A Green New Deal Must Not Sabotage Climate Goals

Recently, 626 organizations — mostly environmental groups, including 350.org and Greenpeace USA — sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to consider a number of principles when crafting climate legislation like a Green New Deal “to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).”  Broadly, there were six major principles in the letter:  Halt all fossil fuel leasing, phase out all fossil fuel extraction, end fossil fuel and other dirty energy subsidies; transition power generation to 100 percent renewable energy; expand public transportation and phase out fossil-fuel vehicles; harness the full power of the Clean Air Act; ensure a just transition led by impacted communities and workers; and uphold indigenous rights.

These are generally wise goals, but some concerns about the details caused eight major environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund — to decline to sign the letter.  As one national environmental group spokesperson put it, “the details matter … There is some language that gave us some concern.”

To meet climate targets, we need every tool in the chest.  Meeting the Paris climate agreement targets of limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of global warming above pre-industrial temperatures — or even a more dangerous but more feasible 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) — would require massive and immediate global action to reduce fossil fuel consumption and carbon pollution.  Simply put, we’ve already burned through so much of our carbon budget that meeting those targets would take everything we’ve got.  (We’ve already locked ourselves in to close to 1.5 degrees C of warming, just based on greenhouse gas emissions to date.)

But the letter includes language that rules out some zero-carbon technologies.  For example, it states, “in addition to excluding fossil fuels, any definition of renewable energy must also exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large scale hydro and waste-to-energy technologies.  To achieve this, the United States must shift to 100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.”

The listed energy sources all have pros and cons, and groups concerned about their non-climate environmental impacts could certainly make the case for eventually phasing out each one.  But the United States currently gets about 32 percent of its electricity generation from natural gas, 30 percent from coal, 20 percent from nuclear, 7 percent from hydroelectricity, 6 percent from wind, and 1 percent from solar, in round numbers.  (The remaining few percent come from miscellaneous energy sources such as geothermal, landfill gas, wood, and others.)  Were nuclear and hydroelectric power to be eliminated as energy sources at the same time as all fossil fuels, that means that the United States would have to replace its top four electricity sources (nearly 90 percent of its supply) within about 15 years.

Simply replacing all forms of fossil fuels alone (63 percent of the supply) with zero-carbon technologies within this short time frame would already be an immense task.  And the figures here are strictly referring to what it is required for electricity generation in the United States; they don’t even account for other voracious energy-consuming sectors like transportation — which bring the fossil-fuel share of the U.S. economy up to 80 percent, plus another 9 percent from nuclear and 7 percent from hydroelectric power and biomass.  Why make the already gargantuan task so much more difficult?

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