I agree with the author. It is a fallacy to think that curbing US extraction is going to change things when OPEC can always increase production to whatever the US decides not to extract.
Better to put our attention onto consumption where we are one of the biggest per capita users of fossil fuels.
By investing in alternate technology we will shorten the time until market forces will no longer support coal powered plants to be built ( many are now being built in China and India). And nuclear as a short term preference over coal will work until alternatives become cheaper. Glad Biden seems OK on nuclear which conservatives like.
Conservation seems the least utilized low hanging fruit. Cars should no longer be built that get under 40 mpg's and appliances should be made not to end up in the landfill in a few years.
It is notable that in the 1950s we had an average household size of 3.6 and an average home size of 1000 sf. Now we have household size at 2.6 and house size at 2300 sf. I dont know how to address why people need so much. I am a bit of an ascetic, but it just seems that some people have no limits on what they think they need so the alternative would be just to tax McMansions and fuel inefficient cars.
Schoolmarm pedantry: the Biden administration is _uninterested_ in defending, not _disinterested_ in defending. Someone who is disintedested does not have an interest (i.e., a financial stake) in the outcome.
The thing that gets me is bombing Mexico and forcing people to freeze to death are just not equivalent to printing money with the unlimited money printer: Your definition of 'good' seems pretty narrowly focused on 'cost-effective'.
There potentially can be bad consequences of spending too much money - on cleaning rivers or initiating new green energy projects or whatever. But there are also potentially bad consequences of sending a signal, from the largest economy in the world, that new fossil fuel extraction is still a-ok, as long as there's a business case for it and local jobs.
Back when the US fubbed the global consensus to reduce emissions in the 1980s, the justification back then was also 'but the economy!'... We have a much larger task ahead of us now, and you're essentially making the same excuse. Saying Biden has done more on climate is not the same as saying he's done enough.
Of course, most people, given the binary choice of lower or higher prices today are going to support more oil drilling! However, I expect their future selves - running from bush fires, dealing with climate refugees and more pandemics, and paying vastly higher insurance premiums - might retrospectively have wanted us to consider a more nuanced values calculation.
But it is. Conventional wells deplete around 5-10%ish a year from peak, necessitating new drilling (more complicated but close enough). Shale is even faster with 2-4 year cycles for major production.
Let’s pretend we stopped, tomorrow, and nobody drilled a new well. So figure about 60% of US oil production is gone in 4 years. The rest in 10 years.
Now what? I’m being serious. Does US energy use per capita get cut in half? Ignoring the political backlash of such a world, massive global effects, etc... are you advocating for massive cuts in energy use? If so, what sectors and what economic impact are you willing to bear?
If not, what is the realistic pace to replace that energy? Can it really be done to meet your “no new fossil extraction” mantra?
No, I'm not saying shut down all oil extraction. However, the Willow project - when it eventually starts production (actually, probably more than 4 years from now) - is no ordinary extraction project. It alone could represent 1.5-2% of all US production, and contribute (in total) roughly 5% of all US annual emissions (at a time when US annual emissions are already 30-40% higher than they need to be).
It is also happening in what is widely considered to be a 'fragile ecosystem' (although, frankly, that's more a concern for the kids on TikTok than me, as I do appreciate we have some ability to regulate and manage our interactions with the land... unlike the global climate)
In fairness, I also didn't insist on 'no new fossil extraction'. My argument was, a project this size sends the message to the rest of the world (of which I am a part) that emissions are ok if they benefit an economy. When that message comes from the largest economy - and, frankly, the economy most-responsible for emissions in the past century - it gives everyone else a pass. In my country (and industry), we also have a problem with emissions; but the standard excuse for not doing much about it is "we're nothing compared to the US (or China/India, fossil fuels, concrete manufacture etc)". This is learned behaviour.
I don't know enough about every industry to know what sectors will need to adapt. But, eventually - certainly in the 30-year lifespan of Willow - it will be 'all of them'. The sooner we start turning the screws, the less tight we'll need to make them.
Money is cheap (see: QE), but value is something different and only really reveals itself on a long time scale. My issue is Matthew (and many macro-economists) only seem to want to measure value in a money frame. That's how he can justify a position that states 'bombing Mexico' is too extreme to protect jobs; but 'consenting a project that will inevitably factor into the deaths of many more people' to protect jobs is good-actually.
I think the mistake here is equating the CO@ content of the Willow production with the net increase in CO@ emissions. It would indeed be bad if the message of Willow is that zero priced _emissions_ are OK to benefit the economy.
And I agree that it is unfair to demand to know exactly which industries/sectors would have to adjust most at greatest cost if we had a tax on net CO2 emissions that made using fossil fuels (coal> petroleum> gas) more expensive. That's the beauty of the tax; no central planner is required to know that. Ditto which zero CO2 energy sources will produce the energy needed to get to negative emissions. "Get the prices right" and let the market figure it out. [Of course, "getting the prices right includes regulatory reform, massive subsidies to research and public investments/subsidies that pass cost benefit analysis using the correct price of the CO2 emissions avoided.]
You might be misreading my argument? I'm sympathetic to the inevitability of some emissions over the next decades, but concerned about the signals being sent by a new project of this scale, from a country with this level of influence.
You also make the tired 'market knows best' points which, IMO, have been demonstratably proven to be, in a generous read, simplistic; but, realistically, utter nonsense... And, in doing so, you defend money as a flawless tool to facilitate do-gooding which, well, (with all due respect) if you need to be paid to 'care' I feel like you might be doing life wrong.
But you yourself said you did not know which sectors would have to adapt to get to net negative CO2 at least cost. I don't think it can be done w/o taxing CO2 emissions so as to align social and private (market) costs and benefits.
Yeah, we might be at cross purposes here. I'm saying: stop signalling that giant fossil fuel extraction projects are ok. This tells companies that need to adapt, they need to start immediately.
You appear to be saying, it's ok to keep telling the world fossil fuel extraction is ok, provided emissions are paid for. This tells companies they need to address costs or increase prices, but they can keep emitting.
Generously-assuming an honest accounting for emissions in your ETS or carbon tax, both of our proposals would likely increase the cost to end-users. But only one of them actually reduces emissions.
Frankly, I think we're at the point where we need to do it all. Tax and regulate and invest and inspire (especially big influential countries) and educate. We are already behind on ambitious targets. I just feel the evidence points to a 'market solution' being a pretty optimistic approach, given what is at stake.
I'm talking to "environmentalists asking them to work for policies to reduce demand for CO2 emissions (tax on net emissions being the least costly way), not trying to prevent the supply of CO2 emissions case by arbitrary case. And the signal would be that other countries should do the same.
The Colorado YIMBY law has some public infrastructure folks in a tizzy. Their concern is infrastructure. We can’t turn single family homes from single family to multi-family because we don’t have the capacity in the sewer lines or the plants.
I tend to think of this as a problem to be solved and not a conversation stopper. In many cases it’s not true and where it is true upgrade the systems.
With anything there are always difficulties. But if there is new construction, regardless of single or multi family they need to upgrade the infrastructure and support systems, just need to do it more for multi family, though likely less expense per household.
The alternative to enshrine large areas as single family which forces the suburbs to build out endlessly probably causes a greater demand on the infrastructure, just less concentrated.
If Colorado hadn't decided to put a ridiculous straightjacket on local government via TABOR, they wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem upgrading their municipal infrastructure.
There is some truth to that. I can’t say the degree that it’s true.
I think that many local government employees have a paradigm of how things are supposed to work and don’t like their apple cart being upset. This is a normal human reaction. The YIMBY’s need to continue making their case about the overall good of making it easier to build stuff.
This thinking shines a light on the limits of expertise. The people I spoke to are bona fide experts. They know what it takes to upgrade a sanitary sewer main or plant. But when I spoke of the overall good - their eyes glazed over.
Experts are needed but we also need leadership who looks at things from a higher level. This was my concern with Fauci from the start. I never doubted his expertise with viruses, I doubted his ability to make macro sense of his proposed policies and their unintended consequences.
Expertise is great but it is limited to your expertise. There seems to be a lot of scope creep in what one is an expert at.
Fauci ad the CDC crowd got way out of their lane. Information about how disease spread is one thing; devising cost effective policies is another and CDC has zero expertise in that.
"the Biden administration itself seems somewhat disinterested in defending its own position"
OK, I have a question for all the linguistic experts out in SB Land.
Given that language is a natural product that changes constantly as speakers change the way they use words, at what point should those of us who understand the "correct" meaning or usage throw up our hands and say, fine, I'll go along with the crowd.
I get it: "disinterested" now predominately means "uninterested." "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less." "Irregardless" means "regardless." Etc. That's language for you! But it does seem a shame to lose a perfectly good meaning in "disinterested," i.e., unbiased by personal interest or advantage; not influenced by selfish motive. Since apparently we can't use it anymore to mean that without confusing people, what's a good substitute word?
There is something perverse that every time we dig a hole in the ground it’s a Federal Case. Let’s just decide on the value of the CO2 emission changed by the action and do the arithmetic. The “Biden Administration” ought not be involved. In practice, it’s very unlikely that any production or transportation project is going to affect world output of petroleum enough to have much effect on the CB analysis, but depoliticize it by just doing the arithmetic.
But the “balancing” idea is off. It makes sense for fossil fuels producers to want to set the cost of CO2 emissions at the profit maximizing rate of zero (although I’d advise them that they would be better off in the long run with a net CO2 emissions tax that they could plan their investment in the coming decades around rather than more costly measures). But it does not make sense for “environmentalist to just oppose every fossil fuel production or transportation investment. Whose net welfare does that maximize?
I don't really think the one-off of Willow fundamentally changes the worldview of the Biden admin, which is more consequential than what some lefty activists yell about. Biden's team believes it's the job of government to make oil extraction harder and more expensive, and to orient clean energy around giving patronage to auto industries in swing states (even if this enrages European and Asian allies) and giving the EPA greater leeway to encourage ESG measures that divest from domestic energy production. This White House has explicitly criticized McCarthy's HR 1 and are trying fine-tune permitting reform in a more complicated and narrow direction than just letting 1000 energy projects bloom all-of-the-above style.
The latter is in no small part because the progressive wing of the party, led by Bernie Sanders, is explicitly hostile to NEPA reforms and think the status quo of regulation on these projects is mostly acceptable. You can see panelists at Roosevelt Institute say this all the time, and they have real purchase with this administration's staff. The Biden admin has weighed in on multiple mining projects and said their environmental review is insufficient; maybe this is the right call for the scenic nature in Minnesota to not be spoiled by mineral extraction, but it's hardly a supply-side attitude.
Similar to the gender identity in schools business, the most consequential people here are people Biden has appointed to his executive branch to make controversial policy, not activists mad at the New York Times. But for commentators like Jonathan Chait and Matt Yglesias, this is very inconvenient, so we see a lot more words focusing on the correctly fine-tuned criticism of left-wing activists without totally handing it to Chris Rufo or another right-wing activist, all while steadfastly ignoring the enormous elephant in the room, which is the presidency they support. It's not an insane left-winger mad on Twitter saying "we need more female pipe-fitters before we can build a cheaper semiconductor factory", it's Biden's Secretary of Commerce talking to Ezra Klein. If only the Czar knew!
Of course as a net fossil fuels exporter the US ever so slightly benefits from higher petroleum prices, but I'm happy to give that up to take resources away from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.
I think the "if not now then when" aspect is hard for climate activists to take.
One way to understand this is if we accept that "the politics of climate change is hard" but "we need to begin the climate transition now" is that we can start with foreign oil first. When the Western world no longer imports oil or gas, then we can begin curtailing domestic production.
And aside from curtailing foreign oil, we can ramp up domestic green energy production to sequentially avoid the most expensive fossil fuel projects, until there's nothing left.
NO. Don't curb production, curb _demand_ and yes that should have started in 1970's as soon as the negative externality of CO2 emissions was understood.
Agreed, I was rather imprecise there. When it comes to ultimately reducing domestic production it would be better to tax (and subsidize) and let the market decide which specific fossil fuel projects and plants are no longer necessary.
Agree with you on Biden's Willow choice and was looking forward to sending this essay to my 15 y.o. son, who is receiving TikTok videos about how Biden's betrayal on Willow was dooming humanity. Probably not going to.
This essay repeats two of your least helpful claims. First, that actual options to constrict supply are like hypothetical carbon taxes except less efficient. There is zero chance that we directly pass an effective carbon tax. Biden actually had the option to interfere with drilling. False parallel.
Second and more alarmingly, that because production is concentrated, it is always obviously wrong for producers to get out of the business. Producers capture the profits of production while imposing the costs on everyone else, per your carbon tax logic. Their profits are unjust. We may not be able to shift the political economy away from embrace of fossil fuels until we have replaced them with cheaper clean energy, but we should try. That the head-on approach doesn't work is true; that we should accept the political economy as a given (except when it comes to carbon taxes) is false.
Everyone pays producers for the benefits of the energy they consume, but consumers do not take account of the costs of CO2 accumulation. That's the issue.
PS Justin Gerdes, whom you should all follow, wrote a fantastic book Quitting Carbon on how Denmark pivoted away from being a fossil fuel producer. They are on track to succeed: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55184580
Is there better support to the idea that natives supported this project and that only a minority opposed? Because I’m not seeing it here or with a google search. All sources I find appear to show “division” among the native community.
I find the framing of that segment to be unfair and counterproductive and essentially just ragging on libruls. My experience is the venn diagram for the climate monomaniacs and the race monomaniacs has little overlap
Just that it does not by itself equate to proof of majority native support. Other native advocacy groups had different opinions. If you try a google search, all the press pieces cite division among the native community
> what they have not done is tried to destroy the domestic fossil fuel industry.
These industries will kill themselves... Example: The per-unit cost of the utility-delivered natural gas delivered is normally at least 50% due to cost-recovery of transmission and distribution infrastructure (pipes), rather than the gas commodity (the molecules). Infrastructure costs are fixed. So, when gas demand declines, the per-unit allocation of infrastructure costs must increase proportionally to the demand reduction. (e.g. A 50% reduction in demand requires a 200% increase in per-unit costs.) The effect of demand-response, efficiency, and Beneficial Electrification, such as heat-pump adoption, is to reduce demand. As these programs grow more successful, per-unit gas prices must increase and those increases will encourage even greater efficiency and even more abandonment of gas in favor of electrification. The result will be a "death spiral" in gas demand as per-unit costs of gas skyrocket and gas abandonment accelerates.
"Cost-recovery during a time of declining demand" is a problem that our gas utilities have never experienced before. However, it will be the problem that eventually ends them.
I read this in the link to the Patrick Brown article:
"I value sober, even-handed analysis above all else. What drew me to science and what gives science its authority in society is the notion that it at least strives to deliver objective analysis rather than goal-oriented advocacy.
Unfortunately, the portions of the IPCC report that deal with impacts and adaptation—the sections that inform the headlines above—do not adhere to this principle. Instead, they read less like a serious scientific assessment and more like a flier for an activist meeting, stringing together mashups of loosely related, but bad-sounding research “findings” in a sloppy and unprincipled way."
That critique could be levelled at so much being excreted from news organisations today.
On the specifics of the crop yield issue, I will bet many of the activists claiming to worry about it are the same activists that think we should curtail the use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. We can eat some wild lentils we find while foraging after taking a break from our oral history jobs.
You know, I agree with this. They bug the hell out of me.
And yet . . .
I suspect I would have found the abolitionists in the 1850s to be too shrill. I might have shrunk from the turmoil that civil rights activists caused in the 1950s and early 1960s. I hope that wouldn't have been the case (we'll never know), but one has to beware of applying the blessings of hindsight and after the fact beatification to groups that were highly controversial in the moment.
“ Environmental groups reacted to indigenous support for the project not by deferring to marginalized people and frontline communities”
I was listening to an interview with the new SF DA who was making the point that crime impacts Black and brown communities most and her constituents want something done about it and would white progressives please stop attempting to speak for these communities.
This just proves they are victims of false consciousness. All the more reason to eliminate policing in their neighborhoods, as their true selves desire.
I agree with the author. It is a fallacy to think that curbing US extraction is going to change things when OPEC can always increase production to whatever the US decides not to extract.
Better to put our attention onto consumption where we are one of the biggest per capita users of fossil fuels.
By investing in alternate technology we will shorten the time until market forces will no longer support coal powered plants to be built ( many are now being built in China and India). And nuclear as a short term preference over coal will work until alternatives become cheaper. Glad Biden seems OK on nuclear which conservatives like.
Conservation seems the least utilized low hanging fruit. Cars should no longer be built that get under 40 mpg's and appliances should be made not to end up in the landfill in a few years.
It is notable that in the 1950s we had an average household size of 3.6 and an average home size of 1000 sf. Now we have household size at 2.6 and house size at 2300 sf. I dont know how to address why people need so much. I am a bit of an ascetic, but it just seems that some people have no limits on what they think they need so the alternative would be just to tax McMansions and fuel inefficient cars.
Schoolmarm pedantry: the Biden administration is _uninterested_ in defending, not _disinterested_ in defending. Someone who is disintedested does not have an interest (i.e., a financial stake) in the outcome.
The thing that gets me is bombing Mexico and forcing people to freeze to death are just not equivalent to printing money with the unlimited money printer: Your definition of 'good' seems pretty narrowly focused on 'cost-effective'.
There potentially can be bad consequences of spending too much money - on cleaning rivers or initiating new green energy projects or whatever. But there are also potentially bad consequences of sending a signal, from the largest economy in the world, that new fossil fuel extraction is still a-ok, as long as there's a business case for it and local jobs.
Back when the US fubbed the global consensus to reduce emissions in the 1980s, the justification back then was also 'but the economy!'... We have a much larger task ahead of us now, and you're essentially making the same excuse. Saying Biden has done more on climate is not the same as saying he's done enough.
Of course, most people, given the binary choice of lower or higher prices today are going to support more oil drilling! However, I expect their future selves - running from bush fires, dealing with climate refugees and more pandemics, and paying vastly higher insurance premiums - might retrospectively have wanted us to consider a more nuanced values calculation.
“new fossil fuel extraction is still a-ok”
But it is. Conventional wells deplete around 5-10%ish a year from peak, necessitating new drilling (more complicated but close enough). Shale is even faster with 2-4 year cycles for major production.
Let’s pretend we stopped, tomorrow, and nobody drilled a new well. So figure about 60% of US oil production is gone in 4 years. The rest in 10 years.
Now what? I’m being serious. Does US energy use per capita get cut in half? Ignoring the political backlash of such a world, massive global effects, etc... are you advocating for massive cuts in energy use? If so, what sectors and what economic impact are you willing to bear?
If not, what is the realistic pace to replace that energy? Can it really be done to meet your “no new fossil extraction” mantra?
Thank you for your considered response.
No, I'm not saying shut down all oil extraction. However, the Willow project - when it eventually starts production (actually, probably more than 4 years from now) - is no ordinary extraction project. It alone could represent 1.5-2% of all US production, and contribute (in total) roughly 5% of all US annual emissions (at a time when US annual emissions are already 30-40% higher than they need to be).
It is also happening in what is widely considered to be a 'fragile ecosystem' (although, frankly, that's more a concern for the kids on TikTok than me, as I do appreciate we have some ability to regulate and manage our interactions with the land... unlike the global climate)
In fairness, I also didn't insist on 'no new fossil extraction'. My argument was, a project this size sends the message to the rest of the world (of which I am a part) that emissions are ok if they benefit an economy. When that message comes from the largest economy - and, frankly, the economy most-responsible for emissions in the past century - it gives everyone else a pass. In my country (and industry), we also have a problem with emissions; but the standard excuse for not doing much about it is "we're nothing compared to the US (or China/India, fossil fuels, concrete manufacture etc)". This is learned behaviour.
I don't know enough about every industry to know what sectors will need to adapt. But, eventually - certainly in the 30-year lifespan of Willow - it will be 'all of them'. The sooner we start turning the screws, the less tight we'll need to make them.
Money is cheap (see: QE), but value is something different and only really reveals itself on a long time scale. My issue is Matthew (and many macro-economists) only seem to want to measure value in a money frame. That's how he can justify a position that states 'bombing Mexico' is too extreme to protect jobs; but 'consenting a project that will inevitably factor into the deaths of many more people' to protect jobs is good-actually.
I think the mistake here is equating the CO@ content of the Willow production with the net increase in CO@ emissions. It would indeed be bad if the message of Willow is that zero priced _emissions_ are OK to benefit the economy.
And I agree that it is unfair to demand to know exactly which industries/sectors would have to adjust most at greatest cost if we had a tax on net CO2 emissions that made using fossil fuels (coal> petroleum> gas) more expensive. That's the beauty of the tax; no central planner is required to know that. Ditto which zero CO2 energy sources will produce the energy needed to get to negative emissions. "Get the prices right" and let the market figure it out. [Of course, "getting the prices right includes regulatory reform, massive subsidies to research and public investments/subsidies that pass cost benefit analysis using the correct price of the CO2 emissions avoided.]
You might be misreading my argument? I'm sympathetic to the inevitability of some emissions over the next decades, but concerned about the signals being sent by a new project of this scale, from a country with this level of influence.
You also make the tired 'market knows best' points which, IMO, have been demonstratably proven to be, in a generous read, simplistic; but, realistically, utter nonsense... And, in doing so, you defend money as a flawless tool to facilitate do-gooding which, well, (with all due respect) if you need to be paid to 'care' I feel like you might be doing life wrong.
But you yourself said you did not know which sectors would have to adapt to get to net negative CO2 at least cost. I don't think it can be done w/o taxing CO2 emissions so as to align social and private (market) costs and benefits.
Yeah, we might be at cross purposes here. I'm saying: stop signalling that giant fossil fuel extraction projects are ok. This tells companies that need to adapt, they need to start immediately.
You appear to be saying, it's ok to keep telling the world fossil fuel extraction is ok, provided emissions are paid for. This tells companies they need to address costs or increase prices, but they can keep emitting.
Generously-assuming an honest accounting for emissions in your ETS or carbon tax, both of our proposals would likely increase the cost to end-users. But only one of them actually reduces emissions.
Frankly, I think we're at the point where we need to do it all. Tax and regulate and invest and inspire (especially big influential countries) and educate. We are already behind on ambitious targets. I just feel the evidence points to a 'market solution' being a pretty optimistic approach, given what is at stake.
I'm talking to "environmentalists asking them to work for policies to reduce demand for CO2 emissions (tax on net emissions being the least costly way), not trying to prevent the supply of CO2 emissions case by arbitrary case. And the signal would be that other countries should do the same.
The Colorado YIMBY law has some public infrastructure folks in a tizzy. Their concern is infrastructure. We can’t turn single family homes from single family to multi-family because we don’t have the capacity in the sewer lines or the plants.
I tend to think of this as a problem to be solved and not a conversation stopper. In many cases it’s not true and where it is true upgrade the systems.
With anything there are always difficulties. But if there is new construction, regardless of single or multi family they need to upgrade the infrastructure and support systems, just need to do it more for multi family, though likely less expense per household.
The alternative to enshrine large areas as single family which forces the suburbs to build out endlessly probably causes a greater demand on the infrastructure, just less concentrated.
If Colorado hadn't decided to put a ridiculous straightjacket on local government via TABOR, they wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem upgrading their municipal infrastructure.
There is some truth to that. I can’t say the degree that it’s true.
I think that many local government employees have a paradigm of how things are supposed to work and don’t like their apple cart being upset. This is a normal human reaction. The YIMBY’s need to continue making their case about the overall good of making it easier to build stuff.
This thinking shines a light on the limits of expertise. The people I spoke to are bona fide experts. They know what it takes to upgrade a sanitary sewer main or plant. But when I spoke of the overall good - their eyes glazed over.
Experts are needed but we also need leadership who looks at things from a higher level. This was my concern with Fauci from the start. I never doubted his expertise with viruses, I doubted his ability to make macro sense of his proposed policies and their unintended consequences.
Expertise is great but it is limited to your expertise. There seems to be a lot of scope creep in what one is an expert at.
Fauci ad the CDC crowd got way out of their lane. Information about how disease spread is one thing; devising cost effective policies is another and CDC has zero expertise in that.
"the Biden administration itself seems somewhat disinterested in defending its own position"
OK, I have a question for all the linguistic experts out in SB Land.
Given that language is a natural product that changes constantly as speakers change the way they use words, at what point should those of us who understand the "correct" meaning or usage throw up our hands and say, fine, I'll go along with the crowd.
I get it: "disinterested" now predominately means "uninterested." "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less." "Irregardless" means "regardless." Etc. That's language for you! But it does seem a shame to lose a perfectly good meaning in "disinterested," i.e., unbiased by personal interest or advantage; not influenced by selfish motive. Since apparently we can't use it anymore to mean that without confusing people, what's a good substitute word?
I now simply understand the definition of disinterested to be consisting of the opinions of the Slow Borer with that username.
There is something perverse that every time we dig a hole in the ground it’s a Federal Case. Let’s just decide on the value of the CO2 emission changed by the action and do the arithmetic. The “Biden Administration” ought not be involved. In practice, it’s very unlikely that any production or transportation project is going to affect world output of petroleum enough to have much effect on the CB analysis, but depoliticize it by just doing the arithmetic.
But the “balancing” idea is off. It makes sense for fossil fuels producers to want to set the cost of CO2 emissions at the profit maximizing rate of zero (although I’d advise them that they would be better off in the long run with a net CO2 emissions tax that they could plan their investment in the coming decades around rather than more costly measures). But it does not make sense for “environmentalist to just oppose every fossil fuel production or transportation investment. Whose net welfare does that maximize?
I don't really think the one-off of Willow fundamentally changes the worldview of the Biden admin, which is more consequential than what some lefty activists yell about. Biden's team believes it's the job of government to make oil extraction harder and more expensive, and to orient clean energy around giving patronage to auto industries in swing states (even if this enrages European and Asian allies) and giving the EPA greater leeway to encourage ESG measures that divest from domestic energy production. This White House has explicitly criticized McCarthy's HR 1 and are trying fine-tune permitting reform in a more complicated and narrow direction than just letting 1000 energy projects bloom all-of-the-above style.
The latter is in no small part because the progressive wing of the party, led by Bernie Sanders, is explicitly hostile to NEPA reforms and think the status quo of regulation on these projects is mostly acceptable. You can see panelists at Roosevelt Institute say this all the time, and they have real purchase with this administration's staff. The Biden admin has weighed in on multiple mining projects and said their environmental review is insufficient; maybe this is the right call for the scenic nature in Minnesota to not be spoiled by mineral extraction, but it's hardly a supply-side attitude.
Similar to the gender identity in schools business, the most consequential people here are people Biden has appointed to his executive branch to make controversial policy, not activists mad at the New York Times. But for commentators like Jonathan Chait and Matt Yglesias, this is very inconvenient, so we see a lot more words focusing on the correctly fine-tuned criticism of left-wing activists without totally handing it to Chris Rufo or another right-wing activist, all while steadfastly ignoring the enormous elephant in the room, which is the presidency they support. It's not an insane left-winger mad on Twitter saying "we need more female pipe-fitters before we can build a cheaper semiconductor factory", it's Biden's Secretary of Commerce talking to Ezra Klein. If only the Czar knew!
" Biden's team believes it's the job of government to make oil extraction harder and more expensive,"
I hope you are now wrong about that. [Unless you can make it equally harder everywhere.]
Mainly here. A little bit overseas where possible.
On the “bright side” we’re also making it more profitable for OPEC+ at the same time! /s
Of course as a net fossil fuels exporter the US ever so slightly benefits from higher petroleum prices, but I'm happy to give that up to take resources away from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc.
I think the "if not now then when" aspect is hard for climate activists to take.
One way to understand this is if we accept that "the politics of climate change is hard" but "we need to begin the climate transition now" is that we can start with foreign oil first. When the Western world no longer imports oil or gas, then we can begin curtailing domestic production.
And aside from curtailing foreign oil, we can ramp up domestic green energy production to sequentially avoid the most expensive fossil fuel projects, until there's nothing left.
NO. Don't curb production, curb _demand_ and yes that should have started in 1970's as soon as the negative externality of CO2 emissions was understood.
Agreed, I was rather imprecise there. When it comes to ultimately reducing domestic production it would be better to tax (and subsidize) and let the market decide which specific fossil fuel projects and plants are no longer necessary.
Agree with you on Biden's Willow choice and was looking forward to sending this essay to my 15 y.o. son, who is receiving TikTok videos about how Biden's betrayal on Willow was dooming humanity. Probably not going to.
This essay repeats two of your least helpful claims. First, that actual options to constrict supply are like hypothetical carbon taxes except less efficient. There is zero chance that we directly pass an effective carbon tax. Biden actually had the option to interfere with drilling. False parallel.
Second and more alarmingly, that because production is concentrated, it is always obviously wrong for producers to get out of the business. Producers capture the profits of production while imposing the costs on everyone else, per your carbon tax logic. Their profits are unjust. We may not be able to shift the political economy away from embrace of fossil fuels until we have replaced them with cheaper clean energy, but we should try. That the head-on approach doesn't work is true; that we should accept the political economy as a given (except when it comes to carbon taxes) is false.
“Producers capture the profits of production while imposing the costs on everyone else…”
Producers produce profit (sometimes) while conferring the benefits of energy on everyone else.
Everyone pays producers for the benefits of the energy they consume, but consumers do not take account of the costs of CO2 accumulation. That's the issue.
PS Justin Gerdes, whom you should all follow, wrote a fantastic book Quitting Carbon on how Denmark pivoted away from being a fossil fuel producer. They are on track to succeed: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55184580
Is there better support to the idea that natives supported this project and that only a minority opposed? Because I’m not seeing it here or with a google search. All sources I find appear to show “division” among the native community.
I find the framing of that segment to be unfair and counterproductive and essentially just ragging on libruls. My experience is the venn diagram for the climate monomaniacs and the race monomaniacs has little overlap
Do you have a specific critique with Matt's link? The AFN is the largest Native organization in Alaska. Is that not sufficient to support his point?
https://alaska-native-news.com/afn-praises-president-bidens-decision-to-approve-the-willow-project/66788/
Just that it does not by itself equate to proof of majority native support. Other native advocacy groups had different opinions. If you try a google search, all the press pieces cite division among the native community
> what they have not done is tried to destroy the domestic fossil fuel industry.
These industries will kill themselves... Example: The per-unit cost of the utility-delivered natural gas delivered is normally at least 50% due to cost-recovery of transmission and distribution infrastructure (pipes), rather than the gas commodity (the molecules). Infrastructure costs are fixed. So, when gas demand declines, the per-unit allocation of infrastructure costs must increase proportionally to the demand reduction. (e.g. A 50% reduction in demand requires a 200% increase in per-unit costs.) The effect of demand-response, efficiency, and Beneficial Electrification, such as heat-pump adoption, is to reduce demand. As these programs grow more successful, per-unit gas prices must increase and those increases will encourage even greater efficiency and even more abandonment of gas in favor of electrification. The result will be a "death spiral" in gas demand as per-unit costs of gas skyrocket and gas abandonment accelerates.
"Cost-recovery during a time of declining demand" is a problem that our gas utilities have never experienced before. However, it will be the problem that eventually ends them.
I read this in the link to the Patrick Brown article:
"I value sober, even-handed analysis above all else. What drew me to science and what gives science its authority in society is the notion that it at least strives to deliver objective analysis rather than goal-oriented advocacy.
Unfortunately, the portions of the IPCC report that deal with impacts and adaptation—the sections that inform the headlines above—do not adhere to this principle. Instead, they read less like a serious scientific assessment and more like a flier for an activist meeting, stringing together mashups of loosely related, but bad-sounding research “findings” in a sloppy and unprincipled way."
That critique could be levelled at so much being excreted from news organisations today.
On the specifics of the crop yield issue, I will bet many of the activists claiming to worry about it are the same activists that think we should curtail the use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. We can eat some wild lentils we find while foraging after taking a break from our oral history jobs.
The more I learn about activists (of all kinds): the less I like any of them.
You know, I agree with this. They bug the hell out of me.
And yet . . .
I suspect I would have found the abolitionists in the 1850s to be too shrill. I might have shrunk from the turmoil that civil rights activists caused in the 1950s and early 1960s. I hope that wouldn't have been the case (we'll never know), but one has to beware of applying the blessings of hindsight and after the fact beatification to groups that were highly controversial in the moment.
That said, they still bug the hell out of me.
Oh activists are necessary. They’re like IRS agents. A necessary evil
The problem is EVERY activist thinks they’re a modern day abolitionist
Interesting about white democrats.
Another thing to consider is foreign policy and Ukraine. US natural gas is doing a lot to ween Europe off of Russian supplies. That’s a good thing!
The environmental movement has been doing this - shooting itself and ally’s in the foot - for decades. Some things never change.
“ Environmental groups reacted to indigenous support for the project not by deferring to marginalized people and frontline communities”
I was listening to an interview with the new SF DA who was making the point that crime impacts Black and brown communities most and her constituents want something done about it and would white progressives please stop attempting to speak for these communities.
Asians are lost in the supermarket or something? Or are they brown?
This just proves they are victims of false consciousness. All the more reason to eliminate policing in their neighborhoods, as their true selves desire.