I love Kamala, but I'M IN FOR GOVERNOR JAY INSLEE

[ancianita]

140. Thanks for your posts. I'm old, too, not a scientist, and with only familiarity on climate issues,

so I do appreciate your knowledge of it. We learn a lot around here from folks like you.

I'm pretty sure that Governor Inslee is "a deeper thinker than his political rhetoric allows," yes.

I also think he can still challenge energy realists and climate nihilists which influence the average American.

I'd like him to publicly echo what Wallace-Wells says:

The project of unplugging the entire industrial world from fossil fuels is intimidating and must be done by 2040. Many avenues are still wide open if we're not too lazy, blinkered and selfish to try them.

Some examples of unnecessary practices:

-- Half of British emissions come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, clothing
-- Two thirds of American energy is wasted
-- Americans subsidize fossil fuel at $5 Trillion each and every year
-- Americans waste 1/4 of their food, which makes each meal's carbon footprint 1/3 larger than it has to be
-- Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world's solar panels combined, wiping out gains of several generations of green energy innovation
-- the average citizen of the West produces many times more emissions than anyone in Asia, just out of habit
-- it's not necessary for Westerners to adopt the life of the global poor.
-- 70% of energy produced on the planet is lost as waste heat
-- if the average American were confined to the carbon footprint of European counterparts, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half
-- if the world's richest 10% were to limited to the European footprint, global emissions would fall by 1/3

The problem is, according to climate studies, individual lifestyle choices don't add up to enough unless they are scaled up by politics.

I think Inslee can lead the national mindset to see that without fossil fuel, green energy scaling shouldn't be imposible.

Recent costs of adaptation in the form of green energy have fallen so much that the old cost equation has flipped -- we now know it will be much much more expensive to not act on climate than to take the most radical, aggressive action today. Today.

In 2018, one paper calcaluted the global cost of rapid energy transition by 2030 -- negative $26 Trillion -- yes, it would make us all that much money, compared to our static system -- in only 12 years.

Right now there are carbon capture technologies that take more carbon out of our systems than contribute to it, "anti-industrial" plants which are expensive at $30,000 each. To match the amount of carbon we presently emit into the atmosphere would require 100 million of them at a cost of $30 Trillion, or roughly 40% of global GDP. To reduce carbon by 20 parts per million per year would require 1 billion of them, $300 Trillion, or four times our total global GDP.

The cost will likely fall. A 2018 paper by David Keith demonstrated a method for removing carbon at $94 per ton to neutralize our 32 gigatons of global emissions -- the cost would be $3 Trillion.

If that sounds expensive, remember that we already pay fossil fuel industries $5 Trillion per year. AND we just gave the U.S.'s richies a $2.3 Trillion tax cut.

We in the U.S. and the world can afford what we want to afford. Turning from our cascading disasters is entirely within human control. How slowly, thoroughly or well we do it is up to us.

After this election, we will never be able to say to our children and grandchildren that we didn't know.

We do know.