"Climate advocacy should focus more on the hard problems...We need technical solutions on steel, cement, agriculture, and more."
By the same token
National debt advocacy should focus more on the hard problems...We need technical solutions like massive productivity, amazing payroll growth, spectacular demographics, low interest rates and more.
As somebody who used to care strongly about climate, but cares a lot more now about beating Republicans, I can't say I find anything major to disagree with in this piece.
But as a practical matter, I think the climate movement is just going to have to burn itself out. At some point reality will set in - that there's nothing much they (or any of us) can do about climate change at this point. It's a collective action problem with no good answer and in any case, we're well past the point where 1.5C or even 3.0C (by 2050) can be avoided. Nothing for it but to expect a hotter, more chaotic future.
Who specifically is advocating for making fossil fuels more expensive? Are there organizations that are advocating for dumb policies? Is it Sierra Club?
While Matt talks about flooding in Bangladesh in 2060, it is happening in Pakistan today. It can't be good for the world today to have unstable nuclear powers.
I think this is maybe the best written take on this subject that I've seen, and I work in carbon capture and CDR.
Environmentalist orgs are ~80% anti- carbon capture because of moral hazard-type arguments, followed by appeals to its high cost. My usual response is "sure, carbon capture is not economic now, but in order for it to *be* economically viable someday, we need to fund research to make it cheaper." This generally lands like a sack of bricks.
Maybe I'm being dense again (forgive me, constant sleep deprivation due to caring for a newborn is taking its mental toll), but it seems to me that Matt Y is doing a category error here.
He's saying: hey climate activists, stop trying to convince ordinary voters to make sacrifices for the climate, and focus on technological advancements!
But how is that supposed to work? As a climate activist, all you need is spare time, enthusiasm, and a "Climate Change 101" facts sheet, and you can reach out to your fellow citizens to try to convince them to use less electricity/drive less/buy solar panels/eat less meat/whatever.
How do you go from that to making technological advances happen, assuming you don't want to ditch your career and start training for many years to become qualified to make advancements in carbon capture or whatever? Is this what you're envisioning:
Engineer: I tell you, this carbon capture plant will be operational as planned.
Activist: The Sunrise Movement does not share your optimistic appraisal of the situation.
Engineer: But they want the impossible! I need more donations.
Activist: Then perhaps you can tell them that when they arrive.
Engineer: The Sunrise Movement is coming here?!?
Activist: That is correct, and they are most displeased with your apparent lack of progress.
Engineer: We shall double our efforts!
Activist: I hope so, for your sake. The Sunrise Movement is not as FORGIVING as I am.
No. Persuade voters that the DWL of a tax on net C02 emissions is worth a sacrifice, less than the hard stuff like paper for plastic drinking straws or giving up organics! And its only for a few decades until all the nukes/geothermal come on line
My one big comment is that it’s not just “okay” to be a high-minded person who cares about coastal flooding in Bangladesh in 2060 - everyone *should* be such a person. But we shouldn’t just write off the people that aren’t. We just need to learn how to work with them to make the world better however we can.
As an exclamation point to your point about "there isn't a massive hidden trove of climate voters who are willing to make big sacrifices for the climate", how many people do you know who stopped eating meat out of concern for the climate? It's a very small percentage of people, and I'd be willing to bet at least 90% of those people (probably way more) are already staunch Democrats. That's a pretty small sacrifice to make on a personal level, and even most climate degrowth advocates don't make that sacrifice. I'd love it if more people did that, but it's just not gonna happen and hoping individual people will voluntarily make sacrifices is a naive way to hope for societal change.
Well of course I know him, he's me! But yeah it's not common. I know a decent number of people who have *reduced* red meat consumption on account of the environment (red meat being substantially worse than others), but still not a ton. Glad to meet another!
I'm comparing it to other impactful sacrifices you could make on behalf of climate change. If you stop eating meat, you can still go to 90% of restaurants, you can still eat healthy or unhealthy, you can still have great-tasting food, you can still be an athlete, etc. If you give up your car, give up using air travel, stop using climate control in your home, those are going to be much larger hits against your quality of life.
I also think there's a balance between "downplaying the magnitude" vs sharing my experience that it's not really that hard. I don't think there's a requirement to be perfect in it either - my point was more "if you're a climate degrowther asking people to make major sacrifices to the economy on behalf of the climate, this is the first meaningful step" (excluding things like "recycle!" and "occasionally take the bus!" that are pretty minor as individual impacts go.
What I would really like to see is Matt make some recommendations for regular activists. Citizens who do want to make a difference and have time on their hands, not money. What is a good place for citizen action? For instance, Matt says that the US is deliberately keeping the cheapest Chinese EV off the market. Could activists bring attention to this issue? Can they raise money build electric stoves in Africa?
When California wanted to close our nuclear power plant, clean energy activists could have lobbied to stop it. Is there another place where activists could lobby to get something like that built?
I know Matt thinks everything climate activists currently do is counterproductive, and they should just stop. But regular people can and do want to make a difference. What can they do?
But as Greg Lukianoff said on Twitter/X, too many are invested in stubbornly holding to inflexible positions for the sake of the politics than finding pragmatic solutions that might actually be politically feasible.
An example of pragmatism? E-cars, electric induction stoves, and heat pumps don't have to be rammed down people's throats or be subject to a new Marshall Plan level of development because they can sell themselves: they are actually are more efficient than older technologies, at least in many applications. Even in areas of prolonged extreme cold, a heat pump coupled with a backup system might still be less of an emissions problem and cost less to operate. E-cars here in New Mexico are still problematic until we have more fast chargers in the boonies. But for those who live and stay near cities, they make a lot of sense right now. The main thing for promoting these technologies is letting them grow in as existing stuff gets old, rather than ramming them down people's throats, which is a surefire way to lose an election.
One thing you don't mention is the N-word: nuclear. I'm with MIT climatologist emeritus Kerry Emanuel on this--we need to invest in state of the art nuclear power here and in the developing world to augment other energy production, especially if folks really want to capture carbon and return it to hydrocarbon, or crack water to make hydrogen. That takes a lot of energy. While batteries are under development, we know how to make a pretty good nuclear power plant. It is a political problem, not a technology problem.
Finally, all of this hinges on how bad climate will change. We still don't know the equilibrium climate sensitivity or transient climate response better than a factor of about 2, so the political/policy question is how serious are we about hedging our bets if it is on the high side? That should help drive our decisions on how to balance climate considerations with other critical issues such as energy, the economy, and third world development.
The USG could put some serious money into building better climate models and prioritizing gathering critical data on sensitivity to CO2 and costs of the sensitivity. The range of the Ruritanian spotted beetle is not that.
"...while progress on getting people to adopt degrowth solutions has been essentially zero."
I will note that current events suggest you can TRICK voters into voting for degrowth strategies.(Of course the climate impact of such strategies is blunted by deciding all clean electricity is gay and that burning coal is something worth doing just for a hoot.)
Given that people have decided "cost of living" is the top economic issue*** you could maybe start to find a framework to pitch degrowth. Negative growth means negative price growth. The lowered prices would be the result and cause of some major chunk of the population having lower income, but the other half wouldn't care. Americans would rather have 10% of the population destitute than 100% mildly inconvenienced, as exemplified by their complaints that the economy of 2023 was worse than that of 2009.
***I think it's been too long since we've had widespread joblessness because people have 100% forgotten how much it blows.
Fed has the dual mandate of "full employment" and "stable prices" because historically politicians found that voters reacted badly to deviations from either side of the mandate.
Unemployment does not have to rise very much for voters to get really pissed off about it. So the 10% destitute scenario will be politically very damaging in an evenly split country.
Trump is currently deeply underwater as voters feel the price "level" is high but the job market is not easy. The future cannot be predicted and things may miraculously turn around but Trump's "de-growth" agenda is not exactly popular at least right now.
"The party should nominate and support candidates who are in line with public opinion in the states they’re running "
What about actually trying to change public opinion? Isn't that a large part of the function of political parties in a democracy? What if public opinion has been formed by corporate media, corporate public relations, and the massive right-wing propaganda apparatus, from Fox to Newsmax to Turning Point America to Christian nationalism? Should the Democratic Party just adapt to that? Take it as given?
This is a perfect example of the mindless, reflexive centrism that so many people find infuriating about Yglesias.
The most important thing, really the only meaningful thing, for any party or politician to do is enact policy. Everything else has to be in service to that goal, and to enact policy you have to win elections.
Sure, some effort at changing public opinion is not a bad thing, but if you haven't changed the opinion by election day and you lose that's the thing that matters. There are no moral victories; electoral losses result in immoral outcomes.
It doesn't matter why the public thinks the way it does, so saying "public opinion has been formed by corporate media, corporate public relations, and the massive right-wing propaganda apparatus" no matter how accurate, doesn't really get you anywhere towards the goal of policy enactment. The public thinks the way it does today, and if we want to stop any of the disastrous tracks we're currently on we do in fact have to take that opinion as a given when deciding who and how to win elections.
No,, no, no. Of course enacting policy matters, but only if that policy is an expression of the will of the electorate. That's what democracy means, Matt, remember? The right lost a lot of elections from Roosevelt to Reagan to Trump, but it carefully (and of course, deceitfully) built a consensus that has resulted in a tsunami of policy-making. The left/center can build a similar consensus based on fact and decency, but not if it continually manipulates and bamboozles the electorate, as you seem to be suggesting. Of course, if you happen to think that the best policies happen to be what a majority of the wants, then fine, no adjustment is needed. But if a majority of the electorate thinks that climate change is a scam or that Obamacare is slavery or that the Republicans are the party of the common man, then why would Democratic candidates want to flatter their delusion?
From a pragmatic point of view, Matt, honesty is the best policy.
"This is a perfect example of the mindless, reflexive centrism that so many people find infuriating about Yglesias."
Matt Y's philosophy is fundamentally flawed but you still need to come up with solutions to geographical and educational sorting which make persuasion very difficult.
Persuasion cannot happen if the people you are trying to persuade see you as an out-group elitist who is clueless about their lives.
Shouting at working class voters that they are morally inadequate people who do not care about sea level rise in Bangladesh is only going to backfire badly.
We shouldn't give up on our normative goal of trying to make polluters internalize the costs of pollution as the centrists suggest but the "moral shaming" approach preferred by progressives is a political disaster.
So Trump is imposing tariffs on drug makers and in exchange for temporary tariff relief for Pfyzer, Pfyzer has agreed to sell some drugs at 50% discount at TrumpRx.
Given the ineptitude, obfuscation, and outright deceit that is the norm for this administration, it's hard to know if there is anything of substance here. But let's assume there is.
Does this mean that Joe Biden simply could have ordered drug companies to lower prices four years ago? Does anyone believe that wouldn't have been stayed by the lower courts and the stay upheld by the Supreme Court within days if not hours of this happening?
Say what you will about the Democratic party, but absolutely none of them are as unprincipled as every single elected or appointed Republican or Republican affiliated official.
In general, for climate advocacy, I think the focus needs to be on improving technology to lower costs, not a world where each and every ton of CO2 captured or not emitted receives a subsidy by the government, perpetually, into the future.
There are multiple problems with the latter approach, starting from the fact that you can't multiply it by enough tons to actually matter without bankrupting the economy. And then, you hit the fact that figuring out how many tons of CO2 a particular activity actually removes or avoids is notoriously difficult because there are so many 2nd order and 3rd order effects to consider. This gets especially gnarly when you start talking about things like biofuels or carbon capture, with the science being far beyond what the politicians making the rules are able to comprehend, which makes them extremely vulnerable to manipulation by lobbyists. So you will end up with lots of shell games where companies pretend to decarbonize on paper, in order to get government money, without actually doing anything to reduce real greenhouse gases. In the worst case, this can even lead to significant environmental damage in its own right, like rain forests being chopped down to grow biofuels.
In terms of the debate of energy technology, I think it's pretty clearly settled by this point, that the best path toward real decarbonization is better and better batteries, able to economically replace fossil fuels in more and more use cases, and that's where the focus should be. Everything else - hydrogen, biofuels, carbon capture, should be viewed with an extreme degree of skepticism, as the shear amount of energy it requires guarantees it to be more expensive than batteries (if batteries improve sufficiently) or plain-old fossil fuels (if they don't).
I also don't think the focus should be on edge cases needed to achieve 100% decarbonization. I don't think 100% decarbonization is happening in any of our lifetimes and that's ok, but we can still make global warming a lot less bad with 50% or 70% decarbonization.
In addition, we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact that chemicals in the air going into people's lungs is bad, and anything that reduces that, while also reducing greenhouse gasses is a win-win. Electric cars reduces pollution going into people's lungs. Carbon capture and biofuels, even in their best case scenario, do not.
Even "removes" is not simple. How much of the CO2 removed from the air actually says out of the air vs. leaks right back into it? Does it count as "removal" of the CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery, causing more CO2 to be emitted later, when the oil is burned? If some of the energy powering the CO2 removal equipment comes from fossil fuels, should the emissions from this energy count against the amount removed? Or, if the CO2 removal comes from plants, rather than machines, are you properly accounting for the opportunity cost of the land? For example, if you chop down a forest to plant a corn field, are you allowed to claim that your corn is removing CO2 from the atmosphere, even though the forest that was there before it was removing far more?
The list goes on and on. And, to have any enforceable carbon trading scheme, every one of the above decisions would have to decided on by some regulatory agency. And, the likelihood of such decisions, in the real world, actually reflecting climate science, rather than industry lobbyists, would be next to none.
I agree. Not everything that claims to be CCS IS CCS. The distinction would have to be administered by fallible human beings. Maybe it woud be impossible to administer in practice. But in _principle_ a firm that can permanently remove a carbon atom in a CO2 molecule from the air or a smokestack should receive the same payment as the fossil fuel company was charged for selling that atom into the economy and into the air.
Question - Is David Robert's, who Matt cites, worth reading in general. I am always on the lookout for good energy coverage but I HATE his approach to politics.
"Climate advocacy should focus more on the hard problems...We need technical solutions on steel, cement, agriculture, and more."
By the same token
National debt advocacy should focus more on the hard problems...We need technical solutions like massive productivity, amazing payroll growth, spectacular demographics, low interest rates and more.
As somebody who used to care strongly about climate, but cares a lot more now about beating Republicans, I can't say I find anything major to disagree with in this piece.
But as a practical matter, I think the climate movement is just going to have to burn itself out. At some point reality will set in - that there's nothing much they (or any of us) can do about climate change at this point. It's a collective action problem with no good answer and in any case, we're well past the point where 1.5C or even 3.0C (by 2050) can be avoided. Nothing for it but to expect a hotter, more chaotic future.
Thinking about mitigation should be top of mind but combine the deniers with "you must fry for your sins" and that's a hard conversation to have.
Who specifically is advocating for making fossil fuels more expensive? Are there organizations that are advocating for dumb policies? Is it Sierra Club?
While Matt talks about flooding in Bangladesh in 2060, it is happening in Pakistan today. It can't be good for the world today to have unstable nuclear powers.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/pakistan-climate-floods
I think this is maybe the best written take on this subject that I've seen, and I work in carbon capture and CDR.
Environmentalist orgs are ~80% anti- carbon capture because of moral hazard-type arguments, followed by appeals to its high cost. My usual response is "sure, carbon capture is not economic now, but in order for it to *be* economically viable someday, we need to fund research to make it cheaper." This generally lands like a sack of bricks.
Maybe I'm being dense again (forgive me, constant sleep deprivation due to caring for a newborn is taking its mental toll), but it seems to me that Matt Y is doing a category error here.
He's saying: hey climate activists, stop trying to convince ordinary voters to make sacrifices for the climate, and focus on technological advancements!
But how is that supposed to work? As a climate activist, all you need is spare time, enthusiasm, and a "Climate Change 101" facts sheet, and you can reach out to your fellow citizens to try to convince them to use less electricity/drive less/buy solar panels/eat less meat/whatever.
How do you go from that to making technological advances happen, assuming you don't want to ditch your career and start training for many years to become qualified to make advancements in carbon capture or whatever? Is this what you're envisioning:
Engineer: I tell you, this carbon capture plant will be operational as planned.
Activist: The Sunrise Movement does not share your optimistic appraisal of the situation.
Engineer: But they want the impossible! I need more donations.
Activist: Then perhaps you can tell them that when they arrive.
Engineer: The Sunrise Movement is coming here?!?
Activist: That is correct, and they are most displeased with your apparent lack of progress.
Engineer: We shall double our efforts!
Activist: I hope so, for your sake. The Sunrise Movement is not as FORGIVING as I am.
No. Persuade voters that the DWL of a tax on net C02 emissions is worth a sacrifice, less than the hard stuff like paper for plastic drinking straws or giving up organics! And its only for a few decades until all the nukes/geothermal come on line
My one big comment is that it’s not just “okay” to be a high-minded person who cares about coastal flooding in Bangladesh in 2060 - everyone *should* be such a person. But we shouldn’t just write off the people that aren’t. We just need to learn how to work with them to make the world better however we can.
As an exclamation point to your point about "there isn't a massive hidden trove of climate voters who are willing to make big sacrifices for the climate", how many people do you know who stopped eating meat out of concern for the climate? It's a very small percentage of people, and I'd be willing to bet at least 90% of those people (probably way more) are already staunch Democrats. That's a pretty small sacrifice to make on a personal level, and even most climate degrowth advocates don't make that sacrifice. I'd love it if more people did that, but it's just not gonna happen and hoping individual people will voluntarily make sacrifices is a naive way to hope for societal change.
The way to make a (small) sacrifice is not to make a stink when your utility's fuel costs rise becasue the coal it burns is taxed at $x per ton.
You know at least one...
(If interacting with me in these comment threads counts as "knowing" me, which admittedly is a bit of a stretch.)
But your overall point is well taken. Vegetarianism and veganism continue to be unpopular.
Well of course I know him, he's me! But yeah it's not common. I know a decent number of people who have *reduced* red meat consumption on account of the environment (red meat being substantially worse than others), but still not a ton. Glad to meet another!
Wish I could give you an extra like for the Star Wars reference! 😊
I'm comparing it to other impactful sacrifices you could make on behalf of climate change. If you stop eating meat, you can still go to 90% of restaurants, you can still eat healthy or unhealthy, you can still have great-tasting food, you can still be an athlete, etc. If you give up your car, give up using air travel, stop using climate control in your home, those are going to be much larger hits against your quality of life.
I also think there's a balance between "downplaying the magnitude" vs sharing my experience that it's not really that hard. I don't think there's a requirement to be perfect in it either - my point was more "if you're a climate degrowther asking people to make major sacrifices to the economy on behalf of the climate, this is the first meaningful step" (excluding things like "recycle!" and "occasionally take the bus!" that are pretty minor as individual impacts go.
What I would really like to see is Matt make some recommendations for regular activists. Citizens who do want to make a difference and have time on their hands, not money. What is a good place for citizen action? For instance, Matt says that the US is deliberately keeping the cheapest Chinese EV off the market. Could activists bring attention to this issue? Can they raise money build electric stoves in Africa?
When California wanted to close our nuclear power plant, clean energy activists could have lobbied to stop it. Is there another place where activists could lobby to get something like that built?
I know Matt thinks everything climate activists currently do is counterproductive, and they should just stop. But regular people can and do want to make a difference. What can they do?
Go to counterdemonstrations t the ones Bill McKibben organizes. :)
Nice article.
But as Greg Lukianoff said on Twitter/X, too many are invested in stubbornly holding to inflexible positions for the sake of the politics than finding pragmatic solutions that might actually be politically feasible.
An example of pragmatism? E-cars, electric induction stoves, and heat pumps don't have to be rammed down people's throats or be subject to a new Marshall Plan level of development because they can sell themselves: they are actually are more efficient than older technologies, at least in many applications. Even in areas of prolonged extreme cold, a heat pump coupled with a backup system might still be less of an emissions problem and cost less to operate. E-cars here in New Mexico are still problematic until we have more fast chargers in the boonies. But for those who live and stay near cities, they make a lot of sense right now. The main thing for promoting these technologies is letting them grow in as existing stuff gets old, rather than ramming them down people's throats, which is a surefire way to lose an election.
One thing you don't mention is the N-word: nuclear. I'm with MIT climatologist emeritus Kerry Emanuel on this--we need to invest in state of the art nuclear power here and in the developing world to augment other energy production, especially if folks really want to capture carbon and return it to hydrocarbon, or crack water to make hydrogen. That takes a lot of energy. While batteries are under development, we know how to make a pretty good nuclear power plant. It is a political problem, not a technology problem.
Finally, all of this hinges on how bad climate will change. We still don't know the equilibrium climate sensitivity or transient climate response better than a factor of about 2, so the political/policy question is how serious are we about hedging our bets if it is on the high side? That should help drive our decisions on how to balance climate considerations with other critical issues such as energy, the economy, and third world development.
The USG could put some serious money into building better climate models and prioritizing gathering critical data on sensitivity to CO2 and costs of the sensitivity. The range of the Ruritanian spotted beetle is not that.
I don’t think they care about climate, honestly.
I think they care about asceticism and the aesthetics of sacrifice.
"...while progress on getting people to adopt degrowth solutions has been essentially zero."
I will note that current events suggest you can TRICK voters into voting for degrowth strategies.(Of course the climate impact of such strategies is blunted by deciding all clean electricity is gay and that burning coal is something worth doing just for a hoot.)
Given that people have decided "cost of living" is the top economic issue*** you could maybe start to find a framework to pitch degrowth. Negative growth means negative price growth. The lowered prices would be the result and cause of some major chunk of the population having lower income, but the other half wouldn't care. Americans would rather have 10% of the population destitute than 100% mildly inconvenienced, as exemplified by their complaints that the economy of 2023 was worse than that of 2009.
***I think it's been too long since we've had widespread joblessness because people have 100% forgotten how much it blows.
Fed has the dual mandate of "full employment" and "stable prices" because historically politicians found that voters reacted badly to deviations from either side of the mandate.
Unemployment does not have to rise very much for voters to get really pissed off about it. So the 10% destitute scenario will be politically very damaging in an evenly split country.
Trump is currently deeply underwater as voters feel the price "level" is high but the job market is not easy. The future cannot be predicted and things may miraculously turn around but Trump's "de-growth" agenda is not exactly popular at least right now.
Yeah, I am also doubtful that you can trick people into ACCEPTING a degrowth economy, even if you can get them to accidentally vote for it.
Yes, voters will vote for any policy as long as it amounts to blaming perceived out-groups for their problems.
"The party should nominate and support candidates who are in line with public opinion in the states they’re running "
What about actually trying to change public opinion? Isn't that a large part of the function of political parties in a democracy? What if public opinion has been formed by corporate media, corporate public relations, and the massive right-wing propaganda apparatus, from Fox to Newsmax to Turning Point America to Christian nationalism? Should the Democratic Party just adapt to that? Take it as given?
This is a perfect example of the mindless, reflexive centrism that so many people find infuriating about Yglesias.
The most important thing, really the only meaningful thing, for any party or politician to do is enact policy. Everything else has to be in service to that goal, and to enact policy you have to win elections.
Sure, some effort at changing public opinion is not a bad thing, but if you haven't changed the opinion by election day and you lose that's the thing that matters. There are no moral victories; electoral losses result in immoral outcomes.
It doesn't matter why the public thinks the way it does, so saying "public opinion has been formed by corporate media, corporate public relations, and the massive right-wing propaganda apparatus" no matter how accurate, doesn't really get you anywhere towards the goal of policy enactment. The public thinks the way it does today, and if we want to stop any of the disastrous tracks we're currently on we do in fact have to take that opinion as a given when deciding who and how to win elections.
No,, no, no. Of course enacting policy matters, but only if that policy is an expression of the will of the electorate. That's what democracy means, Matt, remember? The right lost a lot of elections from Roosevelt to Reagan to Trump, but it carefully (and of course, deceitfully) built a consensus that has resulted in a tsunami of policy-making. The left/center can build a similar consensus based on fact and decency, but not if it continually manipulates and bamboozles the electorate, as you seem to be suggesting. Of course, if you happen to think that the best policies happen to be what a majority of the wants, then fine, no adjustment is needed. But if a majority of the electorate thinks that climate change is a scam or that Obamacare is slavery or that the Republicans are the party of the common man, then why would Democratic candidates want to flatter their delusion?
From a pragmatic point of view, Matt, honesty is the best policy.
True, but candidates have SOME agency to be on the right if unpopular side of some issues.
"This is a perfect example of the mindless, reflexive centrism that so many people find infuriating about Yglesias."
Matt Y's philosophy is fundamentally flawed but you still need to come up with solutions to geographical and educational sorting which make persuasion very difficult.
Persuasion cannot happen if the people you are trying to persuade see you as an out-group elitist who is clueless about their lives.
Shouting at working class voters that they are morally inadequate people who do not care about sea level rise in Bangladesh is only going to backfire badly.
We shouldn't give up on our normative goal of trying to make polluters internalize the costs of pollution as the centrists suggest but the "moral shaming" approach preferred by progressives is a political disaster.
So Trump is imposing tariffs on drug makers and in exchange for temporary tariff relief for Pfyzer, Pfyzer has agreed to sell some drugs at 50% discount at TrumpRx.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/pfizer-to-cut-medicaid-drug-prices-in-deal-with-trump-wapo?srnd=homepage-americas
In the mean time NY capitalists brains are exploding because someone wants to provide free bus rides.
I have to say these John Galt loving Mfers were pretending all along!
Given the ineptitude, obfuscation, and outright deceit that is the norm for this administration, it's hard to know if there is anything of substance here. But let's assume there is.
Does this mean that Joe Biden simply could have ordered drug companies to lower prices four years ago? Does anyone believe that wouldn't have been stayed by the lower courts and the stay upheld by the Supreme Court within days if not hours of this happening?
Say what you will about the Democratic party, but absolutely none of them are as unprincipled as every single elected or appointed Republican or Republican affiliated official.
In general, for climate advocacy, I think the focus needs to be on improving technology to lower costs, not a world where each and every ton of CO2 captured or not emitted receives a subsidy by the government, perpetually, into the future.
There are multiple problems with the latter approach, starting from the fact that you can't multiply it by enough tons to actually matter without bankrupting the economy. And then, you hit the fact that figuring out how many tons of CO2 a particular activity actually removes or avoids is notoriously difficult because there are so many 2nd order and 3rd order effects to consider. This gets especially gnarly when you start talking about things like biofuels or carbon capture, with the science being far beyond what the politicians making the rules are able to comprehend, which makes them extremely vulnerable to manipulation by lobbyists. So you will end up with lots of shell games where companies pretend to decarbonize on paper, in order to get government money, without actually doing anything to reduce real greenhouse gases. In the worst case, this can even lead to significant environmental damage in its own right, like rain forests being chopped down to grow biofuels.
In terms of the debate of energy technology, I think it's pretty clearly settled by this point, that the best path toward real decarbonization is better and better batteries, able to economically replace fossil fuels in more and more use cases, and that's where the focus should be. Everything else - hydrogen, biofuels, carbon capture, should be viewed with an extreme degree of skepticism, as the shear amount of energy it requires guarantees it to be more expensive than batteries (if batteries improve sufficiently) or plain-old fossil fuels (if they don't).
I also don't think the focus should be on edge cases needed to achieve 100% decarbonization. I don't think 100% decarbonization is happening in any of our lifetimes and that's ok, but we can still make global warming a lot less bad with 50% or 70% decarbonization.
In addition, we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact that chemicals in the air going into people's lungs is bad, and anything that reduces that, while also reducing greenhouse gasses is a win-win. Electric cars reduces pollution going into people's lungs. Carbon capture and biofuels, even in their best case scenario, do not.
??? "figuring out how many tons of CO2 a particular activity actually removes or avoids is notoriously difficult"
removes(Weight of the mineral dumped into an ocean trench + high school chemistry), no; avoids yes
Even "removes" is not simple. How much of the CO2 removed from the air actually says out of the air vs. leaks right back into it? Does it count as "removal" of the CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery, causing more CO2 to be emitted later, when the oil is burned? If some of the energy powering the CO2 removal equipment comes from fossil fuels, should the emissions from this energy count against the amount removed? Or, if the CO2 removal comes from plants, rather than machines, are you properly accounting for the opportunity cost of the land? For example, if you chop down a forest to plant a corn field, are you allowed to claim that your corn is removing CO2 from the atmosphere, even though the forest that was there before it was removing far more?
The list goes on and on. And, to have any enforceable carbon trading scheme, every one of the above decisions would have to decided on by some regulatory agency. And, the likelihood of such decisions, in the real world, actually reflecting climate science, rather than industry lobbyists, would be next to none.
I agree. Not everything that claims to be CCS IS CCS. The distinction would have to be administered by fallible human beings. Maybe it woud be impossible to administer in practice. But in _principle_ a firm that can permanently remove a carbon atom in a CO2 molecule from the air or a smokestack should receive the same payment as the fossil fuel company was charged for selling that atom into the economy and into the air.
Question - Is David Robert's, who Matt cites, worth reading in general. I am always on the lookout for good energy coverage but I HATE his approach to politics.