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I'm with you. It's awesome that we're doing this and I think it will be good for future generations. Long term infrastructure investments take a long time, an

I'm with you. It's awesome that we're doing this and I think it will be good for future generations. Long term infrastructure investments take a long time, and it's weird to me to think that we might not even be around to enjoy the benefit, but needing to be done is needing to be done. I think this is exactly the kind of change in thinking we need, that we should take on such efforts, even if they take a long time, now. However, I also concur, I wish we could be even more aggressive. It would be interesting to know if there is a staggered approach and if those dates are sooner (didn't RTFA... to be honest, maybe it was in there). Maybe we'll be 65% electric by 2035 or something, that would still be pretty great, right?

radicalbyte 8y ago
It would be nice if there were say goals of over 90% by 2030; that gives you 12 years to build and decommission or convert existing fossil-fuel plants to sustainable alternatives. The hard problem is the storage and peak handling, hopefully with 90% you could cover that too. A real space-race goal - the kind that I would really have expected from America - would be to be carbon neutral within a decade. That would initially spur investment in natural carbon sinks whilst massively rewarding innovation in that area (which we desperately need - we have two centuries of carbon that needs removing from the atmosphere). Heck, it would also be wise to investigate geo-engineering - to understand in detail how our planet works, and develop methods for altering it. Could we develop technology which would allow us to, say, counter a massive volcano (or a super volcano?).
- sixdimensional 8y ago
  Agreed. Sadly, I believe the way things are going, geo-engineering will be required, not optional. At planerary scale, clearly it's a non-trivial problem, but we probably should be working on it much harder. I like your inspiration for setting such goals as carbon neutral in America. That's the kind of thinking we need.

radicalbyte 8y ago

It would be nice if there were say goals of over 90% by 2030; that gives you 12 years to build and decommission or convert existing fossil-fuel plants to sustainable alternatives. The hard problem is the storage and peak handling, hopefully with 90% you could cover that too. A real space-race goal - the kind that I would really have expected from America - would be to be carbon neutral within a decade. That would initially spur investment in natural carbon sinks whilst massively rewarding innovation in that area (which we desperately need - we have two centuries of carbon that needs removing from the atmosphere). Heck, it would also be wise to investigate geo-engineering - to understand in detail how our planet works, and develop methods for altering it. Could we develop technology which would allow us to, say, counter a massive volcano (or a super volcano?).

sixdimensional 8y ago
Agreed. Sadly, I believe the way things are going, geo-engineering will be required, not optional. At planerary scale, clearly it's a non-trivial problem, but we probably should be working on it much harder. I like your inspiration for setting such goals as carbon neutral in America. That's the kind of thinking we need.