Green New Deal Now

The pushback on the Green New Deal by Republicans, baby-boomer Democrats, mainstream media and pundits has been widespread and near uniform: it’s unrealistic because it calls for rapid change and will cost too much money. With climate denying Republicans controlling the Senate and the Lorax in the White House, it has no chance of passing until after 2020. House Speaker Pelosi even dismissed it as a dream.

What boggles my mind is the boomer denial of objective reality.  Earth’s climate is changing because our economy pumps carbon into the atmosphere. These changes will render us extinct in less than a century. That may seem like a long way off but civilizational collapse will happen much sooner.

Our civilization runs on capital.  A large portion of that capital is invested in and backed by real estate. The most expensive real estate, and therefore the most capital, is at sea level in places like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc. Real estate operates in 20 and 30 year mortgages backed by insurance.  Actuarial tables based on fact mixed with probability determine property insurance risks.  The world’s insurance companies are waking up to the fact that sea levels are rising and will accelerate. What this means is that many sea level properties will become uninsurable for the full 30 year mortgage in the next decade, the owners will be unable to sell it and that capital simply disappears.  Think of the millions of people along the gulf coast and eastern seaboard losing their life savings and having to relocate long before they’re physically underwater.

Now add to this capital problem water shortages and crop failure. We’ll start ramping up to solar maximum in the next couple of years (the sun operates in 9=11 year cycles)) and we have a problem with the Ogallala Aquifer which irrigates much of our midwestern breadbasket. The Ogallala is a non-replenishable aquifer and scientists estimated a couple of years ago that it would run out around 2023. The variability in weather will increase, tricking crops into thinking it’s Spring then killing them when the next winter storm arrives. This means the price of food and water will go up at the same time insurance companies begin to put the bite on sea level real estate. This will create economic and political instability on a scale we haven’t seen.

The economic and political instability will eat away our capital. Without capital, we cannot transition away from fossil fuels nor can we build the infrastructure necessary to survive the coming changes.  If we do not act scientists have warned us that life will continue to die off and the Earth will become uninhabitable for us and most of the tree of life.

We need to act on climate change while we still have the capital to do so.  Many say that a green new deal is unrealistic as we can’t possibly change our infrastructure within 10 years. Are we not as organizationally proficient as Costa Rica, Iceland and Morocco, which have higher percentages of renewable power? Even China, cited frequently as an ecocidal regime that makes our transition to renewables pointless, installs record-setting solar capacity each year. We invented the modern solar and wind industries before Reagan kneecapped them in the 1980s. We’re also the richest country in the world. Do any of us seriously believe we cannot achieve what other countries already have?

Our transformation to a renewable and regenerative economy will be a complicated and expensive process, it would be better to start now rather than when we’re broke and hungry thanks to climate impacts. The longer we wait, the worse those impacts will become – as the permafrost around the arctic circle melts, diseases like smallpox and viruses we haven’t encountered in thirty thousand years will come back to life.  It will only get worse from there as the Arctic feedback loop releases more carbon into the atmosphere thanks to the melting permafrost.

The powers in charge right now will tell you that we need to gradually cut emissions. The problem is that we are already over saturated with carbon. Here’s a crude analogy: if the water in your toilet bowl rises to the top, do you shut the water off or give it one more flush?

Climate change poses an existential threat to our civilization that dwarfs the Axis threat of World War Two. American didn’t call for us to buy our own guns and fight as individuals during that conflict. Humans are a social species that can accomplish great tasks as a group, the only way to fight climate change is to mobilize society against the threat.

We have to act right now.

This Monkey’s Gone To Heaven – The Pixies