The USFG ought to prioritize the development of clean energy over (continued...)

The resolution states, “The USFG ought to prioritize the development of clean energy over continuing support for traditional energy sources.” There are doubtlessly infinite ways to uphold this resolution, but many are tragically indefensible. For instance, the USFG could pass law requiring that all oil rigs are disassembled with the parts scraped for use in windmill infrastructure. A debate reduced to arguing about such absurd scenarios would lack true substance and ultimately teach us nothing. Thus, I will propose a single scenario which I believe well supports the resolution.Scenario: 1) The USFG shall institute a flat $40/ton carbon tax 2) The income generated by this tax will be put into a renewable grant fund 3) The national science foundation (NSF) will oversee the renewable grant fund, they will award grants to applicants (industry & academia) based on proposal calls. That is, to be awarded a grant, applicants must submit a detailed proposal which indicates that their work holds a high likelihood of contributing to the USFG renewable energy portfolio. Specific implementation details will be left up to the NSF. The NSF is well versed in this area, as they handle ~40,000 proposals each year and award ~11,000 of them from a $7.7 billion-dollar budget [1]. I will argue the utility of this plan based on three primary contentions: The risks associated with climate change are immense. In 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their 5th global assessment report [2]. Within the report, compiled by climate experts around the world, they examine various projections which account for how well humanity can address climate change in the coming years. The projections are alarming. In the most conservative scenarios, where humanity takes significant action to curtail carbon emissions, various species and ecosystems face extinction. Less conservative scenarios suggest disproportionate impacts on arctic sea ice and coral reef ecosystems, both of which show intolerance to continued ocean acidification. That is, without drastic action to curb climate change, multiple biodiversity hotbeds face an existential threat. The direct projected impacts on humanity are not better and tend to disproportionately affect impoverished populations. In conservative projections, the risk of heat waves, coastal flooding, and typhoons is already rated as “high”. The moderate projections, accounting for moderate increases in surface temperature ~1-2 °C, anticipate the advent of extreme heat events which threaten crop production, water availability and terrestrial biodiversity. These projections, as well as the more extreme projections, predict aggregate economic damages from sustained public health crisis, food loss, and biodiversity loss. Although these projections are disturbing, the most chilling aspect of the IPCC report is the possibility of “large-scale singular events”. That is, some systems may be at risk for sudden and potentially irreversible transitions. A distinct possibility is that, as permafrost continues to melt, carbon and methane trapped underneath the topsoil will be released into the atmosphere. Sufficient release of these greenhouse gasses may cause a runaway feedback cycle in which permafrost melts increasingly fast as gas is increasingly released. A scenario such as this may cause drastic fluctuations in surface temperature well beyond what experts have modeled. A second possibility is that key biodiversity losses may kill off integral species (keystone) and cause a cascading extinction event up the food chain. By their very nature, the risks posed via “large-scale singular events” are difficult to predict; however, the risks foreseeably range from worrisome upwards to large scale global extinction events. Similar projection reports have been authored by numerous think tanks (notably the international energy agency), numerous world governments, the environmental protection agency (EPA), NASA, the UN, and even the pentagon (to name a few). Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has dedicated substantial time to documenting the current impacts of climate change. For the sake of space, I will list only one of these impacts. Ambient outdoor air pollution, largely attributable to continued burning of fossil fuels, kills 3 million people worldwide, annually [3]. The prioritization of clean energy over traditional energy sources can directly save millions of lives worldwide, in the short them. But continued prioritization holds the potential capacity to save billions of lives. Prioritization of the renewable sector creates net job growth. Critics of renewable prioritization like to float the idea that the job-loss associated with traditional energy sources will be catastrophic for the American economy. To evaluate the veracity of this claim we can examine the 2017 Department of Energy report on “Energy and Employment”. I will simply quote a key finding from the report: “Proportionally, solar employment accounts for the largest share of workers in the Electric Power Generation sector. This is largely due to the construction related to the significant buildout of new solar generation capacity. Solar technologies, both photovoltaic and concentrating, employ almost 374,000 workers, or 43 percent of the Electric Power Generation workforce. This is followed by fossil fuel generation employment, which accounts for 22 percent of total Electric Power Generation employment and supports 187,117 workers across coal, oil, and natural gas generation technologies.” This finding reveals that renewable sources (in fact solar alone) outcompete traditional energy sources in terms of jobs created. However, to fairly evaluate this discrepancy, we must also examine how much of our power consumption is derived from each source. This is also found in the 2017 DOE report [4]: The figure is striking in that it depicts how very little of our current power is derived from solar energy. Despite this, the solar sector alone dominates fossil fuels in terms of jobs provided to the American citizen. The data indicates that investment in renewable resources creates jobs much more effectively than investment in traditional resources. This conclusion has been well supported by others. The Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps report has recently estimated that solar and wind jobs are growing at a rate 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy [5]. The World Bank summarizes the point succinctly: an investment of $1 million in Oil & Natural gas will yield 5.2 jobs on average; an investment of $1 million in Solar will yield 13.7 jobs on average [6]. A world with free energy changes everything. There are limits in what humanity can do which we could define as “costs”. Economically speaking, people tend to break down costs into: labor, energy, time, and resources. The beauty of developing sufficiently efficient renewable energies is that the energy cost approaches zero for any given task. With abundant energy, and societies sufficiently advanced in robotics, labor and resource costs will plummet as a result. The question then becomes, what existent scarcities would be alleviated by the advent of free energy? The answers are endless. A simple impact to abundant energy is the alleviation of harmful energy production methods used in impoverished countries. The National Geographic notes that 3.5 million people die each year from respiratory illness due to indoor wood and biomass cook stoves [7]. The article also notes that Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, has 82.4 million people living without electricity. M.I.T. notes that nearly 300 million people in India live without electricity [8]. These are people who face significant difficulty in meeting their basic needs: sanitizing food/water, staying warm at night, storing food. These are people whose needless deaths and low life expectancies could be alleviated by a world with free energy. Abundant energy would also preclude resource wars. A key aspect of renewable energies is that they are not localized (read: oil) – wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric generation can occur in all regions of the world. The life loss associated with continued resource wars perhaps numbers in the hundreds of millions as of this writing, but to understand the necessity we can look at a single resource: oil. As of this writing, the wiki article on “oil wars” documents 11 distinct wars and many more campaigns: http://tinyurl.com.... These wars alone directly killed hundreds of thousands of lives. Perhaps more substantial are the impacts on technological innovation and free time. A world with trivial energy costs minimizes transportation, computation, and robotics costs. It also lowers the cost of basic consumption-goods required for essential needs (e.g. food, water, shelter, clothing, heating, sanitation and even healthcare). This leaves more people and machines with more free time and with more resources to combat global challenges. The impacts are boundless but include: disease cures, new antibiotics, securing off-world colonies, lifespan longevity breakthroughs, and general advances in science that contribute to the quality of life for humanity. I’m not so naïve as to think that the proposed plan alone is going to produce free energy. Free energy isn’t a question of “if”, it is a question of “how soon”. The plan will significantly expedite renewable development (multi-billion dollar investment) and in doing so achieve free energy on a quicker time table. This is important because every year without free energy is a year in which hundreds of millions of people needlessly face low quality of life and death. Sources: [1] http://tinyurl.com... [2] http://tinyurl.com... [3] http://tinyurl.com... [4] http://tinyurl.com... [5] http://tinyurl.com... [6] http://tinyurl.com... [7] http://tinyurl.com... [8] http://tinyurl.com...