Pirate's Cove

So says hyper-alarmist and Soros monkey Joe Romm

Almost Everything You Know About Climate Change Solutions Is Outdated, Part 1

Almost everything you know about climate change solutions is outdated, for several reasons.

First, climate science and climate politics have been moving unexpectedly quickly toward a broad consensus that we need to keep total human-caused global warming as far as possible below 2°C (3.6°F) — and ideally to no more than 1.5°C. This has truly revolutionary implications for climate solutions policy.

The 1.5C schtick is the primary driver of Romm’s article, in which the arbitrarily picked 2C is no longer acceptable. Because we are utterly and completely dooooooooooomed otherwise. Hence, what is being offered up as “solutions” to keep the world to 2C are no longer acceptable (even though all the taxes and such would have no real effect).

What’s more important for readers is that if indeed Sivaram and Revkin are joining all the nations of the world in acknowledging that 1.5°C is the preferred target for humanity, then we are in a “hair on fire” moment. Yes, R&D remains as important as it always has been in providing options for the post-2050 world (which must go carbon-negative to achieved stabilization of 1.5°C).

What the warmists, including Romm, are proposing is a carbon neutral, and even a negative carbon, world by 2050. How do they do this? With trillions upon trillions in “investments”, along with tens of billions in R&

But as the Climate Analytics paper makes clear, in the 1.5°C case, the sine qua non of climate policy must be to divert substantial investments toward urgent, hyper-rapid deployment of carbon-free technologies — focusing first on the power sector. This underscores the central point climatologist Ken Caldeira made in 2012: “Globally, deployment costs will be in the trillions of dollars, while R&D costs might be in the tens of billions.”

Say, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in R&D more, in order to create the types of clean energy and infrastructure that would be viable, long lasting, and environmentally clean, as well as reduce said CO2 emissions? It would if this were truly about the environment. But, it’s not. It’s about political force and control. About increasing the size and scope of Government

But in the 1.5C case, in fact, government policies must do much more than “level the economic playing field between clean and dirty energy.” In the 1.5C case, the playing field must be rendered free of dirty energy ASAP. So government policies must enable an orderly but rapid shutdown of coal plants (and then gas plants) while simultaneously replacing them with a combination of renewables, nuclear power, and energy efficiency. So, you can’t just have any CO2 price — you need one that starts out at a moderate to high level and rises quite rapidly.

The only way to do that is to empower Government to authoritarian levels. Strangely, the Warmists never seem to understand how these government dominance schemes will negatively affect their own lives. But, this is what they want. Fascism. Authoritarianism.