First off, ignore the Koch brothers’ hired corporate troll, above. The troll business writes extra-long stuff to push the real messages way down the page so more people won’t get that far down.
Now, Mr. McKibben wants “As fast as humanly possible”. Here’s how to do it! Yoo Hoo, Mr. McKibben!!
We need a committee in charge of practical renewables/climate R&D. We’re looking for “bleeding edge” innovations that for some reason don’t quite register on the megacorporations’ short, short time scale.
Previous good examples: Photovoltaic electricity used to cost 100 times as much as oil-fired turbine electricity. U.S. researchers had to bring down the cost. Rhode Island had to put five wind turbines in the water offshore, at a significant short term cost to the state, to show that offshore works on the East Coast (smart state!) Denmark already as built up a long lead in the offshore wind field, and continues to reap a huge national standard of living.
Where we’re going now:
–Solar-based building heat
–Better solar greenhouses
–More robust heliostats for better daylighting
–Solar thermal-based electricity so that we can store power for nighttime and cloudy day use
–Many transit inventions
–We have to put carbon in the ground. Climate change is now a positive feedback loop regardless of what humanity does. We must fight this forest fire and soon.
–We equally have to disable other greenhouse gases such as methane and NOx.
–Ecologically benign ways of restoring the Arctic Ocean’s 14 foot thick ice pack. Yes, ecological solutions exist and they’re affordable! (Don’t smear the ecologically balanced plans with any of the ecologically screwball schemes out there, please. Would you like it if you were smeared with schemes that the fracking industry puts out?)
–We must protect God’s critters from extinction. If Noah was asked to do it, we should do it too.
Next we need to go to 500 friendly but skinflint universities and demand that they perform the vital research, not junk. We must also go to 1000 greenwashing corporations and find a few that will walk their talk. We also have many dozens of regional, state and national governments who occasionally are wise enough and intelligent enough to go out on a limb and win fame, jobs and prosperity for their own citizens. We need activists to do this lobbying.
That’s the plan. R&D is at least ten times as powerful per dollar spent as any other climate-solving strategy, including massive political lobbying, although as you have just seen, sometimes the two have to go together.
Yes, I have read “Drawdown” by Paul Hawken. The book makes a horrible error in not looking at future R&D strategies, but otherwise I admire the committee approach to comparing technologies.
