The Green New Deal is not Green
By Stephen W. Houghton II
What ever
one thinks of the “social justice” and “welfare” provisions of Congresswoman
Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, as a program to reduce carbon emissions it is totally
inadequate.
Those who
are worried about climate change cannot be expected to be taken seriously if
they allow their own prejudices to influence what they claim to be emergency
legislation. A program to reduce carbon emissions that does not include the
words “nuclear fission” cannot claim to be based on science.
The plain
fact is that wind and earth based solar power are inadequate for base line
power generation. Until such time as nuclear fusion can be made work, if it
even can be, hydroelectric and nuclear fission are the key to a low or zero
emissions electric supply. That is not to say that wind and solar have no place
in energy generation, especially if paired with something like hydro energy
storage, but that place will be relatively small at least in the near term.
That Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez cannot even mention fission indicates that she, and a significant
portion of the environmental movement, is not serious about climate change.
Paired with her proposal to ration car and air travel, this suggests that she
is driven by a fundamentally Malthusian mentality.
This is
made even clearer by the omission of the words “space industrialization” from
her proposal. Consider that the energy output of the sun every second
is 678,000 times the amount of power humanity uses in a year. In space, there
are no clouds to block the light so it can be used for base line power
generation.
Further,
space mining will provide nearly unlimited amounts of metals and other elements
that can be used to create orbital habitats many thousands of times the area of
earth for us and the rest of the biosphere to inhabit. But more importantly in
this context, it can be used to create solar shades that could block part of
the sun light not used for photosynthesis, thus lowering global temperature.
Since the value of the hundred most
valuable known asteroids is believed to exceed $10 quadrillion, more than a hundred times annual world GDP,
the probability that asteroid mining will not begin in the next two decades is
essentially zero.
Some might
reasonably ask why we should spend money to build sun shades instead of just reducing
carbon emissions. The answer is that first, space industrialization will make
us all richer and second that they will have to be built eventually anyway as
the increasing solar output over the next few hundred million years will render
the earth uninhabitable without them. The only question is will we build sun
shades as a wealthy space faring society or a poor society crippled by
excessive regulation.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and a part of the
environmental movement seem to have not noticed that Elion Musk, Jeff Bezos,
and the developers of other reusable launch systems have solved climate change
as a long term problem. Now all we have to do is not cripple the space industry
and use nuclear fission to mitigate the possible damage from carbon dioxide
emissions. But we will not do either, if those posing as the champions of the
environment will not face the facts.
Hopefully I am misjudging Ms. Ocasio-Cortez
and she will take the above as friendly criticism and adopt her plan
accordingly. If she does she will be attacked by the “sustainability” cult, it
is a cult since it denies the second law of thermodynamics, for heresy. But if
she believes that global warming is as serious a problem as she states, then
that will be a small price to pay.
