The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [85]
There are bottlenecks in every direction. In the original creation of much of the nation’s infrastructure, federal and state governments used eminent domain to acquire the land and other resources needed to provide the public goods. That has become considerably harder over time. The right of individual landowners and communities to stall projects has stopped abuses but also made it much harder to modernize the infrastructure. Environmentalists are blocking not only coal-fired power plants but low-carbon energy technologies as well. In recent years, environmentalists have fought wind power off Cape Cod, solar power in the Mojave Desert, high-voltage transmission lines to bring renewable energy to New York City, underground sequestration of carbon dioxide at several proposed sites, and nuclear power plant licensing throughout the country.
What will actually be built is now anybody’s guess. Projects can take decades to reach approvals and years or decades more till the first groundbreaking. Until recently the problem was known as NIMBY, Not in My Back Yard. Yet now things are even worse. We’ve arrived at the BANANA economy: Build Absolutely Nothing Anytime Near Anything.
The glaring gap is the lack of a national strategy. There are dozens of bits and pieces of public policy strewn throughout energy legislation, the 2009 stimulus act, transport legislation, and specific tax policies for alternative energy sources and electric vehicles. They do not add up to a coherent strategy. The Obama administration has announced the goal of a 17 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 2005, yet it did not announce any policy to achieve it or even a scenario of how it might be accomplished. Without that, the goals are numbers plucked from thin air, disconnected to the investments in new electricity grids, vehicles, and power plants that could actually get us there.
The transition to a low-carbon energy economy will not be free. Low-carbon energy is more expensive and often less convenient than conventional fossil fuels. Coal can, of course, be burned throughout the day and night, while solar power is available during daylight hours and the wind blows intermittently. Our electricity is currently provided by roughly 50 percent coal, 20 percent nuclear energy, 20 percent natural gas, and the rest mainly by hydropower.21 To move to an energy system that is mainly low-carbon, whether nuclear or renewable energy or coal combined with the capture of CO2 emissions, will probably require an extra $50 or so per ton of CO2 emissions avoided by shifting to cleaner energy. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the total cost of moving to a low-carbon economy would therefore be around $200 billion per year by 2050, compared with a $30 trillion GDP by midcentury, or roughly 0.6 percent of GDP in outlays. Of course, if the low-carbon energy technologies prove to be much less expensive than now or the conventional fossil fuel energy sources rise significantly in price, the incremental costs of shifting to a low-carbon economy could be much less than 0.6 percent of GDP.
My colleagues and I have been designing a gradual transition path to get from here to there, one that would not disrupt fossil fuel—based energy systems in the short term but would enable a dramatic transformation to a low-carbon energy system by 2050.22 The idea is to levy a small tax