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Bernie Sanders unveils $16T 'Green new deal' plan
- sleepysysadmin 7y agoJust gave the leadership to Biden.
- bbmario 7y ago> and commits $200 billion to help poor nations cope with climate change. Why?
- api 7y agoBecause otherwise our abandonment of fossil fuels would make their price fall on the global market, causing them to just be burned in poor countries instead. This is one place in the proposal where he's right. CO2 is a global problem so we can't ignore the rest of the world.
- StreamBright 7y agoThis is not as simple.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- av2 7y agoIf I had to guess: Justice. Wealthy nations like ours are the primary driver of climate change while poor nations will suffer the bulk of the damage.
- notJim 7y agoIn addition to that, wealthy nations developed by exploiting resources like forests and oil. Now we're asking less-developed nations not to do that. Instead, they need to leapfrog that phase of development, which will cost money they don't have.
- jfrankamp 7y agoI'd go one more explicit step: the carbon we emitted made us wealthy while externalizing the costs. The recipe for gaining wealth at present for poor countries is, emit a shit ton of carbon in the pursuit of growth. If we're serious about reducing emissions we'll have to provide a different recipe.
- rinchik 7y agoWell you guessed wrong. What justice? Developing nations are the major polluters (reasons aside, that's just a fact). If there was "justice" for pollution we'd be at war.
- connectsnk 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... Wrong. Per capita, developed nations are the most heavy polluters and have externalized the costs while privatizing the profits
- nostromo 7y agoUS and EU have reduced carbon emissions in the past decade. Meanwhile China almost doubled their emissions, and now emits more than the US and EU combined. China now burns more coal than all the other countries of the world, combined. Any plan ignoring China's dramatic carbon emissions growth (for example: the Paris Accords) will do nothing to stop climate change.
- connectsnk 7y agoThat might be true but you also have to consider that US and EU are still the biggest polluter per capita outstripping other countries by a huge margin. United states CO2 emissions is 16.5 tonnes per capita whereas India is at 1.7 tonnes per capita. Even if United States reduces its emissions by 50%, they will still be 500% more than India
- alekratz 7y agoI don't understand why you were downvoted for just asking a question.
- StreamBright 7y agoThe new HN.
- stronglikedan 7y agoI don't understand why you would ask this two minutes after the comment in question was posted.
- marricks 7y agoCountries like the US and China are the largest contributors to climate change while the nations most affected by it (poorer countries at or near the equator or coastally located) have the least resources to actually do anything about it. How unfair is that? We should be footing the bill to help them.
- pizza 7y agoFrom the plan pdf, p. 3: Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States' leadership in the global fight against climate change. from p. 12: In order to help countries of the Global South with climate adaptation efforts, the U.S. will invest $200 billion in the Green Climate Fund for the equitable transfer of renewable technologies, climate adaptation, and assistance in adopting sustainable energies. U.S. leadership can ensure that the developing world secures reliable electricity, reduces poverty and pollution-related fatalities, creates greater net employment, and improves living standards - all while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-green-new-deal/761873c26ec4075c609b/optimized/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-...
- HugoDaniel 7y ago"reasserting the United States' leadership in the global fight against climate change." nitpicking, did he consider changing "reasserting" to "asserting" ?
- MAGZine 7y agoIIRC, California has had strong pro-environment policy long before it was popular to love the environment. So I don't think it's an outright abuse of language.
- avz 7y agoProbably because diffusion, air currents, stratospheric jets, winds and other climate phenomena are not contained by national borders.
- Caprinicus 7y agoThat is four times the entire US foreign aid budget, perhaps it is a typo?
- safgasCVS 7y agoMan you gonna be so upset when someone tells you how insurance works
- mc32 7y agoHe should do it like China does. “Give” them 200 to buy our solutions with natural resources as collateral. No free lunches. Either that or do it multilaterally, otherwise you’re just encouraging gamification of the system.
- jfrankamp 7y agoWhere do you think China got that strategy? We've long had aid-with-strings-attached.
- Klinky 7y agoGlobal deforestation is one concern. Instead decrying nations depleting their rainforests for economic benefit, we should put money where our mouth is given the importance of these ecosystems for overall global health.
- tinktank 7y agomy guess would be potential allies and short and long term investment opportunities for American businesses.
- MAGZine 7y agoPoor nations will continue to do whatever is most economically expedient to them. Does that mean burning down the rainforest? Overfishing oceans? Or any number of other environmentally unsustainable things? Yes, it does. People do these things to make ends meet. Make their ends meet on condition that that stop doing $BadThing, and the problems stemming from e.g. burning the rainforest will diminish. If the countries themselves aren't willing to establish these programs, let's help. Climate is a world game with all humanity on one side.
- asdkhadsj 7y agoFurthermore, if the solution has to be solved for the entire planet, it's in our interest to ensure poor nations play ball. We have limited options to do that while not forcefully invading/etc. Alternatives are always welcome; but the premise here is that we need them to do it. We need everyone to do it.
- jmull 7y agoBesides morality and compassion (and who cares about that, amiright? /s), there's an enlightened self-interest here. If, e.g., droughts and floods make a various regions holding, say 1 billion people unable to sustain themselves, those billion people are going to be forced to try to move to some place they can survive. That may cause us a lot more than $200 billion worth of trouble. (Not that $200 billion is going to counteract the effects of climate change, but they idea is that it would substantially mitigate the most serious issues. I have no idea if that's true under this plan or possible under any plan, but that's the idea.)
- Hongwei 7y ago"The proposal opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology." Ugh
- spidermango 7y agowhy
- cma 7y agoTo disambiguate, it doesn't oppose energy storage technology, "carbon capture and storage" should be read as one thing, relating to carbon capture only.
- marricks 7y agoI'm for nuclear energy as it gets us away from coal the most reliably, but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. Not only that, but we'd actually be willing to share those green solutions around the world.
- bluejekyll 7y agoSeems that building nuclear plants takes much too long to have any noticeable effect in the short term, better to take it off the table so that it’s not present as a red-herring.
- umvi 7y ago> but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. 2 questions: Don't huge windfarms affect the local climate and wildlife? Afaik we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms. Have we solved the solar storage problem yet? I read something about massive battery plants and/or high speed flywheel energy storage, but as far as I know this is still a problem. I vote we go all in on nuclear just to quickly remove coal, and then slowly phase out nuclear with better, low-impact renewables.
- avmich 7y ago> we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms. Yes, and we should pay (with money) more attention to study that. However we shouldn't/can't stop because of that and wait till we'll know more certainly - in general; some decisions need to be made early, and this question is an example. > Have we solved the solar storage problem yet? We have a variety of ways to store energy, and we're getting better with it with time, so forecasts here are optimistic. This is still a problem, but, again, we may move forward with other parts while we improving on batteries. > I vote we go all in on nuclear I think with nuclear we're uncapping worst case scenarios. This is harder to calculate, so I'm hesitant.
- api 7y agoI don't like this. I like the sentiment but repeat after me: politicians should never ever insert themselves into engineering! The only exception would be politicians who are engineers, and there are not many of these in the US. Bernie Sanders it not an engineer. When they do we tend to get ignorant choices (because 99% of them are not scientists or engineers) and corruption. A great example is our biofuels programs that gave us corn ethanol, which is literally the absolute worst possible biofuel for EROEI. Another example unrelated to energy is the Space Shuttle. NASA would have built a much more affordable and reusable orbiter had Congress not mandated a bunch of extra capabilities that were never used, specific contractor mandates, and other meddling that ruined the design. Just tax fossil fuels and other carbon emitting activities. Do not allow politicians to get involved in picking the alternatives or they'll pick the wrong ones or be influenced by lobbyists for the most expensive or politically well connected ones. I also don't like the categorical rejection of nuclear. I'm not strongly for expansion of current-generation nuclear power but I am also not at all opposed to more research on better ways of exploiting fission energy. I'm also strongly in support of increasing funding for fusion energy given the progress that's occurred in areas like compact superconductors and computer modeling. If we can solve fusion we'd at the very least have a source of base load power for regions with strong base load power demands and that lack large scale renewable resources sufficient to meet that demand.
- danhak 7y ago> politicians should never ever insert themselves into engineering! Never. Ever. So Manhattan Project and Apollo program were mistakes, in your opinion?
- api 7y agoIn those cases politicians set the goals. They did not pick how it was to be done. If NASA came back and said "we think we can put humans on the moon with a big catapult" and they were right, we would have built a big catapult. They set the goals and let the real professionals do the work. What I dislike about this and other proposals is politicians specifically saying what technologies should and should not be used. That's the road to an expensive failure. Instead we should just tax carbon and set emissions goals and let the people who know how to build stuff build stuff.
- mcorning 7y agoSomething along these lines is necessary to save our planet. Cutting off the $650B in fossil fuel subsidies over the course of 15 years pay for a little over half of the plan. If we can hand over trillions of dollars to save big banks, we can hand over what is necessary to save the planet.
- blackflame7000 7y agoBecause there is no guarantee any of that money will actually save the planet but there is a guarantee that all that money will be missed in other places.
- atmosx 7y agoWell it is guaranteed that Greece will never repay the debt, but for some reason the ECB and the IMF keep flushing huge amounts of money down the toilet. No one seems to care all that much though...
- yifanl 7y agoIf an effort like this isn't made, then it's guaranteed we don't save the planet. Yes, it sucks, but someone has to be the first to bite the bullet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nostromo 7y ago> Cutting off the $650B in fossil fuel subsidies over the course of 15 years pay for a little over half of the plan. That's not how subsidies work. "Subsidies" here are just lower tax rates for R&D spending. If those tax breaks go away, so do most of the energy projects associated with them. The taxable income would shrink, and you'd have less money, not more.
- caiob 7y agoI'm not American, I'm just north of the border. From an outsider perspective Sanders seems like the most qualified candidate by a large margin, yet he keeps on getting bamboozled in the primaries. What's stopping Americans (more specifically the Democratic Party) from giving him a shot?
- achow 7y agoFrom Reddit, posted by 'AlarmedScholar': The most significant goals: - Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by at least 2050 - Ending unemployment by creating 20 million jobs - Directly invest an historic $16.3 trillion public investment - A fair transition for workers - Declaring climate change a national emergency - Saving American families money - Supporting small family farms by investing in ecologically regenerative and sustainable agriculture - Justice for frontline communities - Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world - Meeting and exceeding our fair share of global emissions reductions - Making massive investments in research and development - Expanding the climate justice movement - Investing in conservation and public lands to heal our soils, forests, and prairie lands - This plan will pay for itself over 15 years https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ctvmwp/bernie_sanders_unveils_16_trillion_green_new_deal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ctvmwp/bernie_san...
- marricks 7y agoGiven how cities that transitioned to $15 minimum wage workers did better* after implementation maybe it's time to try investing in infrastructure and the working class rather than the 30 years of trickle down economics and stagnate wages we've suffered from both Republican and Democratic administrations...
- partiallypro 7y agoI don't understand why politicians always put forth "plans" that would never pass. Why not put forth realistic options that would pass? It's not wonder we can't tackle anything, much less climate change. Everyone goes so far on the spectrum that they can't garner votes for anything. It's ridiculous. This pleases the base, it does nothing more. And even at that, I'm sure the far flungs will say this isn't enough. Come to the middle.
- derg 7y agoStarting negotiations from the middle never works out.
- asdkhadsj 7y agoWell, not never.. but with congress.... yea, I definitely agree.
- rileyphone 7y agoIf the plan is further out, so is the middle to. It's a political mandate, if your plan is milquetoast congress will pull it to almost nothing.
- m_ke 7y agoYou have to aim high and have room to make sacrifices.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- save_ferris 7y agoBecause politics is largely a negotiating game. It's really not that different from haggling. Formal bills are adjusted in order to be passed, which usually involves making members of both major parties happy. The other reason is that there's a large consensus that believes that we're not in a climate for moderate politics to thrive because some members of congress have a tendency to negotiate in bad faith. There's a widely held belief on the left that the GOP cannot be negotiated with, and any kind of call to the center requires giving them more power.
- 29_29 7y agoWe are already completely broke; and the US annual GDP is 19.3T so I assume Bernie is going to print more counterfeit money to pay for this.
- MAGZine 7y agoUnfortunately planet Earth doesn't care if you ran out of green cotton notes. Make it work.
- defertoreptar 7y agoIf we shouldn't expect people to be compensated, then why even bring up a dollar amount in the first place? Are you justifying enslaving people in order to "make it work"?
- cma 7y agoDid chattel slaves have democratic consensus mechanism where they agreed to do the work?
- defertoreptar 7y agoHow do you "make it work" without someone agreeing to do the work?
- cma 7y agoI think it would be funded through dollars but it could also be done by barter in items/services valued in dollars.
- 29_29 7y ago"planet Earth doesn't care" - The printed money will end up in retirement and transfer funds. Put another way if San Francisco can't even control the human feces, homeless and needle problem - how on earth can liberals control something complex like CO2 through non market legislative means?
- derg 7y agoGood. This is the kind of total war ramp up to help attempt to save the planet that we desperately needed to do years and decades ago.
- misiti3780 7y agoQuestion: If he is dropping 650B in FF subsidies, does that mean we can assume the price for gas prices, flights etc will all go up respectively ?
- rileyphone 7y agoYeah, as they should.
- misiti3780 7y agoit's fine for people that can afford it, i suspect a large group of people in the US cannot afford gas prices to double/triple
- bradlys 7y agoHousing prices will likely adjust accordingly too though. Houses further from jobs will decrease in value because it costs so much in gas just to get to it.
- zaroth 7y agoNYT appears to link to a scanned copy of the plan; https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-green-new-deal/761873c26ec4075c609b/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-...
- nodesocket 7y agoI respect and listen to Bernie even though I have very different ideologies and fiscal policy. Recently he went on the Joe Rogan podcast for over an hour; it is a great source of information on his politics: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-iLk1G_ng https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-iLk1G_ng
- greenail 7y agoThe worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter.
- greenail 7y agocan someone explain why I got downvoted for quoting the community guidelines?
- manfredo 7y agoSome quick napkin-paper math as far as how much electricity we could generate if this $16T was spent on nuclear energy: The levelized cost (that is, including overhead costs of plant construction) are still lower than solar. Less than solar and about the same as wind, except that nuclear isn't intermittent which eliminates the need for energy storage. At $120 per megawatt hour, this $16 trillion could be used to generate 128000 terawatt hours of electricity [1]. Let's put this in more concrete examples. The total us electricity generation is ~1 terawatt. The Palo Verde plant generates ~4 gigawatts and cost $12 billion in 2018 dollars [3]. At this cost/capacity ratio, $16 trillion could be used to generate just over 5 terawatts. Over 5x the current capacity of the US power generation grid. What's even more impressive is that this is a one-off plant design, which is much less cost effective than serial plant production (like what the French did during the 70s and 80s) where a handful of designs are created but dozens or more plants are built using those designs. Granted electricity isn't the only form of energy consumption, but it is a huge source of carbon production that can be replaced. 1. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electric-generating-costs-a-primer/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electri... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
- cma 7y agoDoes that pay for the insurance liability?
- manfredo 7y agoThe amount that insurance will cost depends on how much we want to insure against, there's no fixed value for that. Currently each US nuclear power plant has a minimum of $375 million in insurance, as compared to total plant costs often in the several billion dollar range. If those estimates above didn't include insurance, the total cost would not increase very drastically Contrary to popular belief nuclear power plants have historically been the safest forms of power generation. Even more so if you restrict the analysis to nuclear power plants in developed western countries, where there are zero deaths due to radiation and only a few during construction. We could take 1/5th of the 16 trillion to construct the plants and have over 12 trillion left over to insure them.
- abeppu 7y agoThe article mentions that the plan doesn't include a carbon tax, and that one of Sanders' advisors says we need "more than just a carbon tax", and then gives a favorable quote from that advisor. I can understand why a carbon tax might not be _enough_ given the current state of affairs, but is there a good argument against including it in a comprehensive plan other than that people dislike the idea of new taxes?