Kevin Drum wrote a post summarizing the various groups who are against doing anything about climate change, and while I think he skips over a couple of the more important psychological-religious reasons, I did enjoy this new viewpoint:
This is amateur economics, but listen anyway. We’ve had periodic recessions for the entire history of our country, but median earnings rose anyway. They took a small hit during recessions, and then rose more during the subsequent expansions. In 1973 that stopped happening. There are lots of reasons for this, but I think oil is a big and underappreciated one. It has made the global economy far less stable than in the past, and ordinary workers generally don’t do well in an unstable world.
So that’s another reason to take decarbonization seriously: it would return us to a more stable global economy, which would most likely be good for workers. Shed no tears for the rich, though. They’d do fine. They just wouldn’t gobble up nearly the entire value of economic growth. And in return, for surprisingly little pain, we all get a world that’s safer, more habitable, and economically more stable. What’s not to like?
The point that fossil fuels are an international commodity, and solar, while coming nearly 9 light minutes from the Sun, is really a local resource, is a point that had escaped my attention – and is worth some consideration.
For all the hubbub about there being more jobs in alternative energy industries than in fossil fuels, I have to wonder if this is apples to oranges – or apples to elephants. After all, energy extraction is an ongoing process, requiring labor, everything from manning the oil rigs to running the refineries to scouting for more. Is the extraction effort in the alternate energy industries as labor intensive? Is the labor numbers being cited expected to have some staying power, or are we seeing an installation hump and soon they’ll fall off? The couple of popular citations I’ve seen have that taste of, well, amateurism. That is, they may look good today, but wait a couple of days – or couple of years – and they may have changed drastically.
