No fossil fuel, no nuclear. So electric power will come from ........where? Biomass and hydropower can't do it all.
These are problems inherent in democracy, and exacerbated by today's media technology. In a democracy, to move your campaign forward, you have to claim that your opponent is the devil. It's why the founders preferred a republic to a democracy.
Maybe because he doesn't share your analysis; or perhaps he doesn't care to create posts like the ones you suggest.....
This leads me to hypothesize that Dave Schuler is some kind of imbecile, or perhaps just insincere [edit: insincere can include sarcastic. ] California is (finally, mercifully) killing the existing bullet train plan. A baby version may remain in the central valley, if any people survive the mysterious fungal lung illness there. I realize as a moderate democrat though that you would and will enjoy mocking mass transit efforts, and you are free to do so. The bullet train deserves it, sad to say.
This California bullet train project was initially a Barack Obama production, part of the "stimulus" boondoggle.
I honestly think you can't do it without natural gas generation, honestly. But, I'll point out there are more tools than biomass (which is not without controversy) and hydropower. There's utility scale solar and wind, there's distributed solar, there's battery storage, there's demand response and other sorts of dynamic energy management (DR is where you pay customers to stop consuming during peak hours), there's energy efficiency. If money was no object, you could build the renewables and the storage to cover your needs. But money is an issue so I expect gas to stick around. The environmentalists will say it's not good enough. We might have to learn to adapt to a hotter and more volatile climate then.
I'm not gonna speak on a democracy vs a republic... it's been a while since middle school and I don't remember the difference between the two anymore . I dunno if there is any system of government that can escape creating politics and the negatives that come along with it like the example you have . I think the government can have a positive role in development and the economy . So pieces of legislature that do things like support infrastructure development can be nice . However , Even the best principled idea can become bogged down in the legislative process . That's why I posted in this thread in the first place . I think that ideas like this should be heavily discussed and Id rather the government take action on the side of caution and the future vs letting the current state play out . If more people (consumers) start to understand and demand "clean" energy then market forces will push private firms into it . The question then is how will the competition look and what about the players already in energy ... is it in their best interests to adopt a new strategy or will they make more profit by stalling outside development and continuing down their current production stream? But bringing the discussion to the forefront (might) help give more people accurate information about the negatives of our current resource extraction scheme and what a transition to clean energy would look like . That would at least get the ball rolling . No one knows how bad the impacts of climate change will be , when those impacts will come to bear , and if we can mitigate them . But transitioning now might give us a head start when some of those questions are answered .... and if we got it wrong , we can always switch back hahaha
Solar, hydropower, hydrogen fuel, & thermal. Solar will likely be by far the main workhorse. Technological advancement will continue to make both green energy and all electrical components vastly more energy efficient as well.
No that's not really how analogies work. "How the GOP can't compromise" (which isn't really an accurate descriptor, but whatever) is a "how", and it really kind of refers to legislative procedure in any event The Green New Deal is an actual set of policy proposals - a "what". If you wanted to do analogies or comparables, youd use, , a substantive set of proposals, like the GOP climate change plan.
That project was under budgeted from the beginning. High speed rail isn't cheap at all and isn't going to be initially cost effective especially with the high cost of real estate in a state like California (not to mention mountainous areas). That said, the need to relieve congestion at airports and on highways - and the cost to the economy as well as maintaining high infrastructure seems to make investing in this worth while. But the federal gov't needs to get involved, pick one corridor and just build the sucker and make it work. Pick two cities with major congestion issues at airports and highways where people would easily make a city-to-city trip. The candidate for that seems to be a Boston - NY or an LA to SF.
Megan McArdle's column in the Post today explains why this is probably never going to happen. An excerpt: "Wealth. Of course, the United States does have a few clusters that look ripe for rail, notably Texas, and the Eastern Seaboard. And instead of high-speed rail between these cities, we have the Acela, which takes eight hours to travel from Washington to Boston and shakes like a maraca player with a meth habit. Why haven’t we built something better? Because truly high-speed rail needs to travel in a fairly straight line; you don’t want to be taking a sharp curve at 300 miles per hour. Our current rail infrastructure isn’t that straight where it needs to be. Building newer, better, straighter rail lines would require the government to buy all the land between Point A and Point B and tear down anything that happened to be in the way. Because we’re already really, really rich, what’s between Point A and Point B is no longer farmland; instead we have a great deal of highly valuable real estate that will be very expensive to purchase — which we’d have to, because unlike China, our constitution gives the government limited ability to displace inconveniently located people." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-have-high-speed-rail/?utm_term=.d97ece8c79c8
"The Green New Deal's Disastrous First Week." https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/green-new-deal-disastrous-first-week-for-democrats/
Which part? Solar being the main workhorse of future green energy, green energy being made more efficient, or electric products/components being made more efficient?
Why the end of the Cali bullet train project is a problem for Green New Dealers. "If high-speed rail can’t make it in California, it can’t make it anywhere": Perhaps the most critical national casualty may be the Green New Deal proposed by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Much of her platform for a ten-year transformation of the American economy centers on transportation. In her bid to kill the internal-combustion engine, Ocasio-Cortez apparently seeks to eliminate both cars and planes. Her favored solution for cross-continental travel: a massive network of high-speed trains. Some of this must seem fanciful even to the democratic-socialist heartthrob from the Bronx. In contrast with Western Europe, where several high-speed rail lines operate, the United States has huge distances between cities; its average population density is between three and ten times less compact than that of the European continent. Even on the California coast, a 450-mile high-speed rail trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco would have taken nearly four hours, compared with a one-hour plane ride. Imagine taking high-speed rail from Los Angeles to Chicago: a three-hour trip by plane becomes a 15-hour or longer trek across vast, empty spaces. During that time, the traveler would cover more high-speed rail mileage than the current length of the entire French system. Even fervent supporters of the Green New Deal must recognize what California’s cancellation means: if high-speed rail is not feasible in the state with the three densest major metro areas in the nation, and the highest overall urban density, it is not feasible anywhere else in the United States. (And not just here: Britain’s proposed high-speed rail megaproject, HS2, also appears on the verge of cancellation. Sounding like Governor Newsom, a senior government official told Channel 4’s Dispatches public affairs program: “The costs are spiraling so much we’ve been actively considering other scenarios, including scrapping the entire project.”) It also suggests that the costs for a national network would be formidable and would require the printing presses at the Treasury to work overtime. Of the many high-speed rail lines built in the developed world, only two (Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon) have ever been profitable, and in each case highway tolls for the same routes exceed $80 one-way, making high-speed rail in those cases an economical consumer choice. California, the green heart of the resistance, has met fiscal reality; reality won. https://www.city-journal.org/high-speed-rail-projects
George Will's column on the GND is pretty funny this morning: "Every endorser of the GND thereby endorses its claim to life-and-death urgency, yet — cognitive dissonance alert — every endorser knows that none of it will happen. Its authors say, 'There is no time to waste.' Strange. The last Democratic administration, which departed just 25 months ago, proposed approximately none of what the GND says we cannot survive without." not paywalled here: https://www.richmond.com/opinion/th...cle_5a3bbecc-b3d9-5645-9805-c0ebac2b1292.html
