Trade offs, eh? Who woulda thunk it?
Climate expert suggests Biden will have to ‘admit there will be tradeoffs’ to reach zero carbon goal
Climate activists and scientists have generally received former Vice President Joe Biden’s plan to eliminate U.S. carbon emissions by 2035 warmly, but there will likely be some backlash ahead, especially regarding a potential reliance on wind and solar alternatives, The Guardian reports.
David Keith, a climate and energy expert at Harvard University who co-authored research in 2018 that found America’s transition to solar and particularly wind would require up to 20 times more land area than previously thought, said windmills certainly shouldn’t be abandoned moving forward, but suggested they could be limited. “You should tilt the energy system toward low land footprints, which means focusing on solar, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage, with wind at the margins,” he told The Guardian.
Yeah, but most climate cultists won’t accept nuclear power. They’re dead set against it.
Keith added that if the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee defeats President Trump, the incoming Biden administration will need to “admit there will be tradeoffs for a shared national goal” and that “there will be local decisions people don’t like” en route to an emission-free future.
Whatever could those decisions be? One phrase left out of what Keith said in the Guardian article is “states’ rights”. So, an overbearing, dominant centralized authoritarian government.
But while there are concerns about the effect renewable energy systems can have on land and biodiversity, Melissa Lott, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said the side effects of renewables are unequivocally worth getting to zero carbon. Read more at The Guardian.
Over to the Guardian
But protests have also started to flare around some clean energy projects, such as a Virginia community opposed to a huge solar farm 60 miles south of Washington DC, or demonstrations in the Hawaiian island of Oahu over new wind turbines that led to more than 100 arrests late last year.
“It’s not fair that AES [the company behind the wind project] can just build these monsters in our backyards, rake in all the money from them and leave us to live with the eyesore and all the side-effects,â€Â said Kryssa Stevenson, one of the Oahu protesters, in December.
See, these projects are popular in theory, and popular as long as they are Someone Else’s problem. As soon as they start going up in people’s areas they’re like “whoa, not here.” NIMBY. Like how Ted Kennedy and John Kerry were dead set against the Cape Wind project.
Ultimately, however, the impacts of a surge in renewable energy construction may have to be weighed against an alternative where emissions are not cut and the US is roiled by unbearable heatwaves, failed crops and increasingly powerful storms.
“It’s important that the Biden plan is technology neutral, so communities can pick their path to zero emissions,†said Melissa Lott, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “A portion of the country will oppose this but that’s the case for anything that is built. On balance, are these impacts better than a carbon-intensive grid that will cut thousands of lives short? The answer is an unequivocal yes.
In other words, Los Federales will force communities to do this, regardless. And regardless of whether the power supply will be affordable and reliable. If these climate cultists were smart they’d push for nuclear. But, they won’t.
