Michigan House passes climate change reform, mandating clean energy by 2040

www.bridgemi.com Michigan House passes climate change reform, mandating clean energy by 2040 | Bridge Michigan

A divided Michigan House passes legislation requiring utilities to draw 100 percent of their energy from clean sources by 2040. That's a later timeline than environmentalists had sought — and foes say it will raise rates — but many say the reform is overdue.

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That's only checks notes 10 years after we're all fucked.
- The final deadline is 2040. It means steady decarbonization between now and then, not "do nothing, then suddenly switch"
  
  I'm sure governments will treat this with as much urgency as they've been the past 2 decades or so. Whatever they're planning, it's not happening fast enough and with the biggest offenders not even approaching the table to discuss a solution, I'm not optimistic 2040 is feasible.
  
  It might be, but i don’t think this bill lncludes revoking the corporate charter of Shell, Exon, and BP so the govemrnt can put thier assets into a nationalised non profit trust for as long as it takes to dismantle oil demand. Anything short of that, and well a few hundred billion dollars of lobbying can go a long way to making things non urgent.
- don't worry, they will move it another 10 years further!
  
  Maybe for a long tail - but I think there were a few reports from other places that phaseout can happen faster than expected :) I am just worried that fossil prices drop because nobody buys them, making it super cheap again.
  
  It could happen quickly, in theory. Energy also could have been largely decarbonised by 2010, in theory. France accidentally decarbonized most of thier grid in the 70s after all, and we’ve had scientific consensus that it needed to be done urgently since about then aswell. Better panels, heat pumps, and batteries help, but we’re never necessarily. Instead, we built massive numbers of brand new coal plants and we have since added far more carbon to the atmosphere knowingly in the last fifty years than we had in all of human history before that.
  There is no magic here, China for all its fault is set up to produce enough solar panels next year to power the entire US grid, and do so every year thereafter for decades to come. Electric cars make up over seventy percent of new car purchases in Norway. There is no magic reason the US and Canada couldn’t have done the same.
  Companies like Shell and BP can’t exsist in 30 years, at least not as anything larger than a specialty lubricant supplier, and they know it. They also know that thier jobs depend on the company growing, no matter the cost. They will spend whatever it takes for each delay, each legal battle, massively fund any hate group, take as many politicians to fancy dinners where they lie their asses off about a green transition, so long as it buys just one more day of profits.

8 comments