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Climate Change – Transition from Fossil Fuels and Chewing the Elephant [1]

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Date: 2022-08-03

Quick stats on delivery infrastructure - multiple sources

This post is quick to intro some of the challenges for moving from fossil fuels, we need to get moment on “What” and “How” to transition. This is a part of the whole but “delivers” quite the challenge on it’s own!

We absolutely need to get to NetZero by 2025… probably 2030. All fossil fuel using contraptions need to be converted or replaced by 2025… since that won’t happen I’ll move to the next impossible date of 2030. This is a monumental task, like trying to eat an elephant sized dung heap in one sitting – you have to eat it one chuck a time. I’m throwing this quick post into the pool to prod this subject!

The chunk I’m highlighting here is the infrastructure that brings us all the stuff we need to live and consume. Check the quick table I put together from google. All this infrastructure needs to be converted or replaced by 2030. All of it. My table is a quick mashup to get into the ballpark, and it shows this is NOT a small task! Think about this for a second – we have to replace over 15 million trucks including 2 million semis in 8 years – or somehow convert all the existing ones to electrical or hydrogen fuel!!! How would we go about this?

This is a HUGE task – so we need a plan… then need execute the plan. How should be we do this? All at once? 16% per year for 8 years? Do one part (Locomotives) first, then the next? All these plans are probably waaaaay to simple as this infrastructure keeps us all alive by delivering food, medicine, vital supplies, as well as a unlimited amount of consumer stuff (junk). It would take a team of experts to figure this out, and they only have about 6 months to do it, or by the end of the year. This doesn’t even begin to cover how to run a project this large – and this is just one large task of many. Could we do this? Yes. But what about everything else that needs to be done?

Converting the transportation infrastructure is just one huge task of many – we also have to replace 11K power plants, 290 million cars, all farm machinery, all home non-electric mowers and snow-blowers, build a nation spanning electrical grid that could handle a much higher load!!!!! ETC. ETC. ETC. Someone needs to at least get their arms around the problem and scope it and figure out all the tasks, then we need to put them in to an overall plan.

So we need an overall plan, of which this is just one piece…. If we magically got the backing to save humanity from itself, and especially the 1% hell-bent and killing us all, how would we do it? Do we have a plan, even a concept? Have we scoped the problem at all, broke it down into chunks? Decided on resourcing? This foundational work needs to be done, at least to the point we could all agree the broad outline would work. The whole detailed planning and resourcing has to be done, but we need an overall plan…. Pretty much yesterday….

On a slight serious note. Does such a plan exist for the US or the world? If not, then the whole climate emergency community fighting for change is like a high revving motor w/o a clutch to engage. And to make this even harder: A great plan only comes from a great leader with a great staff — to get something this monumental done takes a REAL LEADER with a REAL STAFF and we have neither. But I would settle for a good high level plan that could be implemented as the first GRAND STEP or 1st Grand Objective…..

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/3/2114118/-Climate-Change-Transition-from-Fossil-Fuels-and-Chewing-the-Elephant

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