The transition to environmental sustainability is underway, but it won’t be easy
Transitions are never easy. Sometimes they are going on without us being aware of them. When New York City switched from a manufacturing to a service economy, we lost 1 million people and 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Landlords lost their buildings to the city because they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay property taxes, and some burned down their buildings to get insurance. People predicted the end of New York City. Few understand that we are in the midst of a technology-driven transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. At the nadir of the transition, more than 2,000 homicides occurred in one year. Our public spaces are broken, and drugs and crime are rampant.to the turn of the 21stYingshi Economic transition has been widely understood for centuries. Finance, media, healthcare, tech businesses, education and tourism have replaced manufacturing. We no longer make clothes in New York City, we design and sell them here. New York City is widely regarded as one of the most important global cities in the world.
Developed countries have already begun transitioning to economies based on renewable resources, but when switching from one economic model to another, those who benefit from the status quo will resist change and sometimes succeed in delaying the future. But in the end, technology affects economic life; economic life affects cultural and social life, and ultimately, all of these affect politics. The changes that technology has brought to our world has accelerated the pace of transformation, but not its ultimate trajectory. A planet of over 8 billion people consuming at our consumption rate would eventually make one-time use of the planet’s resources too costly and damaging to sustain. The transition to environmental sustainability is underway, but it will never be smooth and easy.
inside New York Times last week, david gellers The report said:
“In the fight against global warming, the federal government is pouring a record $370 billion into clean energy, and President Biden wants the nation’s electricity to be 100% carbon-free by 2035many states and utilities plan to increase wind and solar generation. But while policymakers may be setting lofty goals, the future of America’s electric grid is actually being decided in town halls, county courthouses and community buildings across the country. The only way to achieve Biden’s ambitious goals is to persuade rural communities with large tracts of land to build commercial wind and solar farms to embrace renewable energy projects. Many of them. ”
It is likely that some communities will resist the siting of wind and solar installations, while others will resist the siting of transmission lines. But as Gelles reports in his article, some rural communities are attracted by the economic benefits of renewable energy and favor siting, while others don’t want to disturb their cherished rural environment. No one should be surprised that this is happening, and it doesn’t mean the transition to renewable energy will fail. The Kochs can and will pay for opponents of renewable energy to organize against solar and wind; disinformation spreaders can lie all they want, but fossil fuels will be replaced — it’s only a matter of time.
I am surprised that some of the news about the renewable energy transition does not discuss the possibility of technological innovation and breakthroughs: Gelles insists:“ if only If rural areas can be persuaded to build thousands of wind and solar farms, Biden’s carbon reduction goals will be met. That’s assuming we don’t see breakthroughs in solar, wind, batteries, and possibly fusion within the next decade. Maybe home energy systems will replace the grid for most people, reducing the need for thousands of solar and wind farms.this New York Times The report also assumes that we cannot locate some of these facilities in suburban or even urban areas. Solar panels can be built on top of parking lots. Lots of malls are struggling – maybe they’ll put solar or wind on their roofs or parking lots. There are many ways to achieve our 2035 goals.Rural siting is not if only way to decarbonize. If we don’t have zero carbon emissions until 2040, or get below 10% carbon emissions by 2050, I think we should still be credited for successfully making the transition.
Stories About Rural Site Selection Second-rate Far from the only news coverage about the transition to environmental sustainability.inside wall street journall On January 1, 2023, two front page stories headlined: “Shift to EVS sparks biggest auto factory building boom in decades” with “Surging costs threaten U.S. offshore wind buildout.” The first article focuses on multi-billion dollars of new auto manufacturing capacity, primarily invested in the southern US, and the second article focuses on inflation and supply chain issues that, while probably not ending, will delay offshore wind construction. Economic transformation is complicated and difficult, and we should expect to see more examples of two advances and one retreat. But who could have predicted the amount of private capital investing in electric vehicles right now?
It is important that we understand what public policy can do and how policy initiatives actually work. Public policy doesn’t solve the problem — it just makes it less bad. Public policy is remedial, sequential, and progressive. There are many steps to take to solve the problem at hand. Each step teaches us something that informs the next step we take. Homicides in New York City provide a textbook case of public policy impact. At its peak in 1990, we saw 2,245 homicides in New York City. At its nadir in 2017, homicides fell to 192. Homicides rose to 488 in 2021, but in the past year (2022), They drop again to 418. But even in 2017, all the policing and social progress of the past 30 years has failed to deliver perfect public safety. Nearly 200 families lost loved ones. I expand on this to illustrate that our goal must be progress, not perfection. New York City’s success in reducing homicides hasn’t come without a hitch, and it’s far from costless. Government decarbonization targets and public funding are intended to stimulate private investment and action. How quickly this will happen is unpredictable, but funding and targets are already influencing private sector investment.
Moreover, the $370 billion the federal government is pumping into the green economy virtually guarantees that technologies that aren’t ready for the commercial market will get there faster because the federal government’s thumb is tipping the balance of benefit-cost.Predicting the Energy Future Based on Exclusive Use current Technology necessarily leads to inaccurate forecasts. Yet it’s just as absurd to think we can run our economy without a generation-long transition to fossil fuels. The realities of climate change require government intervention to accelerate the transition, but there are inherent limits to the speed of such large-scale transitions. Deploying funds takes a while. Organizations that know how to operate a technology need to learn how to operate a new technology. In the end, the people who benefit from the current system will do everything in their power to resist change. In conclusion, we will continue to use fossil fuels for longer than we would like.
Fortunately, reality has a way of correcting ideological illusions. Fossil fuels are finite, and as Russia recently demonstrated and OPEC taught us half a century ago, these vital resources can be withheld for political purposes. Fortunately, the sun is free and covers the entire planet, and getting energy from it is getting cheaper and more reliable. On a more crowded planet, corporate profits can be impacted by environmental risks, so investors insist on measuring and reporting those risks. The ideological right may consider all these left wing ideologies, but it is a reality of the more crowded and environmentally threatened world we live in.
The transition to environmental sustainability is necessary if we are to maintain and build the high-throughput economies needed to maintain political stability in an economically interconnected and interdependent world. But this shift will alter the physical foundations of the world economy. Due to the challenges of climate change, energy is the first resource to move towards renewables. But others will follow. The transformation has already begun, and the pace of it will be influenced by technology, capital, and public policy.
