Oy, this is a doozy. I think President Obama did a nice job summarizing U.S. interests in the Middle East in his speech to the UN General Assembly in 2013:The gist of it was this:The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests. . . . We will confront external aggression against our allies and partners. . . . We will ensure the free flow of energy. . . . We will dismantle terrorist networks that threaten our people. . . . And finally, we will not tolerate the development or use of weapons of mass destruction..
How fast can we transition to a low-carbon energy system?
The total value of all this infrastructure is on the order of US$10 trillion, or nearly two-thirds of US gross domestic product. Nothing that huge and expensive will be replaced in a year, or even a few years. It will take decades.
Yet there is good news, of a sort, in the fact that all infrastructure eventually wears out. A 2010 study asked: what if the current energy infrastructure were simply allowed to live out its useful life, without being replaced?
The surprising answer: if every worn-out coal-fired power plant were exchanged for solar, wind or hydro, and every dead gas-powered car replaced with an electric one, and so on, we might just stay within our planetary boundaries.
According to the study, using the existing infrastructure until it falls apart would not push us past the 2 degrees Celsius global warming that many scientists see as the upper limit of acceptable climate change.
The problem, of course, is that we aren’t doing this yet. Instead, we’re replacing worn-out systems with more of the same, while drilling, mining and building even more.
.. In Queensland, Australia, over 20% of homes now generate their own electricity. This example suggests the possibility that a “tipping point” toward a new social norm of rooftop solar has already been reached in some places. In fact, a recent study found that the best indicator of whether a given homeowner adds solar panels to a house is whether a neighbor already had them.
What Most People Don’t Understand About Climate Change
The “global energy system represents something over $20 trillion in capital investment, which ordinarily would turn over on a timescale of 30 or 40 years. There is no way to rebuild the energy system overnight—it’s too big, too costly to do that,” Holdren told me.
.. And as a result of that, we are not even today experiencing the full consequences of what we’ve already added to the atmosphere. If we stopped adding greenhouse gases today, the global temperature would continue to coast upward to close to 1.5 degrees until it stopped.”
Bill Gates Expected to Create Billion-Dollar Fund for Clean Energy
As secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged that developed countries would send $100 billion annually to poor countries by 2020 to help them pay for the energy transition. Indian officials have demanded that the Paris deal lock in language that the money would come from public funds — a dealbreaker for rich countries.