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Government United States Earth

Biden Wants To Make Federal Government Carbon Neutral by 2050 106

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
The Biden administration announced Wednesday it aims to buy its way to a cleaner, cooler planet, spending billions to create a federal fleet of electric vehicles, upgrade federal buildings and change how the government buys electricity. From a report: The executive order President Biden signed leverages Washington's buying power to cut the government's carbon emissions 65 percent by the end of the decade. It lays out goals that would put the federal government on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050 and would add at least 10 gigawatts' worth of clean electricity to the grid.

Under the new approach, federal operations would run entirely on carbon-free electricity by 2030. By 2035, the government would stop buying gas-powered vehicles, switching to zero-emission heavy-duty trucks and cars. A decade after that, most of the buildings owned or leased by the government would no longer contribute to the carbon pollution that's warming the planet. The order also instructs the government to launch a "buy clean" initiative, prioritizing products produced and transported with low greenhouse gas emissions. Sarah Bloom Raskin, a Duke University law professor who served as treasury deputy secretary under President Barack Obama, said in a recent interview that the administration's push to reduce its carbon footprint could ripple across the economy.
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Biden Wants To Make Federal Government Carbon Neutral by 2050 More

Biden Wants To Make Federal Government Carbon Neutral by 2050

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  • Is he planning to be around in 2050?
    • Acting on climate change requires consideration of the world after today's decision makers will be dear. We will all be dead by the time the final effects from our impact on climate change have manifest.

      Once we stop increasing the concentration of greenhouse in the atmosphere, the warming will finish something like 25-50 years after that. But sea level rise will continue for centuries.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      No, but I possibly will, and I'll personally enforce it!

  • Does this include the military? (Score:3)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @07:03PM (#62061021)
    I doubt it, because war is very environmentally unfriendly ... then again, fewer wars would do us (and the world!) a lot of good.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by kick6 ( 1081615 )

      I doubt it, because war is very environmentally unfriendly ... then again, fewer wars would do us (and the world!) a lot of good.

      A case could be made that a great big war that killed off a bunch of us would do the world more good.

      • The problem is that any such war would be likely to go NBC (nuke/bio/chemical), none of which is great for other lifeforms on Earth.
        • It'd give them a fighting chance.

        • Biological, if properly targeted at humans only, can have little negative consequences on environment overall. Nuclear hitting largest population centers (not much nature there) is also pretty efficient at significantly reducing human population without causing much impact on environment. Big population centers would probably be targeted first in a big shootout anyway. There have been a lot of improvements in nuclear weapon yields vs radiation left afterwards in the last 50 years or so. From wikipedia artic

        • There's going to be people that can make the case China already started biological warfare. I'm not saying that's the case, only that there's evidence for a case to be made. Evidence like more people dead from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020. https://news.yahoo.com/2021-us... [yahoo.com]

          There's a case to be made that China is waging chemical warfare on the USA by shipping in tainted recreational drugs. China has been waging economic warfare for a long time as well.

          China isn't the only nation that declared war on the U

          • COVID only got going in the US in earnest in March-April 2020, whereas it's had all of 2021 to do its thing. This isn't evidence of biological warfare.

            Also, assuming COVID is a bioweapon, who says that the Chinese released it? That would have been a hell of an "own goal."

        • Meh, the cockroaches will survive.
    • Indeed. But it is a real problem for USA, which economical model is Keynesian stimulation through military sending. It would be great if ecological conversion can replace that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        That's silly, the main drivers of deficit spending are the social programs and the moronic tax cuts. DoD's latest budget is roughly $750 Billion, the last deficit for 2020 was $984 Billion. The entire size of the U.S. economy is north of $21 Trillion.

    • Just because it is environmentally unfriendly doesn't mean it can't be carbon neutral. In fact, it could be an advantage. Electrification can make it easier to energize an invasion / occupation force as a greater variety of energy types can be utilized to create the electricity. It is also more difficult for a defender to defend their electric supply from an invader's use than other sources in the defender's hands.
      • War destroys objects that have to be rebuilt, costing carbon. Steel, concrete, and wood are far from carbon-neutral.
        • Well, I agree about steel and concrete, but wood is pretty much carbon neutral - remember, AGW isn't about carbon, it's about fossilized carbon.

          Oil and coal are carbon that's been locked away from the atmosphere for hundreds of megayears and is being released now.

          Trees? Carbon locked away for a century, maybe, tops. Mostly for a couple-three decades. So a tree represents carbon taken out of the atmosphere when we were kids, and returned to the atmosphere now.

    • If Biden wanted the US military to produce less CO2 then he had ample opportunity to make that happen when he was a senator, and again as VP. He didn't, so I'm not convinced Biden gives a damn about carbon emissions.

      The US Navy wanted nuclear powered ships, not because they produce less CO2 but because they offer other advantages. Biden and his fellow Democrats have been voting against nuclear powered ships in the Navy for decades. For years the US Navy wanted money to develop a carbon neutral jet fuel b

      • Naval ships have used nuclear reactors successfully for 70+ years. The Army and Air Farce have a more dismal record with the technology. See also: SL-1 (the one-rod wonder reactor that made Chernobyl seem like a paragon of good engineering practice), Fort Greely, and Project Pluto.

        • Naval ships have used nuclear reactors successfully for 70+ years.

          Which makes Democrat refusal to fund more Navy nuclear powered ships an even bigger mistake.

          The Army and Air Farce have a more dismal record with the technology. See also: SL-1 (the one-rod wonder reactor that made Chernobyl seem like a paragon of good engineering practice), Fort Greely, and Project Pluto.

          Those are events that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, not exactly representative of how things are run today. I'm sure the US Navy would be nice enough to train some of their fellow defenders of the nation on how to do nuclear power safely if for some reason there's any question on their skills.

  • 2050? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GodWasAnAlien ( 206300 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @07:20PM (#62061067)

    2030 would have been an aggressive target which would have required the government to take some action. 2050 says that someone will do it later.

    Imagine if JFK aimed for 1990? We would have never made it to the moon.

    The main issue is that no one wants to admit what is needed to be sustainable. We would need to reverse a culture of consumption.
    The only time that we made real improvements was during the 2008 housing drop. People stopped buying stuff. Our current culture requires planned obsolescence. It has been that way since 1950. I think such a change in direction starting in the US is unlikely.

    • 2050 basically says this can be done at little to no extra cost beyond normal replacement of systems when they fail. It is a non-goal.

    • 2030 would have been an aggressive target which would have required the government to take some action. 2050 says that someone will do it later.

      2030 is would have been an aggressive target that would be impossible to reach in any sustainable way and would involve trashing a lot of existing equipment and practices. 2050 says we can do it in a way that embeds practices in the long term rather than yet another short term change that will be undone the next time the manager quits and is replaced and benefit from a replacement strategy rather than a dump and change (which itself is also not a very good practice).

      The main issue is that no one wants to admit what is needed to be sustainable.

      You're not seeing the forest through the

    • The end goal is 2050, but there are multiple subgoals, such as having the government only purchase zero emission vehicles by 2030. I don't think the subgoals are ambitious enough, but they are there.

  • The entire world has agreed to reach net zero for the entire globe by 2050 in the Paris Agreement, including the US.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by BoB235423424 ( 6928344 )

      The Paris Agreement is a worthless piece of paper. It was designed specifically to not be a binding treaty as Obama had no means to secure ratification of such in the Senate. It also has no teeth for any other country. Oddly enough, the US under Trump was the furthest along in reaching the goals specified. Largely due to a shift of electric generation from coal to natural gas from fracking. Something which Biden and the Democrats want to end.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Except that the Paris climate agreement has no real enforcement mechanism, and other countries like China and India seem to be ignoring it completely by building new coal plants to produce electricity. It's greenwashing at its finest... all hype and little action.

  • I want a pony by 2022. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @07:40PM (#62061111) Journal

    and I'll troll slashdot if I don't get one.

  • Does it including all the CO2 produced during the manufacturing of the goods and materials, not just electricity and gas, bought by the Feds? I.e. not just "prioritizing" buying "clean" goods, but also include the CO2 produced in their total. E.g. would they count the CO2 used to produce all the steel and aluminum used in their tanks and planes?

    If not, it is simply outsourcing the CO2 production to somewhere else, then pretend they are carbon neutral.

  • You see this with pensions too. By the time the heavy lifting has to be done or bill comes due they are long gone.

  • Lots of pundits are predicting that by 2030 all the major car manufacturers will only be selling EVs.
    Pretty easy to switch if the old way doesn't exist anymore.

  • https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13... [nap.edu]
    https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
    https://www.epa.gov/newsreleas... [epa.gov]
    https://features.propublica.or... [propublica.org]

    That's like 10 seconds of searching. The federal government is literally above the law, and has pollution issues which would drive any other organization into bankruptcy, then, in the best case, uses taxpayer money to clean it up. In the worst case, it simply retains ownership so that it never has to clean it up.

    I get that this proposal is along some narrow lines, but this is

  • The armored limo the President rides in is called the Beast. He should park the Beast and ride around in an electric car. Lead by example. I would bet Elon would jump at the chance to make a Tesla presidential limo.

  • I'm not sure how this is ever going to really work. Unlike some things, where's there's a broad consensus, with arguments over methodology, there's a large proportion of the law-makers and electorate that simply believe climate change is either A) a hoax, b) Unimportant enough that their profits are a bigger priority or C) Not their problem as they'll all be dead/in heaven (and anyway, their religion says the world is theirs to use and abuse as they please). The odds are that sometime in the next 30 years,

  • https://www.thebalance.com/u-s... [thebalance.com]
    The new budget is $6 trillion.
    It exceeds estimated (generously calculated) revenues by $1.8 trillion. Let's call it $2 trn.
    Oh, and "Most of these revenues come from taxes and earnings from quantitative easing."...that means the government PRINTING money to pay its bills.

    Even the dumb-as-grass Keynesians should see the inflationary effects of that.

    Our federal debt is already $29 trillion.

    Pray, tell me where we're going to get the funds to "buy" our way to carbon-neutrality?

    W

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