Renewable Revolution

July 29th, 2017 by Steve Hanley

SNIPPET:


We here at CleanTechnica, we focus heavily on the electrification of the transportation sector. That is critically important, of course, but would you care to guess what the one area is that we as a people have total control over and that has the potential to keep more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than making every car and truck on the planet run on electricity?

#1 is something we have touched on here only briefly — refrigerant management. Read more about it on page 164. The authors estimate that this one area could keep nearly 90 gigatons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Electric cars? About 4 gigatons. 

Here are the other 9 items on the Top 10 list and their carbon reduction potential:

Wind Turbines (Onshore) — 84.60 gigatons
Reduced Food Waste — 70.53 gigatons
Plant-rich diet — 66.11 gigatons
Tropical Forests — 61.23 gigatons
Educating Girls    — 59.60 gigatons
Family Planning — 59.60 gigatons
Solar Farms — 36.90 gigatons
Silvopasture — 31.19 gigatons
Rooftop Solar — 24.60 gigatons

There are 80 items on the list. Total cost if all were fully implemented? $27.4 trillion. That’s a lot of cash, right?

However will we pay for all that?     
With savings, people — or deferred costs. The authors estimated total economic savings at just under $74 trillion.




The trick, of course, is that the costs come up front. The savings often come later. Human beings seem genetically incapable of making hard choices today that will have extraordinary benefits later. Deferred gratification could be the death knell for the capitalist model prevalent in most countries today.

Pie-in-the-sky projections about future savings are discounted.    Either they are treated as irrelevant or derided as #FakeNews. 

The world operates on what I like to call the Wimpy Theory. Wimpy was a character in Popeye cartoons (some of you may be old enough to remember watching cartoons on television on Saturday mornings). Wimpy had one line that he used all the time. It went like this: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today.” It’s the “kick the can down the road” theory of global management and it will kill us all if we don’t stop — all except the lucky few who can escape to Mars aboard Elon Musk’s magic carpet. 


Full article:

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/07/29/drawdown-definitive-guide-combating-climate-change/

Agelbert NOTE: I have a couple of things to say.

First of all, the contents of this article should be required reading for everyone that can read, not just students.

The issue of Deferred Gratification is not new. t is called Common Sense and every religion out there advocates it. Only the SCAM called "greed is good" Capitalism actually labels deferred gratifcation as a "weakness". That explains why Capitalism has been so morally destructive to human society and environmentally disastrous to the biosphere.

Theresa Morris wrote an excellent Essay that fleshes out what we must do. The article here deals with nuts and bolts economic realities. Theresa goes further and explains specifically WHY we should opt for deferred gratification as a matter of ethics, not just survival. I added graphics to underline the importance of her essay and some comments at the end. But the work is hers and it deserves to be broadcast far and wide, just like the article here.

I am posting here two of the graphics I included in my comments on Theresa's Essay in order to explain to readers how TPTB, who are well aware of the dangers inherent in climate change (though they won't admit it), plan to make all the rest of us pay for what those actually DOING over 90%  (about ONE percent of the world population) of the damage are liable for (i.e. environmental damage through government policies subsidizing polluters actively and passively through mendacious happy talk propaganda born of corporate corruption).

IOW, those responsible for the damage plan to spread the cost to further enrich the oligarchic polluters that got us into this mess in the first place. The operative phrase is "Fragmentation of Agency". 

The "Agency" definition here is the responsibility for harm and the consequent responsibility to pay for mitigating said harm. 

"Fragmentation" refers to what percentage of all those with Agency in doing the harm are responsible to pay to mitigate and eventually repair said harm.

Since, according to the U.N., the richest 20% of the world's population uses 80% of the resources, the 'Fragmentation of Agency' pie chart for the damage done to the biosphere should look like this:


The fossil fuel industry, and almost half of the world’s 100 largest companies, want that 'Fragmentation of Agency' pie chart to look like is as follows:


We either take to heart what this Cleantechnica article makes very clear and also adopt the common sense ethical recommendations of visionaries like Theresa Morris, or we are toast.