Building the New American Economy by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Author:Jeffrey D. Sachs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL024000, Political Science/Public Policy/Economic Policy, POL044000, Political Science/Public Policy/Environmental Policy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

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A SMART ENERGY POLICY FOR THE UNITED STATES

Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Without ample, safe, and low-cost energy it is impossible to secure the benefits of modern life, a point underscored by Sustainable Development Goal 7 to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” For two centuries, fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—offered the key to America’s and the world’s growing energy needs. Now, because of global warming, we have to shift and shift rapidly to a new low-carbon energy system.

Despite considerable hullabaloo, there is nothing very mysterious about the world’s energy challenge. The Earth and moon are about the same distance from the sun, but the Earth is about 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the moon because of the Earth’s atmosphere, which traps energy from the sun and thereby warms the Earth. The heat-trapping effect of the atmosphere is called the greenhouse effect.

It’s been known for about 150 years that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the “greenhouse gases” that contribute to the greenhouse effect. It’s been known for 120 years that burning fossil fuels adds to the CO2 in the atmosphere and thereby warms the planet. And it’s been known with considerable precision for at least thirty years that atmospheric CO2 is increasing rapidly and thereby causing global warming. The year 2015 was the warmest on instrument record (dating back to 1880), and 2016 was warmer than 2015.

For this reason, every nation in the world, including the United States, agreed in December 2015 in Paris to shift from a high-carbon energy system based on coal, oil, and gas to a low-carbon energy system based mainly on wind, solar power, hydroelectric power, nuclear energy, and geothermal power. The Paris Climate Agreement, which went into force in November 2016, is part of the sustainable development agenda as SDG 13. The Paris agreement aims to keep human-caused global warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius” (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and to aim for no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), all measured relative to the Earth’s temperature at the start of the fossil fuel era (around 1800). The warming of the Earth up to 2016 is already around 1.1 degrees Celsius, more than halfway to the globally agreed upper limit.

President Trump rejected climate science on the campaign trail and is surrounded by oil and gas interests. He seems intent, at the start of his administration, on turning the clock backward on climate policy, and has even threatened to pull the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. This is certainly an issue where Americans will have to take a stand, to put the common good ahead of the narrow interests of the oil and gas lobby. The climate risks are so dire, the technological opportunities for energy transformation so positive, and the global urgency and consensus so clear, that any reversal of U.S. policy would necessarily be short-lived, though deeply frustrating and costly.

Moreover, climate policy and infrastructure policy are deeply intertwined. When we

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