The Best Path Past Paralysis on Climate and Clean Energy is Starting Where There's Agreement - as with Enhanced Geothermal

We’re in a tough moment in America, facing a momentous fork in the road at the level of the White House, a weakened capacity for government to help reduce environmental and societal risks thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, and the breakdown of bipartisanship in a Congress co-opted by a fringe of elected officials deadset on dismantling things instead of building things (and by the power of the donor class over the rest of our citizenry).

A clear path forward involves identifying points of agreement hiding behind the over-amped, edge-driven discourse in most media - and particularly online media. I was struck years ago to see how a deadocked Congress in the second Obama term passed the Electrify Africa Act. No headlines, but it’s having an impact where the need for modern energy services is greatest.

Surfacing deep clean energy

Domestically, there’s a bright spot: widespread agreement, behind the overheated climate divide, over the potential to expand extraction of the abundant geothermal energy locked beneath the surface of the planet - particularly the process of enhanced geothermal energy extraction, using methods adapted from the hydrofracturing revolution that made the United States a top producer of gas and oil. Here’s a Department of Energy explainer.

source

There’s more on the details below from

David Roberts

and the physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder.

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What you can do on geothermal

Thanks to

Sam Matey

of the Weekly Anthropocene, who’s now also the editor of the new Substack dispatch

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

, I learned of a simple way you can make your case to your federal legislators to endorse the bill. I just used the tool to contact my Maine senators and congressman. It’s through the

Climate Action Now

app and website. As Climate Action now explains:

The Geothermal Energy Optimization (GEO) Act, recently introduced as S.3954 in the U.S. Senate, is cosponsored by Democrats Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico as well as Republicans Jim Risch of Idaho and Mike Lee of Utah. A similar version was introduced in the House by Representative John Curtis of Utah as H.R.7370, the Geothermal Energy Opportunity Act. Basically, this bill makes it easier to set up new enhanced geothermal projects on U.S. public lands, putting the newborn advanced geothermal industry on an equal footing with oil and gas incumbents which have had years to lobby for an extra-friendly permitting process.

Here’s the geothermal post with the link to the web tool and app through which you can reach your representatives:

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: July 1, 2024

Here’s the note Sam is sending around to friends and fans (I’m a fan; watch our conversation here with the actor/activist Ed Begley Jr. and poet Yvonne Reddick):