Scientists lay out a sweeping roadmap for transitioning the US off fossil fuels

[BootinUp]

Scientists lay out a sweeping roadmap for transitioning the US off fossil fuels

A 600-plus-page report from the National Academies of Science includes 80 recommendations for how the U.S. can achieve its target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Meeting the Biden administration’s goal for the United States to be a net-zero greenhouse gas emitter by 2050 is a monumental challenge that must be tackled at an even more daunting pace. But the nation’s top scientists envisioned that future and laid out a plan for realizing it in a report released on Tuesday.

In a sweeping 637-page document, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made 80 recommendations for how the United States can justly and equitably pursue decarbonization policies. It includes recommendations for everything from establishing a carbon tax to phasing out subsidies for high-emissions animal agriculture and codifying environmental justice goals.

“This report addresses how the nation can best overcome the barriers that will slow or prevent a just energy transition,” said Stephen Pacala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University and chair of the committee that authored the latest findings, which build on an earlier report released in 2021. He added that only about a quarter of the recommendations require congressional action, with many being targets at private institutions and federal agencies. There is also a recognition that some changes are unlikely to happen immediately.

“Do we think Congress will go out and pass this? No,” he said. “But maybe a future Congress will.”

Click on the link below to read more.

[CrispyQ]

1. Maybe a future Congress will.

In time to make that 2050 deadline?

[2naSalit]

6. I think...

2050 is overly generous. I think the wars and people and their countries are doing much if anything to change behavior. Seems like a few adjustments should be made about the timeline like several years shaved off foe each year of war like the one in Ukraine.

Probably more like 2035 at best. After that, we're toast if not sooner.

[hunter]

2. The only way we'll quit fossil fuels is by banning them.

Everything else is just another flavor of climate change denial.

"Transition" is a lie.

[BootinUp]

3. so we have to be pessimistic on everything today

sigh.

Don't we have a responsibility to have a plan that doesn't lead to a complete breakdown of our society?

Its definitely going to be better if we can transition in my view.

[hunter]

4. Let's quit pretending that wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars will save the world.

They won't.

The experiment has been done at very large scales in places like California, Germany, and Denmark. It has failed.

It's clear now that the only energy source capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely is nuclear power and that car culture is not sustainable, especially on a planet with a human population of 8 billion.

So yeah, I'm optimistic that we have all the technology we need to get through this.

But will we? You try telling people, even here on DU, that it's possible to live comfortably without gas stoves and automobiles, or that their favorite wind, solar, or hydrogen fantasies are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas.

[BootinUp]

5. You may be more informed

than I am on this subject. The way I see things is that we will eventually be forced to deal more seriously with the issues. And that we need to have people like these scientists working the problem now. Public opinion will come around because there will be no choice.

[CrispyQ]

7. The transition we need is much bigger than getting off fossil fuel.

There are too many of us to have a global economic system that depends on continual growth in a closed system. Until we change something in that equation we're doomed.

[hunter]

9. The trouble is we boil everything down to a single definition of "economic productivity."

Covering the countryside with McMansions, Big Box Stores, roads, and producing all the cars needed to support that lifestyle counts the same in this insane economic theory as turning our cities into attractive affordable places to live where car ownership is unnecessary.

Likewise, factory farm meat and dairy production counts the same as the production of highly nutritious and tasty vegan foods.

On a planet where so many people live in dangerous, unhealthy housing, suffer food shortages, and don't have access to clean water or modern sanitary systems, we still need economic growth. It just has to be focused in such a way that generally reduces the environmental footprint of humanity.

Once we've got the basics worked out, for a start by the elimination of fossil fuels, true economic growth can be directed towards expressions of our humanity that have minimal adverse environmental impacts, or ideally, positive environmental impacts.

I think about my own environmental footprint quite a bit. My wife and I have never enjoyed a stable income, mostly due to health issues, the kind of shit that falls out of the sky. We've been slammed around between affluence and hospital bills and mortgages we can't pay. At our lowest point my wife was recovering from a major surgery and we were a week or two from foreclosure. Thankfully we had family who could bail us out. In our affluence we've bailed some of them out too.

We're in the affluent place now. Knock on wood.

I'll tell you what I'm not doing. I'm not buying an electric car. We just don't drive that much and our little old hybrid gets 40 mpg plus. We're not putting solar panels on our roof, We just don't use that much electricity. Solar panels are so common in our neighborhood there's probably a net export of electricity whenever the sun is shining.

My wife is vegetarian approaching vegan, I'm that most days as well. I'm not going to cook two meals, one for her and one for me. I only do that for large family gatherings, a mix of vegans, vegetarians, and carnivores who sometimes kill the animals they eat. I've been a carnivore who has killed animals I've eaten. Hunter is both my name and a natural talent.

I think what me and my wife appreciate most about affluence is that we can support causes that are important to us and we can support artists.

When we go out to eat, when we go to the movies or theater, when we go to concerts, when we buy paintings from local artists, when we buy books (we buy a lot of those!), when we subscribe to streaming services, then we are supporting the arts.

Art tends to have a small environmental footprint.

[Igel]

10. But continual growth carries some pretty falsifiable assumptions.

Population's going to decrease. Fewer people, same GDP, means more GDP/person.

There's decidedly a bottleneck, *that*'s the problem and where there's pessimism because people focus on what's next up and can't see beyond it.

Carbon efficiency is a big part of why the US' carbon footprint's declined. Right now, much of the world is 19th-century 'carbon efficient'.

There's that ol' anti-Malthusian deus-ex-machina effect that humans have pulled off a time or 10--facing predictions of impending doom, we turn at a sharp angle and miss the disaster. I read predictions of a billion dead from famine by 1980 when I was a kid, and it effing terrified me.

The only thing I took away from that is that short-sighted people like to terrify kids to accomplish their eco-political goals.

We can try to prevent the apocalypse which seems less and less avoidable, given current tech and abilities, or we can plan to accommodate the changes to make the apocalypse mitigatable even as we try to find non-coercive ways to prevent it entirely.

Walk and chew gum at the same time?

[NNadir]

8. Unfortunately, if one takes a moment to download it and scan it, it's largely rehashed rhetoric.

I understand of course, that these are NAS members, prominent scientists, but on the other hand, the chief editor is Steven Pacala, of "Wedgies" fame, who famously wrote, with Socolow, the 2004 paper indicating that we could solve all of our climate problems with then existing technology.

S. Pacala R. Socolow, Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies Science 305, 968-972 (2004).

In the week beginning August 15, 2004, two days after this "earth shattering" wedgie idea was announced to the world with great fanfare, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 375.98 ppm.

On Wednesday of this week, it was 419.37 ppm.

October 18: 419.37 ppm
October 17: 419.66 ppm
October 16: 419.53 ppm
October 15: 419.81 ppm
October 14: Unavailable
Last Updated: October 19, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Those "existing" wedgies in 2004 did nothing at all to stop the rise of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide by over 43 ppm in less than 20 years.

Pacala and Socolow are institutionally associated with Princeton. Princeton University is an intellectual community where everybody's been carrying on endlessly about how the existence of nuclear power makes nuclear war a sure thing. Of course the only nuclear war that ever took place, some 68 years ago, took place before a single commercial nuclear plant existed anywhere on the planet. Notably over at Princeton, they don't give a rat's ass over there about any other kind of war, including those killing people right now, and apparently they have all come to the conclusion that fear of a risk of nuclear war outweighs the reality of the planet bursting into flames because all we can do is to rehash the same line of crap and wishful thinking handed out in the "Wedgies" paper.

Over at Princeton, they still have metaphorical "duck and cover" drills led by Frank Von Hippel.

I do understand that Robert Oppenheimer used to work just down the road, but still...

As for the "wedgies," they didn't work.

In 2023, air pollution is creating a death toll equivalent to the nuclear attack on Hiroshima every three or four days, and has been doing so for decades.

People can lie to each other and to themselves, but numbers don't lie.

If tiresome dogma is chanted repeatedly by a National Academy of Sciences team rather than a congregation in a fundamentalist church, it is still tiresome dogma.

We are not going to "save" the world with soothsaying about plans to rip the surface of the Earth apart for mines for unsustainable fantasies and by covering every last shred of wilderness with industrial parks for the display of semiconductors and rickety greasy towers on which no reliance can be placed.

It was garbage thinking in 2004, and it remains garbage thinking in 2023.

Have a happy Friday.