Environment | Climate Action | Renewables | Infrastructure Spending

There Is No Vaccine For Climate Change

While a federal investment of $1.7 trillion over ten years sounds promising, Biden’s overarching goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 is not aggressive enough to stop climate change from wreaking havoc on humanity

Experts in epidemiology warned of pandemic flu for decades but their cries fell on deaf ears as our leaders were preoccupied with stock portfolios and re-election campaigns. The political establishment failed to put a system in place designed to protect the people from this known risk. These elected officials, and the public they’re supposed to work for, don’t care about invisible enemies, they’d rather foam at the mouth over nuclear war with Kim Jong-un.

Much like a pandemic flu, another existential threat patiently waits to pounce, but it isn’t sexy enough to take precedence over phony geopolitical smoke screens. While the government spends resources and taxpayer dollars on global risks that may or may not come to fruition, the greatest threat to our way of life, Earth’s rising temperature, continues to grow claws.

Biden has announced a sweeping climate plan which includes $1.7 trillion federal dollars to be invested in the coming decade. But what will these funds be invested in? The Obama-Biden administration took steps in the right direction, but ultimately fell short of revolutionizing our utility infrastructure, which is what it would take for us to really address these issues. While they took aim at carbon emissions, it was obvious the administration had an umbilical cord attaching them to the natural gas lobby. We must never forget that it was under the Obama administration, that America’s natural gas production increased by 35%. Great for industry, awful for the planet.

Natural gas certainly burns cleaner then coal, but it is still a hydrocarbon that produces emissions detrimental to the health of the Earth. So when Biden talks about $1.7 trillion, we really need to ask where that money will go. I have already heard him talk about “carbon capture and storage” on the campaign trail which leads me to believe it’s just going to be business as usual.

This process refers to burning gas and coal for electricity, capturing the emissions, and burying them back into the planet. In theory it sounds great, but it is unproven technology which has become a talking point for the oil and gas lobby. In short, Biden doesn’t know what the hell it is, it isn’t something occurring in industry, and some lobbyist told him to say that. This should scare everyone. These politicians aren’t engineers or scientists, they’re pragmatic lawyers who give lip service to the environmentalists while industry continues to hum along until the last Truffula Tree is cut down.

While Trump is certainly a fox in the hen house and any administration would probably roll out better environmental programs, we cannot be fooled by Biden’s sheep disguise. If elected, his administration must be held accountable to ensure that the fossil fuel industry does not continue to dictate our nation’s energy policies. The old model has worked for a century, but it won’t continue to work in the future.

The only way to effectively curb emissions related to electricity generation would involve a complete overhaul of our utility grid. We need to move away from the model reliant on natural gas and coal generating stations, and move towards a model where distributed renewable energy resources are deployed everywhere. This would reduce transmission and distribution losses and dramatically decrease emissions. With electric vehicles becoming more prominent, and our GDP increasing every single year, energy demand will continue to rise. Economic growth and energy demand move in lockstep with one another so it is imperative that we solve this equation soon.

If elected, the Biden administration has to cut the umbilical cord it has with the natural gas industry. We cannot allow these federal funds to go to the gas and coal plants. It must be allocated for green energy or used to revitalize our nuclear generation sector. If aggressive measures aren’t implemented soon, climate experts will be littering the airwaves just like the epidemiologists are now, saying “I told you so”. Biden promises to listen to the experts, hopefully they’re louder than the fossil fuel donations he’s been collecting his whole career.