{"id":3181,"date":"2020-01-13T04:00:18","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T04:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh-2020\/?p=3181"},"modified":"2020-01-13T04:00:18","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T04:00:18","slug":"we-need-a-massive-climate-war-effort-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/we-need-a-massive-climate-war-effort-now\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need a Massive Climate War Effort\u2014Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum<\/a><\/span>January\/February 2020 Issue<\/a><\/span>, Mother Jones.<\/p>\n

We Need a Massive Climate War Effort\u2014Now<\/h1>\n

Only major spending on clean energy R&D can save us.<\/h3>\n

We devoted 30 percent of our economy to fight WWII\u20141,000 times what we spend on green tech.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll take a wild guess<\/span> that you don\u2019t need any convincing about the need for action on climate change. You know that since the start of the Industrial Revolution we\u2019ve dumped more than 500 billion tons<\/a> of carbon into the atmosphere and we\u2019re adding about 10 billion more each year. You know that global temperatures have risen 1 degree Celsius<\/a> over the past century and we\u2019re on track for 2 degrees<\/a> within another few decades.<\/p>\n

And you know what this means. It means more extreme weather. More hurricanes. More droughts. More flooding. More wildfires. More heat-related deaths. There will be more infectious disease<\/a> as insects move ever farther north. The Northwest Passage will be open for much of the year. Sea levels will rise by several feet as the ice shelves of Greenland and the Antarctic melt, producing bigger storm swells and more intense flooding in low-lying areas around the world.<\/p>\n

Some of this is already baked into our future, but to avoid the worst of it, climate experts widely agree that we need to get to net-zero carbon emissions entirely by 2050 at the latest. This is the goal of the Paris Agreement<\/a>, and it\u2019s one that every Democratic candidate for president has committed to. But how to get there?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the good news. About three-quarters<\/a> of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels for power, and we already have the technology to make a big dent in that. Solar power is now price-competitive with the most efficient natural gas plants and is likely to get even cheaper in the near future. In 2019, Los Angeles signed a deal<\/a> to provide 400 megawatts of solar power at a price under 4 cents per kilowatt-hour\u2014including battery storage to keep that power available day and night. That\u2019s just a start\u2014it will provide only about 7 percent of electricity needed in Los Angeles\u2014but for the first time it\u2019s fully competitive with the current wholesale price of fossil fuel electricity in Southern California.<\/p>\n

Full article here<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin DrumJanuary\/February 2020 Issue, Mother Jones. We Need a Massive Climate War Effort\u2014Now Only major spending on clean energy R&D…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":3182,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/pittsburgh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}