This quick comment was added by Greg Mello, lightly edited here:
Will this bill mitigate global warming? No, it will not. It aims to facilitate business-as-usual in essentially all economic sectors and grid-tied states, feeding economic growth in brown, not green, economies. It facilitates monopoly control of energy and cuts the available job creation by at least a factor of ten if not a hundred. It is a massive giveaway to corporate interests preying on legitimate global warming concerns without actually addressing those concerns head-on. The environmental groups promoting this bill, national ones as well as regional ones, should be ashamed. Their raison d’etre involves understanding and honestly communicating key issues in the climate-energy-economy-environment nexus. In this they failed during the national cap-and-trade debacle, which set back climate change mitigation a decade, and they are failing here as well.
Who owns and controls the means of electricity production and where it is located — in the state or out of the state, and above whether distributed in small democratically-controlled bits or built in large fields distant from users — really do matter a great deal, not just for community resilience and jobs but also for mitigating global warming. This bill strips democracy from energy, and strips jobs and careers and community resilience from renewable energy growth. It separates incentives for energy efficiency from energy production; the two are naturally linked under some other renewable incentive approaches. This bill is more about California interests and Wall Street than it is about New Mexico, and it is the California economy which will benefit more from it.
And of course the overall energy policy package being supported by the Governor and her advisors, and most of these same environmental groups, is strongly oriented toward increasing, not decreasing, the state’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. That is because the state produces, at enormous environmental cost to itself and its citizens, an enormous amount of oil and gas, which delights the Governor and most legislators. The environmental groups have never fostered any understanding of this problem, preferring to think in outmoded terms of pollution control. The planned and hoped-for growth of greenhouse gas emissions under this governor is something of a state secret. You will search in vain for any quantitative appraisal of it. Environmental groups are typically very coy about this as well, focusing on greenhouse gas emissions from our energy consumption rather than from our fossil energy production, which is of course consumed somewhere.
The legislature will be over in a few days and the damage, with some silver linings I am sure, will be done. This bill, for better or worse, is a very small step in a much larger transition over which we have only limited control. Environmental groups, which too often function as subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, need to get out of their partisan echo chamber, put on their thinking caps, think more deeply about these issues, and engage with their scientific, engineering, green, pink, red, rural, religious, and traditional New Mexican colleagues better as we head into the uncharted, difficult territory ahead.
Dems re-emphasize climate amid new deal flap
Quick Greg Mello comment, lightly edited here:
I hope readers see through this latest Democratic Party charade of using global warming for partisan purposes. There are elements in the so-called “Green New Deal” which are very meritorious (and others not) but the whole discussion seems to be suffering the fate of a chicken being thrown into a den of hungry crocodiles. We do very badly need fora for these issues but we are very unlikely to get anything approximating an honest one in Congress. So we all must work to educate and act in other ways and with other means, learning as we go. We can resist and we can build, both, and we can proceed with open minds and hearts. The resulting changes in our politics can only improve the general mess in Congress. And we certainly can’t wait for Congress or a new president.
Given conditions in society — and speaking here as someone with decades of experience both as a lobbyist in Washington and as an organizer, we need to bring business as usual to a halt when and where we can. School strikes are an excellent way for many people to start. We need to foment them wherever and whenever we can. There are now school strikes in some countries every Friday (“Fridays for Future”), including ours, and there is an international emphasis on the Friday, March 15 strikes. Greta Thunberg of Sweden is a wonderful spokesperson — look her up — but there are also Americans leading the way [, such as Alexandria Villasenor]. It seems politicians will only do the right thing as a last resort, when easier — corrupt — options are unavailable. Young people — listen to Greta. “A child shall lead them.”