Andrew Yang’s climate plan is good on carbon pricing, poor on everything else
Yang commits $3 trillion to residential solar but same money could decarbonize grid entirely
Andrew Yang’s climate platform is misguided. While I like Yang’s basic income Freedom Dividend, and he has many good, if underfunded, planks in his climate platform, his biggest expenditure has a poor climate benefits-to-cost ratio and a few of his approaches to climate change are dangerously wrong.
His carbon fee and dividend is just fine. His land use and transportation budgets and targets are merely adequate. His approach to renewables is very cost-inefficient and the same money could be a lot more impactful.
About $3 trillion, or 62% of his proposed budget, is for home solar loans, which would address perhaps 2% to 5% of US energy consumption annually based on my assessment (although Mark Z. Jacobson asserts the potential is higher). That’s a bad investment, in my opinion. The same amount of money could pretty much decarbonize all primary energy use in the United States with utility-scale wind and solar, a much more effective lever, but possibly less of a vote buyer.
His focus on non-existent forms of nuclear generation — thorium and fusion — for near-term utility-scale generation…
