Low Carbon USA the Easy Way by Dennis Peterson

Please find below the judging results for your proposal.

Finalist Evaluation

Judges'' comments

Thank you for participating in the 2015 Climate CoLab United States' Climate Action Plan contest, and for the time you spent in creating your entry.

The Judges have strongly considered your proposal, and have chosen to not advance it as a Finalist for this contest.

We, the Judges and contest Fellows, are truly grateful for your contribution to the Climate CoLab and for your commitment to address climate change.

We encourage you to keep developing your work and to submit it into future contests, which will open in the fall and winter of 2016. In the meantime, you can keep developing your work by transferring it to the Regional Climate Action Plan Workspace (http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1302801); here you can re-open it, make edits, and add collaborators. You can do so by logging into your account, opening your proposal, selecting the Admin tab, and clicking “Copy proposal”. Once the 2016 contests open, you can use this same feature to move your proposal to an open contest.

We very much hope you will stay involved in the Climate CoLab community. Please support and comment on other proposals on the platform and continue to submit your ideas into our contests.

If you have questions, please contact the Climate CoLab staff at admin@climatecolab.org

Keep up the great work. And thank you again for being a part of this mission to harness the world’s collective efforts to develop and share innovative climate change solutions.

All the best,
2015 Climate CoLab Judges

Comments from the Judges:

Comment 1:

This is a collection of proposals with variable levels of clarity and feasibility. The most specific and detailed attention is paid to the nuclear components, which many climate scenarios suggest could play a significant role in moving to a low carbon future. However, little attention is provided to the increasingly strong objections to building nuclear facilities -- or to the costs associated in its development and deployment.

The lack of adequate evaluation of political, technical and financial barriers (and proposals for how to overcome them) is also found in other elements of the proposal. In the case of the cryptocurrency, even Bitcoin (the most commonly used currency) has a relatively limited value of several billion only -- hardly enough to build even a single nuclear reactor, much less dozens or hundreds. The author also suggests that the key is to get government out of the way -- yet many of the proposals rely on government regulation to be workable. Thus, for example, while I like the idea of the use of driverless vehicles (enabling fewer cars to be built and more efficient ones to be run), I am not sure that this model will adequately address consumer preference (much less safety or even environmental performance) without government regulation.

Noting these significant caveats, there are some interesting ideas here, including those of driverless vehicles, expansion of our nuclear fleet, and biochar. Collectively, they could make a significant dent in global emissions. More work would be needed to make a clearer presentation of how to overcome operational barriers to implementation if this is to move forward.

Comment 2:

The proposal does not hang together as a self-reinforcing strategy. Rather, it seems more like a grab bag of interesting and provocative ideas.

Comment 3:

I like the various aspects of this proposal, though it really reads like several separate proposals, with the Climatecoin piece being the largest, and the nuclear reactor piece the second largest.

The Climatecoin piece is very innovative and compelling and I like the idea of it becoming a way to encourage carbon removal and sequestration in particular. Extending it into a larger social safety net/basic income argument feels like a stretch, and beyond the reasonable/feasible bounds of this exercise. I am also not clear after reading the proposal exactly how this system would be enacted and administered, which affects feasibility.

On the nuclear reactor element, I very much appreciate the point about needing to have some kind of baseload power as part of the solution, and I like the idea of an alternative to natural gas. But I think it's a mistake to characterize these as "low cost" given the commercialization/scale-up costs (usually at least partially government funded) as well as the potential liability costs (currently subsidized for the nuclear industry).

Overall, while I like pieces of this proposal, I'm not at all clear on how the pieces fit together. So while it's appealing for sure, and somewhat persuasive, I can't give it high marks for clarity.

On the other hand, if it were in fact possible to put a Climatecoin system into effect, and to move away from coal and nat gas and fossils toward small scale nuclear, that would have a huge carbon impact.

Additional Comments from Climate CoLab Fellow:

This plan is impressively comprehensive and technologically ambitious, very much in line with Climate CoLab's goals for its Regional Plan contests. The author also links multiple Climate CoLab and independent proposals related to improving the cost and safety of ultra-efficient nuclear power in the U.S.

Some ideas in this plan are intriguing but less well-developed. In considering the broad and complex issue of "technological obsolescence" that America may face as automation and innovation occur, the author briefly addresses the idea of providing basic income to all Americans via carbon fee and dividend by linking two Climate CoLab proposals. This plan also relates innovation trends in transportation, self-driving cars and car-sharing, focusing not on potential job loss and economic transition (presumably covered by basic income via carbon fee, perhaps) but on linking another innovative Climate CoLab proposal to serve a new population of non-car owners with personal rapid transit.

Although it's intriguing to see these kinds of ideas linked as a regional plan, the complexity of this proposal leads to occasional communication challenges for non-expert readers. The logic stating that natural gas and conventional nuclear power become unsustainably expensive because wind and solar do not produce energy 24/7 is unclear (It seems the amount of time producing shouldn't matter as much as the amount of energy produced in that time). In addition, the proposal does not address the emissions impacts or potential costs of climate-based cryptocurrency or carbon income.

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