“North Carolina conservatives support energy innovation” (Aug. 23) says,“It’s time to focus on the billions of dollars of economic investment, the tens of thousands of jobs, and the cleaner, more affordable power” clean energy has produced in the state.
And that’s just the beginning: Solar and wind power are now cheaper than any fossil fuel and their prices drop substantially every year (forbes.com, lazard.com). Scaled up nationwide, they’ll be “essentially free” by 2030 (Financial Times, UBS Aug 2018) creating over 8 million high-wage, local, permanent (40-year) jobs in the US (Stanford University’s solutionsproject.org).
A rapid national transition to solar and wind energy won’t have to cost us anything either.
A new, detailed version of the Green New Deal’s energy program shows that two-thirds of the cost can be paid by private investment (vox.com May 18, 2019). The final third or the cost will be massively counterbalanced by a $500 billion annual increase in US GDP (IPCC), mainly because of all that free energy and those millions of new jobs.
But if we don’t act now, “catastrophic” climate change will destroy the US economy in the decades to come (IPCC). We only have until 2030 to make massive greenhouse emissions cuts if we are to prevent that (National Academy of Sciences). The costs to the US economy of doing nothing are estimated at over $160 trillion in future climate disasters (Forbes, April 2019).
Just a half-degree increase in average global temperature will cost the US over $13 trillion (National Academy of Sciences).
“The Green New Deal is affordable; The cost of inaction are incalculable” — Forbes
Pete Kuntz
Lancaster, Pennsylvania