All I want for Christmas is a Green New Deal which is actually green and actually a new deal
December 25, 2018
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Previous letter (4 Dec 2018): "Help us hire additional staff! With the election behind and legislature ahead, dialog urgently needed"
Previous Bulletin (251, 11 Dec 2018): "Converging resource, climate, and social crises compel broad, deep transformation -- far more than usually envisioned"
Dear friends on our New Mexico activist list --
Merry Christmas everyone. (Hanukkah slipped by us two weeks ago.) We will be visiting with friends later today and with family tomorrow. We hope you all have an enriching holiday season and a blessed and productive new year -- come what may.
- We are still in end-of-year fundraising mode. Thank you for your contributions and outreach on our behalf!
Thank you all so much for being our partners in disarmament, and in what we hope will be more effective climate and energy leadership.
Please note the corrected PayPal link above. We very much welcome your support and that of your friends. To succeed we need that help and solidarity more than ever, and we will return it in every way we can.
There are many ways to support our work.
This year we hope to establish in government minds, once and for all, that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) cannot be any kind of nuclear factory. This is our biggest single program. We are mostly there, in some offices. The New Mexico delegation remains a big problem.
Also in the new year, we hope to kill the proposed new warhead, called in its successive variations the "Reliable Replacement Warhead" (RRW) under GW Bush, "Interoperable Warhead One" (IW1) under Obama, and now the "W87-1 Life Extension Program" (W87-1 LEP). This warhead is the only one that requires new pits. It requires them ASAP and therefore generates the need for a pit factory ASAP. It's for ground-launched intercontinental missiles we don't need, which will cost well in excess of $100 billion (B), and which leading Democrats and former military leaders oppose. For this missile, it will provide the capability to return to three warheads per missile if desired, which is supposed to scare the Russians more than it scares us. Think of it as an extra pack of explosives on the national nuclear suicide belt. We want to cut back and get rid of ICBMs and close their three bases, not enhance them more than current accuracy improvements are already providing. But first, killing the new warhead removes the near-term "need" for a pit factory anywhere.
Also in the new year, we hope to help foment a significant movement toward climate responsibility and community resilience in New Mexico, about which you will hear more from us, including below. New Mexicans are generally passive politically, a sufficient reason in itself for its egregious poverty and inequality.
We all have to do this -- you too.
We will continue to contribute our unique and important voice on other nuclear weapons and sustainability issues.
We are looking for dedicated new staff and the means to support them.
By the way, the $5,000 matching grant we mentioned previously has been fully subscribed. This gives the Study Group $10,000 for next year's programs from that initiative. That, and other contributions which have come in, give us a solid start for next year -- thank you. We are long way from raising enough funds for what we want and need to do next year, however. If you (or a friend) are in a position to establish another challenge grant, please do contact us.
We say it every year, and it's even more true this year: 2019 will be a momentous year for nuclear weapons policy and for plutonium pit production in particular. With budget woes gaining in salience and the House in Democratic hands, real congressional oversight of nuclear weapons programs could begin again, after a largely-permissive decade. We intend to foster that accountability. The federal government must begin making fundamental budget choices it has postponed.
New Mexico meanwhile is uniquely in the crosshairs. Investments in nuclear weapons -- time, money, committee assignments, membership in "corruption clubs" like the "Regional Coalition of LANL Communities" -- mean more leadership failures from our political class, at every level. We have crises layered upon crises. Our youth are at risk. Our families. We have a huge homeless population. We are beset with violence and drug addiction. Whole communities are being forgotten. The huge weapons labs rule our politicians, whose addictions run not just to nuclear weapons, training Saudi pilots to bomb children in Yemen and related military activities, but also to what Gary Snyder once called "long, smooth injections of crude oil." Violence? Yeah, that's us. Politicians who think these are the only way things can be in New Mexico should be hounded -- I mean literally hounded, with the utmost nonviolence -- out of office.
- If you haven't already, please do listen to Greta Thuenberg.
Her talk at the recent UN Climate Summit and her interviews with Amy Goodman are by now old news. We should have sent them before now. If you have not done so, please do listen carefully to what this 15-year-old has to say, as well as to Kevin Anderson:
We praised the Extinction Rebellion in a letter of 1 Nov, 2018. So here is more, also from Democracy Now.
If you think her message is compatible with the messages coming from the Sierra Club, Environment New Mexico, 350.org, and most other New Mexico environmental organizations, please listen again.
- The incoming New Mexico gubernatorial administration, and our environmental groups which are preparing to lobby the legislature, have no net climate-friendly, and therefore no climate leadership, policies.
Sorry to have to tell you that. The "blue wave" in New Mexico is no kind of environmental Christmas present. Does this sound harsh? The reality is harsh.
Promoting solar and wind generation of electricity (to whatever degree turns out to be chosen or possible) just does not add enough in the positive column to overcome the negative climate leadership of allowing, or even promoting as is the case, oil and gas extraction on a large scale.
Neither does attempting to regulate methane emissions balance out the negative impacts of producing methane in the first place. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas -- some 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years. From the ground to the well to pipelines to distribution to use, too much of it leaks for methane to ever be a clean fuel.
And of course, it does make carbon dioxide when it burns, just less than coal.
The "Obama Clean Power Plan" heavily leaned on methane, which is part of why it was going to increase, not decrease, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over 20 years. (The other reason is that it was so very lame in its targets.)
Further, natural gas and oil are produced together. Oil is the far more valuable product. If you want oil you will get methane, which is not valuable enough even to keep in many cases. Gathering pipes are too expensive, so it is flared. Massively in the Permian.
The consumption of oil products is devastating to the environment, leaving aside production, transportation, and refining. Yes, we use oil and gas, but let's not kid ourselves. This is not a problem which can be solved with the regulatory paradigm.
We do not know which new well will be the one that tips the earth into irreversible global warming.
The dirtiness of the incoming administration will be all the greater if nothing is done to discourage automobile and air travel -- for tourism, for example. Fossil fuel travel, on the contrary, will be promoted.
We meanwhile see nothing serious in the offing to open non- or low-fossil fuel transportation options.
Thus promotion of solar and wind energy, by themselves, amounts to a kind of political greenwashing for the dirty economy every politician wants to grow, not shrink. It's a con. Politicians pretend they are doing something for the climate when they are not because a) they want your vote, b) they are ignorant of what they are doing, c) they are not courageous enough, d) they are simply corrupt, or e) some combination of the above.
I am really concerned about this because this is exactly the way all the important environmental, social justice, and antiwar movements have been coopted over the past few decades. We should be rebelling like Greta Thuenberg, not just preparing to lobby the legislature just like 10, 20, and 30 years ago.
So what to do? In few words, we need to rebel, and bring business as usual to a halt.
- What does Greta Thuenberg understand better than our environmental leaders?
We noticed Ms. Thuenberg has a more sophisticated understanding of climate science and policy than many who are in positions of environmental leadership. How so?
First, Thuenberg understands that goods and services embody greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and that we have to change how we live -- radically.
(It almost goes without saying that she also understand that individual virtue is far from enough, which our environmental leaders do understand well but many others do not.)
The implications of embodied emissions seem to elude those who seek a crash program for "100% renewable energy" by X date (X is usually in the 2030-2050 range) without also greatly decreasing the aggregate demand for energy, including electricity.
In the absence of deep energy conservation (EC), which is necessarily linked to a broader movement for radical simplicity, crash programs like a "Green New Deal" (GND) will increase, not decrease, GHG emissions over the (crucial) short run, for the duration of the program.Why? Because it takes energy and GHGs to a) build and b) install renewable energy (RE) equipment as well as to build and install energy efficiency (EE) infrastructure equipment of all kinds (whether in buildings, transportation, or industry).
We are all for a crash build-out of some kinds (see below) of renewable energy (RE) -- the actually renewable kind, the kind that contributes to sustainable communities. The green kind.
What's not green? Long-distance AC transmission lines, which do nothing to make society sustainable (let alone just) at either end of the transmission line, are not green. They are to "green" what sugar is to food -- a sweet substitute that will make us sick and eventually kill us if we try 100% substitution. Subsidizing new suburban sprawl, or economic growth that inherently depends on oil and gas and embedded energy in products wherever they are made, with RE electricity is not green. Trying to maintain our present way of life using RE electricity is not green. Two-ton electric cars with life-cycle GHG footprints 2-3 times less than decent gasoline cars depending on the circumstances are not green. They are just less brown but not enough less brown to matter. What is green is not driving and especially, not flying.
People are not doing the math. Like the monkeys we are, we are just grasping at the cookies offered by politicians and whose who instinctively act like them. This is very tempting for all of us. We have to do better.
We are also all for prompt, large investments in some kinds of EE programs (again, the green kind), which are complementary to RE and in the case of electricity even better in terms of cost (or any other way of meeting electrical demand). EE investments are also rich in the diversity and accessibility of jobs produced. Like RE, EE has great ancillary benefits to households, firms, and communities. Unlike RE, EE is largely independent of geography, weather, and the diurnal cycle.
But neither RE nor EE can significantly help to mitigate the climate crisis without deep EC and simplicity. Neither can they provide "100% renewable energy" at the current scale of consumption (let alone even more, e.g. for a larger population) by any stated year. There just are no magic technology fairies that can save the American Way of Life. It is going away one way or another, and soon. For a thousand reasons, sustainability is only possible at much lower consumption levels than the US "enjoys" today.
Today and for the crucial one or two decades ahead -- or three decades or however many it turns out to be -- industrial civilization is and will remain heavily, if not almost completely, dependent on fossil fuels. Everything we make, build, or do involves fossil fuels and incurs GHG emissions, including everything that comprises a GND. What money can buy, or make happen, is basically the directed use of energy, principally fossil fuel energy, embodied in goods and services. In many applications, liquid fossil fuels have no scaleable substitutes. Their energy density and versatility are fabulously great. They have made us modern.
When we build PV systems we incur greenhouse gas costs. We start reaping net greenhouse benefits later, approximately in the second or third year of operation. Which is good except that if we try to replace a large fraction of today's electrical generation rapidly with RE on a crash basis (as we need to do), GHG emissions will increase, not decrease. We need to lower emissions very rapidly. We have no "carbon budget" left to spend for decades to come.
We can reach high levels of RE electricity quickly in say the residential sector, by a) lowering demand dramatically, b) accepting time-of-use limitations, and c) installing RE systems and batteries. But to do this our entire way of life will change. We will need to substitute investments in insulation and other EE measures instead of some consumption; tolerate wider temperature ranges; actively manage building ventilation, solar aperatures, and power systems; share dwellings; forego energy-intensive activities in favor of others which are not; share power in local grids that take advantage of the best RE sites; and other measures. We will localize, not globalize. But in all this, we can be very happy.
Needless to say, this program differs substantially from what the "Big Green" groups have on offer, which is basically a neoliberal model of investor-owned interconnected RE, with no cap on total production. That model strips citizens of agency and ownership, expands current monopolies, exports and limits job creation and careers, and maintains consumer, as opposed to producer and conserver, attitudes and identities. It will harm democracy, giving away effective ownership of the sun and wind just as land was given to the railroad barons of the late 19th century but with even more damaging effects in the long run.
To be green, it is essential to decrease electrical generation, not increase it by "diversifying" its sources. Adding RE to a fossil fuel consumer society addicted to growth will just allow more demand, including demand for fossil fuels.
To get close to 100% RE for electricity without these deep changes we would have to build much more generation capacity than we now today, because of RE's lower capacity factors, its high intermittency. All these factors -- the speed we need, the scale, the intermittency -- translate into increases in net GHG emissions for a long period under a "100%" RE plan, or GND, that is not also a movement for simplicity and community resilience, production, conservation, and all the social organization and values that go with them.
Greta, in the choices she is making and suggesting, understands a lot of this, in principle at least. Nearly all US climate leaders do not.
A separate point worth repeating here is that there are no practical engineering solutions to take the US electrical grid, as it now exists, to 100% renewable energy. It's a long story, but the various proposals to do so are fantasies. Long-haul transport -- heavy trucks, airplanes, and ships -- for which there are no scalable substitutes for fossil fuels, comprise an even greater, uh, "challenge."
Second, Greta understands that wealthy countries like Sweden seem much "greener" than they are because as goods are imported, Sweden exports GHG production. It's there, just "off the books." This general idea eludes US (and NM) climate leaders as well. A major incentive for economic growth -- never questioned by our environmentalists or politicians -- is to buy more "stuff," nearly all imported to our state and many to the country and so not counted against renewable targets.
(Interestingly, Steve Pearce's gubernatorial campaign did call for New Mexico "food sufficiency." Eliminating long-distance food imports to New Mexico or even some of them, would have positive implications for land, water, jobs, population distribution, and society. Overall, New Mexico living patterns are currently unsustainable. Past ways of life, from the early 19th century and before, that we rightly honor here in New Mexico, usually were.)
Third, Greta understands that climate "tipping points," beyond which runaway climate collapse will doom most of nature and civilization, are very close. We hardly know whether to laugh or to cry when we see goals for X% renewables by "2040" or "2050." Such goals are mere posturing. They are meant to take the pressure off politicians right now, and to gull the ignorant.
The real primary effect of most of the climate "solutions" now on offer from well-meaning academics, environmental groups, and Democratic Party politicians is to "run out the clock" on global warming, making runaway warming and runaway mass extinction inevitable. Offering politically-based illusions instead of science- and logic-based analysis guides what could be effective protest into ineffective dead-end channels, while emissions and atmospheric concentrations continue to rise.
Finally, Greta understands that if you know about these things, you can't un-know them. To have integrity and mental health, you have to act.
Next time I would like to return to the Green New Deal theme, to the reality that any GND worth it's salt would entail an end to militarism, and the alarming cooptation of progressives.
Again, merry Christmas and simpler, greener new year with nonviolent rebellion to all of us.
Greg Mello, for the Study Group
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