““If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” – Henry David Thoreau
60 Years after JFK fired the starting gun for America’s race to the Moon, Joe Biden has sounded the clarion call for the race to lead the 21st century.
“We’re in a race to see who wins the 21st Century,” the President said today in Cleveland, with a ringing justification for his aggressive plan for sustainable infrastructure.
In researching this month’s Yale Climate Connections video, I spoke to a number of researchers, most notably, former Berkeley Lab researcher, now author, Jonathan Koomey PhD, as well as Tony Seba, whose videos I’ve posted here several times. The model I was looking at was JFK’s bold pledge.
JFK’s moon announcement was greeted with a significant amount of skepticism. While well informed researchers felt the venture was technically do-able, much of the technology to get it done had simply not been engineered, or even invented, yet.
That is not the case today.
Koomey argues below that getting started is the most powerful step, as each success creates new opportunities that could not have existed before. A notable example is how the plummeting cost of renewable energy, sparked by massive support and deployment here in the US, but also China, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.
Below, Koomey and Seba on the power of exponential technological growth.
Upside of exponential growth: computrons
Downside: zebra mussels
USFWS estimates Zebra Mussels at densities of 700,000 individuals per square meter in some areas of the Great Lakes.
I have heard an estimates for Lake Michigan alone in the hundreds of trillions
Fauna of the future. They may have been accidentally introduced, but our pathetic response to climate disruption is making them a lot worse.
What complete horseshit out of the mouth of the latest conservative oligarchic stooge. Biden’s climate program is grossly inadequate. He’s shown for decades he’s not interested in the policies that would get power; because he and his donors are relentlessly anti-progressive and anti-progressive-majority.
He’s not willing to take the steps necessary to avoid the onrushing cataclysm: nationalize the fossil fuel, ICEV, agro-chemical, banking and other industries, provide living wages, health care, education and other rights and necessities, raise taxes by many times on the rich, build local and regional transit systems and a national high speed rail network to replace flying and driving, replace chemical industrial agriculture with small-scale low-meat organic permaculture, require corporations, utilities, and states to get efficient and build enough clean safe renewable energy to reach 100% in 9 years.
To do that, progressive Democrats will have to take power away from the right wing oligarchic duopoly party; to do that Biden will have to adopt a deeply progressive agenda, ditch the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, impeach dozens or scores of incompetent, radically right wing judges at all levels, get statehood for DC, PR, (and etc?), get rid of gerrymandering and voter suppression while encouraging non-dualistic parties instead of virtually banning them as the Democrats are doing. He and Pelosi et al will have to give up the excuses their fake bipartisanship gives them for failing the people of the US and the world over and over and over—endless repetitions that they can’t do [fill in the blank] because of the Republicans. They are the Republicans.
A little off topic but related…
quote: Last Wednesday a Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, must cut its global carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.
https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2021/05/31/finally-some-good-news-on-the-climate-front.html