The climate plan of Andrew Yang, explained

Most plans to fight climate change do not include the "Take our people to the heights" board, but most of the climate change plans do not come from Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and writer who became a candidate to the presidency.

Yang's signing policy for 2020 is his "Freedom Dividend," a plan that would give every US adult $ 1,000 a month, unconditionally. But he also presented 169 other proposals and this week unveiled a long-term plan on climate change.

Mr Yang is committed to an ambitious timetable for the abandonment of fossil fuels: a zero emissions requirement for all new cars by 2030, a 100% renewable electricity grid. Here in 2035 (it is unclear whether it considers nuclear as "renewable"), net net emissions from transport by 2040 and net net emissions in total. here 2049 (some emissions could still be issued at that time, but they should be offset by negative carbon stocks). It would set a carbon tax of $ 40 per tonne, gradually increasing to $ 100 per tonne, a tax on imports from countries without similar carbon taxes.

It promises $ 4.887 billion of climate-related spending over 20 years, although "climate-related" is a somewhat vague term. Of this total, $ 400 billion comes in the form of government-funded campaign bonds that citizens can use to "wipe out the influence of lobbyists" on oil, gas and coal companies, presumably by a donation to campaigns of aggressive climate advocates. It would terminate all leases for the extraction of fossil fuels on federal lands.

Yang 2020

The timing here is aggressive, which makes sense given recent warnings from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that there is not much time left to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The price is at least lower than that of his rivals for the nomination.

With his Green New Deal, Bernie Sanders has proposed an even more ambitious schedule for halving emissions by 2030 and proposing to spend $ 16.3 trillion over 15 years. Elizabeth Warren called for a moratorium on the extraction of fossil fuels on federal-owned land (though not terminate all existing leases), to purchases worth 1.5 trillion the federal government for a "low-carbon technology made in the United States", development for clean energy and $ 100 billion to subsidize the purchase of our green technology by other countries.

But there are also some distinctive Yang-y touches to the plan. It's a climate plan with a section called "Moving to Higher Ground", saying we need to accept and adapt to the effects of climate change, but also to mitigate them – ideas that you will likely hear about on news sites speculative technologies (and perhaps precursory sites) than in traditional political debates.

Andrew Yang wants to bet big on non-traditional nuclear energy

At the moment, most (but not all) environmentalists have accepted the idea that nuclear energy, at least in existing plants, should be part of the solution to climate change. It is less deadly than coal or natural gas and produces no greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike solar or wind energy, it is not very variable, which means that it can provide energy in a continuous way, even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. But nuclear power has major drawbacks, including the fact that it produces long-lived radioactive waste that must be stored safely for thousands of years.

Yang therefore proposes massive subsidies for two alternatives that are somewhat speculative to traditional nuclear reactors. The first, nuclear fusion, consists of breaking isotopes of hydrogen together at high speed, so that they fuse, releasing energy; It's the same process by which the sun produces heat. The radioactive materials involved in the fusion remain dangerous for decades, not thousands of years, but after decades of effort, no one has found a way to make a "profitable" fusion reactor: it would produce more than energy than necessary heat the reactor up to 100 million degrees Kelvin to cause the fusion reaction in the first place.

That said, a number of physicists and private companies around the world are trying to make fusion energy economically viable, and Yang's plan is designed in the hope that additional subsidies will bring them closer together.

Yang's plan is even more ambitious about the power prospects of thorium. Thorium is a more common element than uranium (and, according to its supporters, easier to extract), but disintegrates into uranium 233, which means that thorium can be used as an initial fuel for a nuclear reactor. Advocates of thorium (and there are many in futuristic circles) argue that thorium reactors will produce much less waste than traditional uranium reactors, and radioactive waste for hundreds of years rather than thousands. d & # 39; years.

Thorium is less speculative than fusion, but it is still in its infancy as a technology. The United States briefly operated an experimental reactor using uranium 233 in the 1960s, and China and India have developing thorium reactors. Yang's plan to invest $ 50 billion in the commissioning of thorium and / or fusion reactors by 2027 could be optimistic, but would no doubt help the United States keep pace with these countries.

Andrew Yang wants to prepare for destiny

About halfway through, Yang's plan begins to explain how we are all going to adapt to the horrors that climate change will engender.

Yang 2020

This section of his plan is called "Moving to Higher Ground" and is based on proposals to move in this direction: to move and adapt humanity so as to be able to cope with climate-related disasters that make previously habitable places uninhabitable .

For example, he calls for:

• $ 40 billion in housing resettlement or housing subsidies, grants and loans for residents of coastal communities who wish to settle in the interior of the land or raise their homes
• $ 30 billion for dykes, water pumps, more absorbent roads and sewers, and other adaptations for flood-prone coastal cities
• $ 25 billion in "pre-disaster disaster mitigation grants" for cyclone and flood-prone regions
• Raising US Forest Service's budget to $ 24.5 billion a year for five years to fight forest fires
• Nationalized fire insurance for high-risk fire zones requiring houses to be built to withstand fire and to re-evaluate this insurance in cases where the area is no longer deemed habitable

This is an unusual posture for a campaign, simply because of its gloominess. Part of the political logic of a Green New Deal involves considering climate action as a promising opportunity that generates jobs, investments and a better quality of life. Yang argues instead that we must accept the fact that climate change is already having an impact and needs to be taken into account and mitigated.

Yang also goes further than most geoengineering campaigns: using experimental technologies to absorb carbon or reduce the amount of sun reaching Earth, to minimize the worst effects of climate change.

Yang 2020

Capturing carbon dioxide directly and planting trees is not very controversial in climate policy circles; the problem, with the first in particular, is cost, not wisdom. "Spatial mirrors", let's say, are much more controversial, especially because they are fundamentally impossible to test. The same goes for aerosol spraying and seeding at sea (Kelsey Piper wrote an article on one of these attempts).

Yang proposes to spend $ 800 million on geoengineering research and hold a world summit to coordinate work on the subject. But it is clear that solar mirrors, for example, should "be studied only as a last resort", and that further research is needed before deciding to actually engage in any of these measures.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you will have an overview of ideas and solutions to meet our greatest challenges: improve public health, reduce human and animal suffering, mitigate catastrophic risks, humanly manage the scourge of wild pigs and, to put it mildly simply, get better doing good.