CleanTechnica is a well-respected news site that focuses on energy and climate. It used to have much of a Tesla fancruft but has gotten much more balanced.
It runs occasional pieces by outsiders and today it’s got one titled “Climate—& A Cautionary Tale of Three New Hampshire Commissioners” by a regional director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. (Here it is.) It contrasts the “free market will solve everything” approach of the state’s new head of the Department of Energy with the Insurance Commissioner’s very indirect support of federal flood insurance (he urges more people to get private flood insurance, most of which depends on federal backing).
The basic underlying tale is an obvious one: The global climate emergency is too big, too all-encompassing, too complex to be solved by letting everybody pursue their individual profit motive. Like a world war, it requires a large amount of top-down direction by a government which responds to the people through a representative democracy.
Duh.
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Having free market fundamentalists at the helm is bad for New Hampshire in a few ways. Market failures don’t fix themselves. Whether their failure is due to monopoly control or negative externalities, some form of government intervention is required to guide markets back to functioning efficiently. The Roger Stevenson article you link to is a brilliantly written refutation of the opinion that New Hampshire is too small to matter regarding the global climate pollution from fossil fuels problem. Rather than ignoring our contribution to the pollution problem, the state should act responsibly simply because it is the right thing to do. But those who for whom altruism is trumped by greed should look up: The most direct way to address the market’s failure to account for the costs of the pollution from fossil fuels in their price is by charging fossil fuel producers a carbon fee. 23% of global fossil fuels are now under some form of a carbon price, carbon pricing is spreading rapidly, prices are rising, and CBAMs are starting this year. CBAMs will eventually drive a global carbon price from which New Hampshire can not escape. For our state’s own competitive advantage and to save taxpayers and families money, this should be factored into decions being made at all levels now, from giant state energy projects to how NH citizens make decisions when they replace aging cars, furnaces, and stoves. See “Carbon Pricing is Inevitable. New Hampshire Can Prepare” at http://bit.ly/ccb-resources for details.
There is nothing green about lithium. It is not green to mine. It is not green to refine. Then there is no economically affordable way to re-coup lithim at the the end of a battery’s lifecyle. Landfilling lithium batteries is not green.
Charging Litium batteries is not green. Your EV charged in Concord gets its juice from a Coal Fired Power Plant. Then the elephant in the room trumpets, “There is nothing Green about Nuclear Power.”
10% of that which is changing the climate comes from the production of concrete. 28% comes from electricity production. Another 28% comes from industry / manufacturing.
You want to help the environment? You need to de-industrialise. More of “technology’ is not going to make things better, in fact, it stands to pollute our ground water with lithium to a greater extent than carbon has fouled the atmosphere.
Yet, no one is willing to truly cover the subject. Yah fourth estate!