Wind expert Paul Gipe has calculated that Afghanistan and Iraq war costs could have paid for the United States to have, already, a fully renewable power sector: wind, solar and batteries.
If we had instead invested the $6 trillion we squandered on war in the Middle East, we would, two decades later, have made our grid more resilient with battery storage, and be generating 100% of our electricity with wind and solar. Moreover, existing sources of renewable energy would be sufficient to power a substantial portion of our passenger cars with clean, renewable electricity.
Incredible.
What a lost opportunity.
For those long advocating renewable energy investments, this painful ‘what if’ calculation comes at no surprise even as it is a welcomed exercise to provide tangible numbers to back up what we have long believed.
Worth highlighting, however, is that Gipe’s calculation is actually pessimistic in many ways due a stove-piped look at what it would cost to deploy the wind, solar, and battery systems rather than more robust cost-and-benefits assessment.
Here are just a few ways in which a more robust analysis would have created an even stronger case:
- Consideration of Avoided Costs with a renewables deployment,
- How much would not have been spent on fossil fuel deployment (coal and natural gas power plants, pipelines, etc…) (and even failed nuclear power plant projects) and fossil fuels? (E.g., these renewables would have displaced something.)
- To what extent would the power system’s negative externalities (air, ground, water pollution (for example)) been reduced with, therefore, reduced health care costs, reduced environmental remediation costs, reduced requirements for climate-change mitigation investments, etc?
- How would renewables deployment Created Value
- Since this assumes government investment in renewables, would US electricity costs been much lower (since renewables are almost entirely CAPEX and not OPEX) with benefits throughout the economy?
- How would being the true world leaders in renewable deployment (and thus innovation, manufacturing, etc …) have boosted U.S. competitiveness and balance of trade?
- What might have been spinoffs and innovations from a serious, long-term investment in a clean energy economy over the past 20 years?
- Spending these trillions of dollars in U.S. communities would have mean millions (tens of millions) of domestic jobs due to both the direct expenditure and the economic multiplier impacts.
- The nation would have seen significant productivity improvements due, in part, to reduced pollution/health care impacts.
Since this is all (sadly) a counter-factual exercise, perhaps we should think about expanding the counter-factual.
- Would this path have muted (if not preempted) the 2008 fiscal crash? With $100s of billions being pumped into the domestic economy, creating value and employment throughout the nation, would this economic vitality have had enough positive impact to mute the damage wrought by fiscal improprieties (and illegalities) in the financial sector sparking a global economic meltdown?
- Without a constant need for war-fighting attention from the nation’s leadership and the turning of some of the nation’s most talented people/institutions to solving military challenges (such as countering improvised explosive devices (IEDs), would these resources have been targeted to address (even solve) other serious issues: from education to health care to water quality to … How many new businesses, how many new inventions, how many valuable new policy options executed without the drain on resources (again, not just fiscal, but also human and institutional) for fighting these wars of choice?
- From the villages of the Middle East to American communities, how many people would be healthier, how many people would be alive (not just from conflict, but also warfare), if America hadn’t thrown $Trillions, many 100,000s of people, and thousands of lives into misbegotten wars of choice and had, instead, spent those resources on creating a prosperous, resilient, secure, climate-friendly United States of America?
All of the above just is cracking the door open on the co-benefits that serious investing in renewable energy starting in 2001 would have provide us (the U.S. and, in many ways, all of humanity) already by 2020 and for the decades and centuries to come.
Yes, America, we could have had 100% renewable electricity with the resources wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq … but this understates the case since we could have had so, so, so much more.