Studies
America 3.0 The Resilient Society
America 3.0 The Resilient Society: A team of experts including economist Skip Laitner and sustainability expert Jeremy Rifkin have sent Sen. Chuck Schumer this extensive plan for long-term investment in America’s infrastructure. They calculate the plan would produce as many as 22 million net new jobs by 2042 while reducing climate-related disaster costs by $6.2 trillion.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report on Aug. 7, 2021, offering conclusive evidence that climate change is accelerating and caused by human influences. “The evidence for climate change rests on more than just increasing surface temperatures,” it says. “A broad range of 11 indicators collectively leads to the inescapable conclusion that we are witnessing rapid changes to many 12 aspects of our global climate. We are seeing changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere. Our scientific understanding depicts a coherent picture of a warming world.”
State of the Climate in 2020
While it got less attention than the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NOAA issued the annual State of the Climate report on August 25, 2021, detailing indicators of climate change in 2020. The report includes contributions from 530 scientists from more than 60 countries. 2020 was the warmest year on record without an El Nino effect, the authors said. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations rose to 412.5 parts per million, the highest on record. Sea-level rise grew to record levels, and extreme heat hit Antarctica.
Climate Change is Happening Now
After a four-year delay, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has resumed its reports on climate change indicators. The latest report contains data from more than 50 government agencies, academic institutions, and other organizations. The indicators focus on climate change in the U.S. but include data on trends that are global, such as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The updated indicators include information on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, weather and climate, oceans, snow and ice, health and society, and ecosystems.
Accelerating the US Clean Energy Transformation
Researchers at CU Boulder’s Renewable & Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) on Thursday released a report outlining key steps the U.S. can take to drive carbon dioxide emissions to zero. The report, Accelerating the U.S. Clean Energy Transformation: Challenges and Solutions by Sector, explains why urgent and comprehensive action is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change; describes low- and zero-carbon solutions in the electricity, buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors; and presents policy options for each. It also provides an overview of technologies that have the potential to remove the high levels of carbon dioxide that humankind has already added to the atmosphere.
Resetting the Course of EPA:
This report is part of the Resetting the Course of EPA project by the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a bipartisan network of more than 500 former EPA career employees and political appointees across the country who served under multiple Democratic and Republican administrations. Resetting the Course of EPA outlines specific and actionable steps that EPA leadership can take to reset the course of the agency to address the most significant and pervasive threats to public health and our environment. As there is no single roadmap, EPN looks forward to collaborating with others to advance the dialogue around the future of EPA and set ideas into motion that will better protect the health and wellbeing of everyone. Additional Resetting the Course of EPA documents are available here: https://www.environmentalprotectionnetwork.org/reset. For more information, please contact EPN at reset@environmentalprotectionnetwork.org
Virtually Decarbonize the American Economy by 2035:
It’s possible to virtually decarbonize the American economy by 2035. The solution is the complete electrification of society using technologies that already exist. Author Saul Griffith explains how this could be done in a handbook, “Rewiring America“. Download is free, although a contribution is requested. For an explanation of the idea, go to David Robert’s August 6, 2020, article on Vox. Save
Popular support for green industrial policies:
The World Resources Institute says the United States must invest up to $6 billion per year in federal funding for carbon removal over the next Popular support for green industrial policies: Data for Progress and the McHarg Center have surveyed Americans to see if they support a green industrial policy consistent with the Green New Deal. They found broad support for a massive investment in green technology, including a trillion-dollar investment.”Broadly speaking,” the researchers explained, “we wanted to know if Americans were ready for a form of green industrial policy that is transformative in its scale; includes concrete technologies to immediately improve Americans’ lives; brings more Americans into the production of green technology through union jobs and higher education; and makes global trade more fair.” A majority of respondents, 51%, said they support a trillion-dollar investment in green technology.
Federal Funding For Carbon Removal
The World Resources Institute says the United States must invest up to $6 billion per year in federal funding for carbon removal over the next 10 years in order to meet the 2050 emissions reduction goals in the U.S. Mid-century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization, a plan the Obama Administration submitted to the United Nations in compliance with the Paris climate accord. WRI’s paper provides “a consolidated set of high-priority, near-term federal policy options to advance carbon removal capabilities and deployment in the United States”. This paper is the fourth installment of WRI’s publication series, CarbonShot: Creating Options for Carbon Removal at Scale in the United States.
A Guide to Emergency Powers and Their Use
The Brennan Center for Justice has identified 123 statutory powers that may become available to the President of the United States if he or she were to declare that climate change is a national emergency. An additional 13 statutory powers become available when a national emergency is declared by Congress. The Center’s research on these 136 powers is presented in this guide.
Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century
Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century – The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has released these recommendations to improve the resilience of our democracy by 2026, the nation’s 250th anniversary. The co-chairs are Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; Stephen Heintz, President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and Eric Liu, President and CEO of Citizen University.
The 2035 Report
The 2035 Report – Most conversations about net-zero carbon electricity contemplate reaching that goal by 2050. This report from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley uses the latest cost data on renewable energy and battery storage to show that it is technically and economically possible to achieve 90% carbon-free electricity in the United States by 2035.