baked into our future, but to avoid the worst of it, climate experts widely agree that we need to get to net-zero carbon emissions entirely by 2050 at the latest. This is the goal of the Paris Agreement, and its one that every Democratic candidate for president has committed to. But how to get there?
Lets start with the good news. About three-quarters of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels for power, and we already have the technology to make a big dent in that. Solar power is now price-competitive with the most efficient natural gas plants and is likely to get even cheaper in the near future. In 2019, Los Angeles signed a deal to provide 400 megawatts of solar power at a price under 4 cents per kilowatt-hourincluding battery storage to keep that power available day and night. Thats just a startit will provide only about 7 percent of electricity needed in Los Angelesbut for the first time its fully competitive with the current wholesale price of fossil fuel electricity in Southern California.
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