February 16, 2020
By Marc Peterson

I’ve become a climate change alarmist. (click here)

I didn’t start that way. I spent 30 years in the electrical generation industry dealing with fossil fuel and renewable technologies, so I’m well aware of the efficiencies, challenges, pollution and climate impact of those technologies. Because renewable energy is now less expensive than fossil fuel energy and, because of the performance and technological advantages of electric cars over fossil fuel cars, I believed the market would solve our pollution and climate issues.

However, after significant research into the size of our climate problems, it is clear much more than that needs to be done. To limit the damage to only that caused by a global 2-degree Celsius temperature rise, most, if not all, fossil fuels will need to stay in the ground.

I recommend the En-Roads Climate Change Solutions Simulator, created by Climate Interactive in conjunction with MIT, as an effective tool to analyze what it will take to hit that goal.

The Gardner Institute’s Utah Roadmap, a study commissioned by the Utah Legislature, lists the actions we need to take to move in the right direction. Please encourage your state senators and representatives to support the results of this study.

I have not tried this technology, but, evidently Marc has. I simply know from education and experience what lies ahead. The solutions seem very obvious to me. 

En-ROADS is a transparent, (click here) freely-available policy simulation model that provides policymakers, educators, businesses, the media, and the public with the ability to explore, for themselves, the likely consequences of energy, economic growth, land use, and other policies and uncertainties, with the goal of improving their understanding. The simulation, developed by Climate Interactive, Ventana Systems, and MIT Sloan, runs on an ordinary laptop in a fraction of a second, is available online, offers an intuitive interface, has been carefully grounded in the best available science, and has been calibrated against a wide range of existing integrated assessment, climate and energy models....