Hoax or no hoax, climate action is in our best interest

John Stewart had a great rant on it.  CNN and Fox have beaten it worse than bowl opponents beat the SEC.  Facebook had meme after meme on both side of the issue.  Being stuck inside most of the last couple of days, most could not ignore the story of the year thus far...

Global warming is a hoax because it's so cold in part of the country.

I can discuss (and have discussed...as have many others) how this extreme weather may actually follow from arctic warming, or how Australia finds itself in an intense heatwave, or how climate has to do with long term weather patterns, not short term ones.  But none of that really means anything anymore because all of the actions required to address human-caused climate change are in our best interest economically and socially.

On the economic front, renewable energy sources prove a better investment than new fossil fuel or nuclear sources on the utility scale.  This stands true even in the Midwest where especially solar has had a rough ride.  Both carry some risks, but the risks associated with the cost of commodity in fossil fuel plants greatly outweigh the risks of availability of solar and wind.  Energy efficiency (including the alternative use of renewable sources such as using sunlight for daylight in buildings or providing heating and cooling using geo-exchange thermal storage) trumps them all economically, providing a perpetual return on investment.

Socially, the inequity surrounding the availability and environmental damage associated with energy use exacerbates the gap between the haves and have nots.  Power plants, mines, and wells site near poor communities because the demand for this property gets driven down by the presence of these assets.  This puts only those who cannot afford to live elsewhere at risk.  Especially with assets like coal fired electricity plants, coal mines, and natural gas/oil fracking wells, the local environmental damage placed an extra burden both socially and economically on the communities.  Moving away from these technologies would remove this additional burden, and provide those most at risk with the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

There is no downside to investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency.  To those who scoff at the potential level of investment, we can show how similar levels of investment in the digital economy paid dividends.  To those who fear the loss of jobs in the industries affected, we can show how the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries have higher jobs per dollar than any of the non-renewable industries.  To those who decry the subsidies that would be required for some of these technologies, we can show the higher level of direct and indirect subsidies that the supposedly mature industries in fossil fuels enjoy.

Switching to an all-renewable energy economy requires the solving of many problems, but none of them insurmountable.  We can continue the development of storage technologies to address intermittency, and adjust load timing to improve the matching of source availability to load.  The only issue we really need to overcome is social: we need to stop finding reasons to argue and start to look at the plain numbers if we act or we do not act.  If we act, and all of this was just hype, we have a more resilient economy with little to no risk of pollution.  If we do not act, and the worst of this becomes real, it will not matter that we were right.  We might be dead right as a species.