In this video, the speaker argues that a large‑scale, government‑led rollout of solar panels and battery storage on virtually every public building, parking lot, school, university, post office, and other municipal site could simultaneously create a massive jobs boom, dramatically cut fossil‑fuel use, and enhance national security. By turning the centralized grid into a micro‑distributed network of solar‑powered sites, the nation would be far less vulnerable to cyber‑or physical attacks on a single power hub. The speaker extends the proposal to electrify government vehicle fleets—school buses, postal trucks, and other municipal vehicles—by charging them at solar‑covered parking lots, even suggesting schedule shifts to maximize daylight charging. He frames the investment as a preventative measure that outweighs its costs when compared to the economic and humanitarian toll of climate‑induced famine, coastal flooding, and ongoing payments to fossil‑fuel‑producing adversaries. The talk calls for strong policy incentives, public‑private partnerships, and citizen advocacy to make the plan feasible, emphasizing that the technology already exists and the primary barrier is political will.
Chapters
Hi everybody. It's been a while since I've been able to make a new climate video, and in this one I want to actually not dive so deep into the numbers, but instead start creating a series of videos that explain why, if we choose to, we can probably solve this and we should have hope. The problem that it seems is that we aren't all aligned with our efforts and goals. I think that's the biggest problem facing us when it comes to the climate crisis, more than, you know, the possibility of a solution or even the cost of a solution. And I'd like to talk through that a little bit, but in this first one, I'd like to sort of focus on, you know, just one simple strategy that not just the United States could follow, but pretty much all governments around the world could potentially follow. And if they did this, one, it would create a jobs boom. Two, it would greatly reduce the amount of fossil fuels needed to both power our cities and maybe even, you know, power fleets of vehicles. And I'd like to even make an argument that it could help with our national security, which maybe is the most compelling argument for this investment to those that are still climate skeptics. Um, don't know how you can be a climate skeptic with everything going on right now, but hey, if you are, listen to this video and at least see if you agree with me on the national security, uh, concern that I'm going to bring up. Um, and so the focus of this video is a massive increase in solar done primarily by governmental entities at nearly all governmental locations around the United States. And like I said, this could be replicated in other countries. And here's sort of what I'm thinking is, you know, if they're going to be building or retrofitting or repairing or maintaining any governmental building, putting up any kind of parking lot at a governmental facility, replacing the roof on just about any governmental facility. And when I say that, I would include colleges and universities, which are basically— especially public ones that are in a big part governmentally funded— and also public schools.— and so hear, hear me out on this. If we did what I just described, basically put up a solar array on every reasonable location that is governmentally based, and we put that, build it into the cost of development. Now, one, it might make some of its money back because if it's producing excess power, you know, they could basically require the local utilities to pay them back for any excess power production. Um, but here's the other thing that I want you to think about, and this sort of gets to the point of national security. One of the problems that we have in the United States and many countries abroad is the centralized grid for electrical service. And with a centralized grid, there's already been a ton of articles about how a rogue actor, a rogue state, you know, a criminal state, any country that has people that are dedicated hackers, or just a terrorist organization, frankly, that has hackers, could possibly get in and disrupt our electrical service and our grid. And when you have a centralized grid in most cities, that makes that risk that much bigger because they just got to hit one location. But if you have what I would call a micro-distributed grid, which is very possible if you have massive solar installation, you could greatly reduce that risk. And, and sort of hear me out, um, if every governmental building, every governmental parking lot, every school building, every post office, every University building, when it's going up or when it's getting renovated, had a solar array installed with a backup battery power unit. If the grid was attacked, there would still be a number of governmental locations that could effectively operate at least during daylight hours most of the year, and that would actually greatly reduce the risk of a grid attack, a centralized grid attack. One could even see the argument that instead of having a centralized grid, we could move a lot of cities because of this big solar installation to a modular grid design, meaning segments of the cities each have their own little, you know, sort of central power area which is feeding off all of the solar installations that are feeding into it, backed up by the centralized grid where you have a higher level of power production either produced by hopefully either natural gas or possibly even nuclear, you know, especially for, you know, bad weather times or, you know, the winter when the sunlight hours are less. But nonetheless, that idea would also create tons and tons of jobs because you'd have to one, buy a bunch of solar panels. Uh, two, you'd have to train and hire out a number of people to become solar engineers, solar technicians, and solar installers. Sure seems like it could be potentially an economic boon for the cities where this installation occurs. And, um, obviously the local utilities might want to have a part of this because they now have this mission to have significantly more green power. You know, reduce the amount of fossil fuel power they're generating using coal or oil by having greener energy options. And you know, if this was sort of like a quasi-governmental and private industry partnership, with the solar industry, the, um, you know, the solar industry, the local utility, and the federal or state government, or even the municipal government, all working together to basically create this more sustainable and modularized grid using primarily solar installation at pretty much every governmental location within the area— every courthouse, every library, every school, every governmental administration building, every parking lot that is used by all of the people that work in those buildings— you could see a huge increase in the amount of electricity generated within that municipality, um, to keep those operations running and a big job boom in those cities for it. It could really elevate things to a much higher level. And with that modularized grid, it would greatly reduce even the thought of an attack on our electrical system because the foreign actors would realize, oh, they're not centralized. It doesn't make sense to attack now, you know, because we can't attack one location. We'd have to attack a thousand. That's not reasonable. So you'd push them right onto the— they'd have to start thinking about the other way they're going to mess with you. It'd take one less thing off their plate. And then let's take this even one step further. What if you had— let's say this, I'm going to throw a bit of a bit of one at you. What if you had those solar installed parking lots and that's where all of the new electric school buses bus would park during the daytime hours when they're not doing morning and afternoon drop-offs from the school system, recharging the solar battery or the electric batteries on these electric bus vehicles powered by the one fusion generator that we know works and works every day called the good old sun. And wait a minute, well hey, if you're going to do that, what about the post office Now hear me out on this. What if we switched the post office to start their deliveries at 6 PM and they would run up until like 2 AM? 6 to 2 instead of, you know, 7:30 to 4:30 or whatever it is that the normal postal delivery crew is out doing. And I know that's an evening shift, that would be a change, but that would mean that those new electric postal delivery trucks could be refilling and recharging their batteries up until almost 6 PM to have adequate power to do the daily deliveries, meeting the range. And if you're going to follow this model, you know, any governmental fleet, any university fleet of vehicles could also be electric parked a solar-powered parking lot to use a significant portion of the solar to power up and charge the fleet of vehicles. Yeah. Wow. That'll be expensive. Everything this guy just said is, one, completely doable with our current technology. We could do exactly what I just said. But yeah, it'll be expensive. To do it. But you know what else is expensive? Famine and an unlivable planet and coastal cities underwater or fighting back the water. And so when you look at the investment to do something like I just described, which is forward thinking and preventative and also helps, frankly, national security versus a reactive effort to build giant barriers to protect coastal cities and, you know, crisis efforts to stop the, you know, billion people that are going to suffer from the the next giant climate-induced famine, it seems like the cost-benefit is a no-brainer. It's sort of like preventative medicine versus going in to get, you know, acute treatment after your heart attack. I think that's the way we got to change our thinking, and this would be one step for it. Now, you know, The other thing to think about is there will be an economic benefit from all the jobs created, which will counterbalance the cost of that investment. You know, and these are good quality jobs that will probably be needed for, you know, the next couple hundred years, frankly. You know, because we're gonna have to do more of this kind of work to make it work. And, you know, the one final thing I would say is, you know, I would also encourage the government to give much larger incentives to individual homeowners and individual corporate and business entities for installation of the same kind of systems—parking lot solar, rooftop solar, empty property solar, you know, because if we could get a significant portion of the individual households and businesses with that same setup, at least a few hours every day, even if the centralized grid goes completely down, those businesses and those homes will still have power. And, um, you know, that could really positively change things. So, you know, I just encourage the individual citizens to maybe petition their government leaders to, uh, consider this kind of an idea. Push for it. Write letters. Um, the most effective thing we can do, by the way, is change policy. We gotta change policy, change monetary investment so that, um, The money that we're bringing in from our tax dollars will help solve this really important issue. And we're not going to be able to, you know, fix this without a public and private partnership doing these kinds of behaviors. And this is just one example. I'm going to hopefully be able to make a whole series of these videos discussing how this could be done. But that's just one, and I mean, like I said, there is nothing of what I said that goes beyond the technological capabilities that we currently have. We could electrify governmental buildings and installations of all types with solar arrays. Those solar arrays could help power those locations and vehicle fleets Also providing a greater level of national security for those installations, governmental buildings, police stations, think about that, firehouses, think about that, schools, think about that. Power's out, centralized grid is down, but hey, the kids can still go to school during daylight hours with light and heat. I mean, you know, and then just think about the possibility if you could do that at your home, you know, you would have light and heat even if the grid were to be compromised in some manner or form, either by a natural disaster and/or by a rogue actor. Um, you know, we've got a Fusion generator. Everybody's talking about Fusion. We've got one. We've had it for 4.5 billion years on this planet, and it's hopefully going to run about another 4 or 5 billion years beyond. Um, we should really start taking advantage of it much, much more aggressively, uh, to help stave off the really bad costs that we're going to incur by not taking the appropriate preventative actions. And you know, one last thing to consider on this, if you were significantly less reliant on fossil fuel production for your electrical grid, two interesting things about that. One, we've effectively been paying a significant amount of our money from our economy to some of these rogue actors that we have problems with. You know, some of these states, some of these foreign nations, part of the way that they've been enriched and part of the way they've built their, uh, war machine is through the revenues they've received from fossil fuel production from the global markets. So in essence, we've been paying them to drive our cars and power our businesses, power our houses, so they could build a war machine to attack us and our allies. And if we could switch to home-produced, always available power, for a significant portion of our electrical production, we could take that money out of their pockets, and then they would be less of a threat to all of us globally. And that also means that we could redirect some of those trillions of dollars that we have to put into our military infrastructure infrastructure because now we don't need to be quite so worried about protecting access, especially to oil and natural gas. I hope you agree with me on this, and if you do, share this video with policymakers and start advocating yourself. See, this is the kind of thing that we got to do. I haven't done a cost-benefit analysis. Somebody's going to do a cost-benefit analysis, but if they do, you know, one of the factors that they need to put into that cost-benefit analysis is the cost if you don't do this. Coastal cities, flood mitigation, storm damage,— famine, to name a few. And there is a benefit from all those jobs. We could do this. I'm going to be talking about some other ways we could do this too. Hope you like this video.
