2020-08-20

The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis: report

 Via Twatter. Being pols, they are delusionally optimistic; from the intro:

What we are describing is a future with an improved quality of life, more fairness, and better products. Cars will be better—safer, cleaner, quieter, and you will never need an oil change. Indoor air quality will improve. Windows will be solar panels so that whole skyscrapers, and not just roofs, generate clean electricity.5 The materials used to build homes and office buildings will store carbon instead of being a significant source of carbon pollution.6,7 By powering American homes with clean energy, electricity prices will be more affordable and more stable. Clean energy is already cheaper in many instances, and prices continue to drop fast.8

(my bold). The windows stuff is work-in-progress and my prediction is that it will never amount to much, since it's pointless. The "renewables are cheaper" stuff has the usual problem: if renewables genuinely are cheaper, they will be quickly adopted, and the useless interferring pols should just get out of the way. But actually they aren't, quite, yet. Very likely they will be soon, for some not-too-distant definition of the word "soon", but we're not quite as far forward as these happy folk would like to think. Which is why the entire process won't be as cheap and painless as their intro appears to suggest. ACHIEVING A CLEAN ECONOMY WILL CREATE MILLIONS OF NEW JOBS in our country and positively impact household income.12. Unfortunately ref 12 is a 404 (and from the URL didn't look desperately high quality anyway. Also, jobs are a cost not a benefit; but you either knew that already or won't believe it).

But enough tedious snark, what of the actual content?

[Note: published at end of year at review, but it looks like I didn't bother with the actual content and I presume the whole report has been forgotten now anyway.]

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