Senator Bernie Sanders has the most extreme climate plan among his rivals. If you don’t have doubts about its feasibility politically and economically, then you better read the plan. We have a summary below taken from MIT’s analysis published in Technology Review.
The plan restricts tools that could help rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions, including nuclear power and technologies that can capture carbon dioxide, an MIT analysis shows.
In comparison, Elizabeth Warren has a ($3 trillion) plan for climate change. But it’s hard to see how her bold proposals would pass even if she does win the presidency, MIT asserts.
Pete Buttigieg’s $2 trillion climate plan is infeasible but less so than most. He is not as progressive on the issue and will allow some fracking and nuclear [the cleanest of energy sources.]
THE $16 TRILLION BEHEMOTH
Sanders’ plan by way of comparison will cost $16 trillion and is the Green New Deal of AOC It will eliminate emissions from the US power sector, as well as all ground transportation, within a decade.
To pull it off, he will have the government play a much larger role in the electricity sector. In other words, he is basically nationalizing it. His plan would direct new or expanded federal agencies to build nearly $2.5 trillion worth of wind, solar, geothermal, and energy storage projects.
The plan would also force major changes in the fossil-fuel sector, including ending federal subsidies, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels [This has gotten us off foreign fuel and become a major source of income for the USA]. He plans to fund his program with lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry after he directs federal agencies to look for violations.
Sanders will spend more than $2 trillion to help families and small businesses improve the energy efficiency of their homes, buildings, and operations; and more than $1 trillion to retrofit or construct bridges, roads, water systems, and coastal protections in ways that will stand up to harsher climate conditions.
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It is AOC’s Green New Deal.
CONTROL OF EVERY SECTOR
He says the plan will create 20 million jobs while offering wage guarantees, job training, and other assistance to displaced energy workers. Sanders presents no evidence of that in his plan.
His Green New Deal will go well beyond climate. He will spend on affordable housing and rural economic development while enhancing protections for civil rights, environmental justice, and labor.
Sanders says he’d immediately put the US back into the Paris climate agreement. He’d also work with world leaders to redouble efforts to prevent 1.5 ˚C of warming. That will bring us back before the Industrial Age.
Bernie wants to spend $200 billion to help developing nations build clean energy and climate adaption projects.
Sanders’s plan would require renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal to provide all the nation’s electricity by 2030. To ensure the reliability of the grid he wants to spend more than $500 billion on modern transmission and distribution systems. He has also proposed a $30 billion research and development effort to create cheaper and longer-lasting forms of energy storage.
To decarbonize ground transportation in the next decade, Sanders wants to spend more than $3.6 trillion to help households, businesses, cities, and schools replace their cars, buses, and trucks with electric vehicles.
He plans to invest $100 billion in research funding to cut the costs of electric vehicles and $150 billion on the much tougher task of cleaning up airplanes and ships. On top of all that, he wants to spend $900 billion to expand public transit and high-speed rail, and more than $85 billion to build out a national charging network for electric vehicles.
Other industries: The proposal calls for decarbonizing all sectors of the economy, including manufacturing, by 2050.
TAXES AND BANS
Sanders’s current plan doesn’t specifically mention a carbon tax, but it does say he would force the industry to “pay for their pollution by … massively raising taxes on corporate polluters’ and investors’ fossil fuel income and wealth.”
Sanders will immediately ban fracking. In fact, he already introduced a bill earlier this month that would phase out the practice entirely by 2025.
Sanders’s plan would prevent any new nuclear plants from being built and will enact a moratorium on renewals for existing plants, which would force them to cease operations when licenses expire.
“To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration, or trash incinerators,” he says.
Immediate prohibitions on the energy sources that fuel our vehicles, heat our homes, and power our businesses, before we’ve developed cleaner replacements, will cause major economic disruptions, MIT reports.
Some climate and energy researchers also worry that banning fracking, and hence limiting supplies of natural gas, could end up extending the life of even dirtier coal plants.
There’s a long-running debate in the climate community over whether the US should build more nuclear power facilities or not. But beginning to shut down existing plants, the nation’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, is clearly misguided, MIT declares.
OPINION
Bernie plans to spend us into bankruptcy while basically nationalizing the energy, housing, transportation, education, health, business, and justice sectors. At the same time, he will sue the fossil fuel industry into oblivion, and possibly imprison the people working in the industry. He has said he is willing to have more than top executives prosecuted.
Don’t forget, his free housing and other benefits will be given to anyone who comes into the country illegally, and he promises to keep the borders open.
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