The last two years have seen the best environmental legislation ever passed in the United States. With the CHIPS and Science Act (boosting semiconductor research, development and production), the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, there is $450 billion available for climate investment. Now we need to move with breakneck speed to allocate these resources and avert the worst effects of global warming.

I recently listened to a podcast (The Ezra Klein Show on Nov. 15) that advocated we prioritize an improved electrical grid. When more of our power comes from renewables, we will need an electrical grid with a much larger capacity – double or triple – to transmit renewable energy to consumers to electrify our buildings, transportation and industry. To improve the grid, we need to streamline clean-energy permitting.

The move to renewables to power this grid is feasible because in the last decade the price of renewables has decreased about 90 percent, Bill McKibben said on Ezra Klein’s podcast Nov. 15.

McKibben explains that after 700,000 years of human progress, we no longer need to set things on fire for cooking, transit, heating and manufacturing with the resulting pollution and global warming. Instead, we can use increasingly popular renewable energy.

There is no free lunch, so besides increasing the grid, we will need to mine rare earth materials. McKibben estimates that the total mining burden in a renewable world will be 80 percent less than the mining burden from using fossil fuels. America needs to act quickly to implement these changes, which are now possible with the recently approved legislation.

Nancy Hasenfus
Brunswick

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