A Plan for the Solar Revolution
(Page 5 of 8)
April/May 2009
By Denis Hayes
Establish Tough National Building Energy Standards. We can make all new buildings carbon-neutral by 2025. The astonishing rate at which architects and developers nationwide have adopted the voluntary LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) building standards suggests a deep desire to build structures that will make sense throughout their 50-year lifetimes. We need to build on that momentum to create a new generation of energy-efficient “living buildings.”
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Develop the Green-collar Workforce. Reversing climate change has enormous potential to put disenfranchised America back to work. The greatest employment opportunities are for those who will install and maintain photovoltaic and solar thermal-electric facilities; build and maintain wind farms and geothermal plants; and construct and operate the high-speed rail system and smart grid.
We need to increase by a hundredfold the programs, mostly at community colleges, to teach these new skills. Special emphasis should be placed on retraining those who were displaced in the energy transition (such as workers in coal mines) and the inner-city poor who have seen their job prospects disappear in the globalized economy.
How Will We Pay For All This?
The first stages of these investments will inevitably be paid for with deficit financing. It must begin immediately. I write as a true deficit hawk — appalled to be acknowledging the need to add perhaps another trillion dollars to our national debt.
However, in two years or less President Obama can be in a position to take advantage of a very happy coincidence. In an unexpected “win-win,” the most intriguing potential long-term revenue source in our tax-averse nation turns out to be a system to cap carbon emissions and auction off permits to burn carbon fuels. If we could adopt a system that economists call an “upstream cap and 100-percent auction,” such a system would eventually produce hundreds of billions of dollars a year. At the same time, it would steer energy investments away from carbon-intensive fuels such as oil, coal, liquids from coal, bituminous sands and oil shale. This is the climate strategy most likely to alter the world’s energy markets before irreversible harm is done.
Many variations on this system have been proposed, but any serious program to limit greenhouse gas emissions has to cap carbon at the 2,000 places where it enters the U.S. economy (coal mines, oil fields, pipelines, ports) — as opposed to regulating the millions of places where carbon leaves our smokestacks and tailpipes.
Efforts that focus on emissions themselves are guaranteed to fail for several reasons:
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