Climate Change skeptics? [ot]

Citing various instances of governments turning to the public sector to drive their transitions (including the German experience [stated above in the book]), as well as examples of large corporate-driven renewable projects that were abandoned by their investors midstream, the Greenwich research team concludes, "An active role for government and public sector utilities is thus a far more important condition for developing renewable energy that any expensive system of public subsidies for markets of private investors."

Sorting out what mechanisms have the best chance of pulling off a dramatic and enormously high-stakes energy transition has become particularly pressing of late. That's because it is now clear that--at least from a technical perspective--it is entirely possible to rapidly switch our energy system to 100 percent renewables. In 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, authored a groundbreaking, detailed road map for "how 100 percent of the world's energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water, and solar resources, by as early as 2030." The plan includes not only power generation but also transportation as well as heating and cooling. Later published in the journal of "Energy Policy," the rod map is one of several credible studies that have come out in recent years that show how wealthy countries and regions can shift all, or almost all, of their energy infrastructure to renewables withing a twenty-to-fourty-year time frame. Those studies demonstrating the potential for rapid progress include:

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Most promising of all is new work by a team of researches at Stanford, lead by Mark Jacobson (who contributed to the 2009 global plan). In March 2013, they published a study in "Energy Policy" showing that New York state could meet all of its power needs with renewables by 2030. Jacobson and his colleagues are developing similar plans for every U.S. state, and have already published numbers for the country as a whole. "It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil--we think it's a myth," he told "The New York Times."

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Rebuilding, and Reinventing, the Public Sphere

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It's no mystery where that pubic money needs to be spent. Much of it should go to the kinds of ambitious emission-reducing projects already discussed--the smart grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our lives in traffic jams. The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren't there.

Transit is a good example. In March 2014, when air pollution in French cities reached dangerously high levels, officials in Paris made a snap decision to discourage car use by making public transit free for three days. Obviously private operators would strenuously resit such measures. And yet by all rights, our transit systems should be responding with the same kind of urgency to dangerously high levels of atmospheric carbon. Rather than allowing subway and bus fares to rise while service erodes, we need to be lowering prices and expanding services--regardless of the costs.

Public dollars also need to go to the equally important, though less glamorous projects and services that will help us prepare for the coming heavy weather. That includes things like hiring more firefighters and improving storm barriers. And it means coming up with new, nonprofit disaster insurance programs so that people who have lost everything to a hurricane or a forest fire are not left at the mercy of a private insurance industry that is already adapting to climate change by avoiding payouts and slapping victims with massive rate increases. According to Amy Bach, co-founder of the San Francisco-based advocacy group United Policyholders, disaster insurance is becoming "very much like health insurance. We're going to have to increasingly take the profit motive out of the system so that it operates efficiently and effectively, but without generating obscene executive salaries and bonuses and shareholder returns. Because it's not going to be a sustainable model. A publicly traded insurance company in the face of climate change is not a sustainable business model for the end user, the consumer." It's that or a disaster capitalism free-for-all, those are the choices.

These types of improvements are of course in far greater demand in developing countries like the Philippines, Kenya, and Bangladesh that are already facing some of the most severe climate impacts. Hundreds of billions of dollars are urgently needed to build seawalls; storage and distribution networks for food, water, and medicine; early warning systems, and shelters for hurricanes, cyclones, and tsunamis--as well as public health systems able to cope with increases in climate-related diseases like malaria.

Though mechanisms to protect against government corruption are needed, those countries should not have to spend their health care and educational budgets on costly disaster insurance plans purchased from transnational corporations, as is happening right now. The people should be receiving direct compensation from the countries (and companies) most responsible for warning the planet.

This Changes Everything
    Naomi Kline

The entire paper is speaking of "trends".

And yet Kelly, you have totally failed to produce any viable remedies to the issue at hand. None.