You allude to this, but it deserves a headline: another advantage of technical developments is that we can export them to places our policies and controls do not reach.
If every US citizen accepted Bill McKibben's or Kōhei Saitō’s vision tomorrow, that would, on its own, only 𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘺 global warming.
Most importantly and obviously in terms of technology but in lots of places regulation is simply copied from US standards, particularly nuclear regulations, in Spain lots of their standards just copied American authorities. Also the depressing thing of non-American politicians just copying American talking points unthinkly, British politics is obsessed with an idea of a Green New Deal despite never having a non-Green New Deal.
Everything only delays global warming. China is the world leader in renewable technologies but its own emissions are still going up as it develops more. A lot of even poorer countries have basically zero emissions; even with very good renewable tech their overall emissions are going to go up if we want them to have a humane standard of living. This makes climate change hard but also suggests that “all-of-the-above” is needed, both more technological development and conservation from people who would barely notice it.
If the refrigerators are identical in cost, form, and function, neither you nor I will notice it - and neither would someone in Africa or the Australian outback.
So who is the "group of people who would barely notice it?" Everyone?
Ah, if you didn't read Nikuruga's comment, that's understandable. I know navigating the comment hierarchy can be annoying, so here's what he wrote:
> This makes climate change hard but also suggests that “all-of-the-above” is needed, both more technological development and conservation from people who would barely notice it.
I'm happy to be corrected on this, but I think the clear implication of that is there is a group of people that are so rich that they wouldn't notice if they had to change their lifestyles to conserve more.
For example, it's kinda disappointing that the essay here focuses a lot on gas stoves, which are at best a rounding error.
But to your point, climate can't be separated from economics, but it also can't be separated from foreign policy. Even if the US could achieve zero emissions tomorrow, the growth of carbon in other parts of the developing world would catch up in a few years and continue growing. That's why technical solutions are so important compared to prescriptive policy - because the technical solutions can potentially benefit everyone, everywhere.
Geo engineering is also global and other countries have agency here so it's probably in everyone's interest to work on how that shakes out. If China wipes out US agriculture to cool the planet it's not gonna be pleasant.
Wonderful column on topics where I have previously been critical of Matt's work. The major omission was a lack of quantitative reasoning. Deadpan points out one of the major dimensions: scaling to other countries. There is also scaling to a future in which the global south consumes much more services, meat, etc. Finally, there quantifying to relative impact of different areas: cement and steel matter, but not that much, especially individually. Beef is bigger and harder.
Are there major deposits of gas in Europe that could be accessed through fracking? Given the very real problems they have with alternatives like having to buy from Russia that seems just really dumb.
Speaking of investing in technology, if direct air capture of CO2 becomes efficient, cheap, and widespread enough, it is plausible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere on net, and actually begin cooling the atmosphere. But no one in the climate advocacy space seems interested in doing that.
Just as pro-lifers often don't support contraception and sex education programs that would reduce the abortion rate due to coalitional reasons, for the same sorts of coalitional reasons green and climate groups don't support carbon capture. A big segment of pro-lifers want to disincentivize sex, and a big segment of greens wants to disincentivize "unnatural" growth.
At least pro-lifers acknowledge they're religious. Environmentalists behave religiously and then gaslight you in to thinking you're the one who doesn't care about the environment if you disagree with them.
I think such a measure would be opposed vociferously by both the left and the right. The left would (rightly) point out that a $500 abortion tax is tantamount to an abortion ban for poor people, who don't have $500. The right would (also rightly) point out that anyone with the money would just pay it, so for most of the population, it would be tantamount to legalization.
I personally don't like the idea either, in large part because the impact would be borne almost entirely by poor people.
I don't think it would. For various reasons, primarily having to do with rising expectations, children are increasingly expensive. If you gave people subsidies for having children, I think it would raise how much people spent by the subsidy but wouldn't reduce their own personal expenditure at all.
You're right, but parents aren't the only people in the economy. It would raise the average consumption of parents and decrease the average consumption of non-parents. This makes being a parent (and presumably bringing a pregnancy to term) more attractive than the alternative.
I mean they aren’t free, and while abortions are already rationed on ability to pay, exacerbating that fact isn’t exactly wise. People having children they aren’t equipped to raise, financially and otherwise, is just inherently evil.
What's notable about the former is that it's backfired on them--people are having less sex, in a way that they don't like. The latter, of course, would reap their own downfall when they realize the sheer type of downgrade of quality of life they would sow.
But that is the point, pro-lifers aren't just anti-abortion they are religious people with a whole moral code and philosophy. Similar situation here, climate activists think rich people spending $700,000 on a car is sinful, extravagant and ostentatious, they aren't suddenly going to approve if it is electric.
I'm not a climate activist, but would agree that an individual spending $700,000 on a car is extravagant and ostentatious. Lots of people do things I think are extravagant and ostentatious though, and I don't think that's sufficient reason to make it illegal.
It's worth saying that we don't HAVE a viable solution to climate change via carbon capture. So saying "we shouldn't support this" isn't necessarily saying "this is a bad idea" so much as saying "I am worried that polluters and politicians will use this as an excuse to do nothing, leaving us with more emissions and no actual solution".
I don't think that's what's going on though. Carbon capture is theoretically doable, so the groups should favor putting the research in. They don't because they dislike the idea of solving the global warming problem through a technical solution that doesn't allow them to re-engineer society according to their ideology.
The pro-climate community is similarly hostile to nuclear power for similar reasons. It's a climate crisis... but not a big enough crisis to warrant considering nuclear.
I think there's definitely an element of that in their rhetoric, but isn't it more salient that it would involve very difficult technology requiring significant time and investment that could be more profitably directed elsewhere?
Carbon capture is theoretically doable, so the groups should favor putting the research in. They don't because they dislike the idea of solving the global warming problem through a technical solution that doesn't allow them to re-engineer society according to their ideology.
I have lost count of the times I’ve heard climate activists call direct air capture dangerous because it would make the phaseout of fossil fuels less urgent.
I’d rather have both direct air capture and a gas phaseout of fossil fuels but that argument is not compelling to a certain type of climate activist
You realize we have a giant fusion reactor next to us that will continue to spit out excess energy for the foreseeable future here, right? Thermodynamics doesn't enter into it.
Yes. While thermodynamics prevents us from burning fossil fuels to remove CO2, the sheer amount of excess energy from the sun means we have plenty of energy to do atmospheric capture, if we care to do so.
Eventually the sun will burn out, but that's far, far in the future.
Burning natural gas to get 1000 units of energy puts X kg of CO2 into the air.
Last I checked there's no carbon capture that uses less than 1000 units of energy to extract X kg of CO2.
Any net energy that we might use for carbon capture should instead be used to just displace current fossil fuel energy production.
It's worth researching for the long term, because once we get enough cheap power from fusion we will want to start extracting. But I think the basic themodynamics referred to is the fact that you can't run a gas generator to burn fuel releasing CO2 and use the energy from the generator to extract that much CO2.
That's not really the issue though. The issue is that there are some applications, as listed in the article, where there's no current path to electrification. Take air travel - batteries may never be compact enough to power commercial airlines, but if carbon taxes / regulations are high/strict enough it may make sense for airlines to continue using jet fuel, then turn around and invest in a solar farm to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. You're using 2x+ power but there's a feasible path to carbon neutrality.
It may have escaped you but we do not have perfect efficiency (or even high efficiency) in converting said Sun energy into useful energy to do the work of capture. … so it’s pretty goddamn useless to make such an observation.
Thermodynamics guarantees that simply electrifying whatever emits the carbon will take many times less energy than extracting the equivalent amount of carbon out of the air, once it's emitted. Therefore, as long as the price of electricity is greater than zero, carbon removal will cost more than just electrifying the equipment in the first place. And, if electrifying the industry is technically infeasible, the capturing the carbon is almost certainly going to be economically infeasible. That is why carbon capture is a dead end.
To be clear: You should absolutely do research on it, iterate it, support it, maybe even fund it. But it's so far away as a solution that it makes perfect sense for advocates to focus on solar and heatpumps and EVs and what-have-you. Focusing on things we can actually deploy today instead of a technology that might never work out economically is perfectly rational
Why would anyone hang their hat on something that has low salience now. Carbon capture is not cost effective way to lower tomorrow's atmospheric carbon and there are plenty of practical and cost effective ways for stop new carbon emissions today. So in 2040 or whenever you have tackled new emissions maybe the tech is there, we can use the carbon capture in a more widespread way. Touting a far off economic and technology reality as a focus of today would be backwards.
There is research but it is way down the list - look up carbon capture on wikipedia. The simple issue is even if you found a 100% efficient process, it will still take a lot of energy. That energy can be used to efficiently power replacement of current carbon sources. But much of the carbon capture tech is just an excuse to not cut back on fossil fuel.
Because its positioned as an excuse and the fundamentals are really bad, its a low priority. But certainly in the future, capturing carbon will be useful as an input for other processes like carbonization.
If you look at who is supporting the idea of carbon capture, it's mostly the oil industry. After all, if oil is powering all that carbon capture equipment, that's more revenue for them. And, if the carbon capture equipment ends up emitting more CO2 than it removes, well, that's somebody else's problem.
The biggest problem is the fundamental economics of course, given the energy need.
Of course a lot of the climate Left are more deeply concerned about the "excuse factor" as they're more concerned about strangling oil and gas and moralising than in actual progress
Ultimately, for decarbonization to be economically and politically sustainable, we can't have long-term subsidies per unit of CO2 either captured not emitted. The only way to decarbonize without never-ending subsidies is more clean energy technology.
CSS is a dead end, no matter how much its technology advances because it is inherently dependent on government payouts per unit of CO2 removed. And, when multiplied by an amount of CO2 able to actually make a difference in climate change, quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.
I agree. Taxation/subsidy are not alternative to technology. At some point fossil fuels become uneconomic except niche cases and raise almost no revenue except to pay for a bit of CSS to make that niche use emission neutral. But for now the tax on net emissions is the least cost way of promoting substitution and contributing to the incentive for technology.
That is a decent standard to look at. Would love to see the numbers about how much CSS has gotten as a subsidy compared to its actual carbon capture. I suspect that it CSS would need a much higher subsidy at this point in its development.
Because, historically, carbon capture and storage, either from fossil fuel plant emissions or directly from the air, have been used as an excuse to delay doing anything else.
Direct air capture seems likely to cost several hundred dollars per tonne of CO2 removed, and will take a couple of decades to scale up.
Sucking carbon out of the air with a very expensive straw while putting it back in with a firehouse doesn't reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration either.
Some kind of CO2 removal is ultimately going to be required to clean up the mess we have made; but it makes no sense to be paying $500 a tonne to suck CO2 out of the air while we can abate gigatonnes of annual emissions at negative cost.
And some of it is going to involve telling Americans that they are going to have to suck it up and have a Big Ass electric Truck rather than a Big Ass gasoline-powered Truck, however little political capital MattY wants to spend on climate instead of his own policy priorities.
>And some of it is going to involve telling Americans that they are going to have to suck it up and have a Big Ass electric Truck rather than a Big Ass gasoline-powered Truck
Why would the country who only emits 12% of the world's carbon and whose carbon emissions have been falling steadily since 2005 need to do anything? Global warming is certainly a bad thing, and I agree that China and India should stop doing it. I don't see that the US needs to 'suck it up' or really do much of anything at all
Because we’re only 4% of the world population. Saying only populous countries should sacrifice makes no sense. If China were divided into 2 countries each would emit less than the US but that wouldn’t make an ounce of difference to the climate.
We're already sacrificing- it seems like you missed the part where I noted the US started reducing its emissions in 2005. Meanwhile both China and India continue to increase them- China recently announced vague plans to make 10% cuts within 10 years. We don't even know if they're really going to do that! Just starting from first principles, who do you think should be more focused on cutting emissions:
The country that emits *less* and already has been reducing emissions for 2 decades across multiple presidencies
The countries that emit *more* and have been increasing their emissions steadily over multiple decades
Like, which one would you pick? The answer is obvious. Global warming is definitely bad, and China and India should stop doing it
As a general matter the US should be investing in decarbonising for its energy and economic efficiency factors rather than from climate guiltism (illustration the other reply focusing on the sin of being X% emitting Y% of carbon).
Self-interest on the economic production basis for much higher efficiency.
Sure but if a decarbonized economy is so much more efficient, companies will be incentivized to make that transition on their own- no particular government program is needed
If the Big Ass electric Truck costs about the same amount and works about as well, this can work. If this ultimately means no, you can't have the Big Ass truck, you'll have to get by on a subcompact car, then politicians who advocate for policies leading to that world are going to lose a lot of elections.
If Terraforming Industries is successful, they will have developed efficient CO2 removal technology. Obviously, that doesn't create a business, so their model will be to remove CO2 by turning it into natural gas and then sell that carbon-neutral gas. But, they will have developed a low variable cost CO2 removal machine that can be used to just remove CO2.
It's crazy that climate advocates aren't interested in this. It also, if we're lucky, something that the market could solve without them.
This is a really important point, and I think even the discussion here demonstrates part of the problem on the issue. Most people seem to be stuck thinking in terms of what is presently possible and economical and are not thinking probabilistically about the future. Technology evolves, cost tradeoffs change, things that were once unthinkable gradually or suddenly become possible. Does that mean you should bank on particular solutions working? No. But does that mean you can just say "we can't do that" and move on? Also no.
To borrow from Scott Alexander: culture is fixed, ecology is mutable. The idea that we're stuck with our current position in the environment, or that "we can't for technology" is just wrong. People have spent hundreds and thousands of years fretting about problems that killed millions of people regularly until the point where they stopped being problems (at least in parts of the world). Of course there are often downsides, but taking a backwards-only view of potential solutions that already exist and then trying to socially engineer away the problem seems like a bad way to approach them. And saying that we need to obscure an option like carbon capture because people might try to misuse it both assumes an overly deterministic view of the future and ignores the downsides of alternate strategies. While the left is worried about talking too much about carbon capture to avoid "letting people off the hook," they are actively turning off people by insisting that dealing with climate change must involve major personal sacrifice.
I think a lot of the problem boils down to short term thinking. Sure, most people just want to live their lives and be left alone. But to what end? Say we achieve decarbonization and save the climate solely through social solutions, buy ourselves another few thousand years to continue society in a slightly altered version of the way it is now, and have another few great millennia to argue with each other about whatever new problems we come up with. I don't see that as more desirable than a future where we develop better energy technologies, then use those technologies to power energy intensive applications that become the foundation for even more technological advancement.
There are other existential problems we are likely to face, and many (most?) of them will not be caused by humans. "Grow or die," or better, "evolve or go extinct" has been the strategy of all life on Earth since it came about, and going against that seems like a dead end. The more we focus on solving the current problems with the current technologies, the less prepared we will be for whatever it is we are not worried about. If we try developing all sorts of new technologies as part of a portfolio of potential solutions to the problems we know about, that both makes it more likely that one will work for said problems, and increases the chances that when some black swan event comes, we at least have the building blocks of a technology that might save us then.
Sometimes throwing money and effort at a technological problem works when you need it (see: batteries). Sometimes it doesn’t (see: nuclear fusion power).
Betting that technology is going to painlessly solve *all* your problems on a convenient timescale is a sucker bet IMO.
I wouldn't say that's my position. Developing technology is sometimes painful in itself, and it often creates problems along with solutions. The point isn't that it solves all your problems, but that it solves the problems at all when other solutions fail. And no timescale is ever convenient.
The reality is that there is absolutely nothing you can ever do that will ever be _guaranteed_ to work. 100% probability (and 0%) is an unreachable ideal. Many discussions of technological solutions to complex problems often seem to devolve into zero-sum arguments between pro- and anti-technology camps, and it feels these days like the winner is just whichever side is more fashionable.
There are a lot of people in this world, along with a lot of money and resources. People are bad at predicting outcomes, so diversification is key, and investment should be proportional not just to the perceived likelihood of success, but to the magnitude of the upside (and downside). In the case of carbon capture, there is massive upside potential not just related to climate change, but also as a raw technological capability. Consider how nitrogen fixation through the Haber process essentially solved food security for the developed world (among other industrial benefits). Something similar for carbon could completely transform a variety of resource extraction processes. If something else works faster to fix the climate, great! But I think cost effective carbon capture would be quite beneficial whether it comes in 20 years or 200. The downside seems limited to the amount of money spent on it, plus some vague notion of giving people an "excuse to be lazy" or something.
My main point is that attempts at political messaging, especially around technology, are usually based on incomplete analyses and unexamined assumptions. The current, technologically and economically feasible solutions being pushed to climate change are nice in that we know they work to the degree they do, but the idea that we can just scale up solar panels and batteries to give us a net-zero future with the same standard of living is far from a slam dunk. And that brings the vague downside risk of making people who like big trucks and gas stoves angry.
Finally, I encourage all to be careful when reviewing the history of any technology. Solar panels were derided for decades as inefficient, battery technology 20-30 years ago was disappointing. They may look great now (even if both still have much room for improvement), but it took a while for that to become apparent. The difference is just that the people who were saying "don't bother" then were on the other side of the political spectrum.
What's the market for direct air capture of CO2? Who will pay for it?
How far are we from it being efficient and cheap, compared to, say, electrifying everything and maximizing clean electricity?
That said, should the government invest in direct air capture R&D and pay people to employ and operate it? Yes. Let a thousand flowers bloom and try everything.
After two decades and billions spent, there are only one and a half methods that exist for cost effective carbon removal: biochar and maybe enhanced rock weathering. DAC is 10x the cost of where it needs to be today, and showing few signs of improvement.
It's incredibly hard to do, technically / economically, but it is baked into every long-term climate scenario that eventually we have to find an efficient way to do this at scale.
I'm waiting for solar panels to be worth it for me as an individual - they're already at a 10 year payback but I need probably a 1 or 2 year payback to make it worth the hassle to install them, as well as making it easier for them to fully supply my house rather than going into the national grid & getting a discount for supplying that electricity.
My next car will definitely be electric - having 2 kids and planning a third has shifted me towards being significantly more pro-car than I ever was before mind you, and I want a larger car to fit 3 kids + all their stuff.
This is a very long winded way of saying you're right, and even as someone who is slightly more pro-climate than the average voter, there is no way I'm sacrificing either my current standard of living or my aspirations for higher standards of living in the future for the climate. Willing to adopt tech though (once it gets good enough).
Thanks for laying out your personal experience. I think a lot of climate activists assume that people who don't want to install solar panels, or install a heat pump are climate denialists who are brainwashed by the koch brothers. Really a lot of people are just like you — aware that climate change is a problem but also rationally don't really want to make changes that will alter their standard of living.
And there's cost, as the top level comment cites as well. I am totally fine with spending some money on my household solely for the benefits of using fewer fossil fuels, but I'm also unusual in that.
Last time I replaced my roof it was such a nightmare that I don't want to ever touch the thing at all, and people who say "oh it's really not that bad" without knowing anything about my situation just make get me mad.
I wouldn't mind investing a little money in someone else's solar roof, though.
I don’t know about his case, but in my case it was actually an insurance replacement due to hail damage, so I didn’t have to pay for anything. But it turned out that the impermeable membrane that needed fixing was under metal roofing panels, and one edge of those panels was attached to the bricks of the chimney, and the bricks were non-standard, so we needed to get a specialty brick worker as well as replace the whole roof, and lining up all the people for the insurer to write a check to ended up taking nearly a year.
And then in Texas, it’s only a matter of months until the next hailstorm anyway, and once there’s any leak anywhere, somehow the Gulf of Mexico finds a way into your house through the atmosphere. At a moment when the roof is intact, I’m not touching it again.
Probably older roofs with shingles and tar don’t have an impermeable membrane. But if your roof has some other sort of surface, then it’s often easier for builders to put a layer of tyvek on first and then not worry about whether the top surface is totally impermeable. There’s definitely a stage in new home construction when it looks like the entire thing is covered in tyvek. (I haven’t precisely noticed if it’s the same in California, where the rain is gentle and rare, so Spanish tiles are good enough to prevent any leakage.)
Why would it necessarily alter your standard of living? After I put in my panels+batteries, I felt a lot freer to set my thermostat lower for air conditioning. I felt an illicit thrill in taking the hot rays from the sun that were baking the surroundings and turning them into electricity that then cooled my home, at no marginal cost to me whatsoever.
Jessumsica lays out two things: the payback needs he has for solar power and how much more pro-car he is now. The former is a seemingly inconsequential financial concern, the latter something that has given them a greater appreciation for “mere” convenience.
They add this together, concluding that, whatever their moral or political priors, they wouldn’t actually give up any substantial quality of life for climate.
That is, the two are related but they’re related through what their actions say about their actual willingness to endure sacrifices for climate, which is the ask Matt is arguing about in the post.
I feel like I shouldn't care this much but I'm actually a woman (is Jessumsica not a sufficiently feminine name, or is really the case that the female substack commenter is that rare that everyone thinks all commenters are men?).
But yes, you've hit the nail on the head.
I have friends with three kids who drive everywhere rather than fly, which I think is absolutely nuts and antithetical to enjoyable family life (they do this for ostensibly climate reasons), but it's not something I would ever do, I value convenience and enjoyable family life far too highly to drive over 1000 miles around Europe on the wrong side of the road.
If you must know: I misread your name as “Jesse M Sica”, started off using “he”, realized “Jesse” can be a female name, switched to using “they”, then forgot to circle back and edit the first paragraph.
Heat pump is an odd one as well since a lot of times the electricity is from natural gas anyways so the emissions calculus is genuinely somewhat unclear.
From a customer point of view, shifting to electric power means that any reduction in the carbon emissions per kWh will be a reduction in your own carbon emissions. You don't generally have a direct impact on the nature of electric generation - but since emissions per kWh is falling almost everywhere, switching from direct combustion to electric generation is likely to result in an emissions drop in the medium term even if the short term is not significant (and, unless you have a very coal-heavy grid, heat pumps are not going to result in a short-term increase in emissions)
Is it really unclear? Most heat pumps can pump several times as much heat into your home as the energy they spend in electricity. I don’t exactly know the efficiency of converting gas into electricity at the power plant, but unless it’s really low, the multiplier on the heat pump gets you an advantage over burning the gas inside your house.
It kind of depends on the heat pump you have I think, down to 25 or so there is a pretty solid multiplier, but below that temperature you need a very efficient heat pump to run at a 2x multiplier.
If you live somewhere where it gets below 20F or so, it's likely best to get a cold climate model, but weirdly, it's less about efficiency and more about maintaining heating capability at low temperature. In fact, last time I checked the ratings, Mitsubishi's non cold climate model has a higher COP at 5F than its cold climate model has.
Usually the bigger issue with non cold climate heat pumps is that they lose capacity as the temperature drops and can no longer pump enough btus into the house to keep it warm. For the few btus it can pump in, it still gets decent efficiency. My non-cold climate heat pump (in NH) can bring in around 30k btus at 25F, but that drops to around 10k btus at 0F. I have the thermostat set up to kick over to the oil burner once the outside temp drops to around 5F, even though it's technically still cheaper to run the heat pump (COP at 5F is 2.0). It's just that at that temp it'd likely never shut off without help from the oil burner. If I were getting a new heat pump now, I'd definitely get a cold climate model, which could maintain enough capacity down to -5F and I wouldn't need the oil burner.
Further to this point, modern pumps are far more efficient than older ones. Getting a new pump will take a couple of years to fully pay for itself, but the monthly savings in use is real.
We switched from a gas tankless water heater to a heat pump with an 80 gallon tank and deeply regret it. Our Rheem unit is error-prone, loud as hell, takes up a ton of space in my basement gym, doesn't hold enough hot water for our family of 3 to all wash our hair after a beach day, and was expensive even after tax credits. I'm pissed off that people talk about heat pumps like they have no downside.
Our induction range, on the other hand, is incredible. I thought I'd miss my gas stove but I don't, not one bit.
Heat pumps for water heating definitely aren’t as good as heat pumps for climate control! For climate control there’s really no issue. But for water it just takes so much more heat to heat up the water that it becomes an issue.
I know some households use it for both, but we're in SF and don't even have air conditioning. The cold air exhaust is just blown outside (through a 6-foot-long shiny ugly duct in my homegym that I forgot to mention above).
There's a local org here that goes around helping households do the math on decarbonizing their home appliances and making referrals to installers. I'd seen a presentation and reached out when our tankless needed replacement. Their contractor was fine and they did make sure we got all the tax credits we were entitled to, but I naively assumed I'd be informed of downsides beyond just the size of the thing, which was obvious. I feel hoodwinked.
Didn't know that was an option... we've got an electric water heater but the heat pump is a separate unit only used for AC and as a supplement to our gas furnace. Plus we've got solar panels on the roof, but that's just a thing that happens.
The footprint, noise, and error rate all sound annoying, but surely the endurance has more to do with switching from tankless to tanked than the energy source?
I think the issue is that heat pumps can’t pump heat as quickly as a big gas burner under the pipe can. I think you need to pump a lot of heat into water in advance. At least, I’ve never heard of a tankless heat pump water heater.
Do you know what size electrical hookup your unit has?
Most heat pump water heaters require a 30 amp 240v hookup and have a backup heating element that picks up the slack when the heat pump can't keep up. 80 gallons for a family of 3 with full electric backup should be plenty unless something isn't working right. Again, when in backup electric mode, you're basically just using a standard full power electric water heater.
There are some units on the market that have smaller backup heaters with 120v hookups, but they're less common. If that's what you have, that might explain why it's having trouble keeping up. If you do have a 30 amp hookup, maybe the electric backup coils aren't working or have been disabled (maybe through an app)?
You're correct, we have a 120v model that's heat pump only. And 18 months later we ended up adding 240v service for the induction range, so we definitely should have upgraded when we got the new water heater. Apparently we can add on a separate electric coil unit as a backup, so that's currently like #3 on our list of upcoming house projects.
Weird, vitriolic potshot. Do you really think the marginal climate benefit of solar panels on one SFH is the *most impactful* way they could spend O($10k) on their kids' future? This criticism seems completely asinine if we're talking about one family's decision rather than millions.
This way of thinking about solar is entirely reasonable, especially considering competing priorities and the hassle factor. That said, another framing is that if solar has a 10 year payback, you're probably getting a roughly 8% internal rate of return on the money spent on the project.
A nearly risk free investment with an almost guaranteed 8% return is an incredibly good deal. If you don't have any savings to spare, this might not seem relevant. OTOH, stock market returns have an average return of 8%, but come with a pretty high level of risk. So having an investment option that gives you 8% without all that risk is worth considering, even though it doesn't seem to be as much of a slam dunk as solar installs with much lower payback periods.
a different way to analyze it is to look at the hassle as part of the cost
if solar panels cost e.g. $10000 and return $1000/year at end-of-year for 25 years then IRR is about 8%. but if the hassle is worth $2000 then the IRR is only 6.5% and if the hassle is worth $7500 then the IRR is 3%, worse than a 1-year treasury
im also unsure about whether this really is risk-free, since electricity prices might change (although up perhaps more likely than down) and there may be policy risk due to grid access charges
Electricity prices nationally are up almost a third in the past five years. That kind of continued increase will dramatically reduce the payback time and increase the ROI significantly after the breakeven point.
Is that how much home batteries cost? You’d think at that price they’d have extremely long warranty periods that just meant replacement when they got old - assuming the battery manufacturer is still around
Reasonable although in end for Retail /Consumers really it is very hard - the 10 year horizon sale works with industrial / commercial but only a minority of consumers
but this same for industrial / commercial where you present a positive NPV for XX megawatts and an unadjusted IRR ex any incentives of 8-10%, it moves capital investment decisions.
Of course every firm and individual will have their own payback horizons - and constraints. I am sure you have your specific reasons on 5 yr horizon, shall not 2nd guess although it is not per se optimal in an abstract sense but of course devils cost of capital, time horizons etc.
I agree that net metering schemes are ripe for adjustment on many grids as solar penetration increases and many jurisdictions have already changed the rules. But so far at least, I don't know of any case where previously installed solar didn't get grandfathered in under the old rules even after changes were made for new installs.
Also, on grids with time of use metering and grid battery programs, the economics can work for homeowners to add batteries and self-consume most of their production. Homeowners where this math works or mostly works also get home backup power as a bonus.
In Australia, it's not a hassle to install them (most of the time), and they're half the price they are in the US. Consequently, a large fraction of houses, including in the most politically conservative places in the country, have them installed, and now there's a huge rush to install home batteries to better utilize those solar panels.
The technology is exactly the same in the USA and Australia, it's just that a combination of advocacy and luck have made the logistics far easier.
It's not just about technology, as much as MattY wants to expend zero political capital on climate because he's got other political priorities.
All of the above. Marketing costs are lower because solar is now a mass-market product, design and approvals costs are lower because of a much more uniform and simpler regulatory environment for solar, and utilities have learned to stop worrying and love home solar (and the regulatory environment doesn’t let them say no easily).
The difference in available sunshine is dwarfed by the efficiency of the Australian home solar industry compared to the United States.
The local equivalent of Trader Joe’s is offering a 6.6 kilowatt solar system and a 20 kWh battery for $5000 USD installed, with long warranties. The battery component is subsidised by about 30%, but even taking that into account it’s way, way cheaper than the US equivalent because a) we don’t punch ourselves in the face with tariffs and b) the Australian home solar industry is much, much, much more efficient because it operates in a much more consistent and friendly regulatory environment.
No but it is materially helpful to look at the permitting and rule sets that allow Australians to be more effective - and look at the evolution
Achieving economies of scale in execution, and process learning rather than one off to one off and zero scaling, zero repetition for process expertise.
To be fair another key difference between Australia and the USA is that our roofs are typically constructed from either tiles or coated steel (“tin”), both of which are far more durable than shingles.
Why do most American houses have shingled roofs? It seems dumb to me but I’m assuming there is a sensible reason.
Amazing fact about EVs and children that people don’t mention enough: you can park an EV in your garage, plug it in, turn on the climate control, and let your kid keep sleeping inside. Just for this reason I’m never going back to gas.
This is why I think green financing is a good idea. Theoretically with a PPA/Lease, someone could pay you $5,000 up front for the privilege of using your roof and also lock in your current electric rate so it won't go up with inflation. Free money to help the environment! But no one trusts the utilities or the solar companies not to pull a fast one on them with this kind of deal. People might trust the government to keep its word though.
This is a little known fact, but as I understand it, OBBBA actually keeps the tax credits for solar leasing companies installing residential solar. So basically leasing solar is the only way for homeowners to still get the tax credit, albeit indirectly through leasing companies.
I'm not sure £5k or less would be enough for me to consider it if I'm honest. I'm concerned about the damage to our (expensive!) roof and the possibility of squirrels/pigeons nesting underneath. I'm also interested in resilience and whether it's possible to store our own electricity to be able to withstand blackouts better (although they happen relatively rarely in the UK)
Out of curiosity, which part of the country do you live in? We have solar panels and a plug-in hybrid, but we live in SoCal, which is pretty much the best place in the US for solar panels. It’s far south and sunny year-round! It feels so cool to drive a car powered by electrons from the sun. (The upfront cost was huge though, I must admit.)
Maybe the Mississippi people are more public spirited, not being rent seekers, using real resources to gain an income transfer from cross subsidization. :)
The UK! Our roof is South facing though, and every summer I gaze at it and imagine the electricity it could produce. My husband thinks I'm nuts. I also have an eye to the increasing efficiency of solar, and I hate hassle/dealing with finance stuff and getting solar panels involves a lot of that!
Ah well, that does make it harder. You're a lot farther north than I am. Does your part of the UK get a lot of cloud cover? That makes a big difference too.
Yes, a lot of cloud cover although we are having increasingly hot summers and I'm told that even in winter and even on cloudy days you can generate decent amounts of electricity. This summer and autumn (so far) in particular has been unseasonably warm.
I love my solar panels+batteries. Right now, I calculate the payback period at 8 years. If electricity prices ever go up a lot, then obviously that payback period will decline. And I also like the protection from outages.
That said, I'm not sure I'd recommend that people get rooftop solar. More and more the grids are becoming cleaner (though not as fast as I'd like) and it's a lot cheaper to build huge solar+battery farms than to install it at your home.
The biggest drawback for me for rooftop solar is the 40 year old roof on my house and the 80 year old electrical panel (in addition to the rainy climate, but I think batteries help solve that). If the government would kindly replace both of those (and rewire my house), I’d be happy to let it add solar panels and a battery pack too.
I have a brand spanking new consumer panel and mostly brand new wiring. I'm also wary that efficiency may continue to grow so if I may end up with less hassle, better panels and more tested tech (more related to heat pumps).
Better to be able to draw from a grid that's 100% renewables, in part because of a large transmission network that pulls in wind and solar-generated electricity from wherever it's currently in surplus.
California is trying to pass legislation to bring in more out of state electricity and surprise surprise groups like the Sierra Club are opposing this because it might allow small amounts of coal-generated electricity to sneak onto our grid. Idiots.
Yep! I feel very alone in my group of friends for defending the rapid growth of Seattle on environmental grounds. But fact is we get nearly all of our electricity from hydro and our water is abundant. If we care about the earth we should welcome lots more people moving here and the density that entails
Retail is regardless not the major way forward for signficant RE deployment. Industrial / utility scale megawatts to gigawatts are where the cost deployment effiiciencies kick in big time.
I’m curious why you’d need a 1 or 2 year payback period. That would equate to a 100% (or 50%) annual ROI. Is there another investment you’re making that generates 50% ROI (and if so, please let me know what it is!).
Is there a reason solar could not currently supply 100% of your household electricity needs? Assuming ample roof space, the system would just need to be sized appropriately.
Well, I live in the UK, in an end of terrace house with limited roof space. It would only supply 100% on very sunny days. Payback is due to capital outlay. I want lots of things (holidays, larger car) - solar will only be the priority when it's immediately making us money.
My impression is that permitting/environmental assessments/blocking lawsuits are major problems for all kinds of green energy. Solar and wind require a lot of square meters/kWh, which make it easier for them to get blocked for nimby reasons. Putting them far from urban areas (where land is expensive) requires high-efficiency transmission lines. When that stuff gets blocked, we end up burning more coal to make up for the power we didn't get from the sun and wind.
Great article! Another thing the activists have wrought is negatively polarizing Republicans against green technology to the extent that the current administration is cancelling green energy projects just for fun, and I would guess that a significant fraction of Americans are more skeptical of green technology than they would otherwise be absent activists trying too hard and making things like electric cars into political statements.
As an actual RE &EE investment professional I entirely blame the Activist Left and Green NGO segment for this as for at least the past 7 years it's been the wrong focus and the fact they pushed in Biden Admin heavily on 'strangle the oil and gas" was a major trigger
I think we should put the blame on the group that is actually doing the dumb thing instead of vague outside factors that are impossible to quantify. No one forces them to be dipshits!
I am sure you do given your snobbish characterisation of the others as “dipshits” and perfectly illustrates how the sneering elitism of the profesional class Left has ended up in a dead-end. The idiocy of the Left Climate NGO class actively hindered me and actively moved in a very avoidable way the perceptions. Whereas industrial professionals really wanted different images. One as to sell to the market that is, not the population and market that the pointy headed profesisoinal class snobs want it to be
I know from personal experience that the "left climate NGO class" made things harder to a certain extent. That effect definitely exists. But absolving MAGA world from any personal responsibility for their dumb energy and climate policies is way more removed from reality than my "snobbish characterizations" could ever be.
I get that it's attractive to use the left as a punching bag for everything, but at some point, we need to be serious here. These people wouldn't magically become your friends if the Sunrise movement didn't exist.
Personal Responsability has FUCK ALL to do with this. Achieving the market progress and market share does. The problem is you people are treating this as some moral crusade and moral positioning. I give zero fucks about MAGA personal responsability. I give many fucks about achieving market sales, penetration and what is needed to Communicate to the Widest Market Possible, not engaging in moralising, about personal responsaiblity or whatever. And the LEfty NGOs climate agenda for past 5 yrs at minimum have been a detriment to me. And and an active detriment to achieving real progress - banging on about the evil oil corporations and spending more time trying to block hydrocarbons than waking up to the calls of people like me that the goddamn system is overall starting to strangle our ability to deploy at speed
This would be plausible if Texas and Florida weren’t building out solar power at a break neck speed, and investing in things like geothermal.
Unfortunately, the climate NGO people really did unnecessarily polarize the issue by spending a ton of time talking about “strangling fossils fuels) and pressuring Biden to put a pause on new LNG terminals
The dipshits are the politicians cancelling these projects. AFAIK, Republicans voters aren't asking for that. It's not "sneering elitism" to call them out for that.
And is there a possible argument that what Florian said above is out of bounds but Trump's various characterizations of his political opponents isn't?
if one wants to point to the MAGA Political Activists, the equally online bunch of wankers who for me are the mirror of the wokey woke, right wokism is a good expression - sure - but that’s not the habit of the commentary going on about MAGA idiocy this MAGA that. Separate that out and I have no problem - I was going after the Activist NGOs you should note, that their mirror image on the right are a bunch of fuck-heads too …. activism of all stripes is a modern pox.
The incompetence and senility of the Biden administration was nowhere better illustrated than by their efforts to strangle oil and gas leading to record production.
I do not know if I would say senility as that seems peevish and immature, but it certainly was a huge own-goal that was misplaced spending of limited political capital for no good actual return politically - nor any real result other than self-distraction.
I thought the high level concept of IRA was largely fine - although the Everything Bagelism that undermined it in execution, not. See offshore wind and no Jones etc waiver, see permitting reform getting strangled by TheGRoups because god forbid a gas pipeline might benefit etc. — the missed opportunity for working with Europe and NAFTA on a China competiing industrial scale platform. The fact the opposition will always oppose does not excuse blundering into playing into their opposition.
RATHER if one can count on that - and one should - one needs to counter it on its own turf to sterilise. There was some thinking in that direction (about getting “red state” investment" highlighted but it was in my experience remaining all in the Lefty Professional Class Talking To Itself mode of discourse.
ETA:
The heathcare policy is not my area nor interest, however the lessons are not to me in healthcare policy it is in infrastructure building and historical examples
The fact that the Biden admin getting the execution of much of their building agenda bogged down because they didn't focus on the trade offs (as MAtt, as Klein, as many others have highlighted) and focus on key things to get actual shit built, remaining rather too much in the airy world of Symbolic Capitalists as Musa Al Gharbi puts it, in moving words and ideas and theory around (as like their everything bagelism is "nudges" to achieve poly-agenda.
Insurance market is a totally different subject than hard-infrastructure building which energy is - moving an insurance market around is just an utterly wrong point of comparison.
As a point of clarity - I did not say IRA was bad for not including a deal with EU & NAFTA, I said it was a missed opportunity which is very different - although I would also say that missed opportunity aligned overall with the execution mistakes that did make IRA a failure.
As I said, at initial framing and for most higher-level policy I liked IRA overall as it was an overall efficient lever with minimal up-front Government spend and excellent private capital mobilisation.
The Bad was essentially the execution - the non-reform and inattention to the "cruft" of regulation as I once saw it characterised (forget where) to enable most rapid physical build. Missed opportunity on scale w NAFTA, EU etc is more the "nice to have had" although the blocking factors in re missing that strike me as symptoms of the wider failure (but EU NAFTA again are more 2ndary symptoms to me and not core)
As for sterilisation - to be clear I do not expect ANYTHING to PREVENT political opposition from attempting an attack nor from partisan media like Fox news talk-show twits from going on and on. But that is not the same subject as sterilising or another way to put it, inoculating.
However, I do rather strongly feel that the entire Democratic Party has sold itself on the idea that Fox News Etc has this Mind control effect which explains their own failure to sell beyond the pre-sold, beyond selling to themselves, and the fact that marketing efforts do not fully pay off means they are useless. Analysis-PAralysis, perfect-being-enemy-of-good effects.
Inoculating the wider audiences to such inevitable attacks is entirely and fully possible if one thinks outside of communicating only to the pre-sold and only in the language of your own agenda. We 'sell' our financing to MAGAesque business leadership in our industrial investment financing because we don't sell fucking green. I forbid my people to talk Green Language, to talk about "ecological" or ESG concerns (for all that I have no issues with ESG reporting in itsef as an investor reporting, at least for our investor KPIs which are sensible technocratic ones).
Countering on own turf means going to address the concerns of the potential audiencies of the Fox News talk-shows idiots and addressing them, not talking down to them (nor badgering nor guilting) - or treating MAGA as this big single blog (as dumb as the Righties treating the Democrats as one blob).
Our ground people talk langauge that doesn't put off Fox/WSJ reading interlocutors. Dollars and cents. Savings. Joe Middle Sized industrial owner may have voted for the Orange Cretin, but a good IRR a good NPV and a solid financing for a solid cost-cutting investment wins over.
I have become quite the follower of Cleaning Up (thanks to MagellanNH commentator here to give credit as I am not a podcast guy follower although I oddly knew of Michael Liebreich from Bloomberg) - and his Podcast episode on Climate Reset this past week I very much agree with https://www.cleaningup.live/audioblog-16-the-pragmatic-climate-reset-part-ii-a-provocation/
Of course he's international and not US focused but the broad subject align
Sure it is. Take EVs from an engineering perspective they will end up a lot cheaper and better, more durable etc than ICE vehicles and very few if any ICE vehicles will be sold. This would be absent and environmental benefits. So why enact a ban just to scare and enrage people and driven them to the right?
Sure it does - it's all about oppositional defiant disorder as a political philosophy. People are strongly objecting to being told what to do by environmental scolds. Wind is just one way to object. It's also poorly thought out retaliation for canceling various oil and gas projects by the Biden admin.
"Take EVs from an engineering perspective they will end up a lot cheaper and better."
This is probably true for a new EV vs. a new ICE. I only say probably because there's still a school of thought that a plug in hybrid will remain the "best" overall platform. But there's no EV solution for the $2,000 - $5000 used vehicle segment which represents 25% of the US vehicle population today because the EV battery replacement at 8-10 years will create two depreciation cycles and prevent an EV from reached the 20 year old, near end life segment of the market.
EDIT: Not disagreeing, just noting we'll have ~ 100m ICE vehicles on the road through 2050 based on economics of supporting this segment of the used car market.
What on earth are you talking about? The warranty is 10-100k. Replacing at 8 years? At 10 years the average battery is still at 90% of what it was new.
"At 10 years the average battery is still at 90% of what it was new."
This was definitely not my experience with a 10 year old hybrid battery. It was under 50% at 10 years.
Batteries have improved since then, but currently "Most EV batteries last 15-20 years, with an average degradation rate of about 1.8% per year under moderate conditions." The key point there is "moderate conditions" which is generally considered to be between 60-80° Fahrenheit. There's a lot of places in the US that experience frequent weather outside that range.
I believe moderate conditions refer to how often they are charged to 100%. If you plug it in at night then it would rarely outside of road trips be charged to 100%.
The low-end EVs that currently have the potential to reach this low-end segment < $5k price point are not going to reach the segment due to battery replacement costs. Just facts. The 8-10 year old EVs that are reaching their battery replacement window are all getting scrapped right now. Just like I'll scrap my 2016 Model S in for sure less than 2 years rather than replace the battery.
Also, if you ban ICE vehicles, then the places where EVs won't really work become a huge problem. If EVs are better technology, they'll ultimately win out. There are externality reasons to want fewer ICEs, but a blanket ban is a good way to discover the previously-unclear-to-you situations where some important thing simply cannot be done with current EVs in a reasonable way.
If California wants to ban ICEV sales (after 2035) and the voters of California are fine with that, why is that a problem? Federalism, and all that.
If a candidate for the 2028 Democratic nomination wants to expand the California's action to the entire nation, however, that would be disqualifying for me. But is that likely? I doubt it.
I'm not convinced that market forces alone will lead to widespread adoption of EVs. I don't think we're quite at that takeoff point yet. We need a few more nudges.
If you look at Toyota's solid state battery and the latest manufacturing efficacy out of China you could have a 1,000 mile range EV for half the price of a ICE in a few years. No one is going to buy a $38k RAV4 when they can get the RAV4 EV for $20k.
"I would guess that a significant fraction of Americans are more skeptical of green technology than they would otherwise be absent activists trying too hard and making things like electric cars into political statements"
I'm sure some effect like this exists, but technology like electric cars and solar panels of the quality we have today wouldn't exist without the political and cultural work being put in to develop a market that supported these technologies as they were emerging. Honestly, your comment reads as smug and intellectually lazy piling on to a group that's a popular local villain?
Because it fails to consider the variety of effects that activism has had on technological uptake, to question what the net effect has been, and to weigh to what extent it was possible to get the good without the bad?
Saying what I wrote is “incomplete” or “leaves out something important” would be an equally valid way of making that point. Calling me names is kind of intellectually lazy and smug.
Nah, I'm good with it. "Some backlash exists" is true of just about any type of political action in a polarized world; grabbing just that fact and considering it in isolation from "did the action promote its intended results" or the like isn't analysis, it's just a cheap dunk on a local outgroup.
Yes, I agree - Califnornia not only has high visibiltiy but it is also marginallly dishonest for varioius flavors of Democrats / Left to pretend that California is not sending a signal to the nation at large of what the desired direction of the dominant Democratic party structure is.... particularly when in other settings frequently the same people will tout California driving national markets, implying okay we can't do this nationally but we can use Cali, NY to drive....
And so yeah, not a straw man - it's really in many ways a kind of implicitely revealed agenda.
(equally while I am super favorable to EV, the idea that it's a good economic policy to ban something rather than make the economics of what you want to be the winner is ... daft and a path to losing)
All politics are national! Sure, you don’t see Gretchen Whitmer talking about it, but we don’t live in a world where FDR could hide his polio and affairs anymore.
Biden's 2024 CAFE standards were rowing in the same direction. I just checked - EPA in 2024 estimated that EVs would make up 68% of the domestic fleet in 2032. This was never on a ballot - I think voters are fine with whatever technology the market lands on organically, but the enviros take over the agencies when dems gain power, and push hard to achieve through regulation what they could never get through Congress. If anyone thinks a second Biden term wouldn't have continued to aggressively grind against ICE engines, I have a bridge for sale you may be interested in. :-)
CA is a nationally visible state in terms of politics and culture, just like NY. It's not a coincidence that Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries are from NY and CA. That's where the Democratic donor and activist base is.
Not the most knowledgeable about this (though I am a welder!), but I've long thought setting fossil fuels on fire was extraordinarily wasteful considering what else we can use them for (making steel and plastics amongst other things). There's no denying they're good for generating energy when nothing else is on offer, but renewables are starting to get pretty damn cheap especially in terms of deployment. Pompeo was on TRIP Leading recently pretending that China was doing all their energy build-out on coal and it was quite shocking considering how fast they're cranking out solar (wind too?) to expand their capacity for energy generation. We should be doing this too!
Similarly, my MAGA shithead bar buddy was mocking wind turbines for having blades that only last eight years, and I was incredulous. Who cares? They're cheap to erect and its good work for welders (he's also a welder). We need more juice; who cares where it comes from provided we're maximizing production?
In fairness he's a fabricator and not an installer/millwright so it's not a 1:1 thing for him, but "did not think this through" is a defining characteristic of most MAGA types.
One of my hotter takes is that I don't care if climate change is caused by fossil fuel use or natural warming/cooling patterns. I want carbon capture and related technologies to mature so that we can control the earth's temperature like a thermostat.
Once in the 1920s the LA Auto Show was cancelled when an overnight snowfall collapsed the exhibition roof, a la the Minneapolis Metrodome. That seems cool! Dial up some snow on the beach!
"And of course, if everyone did switch to an electric car, that would drive up the price of electricity."
IMO, this is generally false. As long as regulators do their jobs, the switch to electric cars is likely to make electricity rates go down.
The reason for this counter-intuitive result is that electricity grids have to be massively overbuilt to handle peak loads. This means they have very low overall asset utilization rates. The average distribution grid runs at about 30% of its capacity. Transmission and power generation assets average about 50% utilization. So the system has a ton of excess capacity available for flexible loads like EV charging.
To unlock this excess capacity, regulators have to force utilities to incentivize flexible off-peak EV charging and get customers to avoid charging EVs during peak periods. As long as they do this, charging EVs off-peak means moving more kwhs over the same fixed grid assets. This could reduce the the cost of moving each kwh and lower rates.
That's definitely true, but it's getting harder and harder for regulators to ignore all the successful EV charging programs that have been rolled out around the country that allow EV owners to charger their EVs for significantly less cost than in places where regulators are idiots or captured by utilities.
Texas is a good example. They have tons of excess wind power overnight and lots of excess solar during some sunny days. They also have some crazy high peak loads on the hottest sunniest days that cause grid stress and huge price spikes during peak periods. All the new batteries are helping ease this, but managed EVs charging programs have already been widely deployed and they offer EV charging for between $0.00/kwh and about $.06/per kwh in exchange for letting grid operators control the exact timing of the charging.
how would this work in practice? are we pricing household electricity consumption by time of day? or are we assuming they charge their EVs overnight and only worrying about commercial charging stations?
I think almost everyone in the business believes the best way to keep costs down is to deploy mandatory time-of-use pricing. This is sort of independent of EV adoption.
Given average grid utilization rates and the fact that peak loads are the biggest driver of cost, it just makes the most sense. In competitive generation markets, the cost per kwh during non-peak times averages $.02-$.04 but spikes as high as $1.00-$10.00 per kwh during peaks. It's moronic to charge consumers a flat rate 24/7 given these behind the scenes pricing dynamics.
Managed home EV charging has another value to grid operators in that it can be instantly shut down during grid emergencies. Most grids need something called spinning reserves, where power plants are kept running 24/7 even when their output isn't needed, just in case another plant trips offline suddenly. Managed EV charging can eliminate the need for this type of backup because grid operators can just shut down all the EV charging for a few minutes if there's an emergency. The interruption doesn't need to be very long because slower backup power sources can take over in just a few minutes and the EV chargers can be turned back on.
It depends on the program. For simple time-of-use, there's no control. It's just differential pricing to encourage off-peak charging.
The most advanced programs, and these are already pretty widely deployed in more forward thinking grids, are set up with very granular operator control. The EV owner sets up their charging app with a percent of charge target and a time that target needs to be hit (say 80% charged by 7am). The grid operator looks at supply and load forecasts and optimizes the charging so it happens during the exact best/lowest cost time over the course of the night.
IMO, any programs where grid operators take control have to be completely voluntary and based on carrots not sticks. This is another area where Democrats/bureaucrats could mess up big time and create a huge backlash. We've seen this with programs where grid operators control thermostats and although most (all?) of these programs are voluntary, regulators have to be extremely careful to avoid backlash which will be swift and could cripple programs before they even get going.
In the UK, there is only one grid (obviously), but you can choose your own electricity supplier, who then buys wholesale and sells retail. Some suppliers have a flat rate 24/7, others have simple time of use, yet others have fancier systems where pricing varies based on expected demand; you then get the ability to integrate your own electricity consumption with the grid pricing.
So, for instance, you fill up the washing machine with your laundry, and set a maximum price, and the machine then does the laundry at a time when the pricing falls below that maximum. This does require some smarts in the washing machine (but you can also just get a report on your phone that tells you what time to put the laundry on). EV charging always has enough smarts to follow a plan and will charge the EV at times that minimise cost. Some EVs even have an option to be used as a grid storage battery, so they'll discharge into the grid at high-demand times if they would still have sufficient charge when needed.
The grid operators can't take control, but customers can opt-in to a more complex pricing regime. Mostly people that do opt-in are those where enough of their appliances are "smart" that they don't have to do too much to keep up with the pricing and the appliances manage things for them.
Heat pumps are another one that can do this; if you set a temperature range (say 18-23C), then it might heat to the top of the range while power is cheap, or cool to the bottom of the range and then let the temperature drift to the other end of the range when power is expensive, only using high-price electricity when absolutely necessary to keep the house in the acceptable range. With adequate insulation, you can ride four or five hours of peak price without needing heating or cooling, even on the hottest and coldest days.
Aren't there a lot of places where the power company will give you a break on your rates if you let them install a switch to turn off your AC during peak demand times? Something like that could work for car charging, as well.
It's a fair point and of course the messaging has to be done right. Maybe the trick is to allow people to stick with flat rate but to charge them enough of a flat rate to compensate for the inefficiency of that choice. I'd be fine with that.
OTOH, everyone expects it'll cost more to fly over the holidays compared to less busy times. In term of electricity, especially with cheap but intermittent renewables, the price swings between off-peak and peak (or between energy excess and energy scarcity) may get bigger than they already are. Cheaper batteries may help even the swings out, but we need to be charging people accurate prices for what they use and for the burdens they put on the system.
"Are we pricing household electricity consumption by time of day?"
We are today. Below is the Illinois Comed day-ahead rate table per kWh by hour. There's always a ~ 5x difference between the low and high price per day. The current Tesla app let's you schedule your charging to minimize cost (i.e., charge between 2:00AM and 5:00AM).
I'm curious where the fascination came from with banning gas stoves and ICE cars when the direction of the technology is that those things will go away on their own. It just annoyed people immensely for no valid long term purpose.
Because climate activists decided that EVs / induction stoves had reached the point where they were "good enough" to replace ICE / gas stoves and therefore people who were not making the change were doing so out of stubbornness or hostility and had to be forced. After all, they had heard from some other climate activist that they could do this, so they automatically did - and therefore anyone who hadn't was doing so purely out of hatred for the planet and would never actually do it without being forced.
(ie, they're early adopters who don't want to accept that adoption is a normal S-curve)
I suspect it's partly the conviction that they're at least as good as the alternatives combined. But also people often decide that just because they like something like an induction stove, other people should us that induction stove and if those other people don't want to use an induction stove we should make them because it's just better. That's one of those more unfortunate features of human nature that's going to still be with us when the sun has exhausted all its fuel.
As far as I know, California still has a ban on ICE car sales starting in 2035 (pending court cases), and requires wiring for EV chargers in all new construction. Which seems like a good way to 1) make people mad 2) drive up housing costs, but what do I know.
Mandates for the future like that aren’t that expensive. I don’t think either of these things is a big issue. They’re certainly much better than mandating solar panels or requiring retrofits.
Wiring, plus a new 240v outlet, plus potentially having to get a bigger panel to accommodate it, plus another thing for the inspector to check. Not crazy expensive but every mandate adds a straw to the pile.
These seem pretty negligible in new construction provided you're not actually installing the charging unit in said new construction. A bigger breaker box is a benefit anyways since we have way more gadgets than ever before.
It's troublesome enough that in '63 they thought running 95% of our outlets off of two circuits was a good idea and it's expensive to address that error, but in new construction it's basically nothing.
These guys stand for degrowth first and foremost. Europe shows what happens when you stifle energy production. Germany stands proud by closing its nuclear plants and damaging industrial production. The U.K. is trying to meet energy goals by relying on extortionate wind energy and overly complicated nuclear power, leading to ridiculous energy prices.
No, the only real climate activists *are* the pragmatic people. Those ones you see in the museums with Campbell’s soup cans are just performance artists. Don’t let them take the word “climate activists”.
I live in MA. This winter we got gas and electric bills showing a split of roughly 20/80 supply price to delivery fees. When people got their their bills this winter they experienced sticker shock and were outraged, complained loudly on Facebook, asked the governor to intervene, etc.
One of the main reasons for the increase in delivery fees is that they're used to fund the state's Mass Save program, which subsidizes things like heat pumps, energy efficient appliances, winterization and subsidies for poor people's energy costs.
Mass Save was thought to be a popular program and was recently expanded. The problem is people don't want to pay for it, or to subsidize other people's heat pumps from their own bills.
Due to the blowback governor Healey ended up decreasing the Mass Save expansion and has made energy affordability a big theme for this year.
If even people in rich, ultra liberal MA don't want to be inconvenienced for climate change then I can't imagine the rest of the country does either...
Yep, I was stunned by Con Edison’s delivery charges being 2/3rds of the (very high) bill. I thought the technocrats were supposed to be running a good energy policy in the Blue states, but this sort of thing, California’s mismanagement, Hawaii’s mismanagement is a bad look.
As a proper actual financier of industiral RE & EE I broadly agree.
First the Activists focus heavily on suppression of hydrocarbons and use the pollution paradigm that really is not an actionable paradigm for CO2 (and in most ways inappropriate) - and are for my perception in many ways trapped in the same 1970s BoomerAge Framework Thinking as their right-wing nemeses - whereas the technology of RE and elecrrification has leaped forward over the past 15 years to cost and efficiency levels that frankly myself didn't even believe would happen (when I started on RE & EE about 15 yrs ago as a financier).
Regulatory streamlining, permitting - and grid expansion to remove / reduce congestion as well as grid modernisation to enable the lowest cost energy to move consistently as well as modernise for Grid Efficicency - 60s era grids are leaving money on the table.... or wasting money.
Selling EE & RE as Savings, as Economic Competitiveness, as Growth Drivers - that's what is needed. The Climate Activists have been my nemesis in a way for the past decade as the whole goddamn Hair Shirt Guiltism isn't how you get real adoptoin.
We do our financials and support the investments based on Positive Net Present Value (NPV) ex-subsidies - and it works - get the private counterpart looking at their long-term asset deployment, cost stabilisation (and typically 20-40% up-front energy bill savings again ex-any subsidies which can be fine carrots for enabling important capital deployment but aren't the needed basis of NPV analysis)
Misselling EE & RE as Climate Guilt has set back this deployment. It's wrong headed
Under-focus on the ready-for-market technology acceleration AND on upgrading the needed energy infrastructure (with electricity demand growing by leaps and bounds this needs to be a priority regardless of decarbonisation)
“First the Activists focus heavily on suppression of hydrocarbons and use the pollution paradigm that really is not an actionable paradigm for CO2 (and in most ways inappropriate) - and are for my perception in many ways trapped in the same 1970s “
If they were so focused on pollution they should have been working on nuclear all this time.
well yes - anti-nuclear was always wrong-headed mixing of anti-Nukes (weapons) with generally incoherent non-factual fears of nuclear reactors being bombs (or massively incompetent idiocies like Chernobyl although there of course bad design was coupled with bad Communist maintenance and bad Soviet hierarchies and bad… well just everything Soviet… for a fuck up of Russo-Soviet scale
This was great, and really spoke to where I am at.
In my head full of ideals, I embrace the future of modern abundance full of windmills and solar panels. Once my family moves back to my home state (Michigan) I will gladly buy an electric car to zip around with, much like my sister-in-law has.
But just like my SIL has a husband with an ICE truck for "going up north", we are going to keep an ICE truck for now ... for "going up north."
The cabin is 4 hours away. That's out of range. Charging takes time. Now our trip "up north" is 5-6 hours instead of 4. With kids. Ugh.
Can we acknowledge that sitting at a charging station with children of any age, on a road trip, is not good times? Can we acknowledge that family road trips are still the most cost effective way for most families to travel? Can we recognize that in some parts of the country - particularly the upper Midwest - weekend road trips to vacation homes are something families often do multiple times a *month* in winter and summer and this is deeply ingrained in the local culture? That I need an answer for how I can continue to live my life and make the energy transition?
Yes, yes, I know I don't *need* any of those things. But as my immigrant father-in-law says, "America is the one country where you can eat steak every day."
And this where I think a lot of progressive messaging runs up against a wall with Americans. What progressives need, more than any particular policy, is to show some *empathy* for ordinary American life. I think a huge barrier is that climate has gotten politicized and "left-coded," and "left-coded" for a lot of Americans means "well educated, single, childless, coastal, vegan, urbanite nepo babies who distain and look down upon my married, suburban, steak-eating, truck driving, hard working, flyover country family life."
(And admit it, y'all do look down on them a little. I've lived on the East Coast for 20 years, I've heard how you people speak about the rest of America because you do it to muh face when I tell you where I am from.)
It doesn't have to be like this. I think so much of our polarization is just perceived lack of empathy - "Those people hate how I live; Fuck them and everything they stand for."
(Yes, this goes both ways, I know.)
But the climate people often make this worse by a) not showing empathy b) wrapping climate up with a bunch of other lefty-esque causes like "more density" and "affordable housing" - which aren't bad things! But it does make a lot of normie Americans think "those commies want to force me into a condo with criminals and loud rap music, and they will get off on my suffering because they hate me and people like me." And it's hard for progressives to make an argument for practical policies when the face of Progressive America is often a self-righteous chick with a pixie cut yelling into TikTok about how your F-150 is an expression of nature-murdering Toxic Whiteness and Misogyny, going on about global warming and personal sacrifice like a Campus Crusader for Christ telling you about the fires of hell you will burn in if you don't accept Jesus into your heart *now.*
Americans hate that shit and will *actively* resist it. If their Big Ass Truck makes them Bad, they don't want to be Good.
Americans are not people who are into morally-induced austerity. Even our native versions of Christianity - a religion whose entire point is to "lay down one's life for love and other existential causes" - are steeped in entertainment, self-assurance, prosperity, glitter, Big Hair, and donuts.
Bundling issues together also makes Americans suspicious; it trips the Fox News nerve center in the brain that goes "What's their REAL AGENDA?"
So progressives, to see any movement on climate, need to start with showing empathy towards the lives of most Americans. They need to accept Big Ass Trucks and suburbia and the people who love them. They need to not sound like woke, overeducated versions of Dana Carvey in a grey wig.
And by doing that, develop some empathy, maybe they will stop talking about the issue in the desperate, moral terms that turn people off, stop pressuring elected officials rush into solutions that aren't ready, and stop creating unnecessary barriers. And they will start to discuss the issue in a more politically productive, "This is what energy abundance can do for YOU" mode.
Because that is ultimate what politics boils down to. Politics isn't religion. With apologies to the memory of JFK, politics is NOT really about "Asking what you can do for your country." That's nice, but asking sacrifice of people is what religion - including civic religion - does.
Politics is not Civic Religion, even if our politicians often draw upon our patriotism. But the act of Politics is about getting people to vote for you by promising that you will make *their* lives better, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Maybe it requires a little humility to get off the pulpit of Climate-as-Morality and get onto the stump of "This is what energy abundance can do for YOU."
One of the most annoying aspects of the EV discourse over the last 15 years was the “range is a red herring” talking point but over the next 15 years I do think that the range and charging problem will be solved and refueling an EV will come very close to the gasoline fill-up experience.
If I regularly road trip with 3 kids - and kids suck to travel with - and I have to road trip around school schedules, so I am often on a tight schedule, especially for holidays, then charging times and range are a real issue, especially on longer interstate road trips to see family.
I usually make 2 10 minute stops between Connecticut and Michigan, for a total drive time of about 11ish hours. I can do that in a single day; I'm tired, but I can do it.
Adding in more and longer stops starts pushing that trip out into one that is longer and more aggravating and maybe requires a hotel stay, which is fine in the summer, but over the holidays? It would be a big lifestyle change.
I could see an EV if I wasn't doing that road trip anymore.
The bottom line is the argument for EVs can't be "they are good enough" or "you can make the lifestyle changes to deal with it." People aren't going to adopt them out of the goodness of their hearts because they have been told they "should," and any politician who tries to make them is going to get an electoral b*tch slap.
EVs have to be "sold" to people. And you sell things to people by convincing them that they are an improvement over the previous thing, and an improvement in ways that matter to the people buying them - so yes, they may accelerate really nice, but if I'm a mom in Saline with 3 kids whose priority is getting to Boyne as fast as I can on Friday after school, you need to tell me how an EV is *better* - not equal, not "almost as good," - but better than the car I've got.
And this is where the climate and green energy movements are failing.
I agree with the empathy part, but do think that is a problem in both sides. I find very little empathy from “middle America” toward the young childless urban dwellers.
Charging isn't going to add 1-2 hours to a 4 hour drive. I've driven Denver/Santa Fe in my EV, which is about six hours of driving time through a lot of lightly populated areas. It takes two* charging stops and each stop only requires about 15 minutes of charging time.
*I could do it with one longer charging stop, but it's just nice to get out of the car twice.
A deeply conservative family friend skeptical of climate change recently bought a Rivian that he uses to drive 4.5 hours to his cottage multiple times per month. He's even towed a boat up, and only needed to stop once to recharge. He says he often needs a twenty minute charge during winter but that the range is no problem. Outside of his Rivian, I see tons of EVs (including EV trucks) up near my cottage, which is nearby his and also 4.5 hours from major population centers. Obviously this won't work for everybody (he stores his boats during winter a couple miles from his cottage, so not really regularly towing), but owning an EV truck as a cottage-going midwesterner isn't that hard, and become more common every year.
Michigan has a notably high number of second homes. Going “up north” is a thing, and a quick google search suggests something like 1/4 of all homes in MI are second homes.
A few people I grew up with in TN (admittedly an affluent part) were from the Midwest, and had vacation homes in Michigan! It wasn’t as common as a lake house somewhere a couple hours away, but it wasn’t uncommon
In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota I think it is a lot more than 5%, and its not a "rich person thing." And then you have all the people who make the same trip but rent, or camp, etc. Its really ingrained in the way of life here.
And these are all swing states - the Democrats need the buy-in of Michiganders and Minnesotans etc to get things done. They need our Senators. They need our electoral votes. You can't make progress in America based on what people want in New England and California - you have to get Heartland Buy-In.
And I think the good news is, IME, Midwesterners are pretty open to change and progress! We're descended from pioneers! We are proud of our heritage of progress and industry, people here deeply value egalitarianism, mutuality, and our natural resources and the beauty of the land and water. The Midwest used to be the heartland of Progressive politics in America for a reason (a tradition that especially lives on in Minnesota). I think Democrats could be very successful making well targeted appeals to our little pioneer hearts to sell good climate policies.
But the Dems need to have empathy. You can't come in from New England with your Climate Puritan hat on and your manual of Sins and Penances.
His example was a 4 hour trip in-state, though. And depending on age of kids, throwing them in the car versus wrangling them in an airport and onto a plane are very different experiences.
The Model 3 is very efficient but even in a less efficient EV 250 miles is a single charging stop and PlugShare shows quite a few 150 kW+ chargers across the center of the mitten. My guess is that an EV would add maybe 20 minutes to a drive from the Detroit metro to a cabin somewhere in the northern part of the mitten. Given how long it's going to take to get children out of the car, into the bathroom, then back into the car, it might be a wash.
As a highly satisfied ICE owner, I can't tell you how much I relish getting gas and being back on the highway in under ten minutes. In every range conversation, there's inevitably a chorus of folksy EV drivers who love the charging break and enjoy the time to pee and stretch their legs and maybe get a steaming hot cup of joe. Not me - total trip time is the primary metric here (and maybe for a lot of people - 'range anxiety' seems like a misnomer. I think the ceiling on EV ownership could well be people like me who aren't *anxious* about range so much as we like the quick fillup and don't want to fart around for 20-30 min twice on a long drive).
Cool. Keep driving a GV if absolutely minimizing the duration of long drives is of enormous concern to you.
For me, the superior acceleration and handling of EVs far outweigh that. Time saved with a simpler maintenance schedule and the ability to charge at home are the cherry on top.
Yeah, that's not a wash but it isn't bad. Our in-state rest stops are usually 5 minutes, if that. Sometimes I fuel and go and kids stay in the car. But 20 isn't crazy long. It's annoying, but not crazy. If I decided the other EV benefits were worth it - which I might at some point - that is an acceptable trade off. I would probably find a good roadhouse on the way (preferably with lots of pine paneling and antlers) and just make eating a sit down meal on the road a new tradition.
What is the range with 4WD, cold weather, or a trailer (horses, snowmobiles, boat, etc)?
I don't mean that sacrastically, BTW. I am genuinely curious.
Also, I want to throw it in the conversation because these are all things that buyers in Flyover Land are going to consider - so they should be things that policy people are thinking about, too!
AWD is very common in EVs, mine is AWD. It doesn't seem to have much impact on range.
Freezing weather seems to reduce range about 20%. This really isn't that big of a deal; plenty of people in Colorado and Norway drive EVs.
Trailers kill range. Aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance are very important in EVs.
I do think that people usually overindex on charging time during long road trips and underindex on day-to-day use. Charging at home is a huge timesaver. The enormous torque makes driving much more pleasant. EVs have a low center of gravity and usually handle well. There isn't much maintenance; I'm at 8,500 miles and all I've done is change the windshield wipers and rotate the tires.
Of course I am aware that there is a wear and tear cost.
But that cost gets paid for over the course of years. And it's already accounted for in the maintence costs I am spending and budgeting for anyway. I might need to do maintenence more often, but we are talking a few extra oil changes a year and maybe a tune up slightly more often, and trading it in after 4 years instead of 5. That 900$ is being spread out over the course of *years,* easily coming out of weekly budgets.
When I say the trip costs 300, I mean it costs 300 out of my immediate, right now budget, because that it what I have to consider when I plan a trip. My long term budget has already accounted for wear and tear in my car. My right now budget can absorb 300$ a lot easier than 2-3000$
Yes. It is. It literally comes out of what is leftover on good weeks from the Grocery and Gas Budget in little 50$ oil changes and $100 tune ups spread out over years. Yes, it is more frequent when you take road trips, but it is still so spread out over time that it can just be paid for out of whatever is left over for the week. I don't need to *set aside* money for that, just be aware of it.
The "cost" of a family vacation when doing the summer budget is the cost of what I need to spend *right now.* It's what I need to have cash for within 30 days to avoid interest on my credit card.
It should be obvious that in Real Life, it is easier financially for a family to spend 300 at once / 900 trickled out over 3-4 years than 3000 all at once, possibly with interest on top if you can't afford to pay it off at once.
And I'm guessing its similar for most American families. It doesn't make people stupid. Almost everyone is aware of the cost of wesr and tear. It's not news to anyone. It's just not money that has to be spent out of the immediate budget.
But the accounting is almost completely accurate. And that's how OG Uber got its start. Exploiting the fact that people tend to vastly underestimate how much that extra mile actually costs.
1400? Naw! Say you’ve gotta refill your gas tank 6 times. $50x6 =300. You can do that in a 2 day drive, but say you do it in 3 to be generous, and spend $200 both nights at a hotel, which is ample for a family accommodating hotel suite on the road if you book in advance. That’s $700. Now if you’re driving a V8, getting multiple rooms for the kids, or breaking up the trip into small segments you can approach $1400, but that’s not how a budget-conscious family would do it. Now I’d still fly, even if the tickets were twice as much as you quote, that’s a lot of time on the road.
I mean I get that, given that I’m compensated for mileage with my commute. But that’s not really how people factor in the cost of road trips. Road trips are a big motivator to having that car in the first place, especially if you live in an urbanist dream like DC or NYC
a) If I figure in the cost of milage, it is 1400$ to drive from Connecticut to SE Michigan. That is 5 people with sh*t tons of luggage. The same cost to fly those 5 people and maybe half as much luggage on Delta, BDL-DTW, in reasonable comfort, is 1500-2500 just for plane tickets; add in luggage and long term parking and an overpriced meal for the kids at the airport and it costs usually over 3000$ total. That's almost twice what it is to drive.
b) And that $3000 needs to be available *up front*. Yes, a road trip will, long term, cost me in wear and tear on my car. But I don't need to deduct that money *right now* out of my bank account or charge it to my credit card to make the trip - that is money I need to factor into the big picture, that gets spent over a long period of time.
It is much, much easier for a family to pay 300$ *at once* than 3000$.
Matt provides a useful primer on how to worry about climate less destructively, but he never asks why climate change should be such a consuming priority.
The very kind of technological abundance he celebrates — cheaper energy, cheaper electricity — doesn’t just reduce carbon, it makes societies resilient to warming itself. If energy is abundant, Bangladesh can move earth and build coastal defenses. If electricity is cheap, the global poor can afford air conditioning. Once coastal defenses and AC are in place, people often prefer warmer climates anyway.
Actual human beings don’t regard Columbus, Ohio or Frankfurt, Germany circa 1975 as climatic ideals. They migrate toward Jacksonville or Málaga, and they pay the air conditioning bill happily. Humans today are less likely to be immiserated by weather than at any point in our history.
I think Matt is writing under the understanding that major donors are going to prioritize AGW mitigation, even if he thinks they should prioritize other things.
Indeed. It’s interesting that anti warming sentiments are more a vice that needs to be channeled than a virtue. It’s worth pointing that out, even if the donors won’t care.
I'm not sure if virtue/vice is the right way to structure that. Plenty of people have their own ascetic quirks that they feel is very important to practice for their psyche. Things just run afoul if they try to impose their asceticism on everyone else.
I think that west of the Cascades climate is quite underrated, and obviously ideal is subjective, but if the key metric is going to be lack of temperature deviation I don't know how anywhere competes with San Diego.
Yall have gotten fucked by climate change. The number of 90 degree plus days in Seattle has exploded. Oftentimes, Maggie Valley, NC is cooler than Packwood, WA
Idk, there were less than 10 this summer I feel like. It’s a huge deal when it happens because too many people don’t have a/c. What’s crazy is that they build new residential apartment buildings without a/c. I absolutely couldn’t abide. We have 3 window units just for our 800sf upstairs! It’s September and they’re all off now, though.
In 2009, I went camping in the Olympic Penninsula. Temperature reached 104 at altitude. I was hallucinating by the time I got down to the Elwah river. Two subsequent trips to the NW have also seen 100+ degree temperatures
Ouch! Living here, it’s still quite mild during the summer most of the time, at least within the protection of the mountains around the sound. But yes, the number of hot days have increased. And in Central WA, all bets are off. I did some work in Tri-Cities a couple of weeks ago and it was 90+ during the day. But that’s the high desert, a totally different climate.
I do love western NC, though. I had friends with a home in Old Fort for years, and my mom’s best friend retired to Lake Toxaway. It’s a nice place if you’re out of a flood zone!
If we stopped all carbon production today, Bangladesh might be able manage the sea level rise with sea walls. If we let it rip, the country's agricultural lowlands will be all underwater, no chance.
I don't really see us getting out of this without some sort of carbon capture technology.
Climate change is tricky because we EVENTUALLY have to do SOMETHING. I've heard the figure 3-4F of warming by the end of the century and that that's baked in and there's nothing we can do about it (unless we directly removed carbon from the atmosphere, right? I'm not a scientist). But then like what next century, another 3-4F of warming? This has to stop eventually, and I think it will. But this is a good illustration of the limits of copy/pasting public opinion in to policy, and thank you to Matt for saying "you don't have to stop caring about something just because voters don't, you just have to be smart about it." If that's what popularism means, I'm all for it. I'm just tired of "you favor XYZ policy? But that's unpopular hurr hurr hurr"
I think the larger chunk than "we'll figure it out" which is closer to my view, is "climate change is super cereal guys, but I'm not willing to pay a dime to fix it" which is more difficult to work with.
Most people are (in many cases, wrongly) opposed to tolling roads that aren't currently tolled, but if the toll already exists, they're less likely to be opposed to it.
I think one thing Matt and most of the comment section misses about climate concerned people is the importance of low likelihood high impact possibilities in their thinking. This is things like permafrost melting and carbon release and other "tipping point" type problems.
The activists tend to overestimate the climate science consensus about these things happening. But on the other hand, they're not zero (and much higher than Skynet, or whatever). I don't know that a proper estimate could actually bridge the political gap here, but that's much more the root of the disconnect than concern about the third world in 60 years.
In part because most of those others are not anthropogenic. Moving the average temperature change up in high emissions scenarios also moves 1% tail risks to 5% tail risks (or whatever). And they are probably generally inclined to be interested in environmental stuff.
Also, people have idiosyncratic concerns, why is Matt and the EA types worked up about Skynet? idk
If that’s the case I think they’re wrong. This world today was built on FFs — decarbonization is akin to changing all the blood in a person to a synthetic version while keeping them alive — oh and we still need to invent the synthetic blood.
Also, we’ve prevented many deaths from earthquakes and pandemics. We could do a lot more to prepare for a Carrington-level solar storm. These risks are not intractable.
The argument seems to be "despite all of the technical progress, we still aren't ready for reduction in fossil fuel production, imposing limits would be too costly. At some point in the future, we will have the technology such that we can start reducing, but until then we need to accept increasing production."
I'm not sure I buy it. Is it not the case that no matter how much technology we develop, reducing fossil fuel production will always be an economic drag that voters won't be happy with? Why in 20 years would we not just be in exactly the same scenario, with the technical capacity but not the political will to sacrifice?
One might think otherwise if one conceived of fossil fuels like horse power, a fundamentally inferior technology that would be replaced naturally, but fossil fuel is a technology too, and one that can get more productive with technical developments in parallel with renewables.
Coal vs Natural Gas is a useful example, but I think not as an exemplar of inevitable progress. Despite all of the success of natural gas, the end state is not the decline of coal, whose production hits new highs every year. Additionally coal is a technology that can improve, e.g. by adding particulate scrubbers that reduce the air quality impact (while doing nothing for CO2 emissions).
It is possible that coal gives way to nat gas gives way to renewables without intervention, but it's also equally possible that coal or natural gas come back on top in terms of economic efficiency as long as CO2 impacts are not explicitly prioritized through policy.
I agree that it is likely that the natural course favors the rollout of nat gas and perhaps renewables, but to me the question is that course one toward displacement or mere reduction c.f. hypothetical alternative paths. I suppose another way to frame my skepticism for the green tech investment approach is that I believe coal power will only disappear when the cost per watt-hour of operating the mines and infrastructure is higher than the market value of electricity per watt-hour. That could either happen because the operating cost goes up or the market value of electricity goes down. I believe without intervention, the cost to operate will go down (technology improvements) and the market value of electricity will go up (skyrocketing power demand, which I suspect no amount of alternative power source rollout can counteract, barring a truly transformative unforeseen development).
You allude to this, but it deserves a headline: another advantage of technical developments is that we can export them to places our policies and controls do not reach.
If every US citizen accepted Bill McKibben's or Kōhei Saitō’s vision tomorrow, that would, on its own, only 𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘺 global warming.
Good point.
Most importantly and obviously in terms of technology but in lots of places regulation is simply copied from US standards, particularly nuclear regulations, in Spain lots of their standards just copied American authorities. Also the depressing thing of non-American politicians just copying American talking points unthinkly, British politics is obsessed with an idea of a Green New Deal despite never having a non-Green New Deal.
Britain is so funny
Everything only delays global warming. China is the world leader in renewable technologies but its own emissions are still going up as it develops more. A lot of even poorer countries have basically zero emissions; even with very good renewable tech their overall emissions are going to go up if we want them to have a humane standard of living. This makes climate change hard but also suggests that “all-of-the-above” is needed, both more technological development and conservation from people who would barely notice it.
"... [C]onservation from people who would barely notice it"
This is an expectation that is heavily influenced by projection bias / the typical mind fallacy.
Why? Aren't, e.g., more efficient refrigerators an example of conservation from people (e.g.., you and me) who barely notice it?
If the refrigerators are identical in cost, form, and function, neither you nor I will notice it - and neither would someone in Africa or the Australian outback.
So who is the "group of people who would barely notice it?" Everyone?
I'm sorry but I'm not getting your point. Mine was that there's a lot of conservation (e.g., increased efficiency) that people don't notice.
I did notice how terrible the Obama era dishwashers are.
Ah, if you didn't read Nikuruga's comment, that's understandable. I know navigating the comment hierarchy can be annoying, so here's what he wrote:
> This makes climate change hard but also suggests that “all-of-the-above” is needed, both more technological development and conservation from people who would barely notice it.
I'm happy to be corrected on this, but I think the clear implication of that is there is a group of people that are so rich that they wouldn't notice if they had to change their lifestyles to conserve more.
> Everything only delays global warming
Is an obvious contradiction.
It is? A lot of warming is baked in; we slow it by taking additional steps now.
China's emissions have probably peaked now as well. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-emissions-into-reverse-for-first-time/
Yeah, stopping Chinese growth is critical, and not just for climate reasons
True, but you can't export policy.
For example, it's kinda disappointing that the essay here focuses a lot on gas stoves, which are at best a rounding error.
But to your point, climate can't be separated from economics, but it also can't be separated from foreign policy. Even if the US could achieve zero emissions tomorrow, the growth of carbon in other parts of the developing world would catch up in a few years and continue growing. That's why technical solutions are so important compared to prescriptive policy - because the technical solutions can potentially benefit everyone, everywhere.
Geo engineering is also global and other countries have agency here so it's probably in everyone's interest to work on how that shakes out. If China wipes out US agriculture to cool the planet it's not gonna be pleasant.
Wonderful column on topics where I have previously been critical of Matt's work. The major omission was a lack of quantitative reasoning. Deadpan points out one of the major dimensions: scaling to other countries. There is also scaling to a future in which the global south consumes much more services, meat, etc. Finally, there quantifying to relative impact of different areas: cement and steel matter, but not that much, especially individually. Beef is bigger and harder.
Lots of places alreasy DO. Fracking is outlawed all over Europe.
I think the Poles do fracking because they hate Russians and Russian gas.
Are there major deposits of gas in Europe that could be accessed through fracking? Given the very real problems they have with alternatives like having to buy from Russia that seems just really dumb.
There must be, otherwise, why make it illegal :)
I’m no geologist, since I do not know. Possibly much less than the US; Europe never produced much petroleum. But it’s probably greater than zero
Liked for use of italics.
Speaking of investing in technology, if direct air capture of CO2 becomes efficient, cheap, and widespread enough, it is plausible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere on net, and actually begin cooling the atmosphere. But no one in the climate advocacy space seems interested in doing that.
Just as pro-lifers often don't support contraception and sex education programs that would reduce the abortion rate due to coalitional reasons, for the same sorts of coalitional reasons green and climate groups don't support carbon capture. A big segment of pro-lifers want to disincentivize sex, and a big segment of greens wants to disincentivize "unnatural" growth.
At least pro-lifers acknowledge they're religious. Environmentalists behave religiously and then gaslight you in to thinking you're the one who doesn't care about the environment if you disagree with them.
Hear me out. What about an abortion tax? $500 per trimester.
The same thing could probably be achieved a lot less politically toxically with generous child tax credits.
I think such a measure would be opposed vociferously by both the left and the right. The left would (rightly) point out that a $500 abortion tax is tantamount to an abortion ban for poor people, who don't have $500. The right would (also rightly) point out that anyone with the money would just pay it, so for most of the population, it would be tantamount to legalization.
I personally don't like the idea either, in large part because the impact would be borne almost entirely by poor people.
I don't think it was being proposed seriously.
I don't think it would. For various reasons, primarily having to do with rising expectations, children are increasingly expensive. If you gave people subsidies for having children, I think it would raise how much people spent by the subsidy but wouldn't reduce their own personal expenditure at all.
I find it hard to believe the effect wouldn't be greater than zero.
You're right, but parents aren't the only people in the economy. It would raise the average consumption of parents and decrease the average consumption of non-parents. This makes being a parent (and presumably bringing a pregnancy to term) more attractive than the alternative.
$1000 tax credit every month you are pregnant.
People will have more late term abortions.
Definitely the preferred approach!
I mean they aren’t free, and while abortions are already rationed on ability to pay, exacerbating that fact isn’t exactly wise. People having children they aren’t equipped to raise, financially and otherwise, is just inherently evil.
What's notable about the former is that it's backfired on them--people are having less sex, in a way that they don't like. The latter, of course, would reap their own downfall when they realize the sheer type of downgrade of quality of life they would sow.
Talk about never satisfied.
But that is the point, pro-lifers aren't just anti-abortion they are religious people with a whole moral code and philosophy. Similar situation here, climate activists think rich people spending $700,000 on a car is sinful, extravagant and ostentatious, they aren't suddenly going to approve if it is electric.
I'm not a climate activist, but would agree that an individual spending $700,000 on a car is extravagant and ostentatious. Lots of people do things I think are extravagant and ostentatious though, and I don't think that's sufficient reason to make it illegal.
It's worth saying that we don't HAVE a viable solution to climate change via carbon capture. So saying "we shouldn't support this" isn't necessarily saying "this is a bad idea" so much as saying "I am worried that polluters and politicians will use this as an excuse to do nothing, leaving us with more emissions and no actual solution".
I don't think that's what's going on though. Carbon capture is theoretically doable, so the groups should favor putting the research in. They don't because they dislike the idea of solving the global warming problem through a technical solution that doesn't allow them to re-engineer society according to their ideology.
The pro-climate community is similarly hostile to nuclear power for similar reasons. It's a climate crisis... but not a big enough crisis to warrant considering nuclear.
I think there's definitely an element of that in their rhetoric, but isn't it more salient that it would involve very difficult technology requiring significant time and investment that could be more profitably directed elsewhere?
Carbon capture is theoretically doable, so the groups should favor putting the research in. They don't because they dislike the idea of solving the global warming problem through a technical solution that doesn't allow them to re-engineer society according to their ideology.
I have lost count of the times I’ve heard climate activists call direct air capture dangerous because it would make the phaseout of fossil fuels less urgent.
I’d rather have both direct air capture and a gas phaseout of fossil fuels but that argument is not compelling to a certain type of climate activist
And Matt's whole point is the increase the size of tents, by NOT letting one coalition partner black ball the entry of others.
Same with nuclear power.
Direct capture of CO2 to date has not proven economical, the tyranny of thermodynamics so far renders this Pie in the Sky.
Future perhaps but at the moment it's not really even a medium hanging fruit.
You realize we have a giant fusion reactor next to us that will continue to spit out excess energy for the foreseeable future here, right? Thermodynamics doesn't enter into it.
? what? - you mean the Sun? ... that's your answer then you're in the territory of Not Even Wrong.
Yes. While thermodynamics prevents us from burning fossil fuels to remove CO2, the sheer amount of excess energy from the sun means we have plenty of energy to do atmospheric capture, if we care to do so.
Eventually the sun will burn out, but that's far, far in the future.
EDIT: I'm not sure I was disagreeing with you.
Burning natural gas to get 1000 units of energy puts X kg of CO2 into the air.
Last I checked there's no carbon capture that uses less than 1000 units of energy to extract X kg of CO2.
Any net energy that we might use for carbon capture should instead be used to just displace current fossil fuel energy production.
It's worth researching for the long term, because once we get enough cheap power from fusion we will want to start extracting. But I think the basic themodynamics referred to is the fact that you can't run a gas generator to burn fuel releasing CO2 and use the energy from the generator to extract that much CO2.
That's not really the issue though. The issue is that there are some applications, as listed in the article, where there's no current path to electrification. Take air travel - batteries may never be compact enough to power commercial airlines, but if carbon taxes / regulations are high/strict enough it may make sense for airlines to continue using jet fuel, then turn around and invest in a solar farm to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. You're using 2x+ power but there's a feasible path to carbon neutrality.
It may have escaped you but we do not have perfect efficiency (or even high efficiency) in converting said Sun energy into useful energy to do the work of capture. … so it’s pretty goddamn useless to make such an observation.
We don't need perfect efficiency. 20% is plenty. The sun puts out a LOT of energy.
Thermodynamics guarantees that simply electrifying whatever emits the carbon will take many times less energy than extracting the equivalent amount of carbon out of the air, once it's emitted. Therefore, as long as the price of electricity is greater than zero, carbon removal will cost more than just electrifying the equipment in the first place. And, if electrifying the industry is technically infeasible, the capturing the carbon is almost certainly going to be economically infeasible. That is why carbon capture is a dead end.
I completely agree that we should be focusing on adding solar (and other low carbon) energy to the grid. But that's economics, not thermodynamics.
I think it's perfectly rational to be disinterested in a solution that's gonna be viable in the 2050s at the earliest
> disinterested
As the bearer of this nom de internet, this is not the word you are looking for
Team Correct-Use-of-Disinterested assemble!
Username checks out!
Absolutely not. If you are, then it will NOT be viable in 2050.
To be clear: You should absolutely do research on it, iterate it, support it, maybe even fund it. But it's so far away as a solution that it makes perfect sense for advocates to focus on solar and heatpumps and EVs and what-have-you. Focusing on things we can actually deploy today instead of a technology that might never work out economically is perfectly rational
Well, disinterested maybe not the word, but certainly it's not where one should be focusing for immediate term action.
Why would anyone hang their hat on something that has low salience now. Carbon capture is not cost effective way to lower tomorrow's atmospheric carbon and there are plenty of practical and cost effective ways for stop new carbon emissions today. So in 2040 or whenever you have tackled new emissions maybe the tech is there, we can use the carbon capture in a more widespread way. Touting a far off economic and technology reality as a focus of today would be backwards.
i would have thought the point of funding research into technology was that there are areas where no practical, cost-effective solution exists
There is research but it is way down the list - look up carbon capture on wikipedia. The simple issue is even if you found a 100% efficient process, it will still take a lot of energy. That energy can be used to efficiently power replacement of current carbon sources. But much of the carbon capture tech is just an excuse to not cut back on fossil fuel.
Because its positioned as an excuse and the fundamentals are really bad, its a low priority. But certainly in the future, capturing carbon will be useful as an input for other processes like carbonization.
If you look at who is supporting the idea of carbon capture, it's mostly the oil industry. After all, if oil is powering all that carbon capture equipment, that's more revenue for them. And, if the carbon capture equipment ends up emitting more CO2 than it removes, well, that's somebody else's problem.
The biggest problem is the fundamental economics of course, given the energy need.
Of course a lot of the climate Left are more deeply concerned about the "excuse factor" as they're more concerned about strangling oil and gas and moralising than in actual progress
I don't see what your tradeoffs are? Molecule for molecule CSS deserves just a much subsidy as the CO2 not emitted becasue of use of solar or wind.
Ultimately, for decarbonization to be economically and politically sustainable, we can't have long-term subsidies per unit of CO2 either captured not emitted. The only way to decarbonize without never-ending subsidies is more clean energy technology.
CSS is a dead end, no matter how much its technology advances because it is inherently dependent on government payouts per unit of CO2 removed. And, when multiplied by an amount of CO2 able to actually make a difference in climate change, quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.
I agree. Taxation/subsidy are not alternative to technology. At some point fossil fuels become uneconomic except niche cases and raise almost no revenue except to pay for a bit of CSS to make that niche use emission neutral. But for now the tax on net emissions is the least cost way of promoting substitution and contributing to the incentive for technology.
That is a decent standard to look at. Would love to see the numbers about how much CSS has gotten as a subsidy compared to its actual carbon capture. I suspect that it CSS would need a much higher subsidy at this point in its development.
Because, historically, carbon capture and storage, either from fossil fuel plant emissions or directly from the air, have been used as an excuse to delay doing anything else.
Direct air capture seems likely to cost several hundred dollars per tonne of CO2 removed, and will take a couple of decades to scale up.
It's not just climate Puritanism at work.
Except anything else doesn't actually decrease atmospheric CO2 concentration, which is the primary problem.
Sucking carbon out of the air with a very expensive straw while putting it back in with a firehouse doesn't reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration either.
Some kind of CO2 removal is ultimately going to be required to clean up the mess we have made; but it makes no sense to be paying $500 a tonne to suck CO2 out of the air while we can abate gigatonnes of annual emissions at negative cost.
And some of it is going to involve telling Americans that they are going to have to suck it up and have a Big Ass electric Truck rather than a Big Ass gasoline-powered Truck, however little political capital MattY wants to spend on climate instead of his own policy priorities.
>And some of it is going to involve telling Americans that they are going to have to suck it up and have a Big Ass electric Truck rather than a Big Ass gasoline-powered Truck
Why would the country who only emits 12% of the world's carbon and whose carbon emissions have been falling steadily since 2005 need to do anything? Global warming is certainly a bad thing, and I agree that China and India should stop doing it. I don't see that the US needs to 'suck it up' or really do much of anything at all
Because we’re only 4% of the world population. Saying only populous countries should sacrifice makes no sense. If China were divided into 2 countries each would emit less than the US but that wouldn’t make an ounce of difference to the climate.
We're already sacrificing- it seems like you missed the part where I noted the US started reducing its emissions in 2005. Meanwhile both China and India continue to increase them- China recently announced vague plans to make 10% cuts within 10 years. We don't even know if they're really going to do that! Just starting from first principles, who do you think should be more focused on cutting emissions:
The country that emits *less* and already has been reducing emissions for 2 decades across multiple presidencies
The countries that emit *more* and have been increasing their emissions steadily over multiple decades
Like, which one would you pick? The answer is obvious. Global warming is definitely bad, and China and India should stop doing it
“I agree that China and India should stop doing it”
Do you propose dramatically cutting industrial imports from those countries?
China is going to convert to an all-EV fleet long, long before we do. I suspect we'll see their total emissions fall a lot faster than ours as well.
If we want a globally-competitive auto industry, we better get on board and fast.
As a general matter the US should be investing in decarbonising for its energy and economic efficiency factors rather than from climate guiltism (illustration the other reply focusing on the sin of being X% emitting Y% of carbon).
Self-interest on the economic production basis for much higher efficiency.
Sure but if a decarbonized economy is so much more efficient, companies will be incentivized to make that transition on their own- no particular government program is needed
If the Big Ass electric Truck costs about the same amount and works about as well, this can work. If this ultimately means no, you can't have the Big Ass truck, you'll have to get by on a subcompact car, then politicians who advocate for policies leading to that world are going to lose a lot of elections.
If Terraforming Industries is successful, they will have developed efficient CO2 removal technology. Obviously, that doesn't create a business, so their model will be to remove CO2 by turning it into natural gas and then sell that carbon-neutral gas. But, they will have developed a low variable cost CO2 removal machine that can be used to just remove CO2.
It's crazy that climate advocates aren't interested in this. It also, if we're lucky, something that the market could solve without them.
This is a really important point, and I think even the discussion here demonstrates part of the problem on the issue. Most people seem to be stuck thinking in terms of what is presently possible and economical and are not thinking probabilistically about the future. Technology evolves, cost tradeoffs change, things that were once unthinkable gradually or suddenly become possible. Does that mean you should bank on particular solutions working? No. But does that mean you can just say "we can't do that" and move on? Also no.
To borrow from Scott Alexander: culture is fixed, ecology is mutable. The idea that we're stuck with our current position in the environment, or that "we can't for technology" is just wrong. People have spent hundreds and thousands of years fretting about problems that killed millions of people regularly until the point where they stopped being problems (at least in parts of the world). Of course there are often downsides, but taking a backwards-only view of potential solutions that already exist and then trying to socially engineer away the problem seems like a bad way to approach them. And saying that we need to obscure an option like carbon capture because people might try to misuse it both assumes an overly deterministic view of the future and ignores the downsides of alternate strategies. While the left is worried about talking too much about carbon capture to avoid "letting people off the hook," they are actively turning off people by insisting that dealing with climate change must involve major personal sacrifice.
I think a lot of the problem boils down to short term thinking. Sure, most people just want to live their lives and be left alone. But to what end? Say we achieve decarbonization and save the climate solely through social solutions, buy ourselves another few thousand years to continue society in a slightly altered version of the way it is now, and have another few great millennia to argue with each other about whatever new problems we come up with. I don't see that as more desirable than a future where we develop better energy technologies, then use those technologies to power energy intensive applications that become the foundation for even more technological advancement.
There are other existential problems we are likely to face, and many (most?) of them will not be caused by humans. "Grow or die," or better, "evolve or go extinct" has been the strategy of all life on Earth since it came about, and going against that seems like a dead end. The more we focus on solving the current problems with the current technologies, the less prepared we will be for whatever it is we are not worried about. If we try developing all sorts of new technologies as part of a portfolio of potential solutions to the problems we know about, that both makes it more likely that one will work for said problems, and increases the chances that when some black swan event comes, we at least have the building blocks of a technology that might save us then.
Sometimes throwing money and effort at a technological problem works when you need it (see: batteries). Sometimes it doesn’t (see: nuclear fusion power).
Betting that technology is going to painlessly solve *all* your problems on a convenient timescale is a sucker bet IMO.
I wouldn't say that's my position. Developing technology is sometimes painful in itself, and it often creates problems along with solutions. The point isn't that it solves all your problems, but that it solves the problems at all when other solutions fail. And no timescale is ever convenient.
The reality is that there is absolutely nothing you can ever do that will ever be _guaranteed_ to work. 100% probability (and 0%) is an unreachable ideal. Many discussions of technological solutions to complex problems often seem to devolve into zero-sum arguments between pro- and anti-technology camps, and it feels these days like the winner is just whichever side is more fashionable.
There are a lot of people in this world, along with a lot of money and resources. People are bad at predicting outcomes, so diversification is key, and investment should be proportional not just to the perceived likelihood of success, but to the magnitude of the upside (and downside). In the case of carbon capture, there is massive upside potential not just related to climate change, but also as a raw technological capability. Consider how nitrogen fixation through the Haber process essentially solved food security for the developed world (among other industrial benefits). Something similar for carbon could completely transform a variety of resource extraction processes. If something else works faster to fix the climate, great! But I think cost effective carbon capture would be quite beneficial whether it comes in 20 years or 200. The downside seems limited to the amount of money spent on it, plus some vague notion of giving people an "excuse to be lazy" or something.
My main point is that attempts at political messaging, especially around technology, are usually based on incomplete analyses and unexamined assumptions. The current, technologically and economically feasible solutions being pushed to climate change are nice in that we know they work to the degree they do, but the idea that we can just scale up solar panels and batteries to give us a net-zero future with the same standard of living is far from a slam dunk. And that brings the vague downside risk of making people who like big trucks and gas stoves angry.
Finally, I encourage all to be careful when reviewing the history of any technology. Solar panels were derided for decades as inefficient, battery technology 20-30 years ago was disappointing. They may look great now (even if both still have much room for improvement), but it took a while for that to become apparent. The difference is just that the people who were saying "don't bother" then were on the other side of the political spectrum.
What's the market for direct air capture of CO2? Who will pay for it?
How far are we from it being efficient and cheap, compared to, say, electrifying everything and maximizing clean electricity?
That said, should the government invest in direct air capture R&D and pay people to employ and operate it? Yes. Let a thousand flowers bloom and try everything.
After two decades and billions spent, there are only one and a half methods that exist for cost effective carbon removal: biochar and maybe enhanced rock weathering. DAC is 10x the cost of where it needs to be today, and showing few signs of improvement.
It's incredibly hard to do, technically / economically, but it is baked into every long-term climate scenario that eventually we have to find an efficient way to do this at scale.
How cheap could burying charcoal in a strip mine get
Ah. Beat me to it.
And it set an upper limit on which will be the remaining niche uses of fossil fuels.
I'm waiting for solar panels to be worth it for me as an individual - they're already at a 10 year payback but I need probably a 1 or 2 year payback to make it worth the hassle to install them, as well as making it easier for them to fully supply my house rather than going into the national grid & getting a discount for supplying that electricity.
My next car will definitely be electric - having 2 kids and planning a third has shifted me towards being significantly more pro-car than I ever was before mind you, and I want a larger car to fit 3 kids + all their stuff.
This is a very long winded way of saying you're right, and even as someone who is slightly more pro-climate than the average voter, there is no way I'm sacrificing either my current standard of living or my aspirations for higher standards of living in the future for the climate. Willing to adopt tech though (once it gets good enough).
Thanks for laying out your personal experience. I think a lot of climate activists assume that people who don't want to install solar panels, or install a heat pump are climate denialists who are brainwashed by the koch brothers. Really a lot of people are just like you — aware that climate change is a problem but also rationally don't really want to make changes that will alter their standard of living.
And there's cost, as the top level comment cites as well. I am totally fine with spending some money on my household solely for the benefits of using fewer fossil fuels, but I'm also unusual in that.
Last time I replaced my roof it was such a nightmare that I don't want to ever touch the thing at all, and people who say "oh it's really not that bad" without knowing anything about my situation just make get me mad.
I wouldn't mind investing a little money in someone else's solar roof, though.
This is my fear. Most sola panels in the UK also sit on the roof, I think, and a colleague has pigeons nesting under his!
What went wrong?
I don’t know about his case, but in my case it was actually an insurance replacement due to hail damage, so I didn’t have to pay for anything. But it turned out that the impermeable membrane that needed fixing was under metal roofing panels, and one edge of those panels was attached to the bricks of the chimney, and the bricks were non-standard, so we needed to get a specialty brick worker as well as replace the whole roof, and lining up all the people for the insurer to write a check to ended up taking nearly a year.
And then in Texas, it’s only a matter of months until the next hailstorm anyway, and once there’s any leak anywhere, somehow the Gulf of Mexico finds a way into your house through the atmosphere. At a moment when the roof is intact, I’m not touching it again.
I didn’t even know there was an impermeable membrane under a roof. I thought it was just shingles attached to plywood by tar and nails
Probably older roofs with shingles and tar don’t have an impermeable membrane. But if your roof has some other sort of surface, then it’s often easier for builders to put a layer of tyvek on first and then not worry about whether the top surface is totally impermeable. There’s definitely a stage in new home construction when it looks like the entire thing is covered in tyvek. (I haven’t precisely noticed if it’s the same in California, where the rain is gentle and rare, so Spanish tiles are good enough to prevent any leakage.)
Why would it necessarily alter your standard of living? After I put in my panels+batteries, I felt a lot freer to set my thermostat lower for air conditioning. I felt an illicit thrill in taking the hot rays from the sun that were baking the surroundings and turning them into electricity that then cooled my home, at no marginal cost to me whatsoever.
Jessumsica lays out two things: the payback needs he has for solar power and how much more pro-car he is now. The former is a seemingly inconsequential financial concern, the latter something that has given them a greater appreciation for “mere” convenience.
They add this together, concluding that, whatever their moral or political priors, they wouldn’t actually give up any substantial quality of life for climate.
That is, the two are related but they’re related through what their actions say about their actual willingness to endure sacrifices for climate, which is the ask Matt is arguing about in the post.
I feel like I shouldn't care this much but I'm actually a woman (is Jessumsica not a sufficiently feminine name, or is really the case that the female substack commenter is that rare that everyone thinks all commenters are men?).
But yes, you've hit the nail on the head.
I have friends with three kids who drive everywhere rather than fly, which I think is absolutely nuts and antithetical to enjoyable family life (they do this for ostensibly climate reasons), but it's not something I would ever do, I value convenience and enjoyable family life far too highly to drive over 1000 miles around Europe on the wrong side of the road.
If you must know: I misread your name as “Jesse M Sica”, started off using “he”, realized “Jesse” can be a female name, switched to using “they”, then forgot to circle back and edit the first paragraph.
No worries!
Heat pump is an odd one as well since a lot of times the electricity is from natural gas anyways so the emissions calculus is genuinely somewhat unclear.
From a customer point of view, shifting to electric power means that any reduction in the carbon emissions per kWh will be a reduction in your own carbon emissions. You don't generally have a direct impact on the nature of electric generation - but since emissions per kWh is falling almost everywhere, switching from direct combustion to electric generation is likely to result in an emissions drop in the medium term even if the short term is not significant (and, unless you have a very coal-heavy grid, heat pumps are not going to result in a short-term increase in emissions)
Is it really unclear? Most heat pumps can pump several times as much heat into your home as the energy they spend in electricity. I don’t exactly know the efficiency of converting gas into electricity at the power plant, but unless it’s really low, the multiplier on the heat pump gets you an advantage over burning the gas inside your house.
It kind of depends on the heat pump you have I think, down to 25 or so there is a pretty solid multiplier, but below that temperature you need a very efficient heat pump to run at a 2x multiplier.
If you live somewhere where it gets below 20F or so, it's likely best to get a cold climate model, but weirdly, it's less about efficiency and more about maintaining heating capability at low temperature. In fact, last time I checked the ratings, Mitsubishi's non cold climate model has a higher COP at 5F than its cold climate model has.
Usually the bigger issue with non cold climate heat pumps is that they lose capacity as the temperature drops and can no longer pump enough btus into the house to keep it warm. For the few btus it can pump in, it still gets decent efficiency. My non-cold climate heat pump (in NH) can bring in around 30k btus at 25F, but that drops to around 10k btus at 0F. I have the thermostat set up to kick over to the oil burner once the outside temp drops to around 5F, even though it's technically still cheaper to run the heat pump (COP at 5F is 2.0). It's just that at that temp it'd likely never shut off without help from the oil burner. If I were getting a new heat pump now, I'd definitely get a cold climate model, which could maintain enough capacity down to -5F and I wouldn't need the oil burner.
Further to this point, modern pumps are far more efficient than older ones. Getting a new pump will take a couple of years to fully pay for itself, but the monthly savings in use is real.
We switched from a gas tankless water heater to a heat pump with an 80 gallon tank and deeply regret it. Our Rheem unit is error-prone, loud as hell, takes up a ton of space in my basement gym, doesn't hold enough hot water for our family of 3 to all wash our hair after a beach day, and was expensive even after tax credits. I'm pissed off that people talk about heat pumps like they have no downside.
Our induction range, on the other hand, is incredible. I thought I'd miss my gas stove but I don't, not one bit.
Heat pumps for water heating definitely aren’t as good as heat pumps for climate control! For climate control there’s really no issue. But for water it just takes so much more heat to heat up the water that it becomes an issue.
I know some households use it for both, but we're in SF and don't even have air conditioning. The cold air exhaust is just blown outside (through a 6-foot-long shiny ugly duct in my homegym that I forgot to mention above).
There's a local org here that goes around helping households do the math on decarbonizing their home appliances and making referrals to installers. I'd seen a presentation and reached out when our tankless needed replacement. Their contractor was fine and they did make sure we got all the tax credits we were entitled to, but I naively assumed I'd be informed of downsides beyond just the size of the thing, which was obvious. I feel hoodwinked.
Hmm.
Might I suggest that the problem here isn't with heat pump technology, it's the fact you were sold a unit that's too small to meet your needs.
That said...you're emptying an 80 gallon hot water unit with three people? That seems *well* above average.
Didn't know that was an option... we've got an electric water heater but the heat pump is a separate unit only used for AC and as a supplement to our gas furnace. Plus we've got solar panels on the roof, but that's just a thing that happens.
The footprint, noise, and error rate all sound annoying, but surely the endurance has more to do with switching from tankless to tanked than the energy source?
I think the issue is that heat pumps can’t pump heat as quickly as a big gas burner under the pipe can. I think you need to pump a lot of heat into water in advance. At least, I’ve never heard of a tankless heat pump water heater.
I wasn't aware until too late that the largest tank available wasn't sufficient for 3 people with curly hair.
Do you know what size electrical hookup your unit has?
Most heat pump water heaters require a 30 amp 240v hookup and have a backup heating element that picks up the slack when the heat pump can't keep up. 80 gallons for a family of 3 with full electric backup should be plenty unless something isn't working right. Again, when in backup electric mode, you're basically just using a standard full power electric water heater.
There are some units on the market that have smaller backup heaters with 120v hookups, but they're less common. If that's what you have, that might explain why it's having trouble keeping up. If you do have a 30 amp hookup, maybe the electric backup coils aren't working or have been disabled (maybe through an app)?
You're correct, we have a 120v model that's heat pump only. And 18 months later we ended up adding 240v service for the induction range, so we definitely should have upgraded when we got the new water heater. Apparently we can add on a separate electric coil unit as a backup, so that's currently like #3 on our list of upcoming house projects.
well the output. Obviously you can't increase the capacity without a new tank.
also if you use a mixing valve that increases the capacity of the water heater by ~25+%
It's also the hassle factor - it has to be easy to make the choice, not just in terms of cost but in terms of admin etc.
"rationally"
I'd say egotistically. Extra weird for someone who has kids.
Weird, vitriolic potshot. Do you really think the marginal climate benefit of solar panels on one SFH is the *most impactful* way they could spend O($10k) on their kids' future? This criticism seems completely asinine if we're talking about one family's decision rather than millions.
My kids also experience my standard of living. And unless we can convince people kids and egotism work together, birth rates will continue to fall.
This way of thinking about solar is entirely reasonable, especially considering competing priorities and the hassle factor. That said, another framing is that if solar has a 10 year payback, you're probably getting a roughly 8% internal rate of return on the money spent on the project.
A nearly risk free investment with an almost guaranteed 8% return is an incredibly good deal. If you don't have any savings to spare, this might not seem relevant. OTOH, stock market returns have an average return of 8%, but come with a pretty high level of risk. So having an investment option that gives you 8% without all that risk is worth considering, even though it doesn't seem to be as much of a slam dunk as solar installs with much lower payback periods.
a different way to analyze it is to look at the hassle as part of the cost
if solar panels cost e.g. $10000 and return $1000/year at end-of-year for 25 years then IRR is about 8%. but if the hassle is worth $2000 then the IRR is only 6.5% and if the hassle is worth $7500 then the IRR is 3%, worse than a 1-year treasury
im also unsure about whether this really is risk-free, since electricity prices might change (although up perhaps more likely than down) and there may be policy risk due to grid access charges
Electricity prices nationally are up almost a third in the past five years. That kind of continued increase will dramatically reduce the payback time and increase the ROI significantly after the breakeven point.
yeah but you dont know how much the price will change. so there's risk
I think the risk of electricity prices declining significantly and so reducing the ROI of installing solar panels is pretty small.
The cost of installing panels on the other hand is dominated by labor (and permitting), which is to say it will almost certainly also go up.
Best time to install home rooftop solar was yesterday...
Annoyingly, in CA batteries are mandatory, so there's an extra 15k cost on a much less durable item
When did that happen? We installed solar panels in 2023 and we don't have batteries.
I believe it is new single family dwellings from 2025 on.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/building-energy-efficiency-standards/energy-code-support-center-17
LOL. CA Democrats like to talk about abundance to sound cool but pursue scarcity.
Huh, that’s weird. My house was just completed a few weeks ago and it doesn’t have batteries.
Is that how much home batteries cost? You’d think at that price they’d have extremely long warranty periods that just meant replacement when they got old - assuming the battery manufacturer is still around
I have two Enphase batteries. They have a 10 year warranty.
And no, they're not mandatory in California (which is where I live.)
How much did they cost?
Also squirrels might chew at your connections and disable some panels, and fixing those isn't cheap.
Reasonable although in end for Retail /Consumers really it is very hard - the 10 year horizon sale works with industrial / commercial but only a minority of consumers
but this same for industrial / commercial where you present a positive NPV for XX megawatts and an unadjusted IRR ex any incentives of 8-10%, it moves capital investment decisions.
When looking at Capex projects, we are unlikely to green light anything with longer than a 5 year payback
Of course every firm and individual will have their own payback horizons - and constraints. I am sure you have your specific reasons on 5 yr horizon, shall not 2nd guess although it is not per se optimal in an abstract sense but of course devils cost of capital, time horizons etc.
Capital is limited, there are a lot of projects. First we prioritize safety or regulatory stuff, but after that it's going to be payback.
Quote often it's mainly stuff that has a positive return within a year or two.
It’s all about the opportunity cost
A 10 year payback if the payola from the utility companies doesn’t change, which there are rumblings about.
I agree that net metering schemes are ripe for adjustment on many grids as solar penetration increases and many jurisdictions have already changed the rules. But so far at least, I don't know of any case where previously installed solar didn't get grandfathered in under the old rules even after changes were made for new installs.
Also, on grids with time of use metering and grid battery programs, the economics can work for homeowners to add batteries and self-consume most of their production. Homeowners where this math works or mostly works also get home backup power as a bonus.
CA is making a bunch of rumbles about this, I wouldn't bet 25 grand against it happening
I thought most of CA already killed net metering a while ago?
It got much less generous, but they're coming for the grandfathered customers, and strangling what's left.
In Australia, it's not a hassle to install them (most of the time), and they're half the price they are in the US. Consequently, a large fraction of houses, including in the most politically conservative places in the country, have them installed, and now there's a huge rush to install home batteries to better utilize those solar panels.
The technology is exactly the same in the USA and Australia, it's just that a combination of advocacy and luck have made the logistics far easier.
It's not just about technology, as much as MattY wants to expend zero political capital on climate because he's got other political priorities.
In my understanding, the drivers of resi solar costs are
- Huge advertising bills to find customers who are interested
- Navigating a maze of different building codes for every county and getting a building permit
- Needing to ask permission from reluctant utilities before installing
Any idea which of those Australia does better?
All of the above. Marketing costs are lower because solar is now a mass-market product, design and approvals costs are lower because of a much more uniform and simpler regulatory environment for solar, and utilities have learned to stop worrying and love home solar (and the regulatory environment doesn’t let them say no easily).
All I know is I’ve had to shout at pushy home solar door to door salesmen to get off my property way too many times
I imagine Australia has, on average, much better sun + weather than most of the US does, too.
The difference in available sunshine is dwarfed by the efficiency of the Australian home solar industry compared to the United States.
The local equivalent of Trader Joe’s is offering a 6.6 kilowatt solar system and a 20 kWh battery for $5000 USD installed, with long warranties. The battery component is subsidised by about 30%, but even taking that into account it’s way, way cheaper than the US equivalent because a) we don’t punch ourselves in the face with tariffs and b) the Australian home solar industry is much, much, much more efficient because it operates in a much more consistent and friendly regulatory environment.
Economies of scale, and economies in process learning!
More you do, better you get at it, driving down cost.
So after we get the Spanish to come build our subways and passenger trains, we need to get the Australians to come install our solar panels?
No but it is materially helpful to look at the permitting and rule sets that allow Australians to be more effective - and look at the evolution
Achieving economies of scale in execution, and process learning rather than one off to one off and zero scaling, zero repetition for process expertise.
If you get them to cross an ocean and do it, they can’t apply all the cost savings of the domestic supply chains and supporting companies.
My hurdle with solar panels is that I don't want to put them on until I need to replace my roof, and so far it continues to be a rock star.
Sending the hail damage roof inspector over to move your decision point. ;)
This is a significant constraint to be sure. I just put up panels but had to replace the roof five years ago, so it wasn't a problem for me.
Someone needs to figure out a new panel installation scheme that won't increase the costs of replacing the roof. That could be a real tough one.
To be fair another key difference between Australia and the USA is that our roofs are typically constructed from either tiles or coated steel (“tin”), both of which are far more durable than shingles.
Why do most American houses have shingled roofs? It seems dumb to me but I’m assuming there is a sensible reason.
Ancestral aesthetics I think.
Amazing fact about EVs and children that people don’t mention enough: you can park an EV in your garage, plug it in, turn on the climate control, and let your kid keep sleeping inside. Just for this reason I’m never going back to gas.
I wonder if parenting advice will catch up to new technology. There was a huge push to never let kids stay in a parked car alone.
Sadly I'm British so I don't know what a "garage" is :(
It's an auxiliary storage unit that has a really large access door in the front for some unknown reason.
> but I need probably a 1 or 2 year payback
This is why I think green financing is a good idea. Theoretically with a PPA/Lease, someone could pay you $5,000 up front for the privilege of using your roof and also lock in your current electric rate so it won't go up with inflation. Free money to help the environment! But no one trusts the utilities or the solar companies not to pull a fast one on them with this kind of deal. People might trust the government to keep its word though.
This is a little known fact, but as I understand it, OBBBA actually keeps the tax credits for solar leasing companies installing residential solar. So basically leasing solar is the only way for homeowners to still get the tax credit, albeit indirectly through leasing companies.
I think just through the end of 2025.
I'm not sure £5k or less would be enough for me to consider it if I'm honest. I'm concerned about the damage to our (expensive!) roof and the possibility of squirrels/pigeons nesting underneath. I'm also interested in resilience and whether it's possible to store our own electricity to be able to withstand blackouts better (although they happen relatively rarely in the UK)
Don’t think I’d bother in the UK unless they paid me. Weather doesn’t seem good enough.
Will they put a new roof on your house, too?
Out of curiosity, which part of the country do you live in? We have solar panels and a plug-in hybrid, but we live in SoCal, which is pretty much the best place in the US for solar panels. It’s far south and sunny year-round! It feels so cool to drive a car powered by electrons from the sun. (The upfront cost was huge though, I must admit.)
It’s nuts how many homes in my Seattle neighborhood have home solar, and how none in my family’s sunny Mississippi neighborhood do
Maybe the Mississippi people are more public spirited, not being rent seekers, using real resources to gain an income transfer from cross subsidization. :)
I’m wondering if the dumb HOA would let them
The UK! Our roof is South facing though, and every summer I gaze at it and imagine the electricity it could produce. My husband thinks I'm nuts. I also have an eye to the increasing efficiency of solar, and I hate hassle/dealing with finance stuff and getting solar panels involves a lot of that!
Ah well, that does make it harder. You're a lot farther north than I am. Does your part of the UK get a lot of cloud cover? That makes a big difference too.
Yes, a lot of cloud cover although we are having increasingly hot summers and I'm told that even in winter and even on cloudy days you can generate decent amounts of electricity. This summer and autumn (so far) in particular has been unseasonably warm.
I love my solar panels+batteries. Right now, I calculate the payback period at 8 years. If electricity prices ever go up a lot, then obviously that payback period will decline. And I also like the protection from outages.
That said, I'm not sure I'd recommend that people get rooftop solar. More and more the grids are becoming cleaner (though not as fast as I'd like) and it's a lot cheaper to build huge solar+battery farms than to install it at your home.
The biggest drawback for me for rooftop solar is the 40 year old roof on my house and the 80 year old electrical panel (in addition to the rainy climate, but I think batteries help solve that). If the government would kindly replace both of those (and rewire my house), I’d be happy to let it add solar panels and a battery pack too.
I have a brand spanking new consumer panel and mostly brand new wiring. I'm also wary that efficiency may continue to grow so if I may end up with less hassle, better panels and more tested tech (more related to heat pumps).
It's probably not a good option for you.
Better to be able to draw from a grid that's 100% renewables, in part because of a large transmission network that pulls in wind and solar-generated electricity from wherever it's currently in surplus.
California is trying to pass legislation to bring in more out of state electricity and surprise surprise groups like the Sierra Club are opposing this because it might allow small amounts of coal-generated electricity to sneak onto our grid. Idiots.
Yep! I feel very alone in my group of friends for defending the rapid growth of Seattle on environmental grounds. But fact is we get nearly all of our electricity from hydro and our water is abundant. If we care about the earth we should welcome lots more people moving here and the density that entails
Retail is regardless not the major way forward for signficant RE deployment. Industrial / utility scale megawatts to gigawatts are where the cost deployment effiiciencies kick in big time.
I’m curious why you’d need a 1 or 2 year payback period. That would equate to a 100% (or 50%) annual ROI. Is there another investment you’re making that generates 50% ROI (and if so, please let me know what it is!).
Is there a reason solar could not currently supply 100% of your household electricity needs? Assuming ample roof space, the system would just need to be sized appropriately.
Well, I live in the UK, in an end of terrace house with limited roof space. It would only supply 100% on very sunny days. Payback is due to capital outlay. I want lots of things (holidays, larger car) - solar will only be the priority when it's immediately making us money.
My impression is that permitting/environmental assessments/blocking lawsuits are major problems for all kinds of green energy. Solar and wind require a lot of square meters/kWh, which make it easier for them to get blocked for nimby reasons. Putting them far from urban areas (where land is expensive) requires high-efficiency transmission lines. When that stuff gets blocked, we end up burning more coal to make up for the power we didn't get from the sun and wind.
Great article! Another thing the activists have wrought is negatively polarizing Republicans against green technology to the extent that the current administration is cancelling green energy projects just for fun, and I would guess that a significant fraction of Americans are more skeptical of green technology than they would otherwise be absent activists trying too hard and making things like electric cars into political statements.
I really don't think it's the left's fault that MAGA is on a dipshit crusade against greentech
As an actual RE &EE investment professional I entirely blame the Activist Left and Green NGO segment for this as for at least the past 7 years it's been the wrong focus and the fact they pushed in Biden Admin heavily on 'strangle the oil and gas" was a major trigger
so they for me bear a significant blame
I think we should put the blame on the group that is actually doing the dumb thing instead of vague outside factors that are impossible to quantify. No one forces them to be dipshits!
I am sure you do given your snobbish characterisation of the others as “dipshits” and perfectly illustrates how the sneering elitism of the profesional class Left has ended up in a dead-end. The idiocy of the Left Climate NGO class actively hindered me and actively moved in a very avoidable way the perceptions. Whereas industrial professionals really wanted different images. One as to sell to the market that is, not the population and market that the pointy headed profesisoinal class snobs want it to be
I know from personal experience that the "left climate NGO class" made things harder to a certain extent. That effect definitely exists. But absolving MAGA world from any personal responsibility for their dumb energy and climate policies is way more removed from reality than my "snobbish characterizations" could ever be.
I get that it's attractive to use the left as a punching bag for everything, but at some point, we need to be serious here. These people wouldn't magically become your friends if the Sunrise movement didn't exist.
Personal Responsability has FUCK ALL to do with this. Achieving the market progress and market share does. The problem is you people are treating this as some moral crusade and moral positioning. I give zero fucks about MAGA personal responsability. I give many fucks about achieving market sales, penetration and what is needed to Communicate to the Widest Market Possible, not engaging in moralising, about personal responsaiblity or whatever. And the LEfty NGOs climate agenda for past 5 yrs at minimum have been a detriment to me. And and an active detriment to achieving real progress - banging on about the evil oil corporations and spending more time trying to block hydrocarbons than waking up to the calls of people like me that the goddamn system is overall starting to strangle our ability to deploy at speed
This would be plausible if Texas and Florida weren’t building out solar power at a break neck speed, and investing in things like geothermal.
Unfortunately, the climate NGO people really did unnecessarily polarize the issue by spending a ton of time talking about “strangling fossils fuels) and pressuring Biden to put a pause on new LNG terminals
The dipshits are the politicians cancelling these projects. AFAIK, Republicans voters aren't asking for that. It's not "sneering elitism" to call them out for that.
And is there a possible argument that what Florian said above is out of bounds but Trump's various characterizations of his political opponents isn't?
if one wants to point to the MAGA Political Activists, the equally online bunch of wankers who for me are the mirror of the wokey woke, right wokism is a good expression - sure - but that’s not the habit of the commentary going on about MAGA idiocy this MAGA that. Separate that out and I have no problem - I was going after the Activist NGOs you should note, that their mirror image on the right are a bunch of fuck-heads too …. activism of all stripes is a modern pox.
It's not instead of!
The incompetence and senility of the Biden administration was nowhere better illustrated than by their efforts to strangle oil and gas leading to record production.
I do not know if I would say senility as that seems peevish and immature, but it certainly was a huge own-goal that was misplaced spending of limited political capital for no good actual return politically - nor any real result other than self-distraction.
I thought the high level concept of IRA was largely fine - although the Everything Bagelism that undermined it in execution, not. See offshore wind and no Jones etc waiver, see permitting reform getting strangled by TheGRoups because god forbid a gas pipeline might benefit etc. — the missed opportunity for working with Europe and NAFTA on a China competiing industrial scale platform. The fact the opposition will always oppose does not excuse blundering into playing into their opposition.
RATHER if one can count on that - and one should - one needs to counter it on its own turf to sterilise. There was some thinking in that direction (about getting “red state” investment" highlighted but it was in my experience remaining all in the Lefty Professional Class Talking To Itself mode of discourse.
ETA:
The heathcare policy is not my area nor interest, however the lessons are not to me in healthcare policy it is in infrastructure building and historical examples
The fact that the Biden admin getting the execution of much of their building agenda bogged down because they didn't focus on the trade offs (as MAtt, as Klein, as many others have highlighted) and focus on key things to get actual shit built, remaining rather too much in the airy world of Symbolic Capitalists as Musa Al Gharbi puts it, in moving words and ideas and theory around (as like their everything bagelism is "nudges" to achieve poly-agenda.
Insurance market is a totally different subject than hard-infrastructure building which energy is - moving an insurance market around is just an utterly wrong point of comparison.
As a point of clarity - I did not say IRA was bad for not including a deal with EU & NAFTA, I said it was a missed opportunity which is very different - although I would also say that missed opportunity aligned overall with the execution mistakes that did make IRA a failure.
As I said, at initial framing and for most higher-level policy I liked IRA overall as it was an overall efficient lever with minimal up-front Government spend and excellent private capital mobilisation.
The Bad was essentially the execution - the non-reform and inattention to the "cruft" of regulation as I once saw it characterised (forget where) to enable most rapid physical build. Missed opportunity on scale w NAFTA, EU etc is more the "nice to have had" although the blocking factors in re missing that strike me as symptoms of the wider failure (but EU NAFTA again are more 2ndary symptoms to me and not core)
As for sterilisation - to be clear I do not expect ANYTHING to PREVENT political opposition from attempting an attack nor from partisan media like Fox news talk-show twits from going on and on. But that is not the same subject as sterilising or another way to put it, inoculating.
However, I do rather strongly feel that the entire Democratic Party has sold itself on the idea that Fox News Etc has this Mind control effect which explains their own failure to sell beyond the pre-sold, beyond selling to themselves, and the fact that marketing efforts do not fully pay off means they are useless. Analysis-PAralysis, perfect-being-enemy-of-good effects.
Inoculating the wider audiences to such inevitable attacks is entirely and fully possible if one thinks outside of communicating only to the pre-sold and only in the language of your own agenda. We 'sell' our financing to MAGAesque business leadership in our industrial investment financing because we don't sell fucking green. I forbid my people to talk Green Language, to talk about "ecological" or ESG concerns (for all that I have no issues with ESG reporting in itsef as an investor reporting, at least for our investor KPIs which are sensible technocratic ones).
Countering on own turf means going to address the concerns of the potential audiencies of the Fox News talk-shows idiots and addressing them, not talking down to them (nor badgering nor guilting) - or treating MAGA as this big single blog (as dumb as the Righties treating the Democrats as one blob).
Our ground people talk langauge that doesn't put off Fox/WSJ reading interlocutors. Dollars and cents. Savings. Joe Middle Sized industrial owner may have voted for the Orange Cretin, but a good IRR a good NPV and a solid financing for a solid cost-cutting investment wins over.
I have become quite the follower of Cleaning Up (thanks to MagellanNH commentator here to give credit as I am not a podcast guy follower although I oddly knew of Michael Liebreich from Bloomberg) - and his Podcast episode on Climate Reset this past week I very much agree with https://www.cleaningup.live/audioblog-16-the-pragmatic-climate-reset-part-ii-a-provocation/
Of course he's international and not US focused but the broad subject align
Sure it is. Take EVs from an engineering perspective they will end up a lot cheaper and better, more durable etc than ICE vehicles and very few if any ICE vehicles will be sold. This would be absent and environmental benefits. So why enact a ban just to scare and enrage people and driven them to the right?
I agree with you but if you think this has anything to do with Trump's war on wind power, you are, dare I say, credulous.
Sure it does - it's all about oppositional defiant disorder as a political philosophy. People are strongly objecting to being told what to do by environmental scolds. Wind is just one way to object. It's also poorly thought out retaliation for canceling various oil and gas projects by the Biden admin.
People underrate the extent to which ODD drives a lot of decision making. I'm convinced that it's behind a lot of COVID vaccine refusal.
The reasons for Trump's opposition to wind energy are way older and way dumber than that.
True. A scottish golf course.
Generally all things for Trump are personal peeves.
Ah I was thinking you were talking about the right/MAGA opposition to wind power vs. Trump specifically.
"Take EVs from an engineering perspective they will end up a lot cheaper and better."
This is probably true for a new EV vs. a new ICE. I only say probably because there's still a school of thought that a plug in hybrid will remain the "best" overall platform. But there's no EV solution for the $2,000 - $5000 used vehicle segment which represents 25% of the US vehicle population today because the EV battery replacement at 8-10 years will create two depreciation cycles and prevent an EV from reached the 20 year old, near end life segment of the market.
EDIT: Not disagreeing, just noting we'll have ~ 100m ICE vehicles on the road through 2050 based on economics of supporting this segment of the used car market.
"EV battery replacement at 8-10 years "
What on earth are you talking about? The warranty is 10-100k. Replacing at 8 years? At 10 years the average battery is still at 90% of what it was new.
"At 10 years the average battery is still at 90% of what it was new."
This was definitely not my experience with a 10 year old hybrid battery. It was under 50% at 10 years.
Batteries have improved since then, but currently "Most EV batteries last 15-20 years, with an average degradation rate of about 1.8% per year under moderate conditions." The key point there is "moderate conditions" which is generally considered to be between 60-80° Fahrenheit. There's a lot of places in the US that experience frequent weather outside that range.
I believe moderate conditions refer to how often they are charged to 100%. If you plug it in at night then it would rarely outside of road trips be charged to 100%.
The low-end EVs that currently have the potential to reach this low-end segment < $5k price point are not going to reach the segment due to battery replacement costs. Just facts. The 8-10 year old EVs that are reaching their battery replacement window are all getting scrapped right now. Just like I'll scrap my 2016 Model S in for sure less than 2 years rather than replace the battery.
"The 8-10 year old EVs that are reaching their battery replacement window are all getting scrapped right now."
I'm going to need a cite for that load of complete nonsense.
I mean you're going to replace the battery when the warranty expires for no reason? Who is feeding you this nonsense?
Also, if you ban ICE vehicles, then the places where EVs won't really work become a huge problem. If EVs are better technology, they'll ultimately win out. There are externality reasons to want fewer ICEs, but a blanket ban is a good way to discover the previously-unclear-to-you situations where some important thing simply cannot be done with current EVs in a reasonable way.
If California wants to ban ICEV sales (after 2035) and the voters of California are fine with that, why is that a problem? Federalism, and all that.
If a candidate for the 2028 Democratic nomination wants to expand the California's action to the entire nation, however, that would be disqualifying for me. But is that likely? I doubt it.
The problem is that idiotic policies in big blue states hurts the Democratic brand nationwide.
It's a pointless expenditure of political capital to cause something that is obviously going to happen to happen. That's bad.
I'm not convinced that market forces alone will lead to widespread adoption of EVs. I don't think we're quite at that takeoff point yet. We need a few more nudges.
If you look at Toyota's solid state battery and the latest manufacturing efficacy out of China you could have a 1,000 mile range EV for half the price of a ICE in a few years. No one is going to buy a $38k RAV4 when they can get the RAV4 EV for $20k.
"I would guess that a significant fraction of Americans are more skeptical of green technology than they would otherwise be absent activists trying too hard and making things like electric cars into political statements"
I'm sure some effect like this exists, but technology like electric cars and solar panels of the quality we have today wouldn't exist without the political and cultural work being put in to develop a market that supported these technologies as they were emerging. Honestly, your comment reads as smug and intellectually lazy piling on to a group that's a popular local villain?
So if you agree that this effect probably exists, why is it intellectually lazy and smug to point it out?
Because it fails to consider the variety of effects that activism has had on technological uptake, to question what the net effect has been, and to weigh to what extent it was possible to get the good without the bad?
Saying what I wrote is “incomplete” or “leaves out something important” would be an equally valid way of making that point. Calling me names is kind of intellectually lazy and smug.
Nah, I'm good with it. "Some backlash exists" is true of just about any type of political action in a polarized world; grabbing just that fact and considering it in isolation from "did the action promote its intended results" or the like isn't analysis, it's just a cheap dunk on a local outgroup.
I'm not sure we can let Republicans off the hook by blaming activists for turning the poor dears against green technology.
I mean, it's the same people who are gutting cancer research and screwing with vaccines. They can do galactic idiocy all on their own.
It is interesting how federal level Republicans are anti-green tech but state level ones especially in Texas don't seem to hide their support.
Iowa is very proud of the amount of wind power they generate
Facts-on-the-ground (notably generating facts on the ground)
People are afraid gas cars will be banned
Because in lots of places - CA, for one, people in power actively talk about banning gas cars! See also, gas stoves. It’s, sadly, not a straw man.
Yes, I agree - Califnornia not only has high visibiltiy but it is also marginallly dishonest for varioius flavors of Democrats / Left to pretend that California is not sending a signal to the nation at large of what the desired direction of the dominant Democratic party structure is.... particularly when in other settings frequently the same people will tout California driving national markets, implying okay we can't do this nationally but we can use Cali, NY to drive....
And so yeah, not a straw man - it's really in many ways a kind of implicitely revealed agenda.
(equally while I am super favorable to EV, the idea that it's a good economic policy to ban something rather than make the economics of what you want to be the winner is ... daft and a path to losing)
> not a straw
I see what you did there.
All politics are national! Sure, you don’t see Gretchen Whitmer talking about it, but we don’t live in a world where FDR could hide his polio and affairs anymore.
CA will not allow ICE vehicle sales after 2035 under current law.
Biden's 2024 CAFE standards were rowing in the same direction. I just checked - EPA in 2024 estimated that EVs would make up 68% of the domestic fleet in 2032. This was never on a ballot - I think voters are fine with whatever technology the market lands on organically, but the enviros take over the agencies when dems gain power, and push hard to achieve through regulation what they could never get through Congress. If anyone thinks a second Biden term wouldn't have continued to aggressively grind against ICE engines, I have a bridge for sale you may be interested in. :-)
CA is a nationally visible state in terms of politics and culture, just like NY. It's not a coincidence that Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries are from NY and CA. That's where the Democratic donor and activist base is.
Not the most knowledgeable about this (though I am a welder!), but I've long thought setting fossil fuels on fire was extraordinarily wasteful considering what else we can use them for (making steel and plastics amongst other things). There's no denying they're good for generating energy when nothing else is on offer, but renewables are starting to get pretty damn cheap especially in terms of deployment. Pompeo was on TRIP Leading recently pretending that China was doing all their energy build-out on coal and it was quite shocking considering how fast they're cranking out solar (wind too?) to expand their capacity for energy generation. We should be doing this too!
Similarly, my MAGA shithead bar buddy was mocking wind turbines for having blades that only last eight years, and I was incredulous. Who cares? They're cheap to erect and its good work for welders (he's also a welder). We need more juice; who cares where it comes from provided we're maximizing production?
And as more blades pile up some clever people will figure out how to reuse or recycle them.
I wonder if people thought this about tires 50 years ago?
I love it when people trash their own occupation to own the libs.
In fairness he's a fabricator and not an installer/millwright so it's not a 1:1 thing for him, but "did not think this through" is a defining characteristic of most MAGA types.
One of my hotter takes is that I don't care if climate change is caused by fossil fuel use or natural warming/cooling patterns. I want carbon capture and related technologies to mature so that we can control the earth's temperature like a thermostat.
This is an important point... don't like an Ice Age? "Just" turn it off... Hothouse Terra? Time to cool it.
Getting that kind of tech and then not screwing it up massively is a consideration but the benefits are obvious.
Once in the 1920s the LA Auto Show was cancelled when an overnight snowfall collapsed the exhibition roof, a la the Minneapolis Metrodome. That seems cool! Dial up some snow on the beach!
"And of course, if everyone did switch to an electric car, that would drive up the price of electricity."
IMO, this is generally false. As long as regulators do their jobs, the switch to electric cars is likely to make electricity rates go down.
The reason for this counter-intuitive result is that electricity grids have to be massively overbuilt to handle peak loads. This means they have very low overall asset utilization rates. The average distribution grid runs at about 30% of its capacity. Transmission and power generation assets average about 50% utilization. So the system has a ton of excess capacity available for flexible loads like EV charging.
To unlock this excess capacity, regulators have to force utilities to incentivize flexible off-peak EV charging and get customers to avoid charging EVs during peak periods. As long as they do this, charging EVs off-peak means moving more kwhs over the same fixed grid assets. This could reduce the the cost of moving each kwh and lower rates.
Assuming that regulators will do their job is very risky IMO
That's definitely true, but it's getting harder and harder for regulators to ignore all the successful EV charging programs that have been rolled out around the country that allow EV owners to charger their EVs for significantly less cost than in places where regulators are idiots or captured by utilities.
Texas is a good example. They have tons of excess wind power overnight and lots of excess solar during some sunny days. They also have some crazy high peak loads on the hottest sunniest days that cause grid stress and huge price spikes during peak periods. All the new batteries are helping ease this, but managed EVs charging programs have already been widely deployed and they offer EV charging for between $0.00/kwh and about $.06/per kwh in exchange for letting grid operators control the exact timing of the charging.
how would this work in practice? are we pricing household electricity consumption by time of day? or are we assuming they charge their EVs overnight and only worrying about commercial charging stations?
I think almost everyone in the business believes the best way to keep costs down is to deploy mandatory time-of-use pricing. This is sort of independent of EV adoption.
Given average grid utilization rates and the fact that peak loads are the biggest driver of cost, it just makes the most sense. In competitive generation markets, the cost per kwh during non-peak times averages $.02-$.04 but spikes as high as $1.00-$10.00 per kwh during peaks. It's moronic to charge consumers a flat rate 24/7 given these behind the scenes pricing dynamics.
Managed home EV charging has another value to grid operators in that it can be instantly shut down during grid emergencies. Most grids need something called spinning reserves, where power plants are kept running 24/7 even when their output isn't needed, just in case another plant trips offline suddenly. Managed EV charging can eliminate the need for this type of backup because grid operators can just shut down all the EV charging for a few minutes if there's an emergency. The interruption doesn't need to be very long because slower backup power sources can take over in just a few minutes and the EV chargers can be turned back on.
so would the grid operator be able to selectively shut off EV charging?
It depends on the program. For simple time-of-use, there's no control. It's just differential pricing to encourage off-peak charging.
The most advanced programs, and these are already pretty widely deployed in more forward thinking grids, are set up with very granular operator control. The EV owner sets up their charging app with a percent of charge target and a time that target needs to be hit (say 80% charged by 7am). The grid operator looks at supply and load forecasts and optimizes the charging so it happens during the exact best/lowest cost time over the course of the night.
IMO, any programs where grid operators take control have to be completely voluntary and based on carrots not sticks. This is another area where Democrats/bureaucrats could mess up big time and create a huge backlash. We've seen this with programs where grid operators control thermostats and although most (all?) of these programs are voluntary, regulators have to be extremely careful to avoid backlash which will be swift and could cripple programs before they even get going.
In the UK, there is only one grid (obviously), but you can choose your own electricity supplier, who then buys wholesale and sells retail. Some suppliers have a flat rate 24/7, others have simple time of use, yet others have fancier systems where pricing varies based on expected demand; you then get the ability to integrate your own electricity consumption with the grid pricing.
So, for instance, you fill up the washing machine with your laundry, and set a maximum price, and the machine then does the laundry at a time when the pricing falls below that maximum. This does require some smarts in the washing machine (but you can also just get a report on your phone that tells you what time to put the laundry on). EV charging always has enough smarts to follow a plan and will charge the EV at times that minimise cost. Some EVs even have an option to be used as a grid storage battery, so they'll discharge into the grid at high-demand times if they would still have sufficient charge when needed.
The grid operators can't take control, but customers can opt-in to a more complex pricing regime. Mostly people that do opt-in are those where enough of their appliances are "smart" that they don't have to do too much to keep up with the pricing and the appliances manage things for them.
Heat pumps are another one that can do this; if you set a temperature range (say 18-23C), then it might heat to the top of the range while power is cheap, or cool to the bottom of the range and then let the temperature drift to the other end of the range when power is expensive, only using high-price electricity when absolutely necessary to keep the house in the acceptable range. With adequate insulation, you can ride four or five hours of peak price without needing heating or cooling, even on the hottest and coldest days.
^^^ This is the techno-future I want, not Tiktok
Aren't there a lot of places where the power company will give you a break on your rates if you let them install a switch to turn off your AC during peak demand times? Something like that could work for car charging, as well.
Cool!
It's a fair point and of course the messaging has to be done right. Maybe the trick is to allow people to stick with flat rate but to charge them enough of a flat rate to compensate for the inefficiency of that choice. I'd be fine with that.
OTOH, everyone expects it'll cost more to fly over the holidays compared to less busy times. In term of electricity, especially with cheap but intermittent renewables, the price swings between off-peak and peak (or between energy excess and energy scarcity) may get bigger than they already are. Cheaper batteries may help even the swings out, but we need to be charging people accurate prices for what they use and for the burdens they put on the system.
"Are we pricing household electricity consumption by time of day?"
We are today. Below is the Illinois Comed day-ahead rate table per kWh by hour. There's always a ~ 5x difference between the low and high price per day. The current Tesla app let's you schedule your charging to minimize cost (i.e., charge between 2:00AM and 5:00AM).
Time (Hour Ending) Day-Ahead Hourly Price
12:00 AM 3.0¢
1:00 AM 2.5¢
2:00 AM 2.1¢
3:00 AM 2.0¢
4:00 AM 2.2¢
5:00 AM 2.7¢
6:00 AM 4.2¢
7:00 AM 4.8¢
8:00 AM 4.1¢
9:00 AM 3.6¢
10:00 AM 3.5¢
11:00 AM 4.0¢
12:00 PM 4.6¢
1:00 PM 5.0¢
2:00 PM 5.3¢
3:00 PM 5.4¢
4:00 PM 6.4¢
5:00 PM 8.9¢
6:00 PM 9.8¢
7:00 PM 8.2¢
8:00 PM 5.3¢
9:00 PM 4.3¢
10:00 PM 3.7¢
11:00 PM 3.0¢
"are we pricing household electricity consumption by time of day?"
That started in at least the 1970s.
I thought that was the whole backlash to “smart metering”
OH by the way, I am reminded I need to thank you for introducing me to Cleaning up podcast some months ago, as while I knew of Michael L from his Bloomberg days, I wasn't ever a podcast consumer, and now I very much enjoy him: as like https://www.cleaningup.live/audioblog-16-the-pragmatic-climate-reset-part-ii-a-provocation/
I'm glad you're finding him interesting. I thought these recent "pragmatic reset" episodes were especially good.
Yes, I absolutely agree, the pragmatic reset episodes are excellent
I'm curious where the fascination came from with banning gas stoves and ICE cars when the direction of the technology is that those things will go away on their own. It just annoyed people immensely for no valid long term purpose.
Because climate activists decided that EVs / induction stoves had reached the point where they were "good enough" to replace ICE / gas stoves and therefore people who were not making the change were doing so out of stubbornness or hostility and had to be forced. After all, they had heard from some other climate activist that they could do this, so they automatically did - and therefore anyone who hadn't was doing so purely out of hatred for the planet and would never actually do it without being forced.
(ie, they're early adopters who don't want to accept that adoption is a normal S-curve)
I suspect it's partly the conviction that they're at least as good as the alternatives combined. But also people often decide that just because they like something like an induction stove, other people should us that induction stove and if those other people don't want to use an induction stove we should make them because it's just better. That's one of those more unfortunate features of human nature that's going to still be with us when the sun has exhausted all its fuel.
I'd hope that our descendents would no longer count as H.sapiens and may well have evolved past that point.
As far as I know, California still has a ban on ICE car sales starting in 2035 (pending court cases), and requires wiring for EV chargers in all new construction. Which seems like a good way to 1) make people mad 2) drive up housing costs, but what do I know.
Mandates for the future like that aren’t that expensive. I don’t think either of these things is a big issue. They’re certainly much better than mandating solar panels or requiring retrofits.
Wiring, plus a new 240v outlet, plus potentially having to get a bigger panel to accommodate it, plus another thing for the inspector to check. Not crazy expensive but every mandate adds a straw to the pile.
These seem pretty negligible in new construction provided you're not actually installing the charging unit in said new construction. A bigger breaker box is a benefit anyways since we have way more gadgets than ever before.
It's troublesome enough that in '63 they thought running 95% of our outlets off of two circuits was a good idea and it's expensive to address that error, but in new construction it's basically nothing.
If you allow the market to solve the problem on its own, how are you a virtuous hero?
I suspect because they are the two most visible uses of hydrocarbons in everyones life.
These guys stand for degrowth first and foremost. Europe shows what happens when you stifle energy production. Germany stands proud by closing its nuclear plants and damaging industrial production. The U.K. is trying to meet energy goals by relying on extortionate wind energy and overly complicated nuclear power, leading to ridiculous energy prices.
"Support degrowth for your kids, of which you shouldn't have any, and we don't either" usually is not a winning message.
While there is investment in the UK in nuclear the policy is that renewables take the lions share.
Climate activists don't see it as an economic or technical issue, they see it as a moral one.
Pragmatic arguments, just don't work, to change their mind you need to explore their psychology.
No, the only real climate activists *are* the pragmatic people. Those ones you see in the museums with Campbell’s soup cans are just performance artists. Don’t let them take the word “climate activists”.
I am defining climate activists by how much they care and attention they get not by how effective they are.
I live in MA. This winter we got gas and electric bills showing a split of roughly 20/80 supply price to delivery fees. When people got their their bills this winter they experienced sticker shock and were outraged, complained loudly on Facebook, asked the governor to intervene, etc.
One of the main reasons for the increase in delivery fees is that they're used to fund the state's Mass Save program, which subsidizes things like heat pumps, energy efficient appliances, winterization and subsidies for poor people's energy costs.
Mass Save was thought to be a popular program and was recently expanded. The problem is people don't want to pay for it, or to subsidize other people's heat pumps from their own bills.
Due to the blowback governor Healey ended up decreasing the Mass Save expansion and has made energy affordability a big theme for this year.
If even people in rich, ultra liberal MA don't want to be inconvenienced for climate change then I can't imagine the rest of the country does either...
Yep, I was stunned by Con Edison’s delivery charges being 2/3rds of the (very high) bill. I thought the technocrats were supposed to be running a good energy policy in the Blue states, but this sort of thing, California’s mismanagement, Hawaii’s mismanagement is a bad look.
As a proper actual financier of industiral RE & EE I broadly agree.
First the Activists focus heavily on suppression of hydrocarbons and use the pollution paradigm that really is not an actionable paradigm for CO2 (and in most ways inappropriate) - and are for my perception in many ways trapped in the same 1970s BoomerAge Framework Thinking as their right-wing nemeses - whereas the technology of RE and elecrrification has leaped forward over the past 15 years to cost and efficiency levels that frankly myself didn't even believe would happen (when I started on RE & EE about 15 yrs ago as a financier).
Regulatory streamlining, permitting - and grid expansion to remove / reduce congestion as well as grid modernisation to enable the lowest cost energy to move consistently as well as modernise for Grid Efficicency - 60s era grids are leaving money on the table.... or wasting money.
Selling EE & RE as Savings, as Economic Competitiveness, as Growth Drivers - that's what is needed. The Climate Activists have been my nemesis in a way for the past decade as the whole goddamn Hair Shirt Guiltism isn't how you get real adoptoin.
We do our financials and support the investments based on Positive Net Present Value (NPV) ex-subsidies - and it works - get the private counterpart looking at their long-term asset deployment, cost stabilisation (and typically 20-40% up-front energy bill savings again ex-any subsidies which can be fine carrots for enabling important capital deployment but aren't the needed basis of NPV analysis)
Misselling EE & RE as Climate Guilt has set back this deployment. It's wrong headed
Under-focus on the ready-for-market technology acceleration AND on upgrading the needed energy infrastructure (with electricity demand growing by leaps and bounds this needs to be a priority regardless of decarbonisation)
“First the Activists focus heavily on suppression of hydrocarbons and use the pollution paradigm that really is not an actionable paradigm for CO2 (and in most ways inappropriate) - and are for my perception in many ways trapped in the same 1970s “
If they were so focused on pollution they should have been working on nuclear all this time.
well yes - anti-nuclear was always wrong-headed mixing of anti-Nukes (weapons) with generally incoherent non-factual fears of nuclear reactors being bombs (or massively incompetent idiocies like Chernobyl although there of course bad design was coupled with bad Communist maintenance and bad Soviet hierarchies and bad… well just everything Soviet… for a fuck up of Russo-Soviet scale
This was great, and really spoke to where I am at.
In my head full of ideals, I embrace the future of modern abundance full of windmills and solar panels. Once my family moves back to my home state (Michigan) I will gladly buy an electric car to zip around with, much like my sister-in-law has.
But just like my SIL has a husband with an ICE truck for "going up north", we are going to keep an ICE truck for now ... for "going up north."
The cabin is 4 hours away. That's out of range. Charging takes time. Now our trip "up north" is 5-6 hours instead of 4. With kids. Ugh.
Can we acknowledge that sitting at a charging station with children of any age, on a road trip, is not good times? Can we acknowledge that family road trips are still the most cost effective way for most families to travel? Can we recognize that in some parts of the country - particularly the upper Midwest - weekend road trips to vacation homes are something families often do multiple times a *month* in winter and summer and this is deeply ingrained in the local culture? That I need an answer for how I can continue to live my life and make the energy transition?
Yes, yes, I know I don't *need* any of those things. But as my immigrant father-in-law says, "America is the one country where you can eat steak every day."
And this where I think a lot of progressive messaging runs up against a wall with Americans. What progressives need, more than any particular policy, is to show some *empathy* for ordinary American life. I think a huge barrier is that climate has gotten politicized and "left-coded," and "left-coded" for a lot of Americans means "well educated, single, childless, coastal, vegan, urbanite nepo babies who distain and look down upon my married, suburban, steak-eating, truck driving, hard working, flyover country family life."
(And admit it, y'all do look down on them a little. I've lived on the East Coast for 20 years, I've heard how you people speak about the rest of America because you do it to muh face when I tell you where I am from.)
It doesn't have to be like this. I think so much of our polarization is just perceived lack of empathy - "Those people hate how I live; Fuck them and everything they stand for."
(Yes, this goes both ways, I know.)
But the climate people often make this worse by a) not showing empathy b) wrapping climate up with a bunch of other lefty-esque causes like "more density" and "affordable housing" - which aren't bad things! But it does make a lot of normie Americans think "those commies want to force me into a condo with criminals and loud rap music, and they will get off on my suffering because they hate me and people like me." And it's hard for progressives to make an argument for practical policies when the face of Progressive America is often a self-righteous chick with a pixie cut yelling into TikTok about how your F-150 is an expression of nature-murdering Toxic Whiteness and Misogyny, going on about global warming and personal sacrifice like a Campus Crusader for Christ telling you about the fires of hell you will burn in if you don't accept Jesus into your heart *now.*
Americans hate that shit and will *actively* resist it. If their Big Ass Truck makes them Bad, they don't want to be Good.
Americans are not people who are into morally-induced austerity. Even our native versions of Christianity - a religion whose entire point is to "lay down one's life for love and other existential causes" - are steeped in entertainment, self-assurance, prosperity, glitter, Big Hair, and donuts.
Bundling issues together also makes Americans suspicious; it trips the Fox News nerve center in the brain that goes "What's their REAL AGENDA?"
So progressives, to see any movement on climate, need to start with showing empathy towards the lives of most Americans. They need to accept Big Ass Trucks and suburbia and the people who love them. They need to not sound like woke, overeducated versions of Dana Carvey in a grey wig.
And by doing that, develop some empathy, maybe they will stop talking about the issue in the desperate, moral terms that turn people off, stop pressuring elected officials rush into solutions that aren't ready, and stop creating unnecessary barriers. And they will start to discuss the issue in a more politically productive, "This is what energy abundance can do for YOU" mode.
Because that is ultimate what politics boils down to. Politics isn't religion. With apologies to the memory of JFK, politics is NOT really about "Asking what you can do for your country." That's nice, but asking sacrifice of people is what religion - including civic religion - does.
Politics is not Civic Religion, even if our politicians often draw upon our patriotism. But the act of Politics is about getting people to vote for you by promising that you will make *their* lives better, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Maybe it requires a little humility to get off the pulpit of Climate-as-Morality and get onto the stump of "This is what energy abundance can do for YOU."
But it needs to happen.
One of the most annoying aspects of the EV discourse over the last 15 years was the “range is a red herring” talking point but over the next 15 years I do think that the range and charging problem will be solved and refueling an EV will come very close to the gasoline fill-up experience.
Don’t Chinese EVs already charge in 5-10 min?
It's not annoying; it's a genuine annoyance.
If I regularly road trip with 3 kids - and kids suck to travel with - and I have to road trip around school schedules, so I am often on a tight schedule, especially for holidays, then charging times and range are a real issue, especially on longer interstate road trips to see family.
I usually make 2 10 minute stops between Connecticut and Michigan, for a total drive time of about 11ish hours. I can do that in a single day; I'm tired, but I can do it.
Adding in more and longer stops starts pushing that trip out into one that is longer and more aggravating and maybe requires a hotel stay, which is fine in the summer, but over the holidays? It would be a big lifestyle change.
I could see an EV if I wasn't doing that road trip anymore.
The bottom line is the argument for EVs can't be "they are good enough" or "you can make the lifestyle changes to deal with it." People aren't going to adopt them out of the goodness of their hearts because they have been told they "should," and any politician who tries to make them is going to get an electoral b*tch slap.
EVs have to be "sold" to people. And you sell things to people by convincing them that they are an improvement over the previous thing, and an improvement in ways that matter to the people buying them - so yes, they may accelerate really nice, but if I'm a mom in Saline with 3 kids whose priority is getting to Boyne as fast as I can on Friday after school, you need to tell me how an EV is *better* - not equal, not "almost as good," - but better than the car I've got.
And this is where the climate and green energy movements are failing.
I was agreeing with you but you responded as if I wasn’t.
I agree with the empathy part, but do think that is a problem in both sides. I find very little empathy from “middle America” toward the young childless urban dwellers.
"an ICE truck for 'going up north'"
I'd suggest workshopping some other abbreviation for "internal combustion engine."
Nothing says they can't arrest a few immigrants on their way to their cabin....
Charging isn't going to add 1-2 hours to a 4 hour drive. I've driven Denver/Santa Fe in my EV, which is about six hours of driving time through a lot of lightly populated areas. It takes two* charging stops and each stop only requires about 15 minutes of charging time.
*I could do it with one longer charging stop, but it's just nice to get out of the car twice.
Thats good to know! I'm not averse to EVs if the charging becomes less of an issue; 15 minutes isn't too bad.
A deeply conservative family friend skeptical of climate change recently bought a Rivian that he uses to drive 4.5 hours to his cottage multiple times per month. He's even towed a boat up, and only needed to stop once to recharge. He says he often needs a twenty minute charge during winter but that the range is no problem. Outside of his Rivian, I see tons of EVs (including EV trucks) up near my cottage, which is nearby his and also 4.5 hours from major population centers. Obviously this won't work for everybody (he stores his boats during winter a couple miles from his cottage, so not really regularly towing), but owning an EV truck as a cottage-going midwesterner isn't that hard, and become more common every year.
Thats good to know! I was actually really curious about towing and range.
I don’t think the average American owns a vacation home. Google tells me only 5% do.
Michigan has a notably high number of second homes. Going “up north” is a thing, and a quick google search suggests something like 1/4 of all homes in MI are second homes.
A few people I grew up with in TN (admittedly an affluent part) were from the Midwest, and had vacation homes in Michigan! It wasn’t as common as a lake house somewhere a couple hours away, but it wasn’t uncommon
In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota I think it is a lot more than 5%, and its not a "rich person thing." And then you have all the people who make the same trip but rent, or camp, etc. Its really ingrained in the way of life here.
And these are all swing states - the Democrats need the buy-in of Michiganders and Minnesotans etc to get things done. They need our Senators. They need our electoral votes. You can't make progress in America based on what people want in New England and California - you have to get Heartland Buy-In.
And I think the good news is, IME, Midwesterners are pretty open to change and progress! We're descended from pioneers! We are proud of our heritage of progress and industry, people here deeply value egalitarianism, mutuality, and our natural resources and the beauty of the land and water. The Midwest used to be the heartland of Progressive politics in America for a reason (a tradition that especially lives on in Minnesota). I think Democrats could be very successful making well targeted appeals to our little pioneer hearts to sell good climate policies.
But the Dems need to have empathy. You can't come in from New England with your Climate Puritan hat on and your manual of Sins and Penances.
It's very common in the Great Lakes states, and vacation places "up north" are often used by extended family and friends.
Literally my entire facebook feed is "Up North" in July.
Even the people I graduated high school with who moved away bring their families to Michigan in July and go up north.
It's actually really sweet towards the end of June as we all trickle into the state and start posting our "Lake Pictures."
"Can we acknowledge that family road trips are still the most cost effective way for most families to travel?"
Driving a car from DC to Miami round trip costs $1400. You can fly a family of 4 to Miami for less than $800.
His example was a 4 hour trip in-state, though. And depending on age of kids, throwing them in the car versus wrangling them in an airport and onto a plane are very different experiences.
In that case 4 hours is about 250 miles which is well within the range of many EVs on a single charge. A Model 3 is 363 miles.
The Model 3 is very efficient but even in a less efficient EV 250 miles is a single charging stop and PlugShare shows quite a few 150 kW+ chargers across the center of the mitten. My guess is that an EV would add maybe 20 minutes to a drive from the Detroit metro to a cabin somewhere in the northern part of the mitten. Given how long it's going to take to get children out of the car, into the bathroom, then back into the car, it might be a wash.
As a highly satisfied ICE owner, I can't tell you how much I relish getting gas and being back on the highway in under ten minutes. In every range conversation, there's inevitably a chorus of folksy EV drivers who love the charging break and enjoy the time to pee and stretch their legs and maybe get a steaming hot cup of joe. Not me - total trip time is the primary metric here (and maybe for a lot of people - 'range anxiety' seems like a misnomer. I think the ceiling on EV ownership could well be people like me who aren't *anxious* about range so much as we like the quick fillup and don't want to fart around for 20-30 min twice on a long drive).
Cool. Keep driving a GV if absolutely minimizing the duration of long drives is of enormous concern to you.
For me, the superior acceleration and handling of EVs far outweigh that. Time saved with a simpler maintenance schedule and the ability to charge at home are the cherry on top.
Yeah, that's not a wash but it isn't bad. Our in-state rest stops are usually 5 minutes, if that. Sometimes I fuel and go and kids stay in the car. But 20 isn't crazy long. It's annoying, but not crazy. If I decided the other EV benefits were worth it - which I might at some point - that is an acceptable trade off. I would probably find a good roadhouse on the way (preferably with lots of pine paneling and antlers) and just make eating a sit down meal on the road a new tradition.
What is the range with 4WD, cold weather, or a trailer (horses, snowmobiles, boat, etc)?
I don't mean that sacrastically, BTW. I am genuinely curious.
Also, I want to throw it in the conversation because these are all things that buyers in Flyover Land are going to consider - so they should be things that policy people are thinking about, too!
AWD is very common in EVs, mine is AWD. It doesn't seem to have much impact on range.
Freezing weather seems to reduce range about 20%. This really isn't that big of a deal; plenty of people in Colorado and Norway drive EVs.
Trailers kill range. Aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance are very important in EVs.
I do think that people usually overindex on charging time during long road trips and underindex on day-to-day use. Charging at home is a huge timesaver. The enormous torque makes driving much more pleasant. EVs have a low center of gravity and usually handle well. There isn't much maintenance; I'm at 8,500 miles and all I've done is change the windshield wipers and rotate the tires.
But then you have to rent a car when you get there, so....
If your hanging out in the pool at the hotel - then no.
Delta between Hartford and Detroit is usually 1500-2500 for our 5 people.
It costs me 300 to drive. Maybe 350 if we make an extra Stsrbucks stop.
It doesn't cost you $300 if you do the accounting correctly. It costs $929.60 just for the use of the vehicle.
If you only think it costs $300 then you'd have made a great uber driver to exploit.
Of course I am aware that there is a wear and tear cost.
But that cost gets paid for over the course of years. And it's already accounted for in the maintence costs I am spending and budgeting for anyway. I might need to do maintenence more often, but we are talking a few extra oil changes a year and maybe a tune up slightly more often, and trading it in after 4 years instead of 5. That 900$ is being spread out over the course of *years,* easily coming out of weekly budgets.
When I say the trip costs 300, I mean it costs 300 out of my immediate, right now budget, because that it what I have to consider when I plan a trip. My long term budget has already accounted for wear and tear in my car. My right now budget can absorb 300$ a lot easier than 2-3000$
"And it's already accounted for in the maintence costs I am spending and budgeting for anyway."
No, it's not. All that wear pulls everything forward. Again, this was Uber's business model for many years.
Yes. It is. It literally comes out of what is leftover on good weeks from the Grocery and Gas Budget in little 50$ oil changes and $100 tune ups spread out over years. Yes, it is more frequent when you take road trips, but it is still so spread out over time that it can just be paid for out of whatever is left over for the week. I don't need to *set aside* money for that, just be aware of it.
The "cost" of a family vacation when doing the summer budget is the cost of what I need to spend *right now.* It's what I need to have cash for within 30 days to avoid interest on my credit card.
It should be obvious that in Real Life, it is easier financially for a family to spend 300 at once / 900 trickled out over 3-4 years than 3000 all at once, possibly with interest on top if you can't afford to pay it off at once.
And I'm guessing its similar for most American families. It doesn't make people stupid. Almost everyone is aware of the cost of wesr and tear. It's not news to anyone. It's just not money that has to be spent out of the immediate budget.
But the accounting is almost completely accurate. And that's how OG Uber got its start. Exploiting the fact that people tend to vastly underestimate how much that extra mile actually costs.
1400? Naw! Say you’ve gotta refill your gas tank 6 times. $50x6 =300. You can do that in a 2 day drive, but say you do it in 3 to be generous, and spend $200 both nights at a hotel, which is ample for a family accommodating hotel suite on the road if you book in advance. That’s $700. Now if you’re driving a V8, getting multiple rooms for the kids, or breaking up the trip into small segments you can approach $1400, but that’s not how a budget-conscious family would do it. Now I’d still fly, even if the tickets were twice as much as you quote, that’s a lot of time on the road.
Wear and tear plus fuel gets you to $0.70 a mile.
Your thought process was Uber's business model for a while until people wised up to the actual cost of driving a car.
https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates
I mean I get that, given that I’m compensated for mileage with my commute. But that’s not really how people factor in the cost of road trips. Road trips are a big motivator to having that car in the first place, especially if you live in an urbanist dream like DC or NYC
"But that’s not really how people factor in the cost of road trips. "
Yup, Uber had quite a business going for a while based on people being idiots.
a) If I figure in the cost of milage, it is 1400$ to drive from Connecticut to SE Michigan. That is 5 people with sh*t tons of luggage. The same cost to fly those 5 people and maybe half as much luggage on Delta, BDL-DTW, in reasonable comfort, is 1500-2500 just for plane tickets; add in luggage and long term parking and an overpriced meal for the kids at the airport and it costs usually over 3000$ total. That's almost twice what it is to drive.
b) And that $3000 needs to be available *up front*. Yes, a road trip will, long term, cost me in wear and tear on my car. But I don't need to deduct that money *right now* out of my bank account or charge it to my credit card to make the trip - that is money I need to factor into the big picture, that gets spent over a long period of time.
It is much, much easier for a family to pay 300$ *at once* than 3000$.
If you asking this I'm thinking you aren't buying the median new car which is $48,000. Not that used cars are a deal either.
Matt provides a useful primer on how to worry about climate less destructively, but he never asks why climate change should be such a consuming priority.
The very kind of technological abundance he celebrates — cheaper energy, cheaper electricity — doesn’t just reduce carbon, it makes societies resilient to warming itself. If energy is abundant, Bangladesh can move earth and build coastal defenses. If electricity is cheap, the global poor can afford air conditioning. Once coastal defenses and AC are in place, people often prefer warmer climates anyway.
Actual human beings don’t regard Columbus, Ohio or Frankfurt, Germany circa 1975 as climatic ideals. They migrate toward Jacksonville or Málaga, and they pay the air conditioning bill happily. Humans today are less likely to be immiserated by weather than at any point in our history.
I think Matt is writing under the understanding that major donors are going to prioritize AGW mitigation, even if he thinks they should prioritize other things.
Yeah, you don’t want to undermine an attempt at persuasion with rhetoric that elicits defensiveness.
He has said elsewhere, more than once, that climate change is a phenomenon to be managed rather than vanquished.
Indeed. It’s interesting that anti warming sentiments are more a vice that needs to be channeled than a virtue. It’s worth pointing that out, even if the donors won’t care.
I'm not sure if virtue/vice is the right way to structure that. Plenty of people have their own ascetic quirks that they feel is very important to practice for their psyche. Things just run afoul if they try to impose their asceticism on everyone else.
totally agree
I disagree. Seattle summer is the ideal climate. God cries when the temperature deviates from 68/72°. Florida is only good in the winter
I think that west of the Cascades climate is quite underrated, and obviously ideal is subjective, but if the key metric is going to be lack of temperature deviation I don't know how anywhere competes with San Diego.
Yall have gotten fucked by climate change. The number of 90 degree plus days in Seattle has exploded. Oftentimes, Maggie Valley, NC is cooler than Packwood, WA
Idk, there were less than 10 this summer I feel like. It’s a huge deal when it happens because too many people don’t have a/c. What’s crazy is that they build new residential apartment buildings without a/c. I absolutely couldn’t abide. We have 3 window units just for our 800sf upstairs! It’s September and they’re all off now, though.
In 2009, I went camping in the Olympic Penninsula. Temperature reached 104 at altitude. I was hallucinating by the time I got down to the Elwah river. Two subsequent trips to the NW have also seen 100+ degree temperatures
Ouch! Living here, it’s still quite mild during the summer most of the time, at least within the protection of the mountains around the sound. But yes, the number of hot days have increased. And in Central WA, all bets are off. I did some work in Tri-Cities a couple of weeks ago and it was 90+ during the day. But that’s the high desert, a totally different climate.
I do love western NC, though. I had friends with a home in Old Fort for years, and my mom’s best friend retired to Lake Toxaway. It’s a nice place if you’re out of a flood zone!
If we stopped all carbon production today, Bangladesh might be able manage the sea level rise with sea walls. If we let it rip, the country's agricultural lowlands will be all underwater, no chance.
I don't really see us getting out of this without some sort of carbon capture technology.
Climate change is tricky because we EVENTUALLY have to do SOMETHING. I've heard the figure 3-4F of warming by the end of the century and that that's baked in and there's nothing we can do about it (unless we directly removed carbon from the atmosphere, right? I'm not a scientist). But then like what next century, another 3-4F of warming? This has to stop eventually, and I think it will. But this is a good illustration of the limits of copy/pasting public opinion in to policy, and thank you to Matt for saying "you don't have to stop caring about something just because voters don't, you just have to be smart about it." If that's what popularism means, I'm all for it. I'm just tired of "you favor XYZ policy? But that's unpopular hurr hurr hurr"
Ha you think there’ll still be a world next century lolol
Yeah there will be
I’m obviously just joking
I think the larger chunk than "we'll figure it out" which is closer to my view, is "climate change is super cereal guys, but I'm not willing to pay a dime to fix it" which is more difficult to work with.
Most people are (in many cases, wrongly) opposed to tolling roads that aren't currently tolled, but if the toll already exists, they're less likely to be opposed to it.
I think one thing Matt and most of the comment section misses about climate concerned people is the importance of low likelihood high impact possibilities in their thinking. This is things like permafrost melting and carbon release and other "tipping point" type problems.
The activists tend to overestimate the climate science consensus about these things happening. But on the other hand, they're not zero (and much higher than Skynet, or whatever). I don't know that a proper estimate could actually bridge the political gap here, but that's much more the root of the disconnect than concern about the third world in 60 years.
Tail events can happen in other areas as well (pandemics, earthquakes, supervolcanos, solar storms).
Why aren’t they consumed by those?
In part because most of those others are not anthropogenic. Moving the average temperature change up in high emissions scenarios also moves 1% tail risks to 5% tail risks (or whatever). And they are probably generally inclined to be interested in environmental stuff.
Also, people have idiosyncratic concerns, why is Matt and the EA types worked up about Skynet? idk
Yeah I don’t think this is why. It’s because it has cultural cachet among progressives.
Ok
You have to admit, climate change gets an order of magnitude more attention than anything else.
It’s because it also functions as a tribal signifier.
If that’s the case I think they’re wrong. This world today was built on FFs — decarbonization is akin to changing all the blood in a person to a synthetic version while keeping them alive — oh and we still need to invent the synthetic blood.
Also, we’ve prevented many deaths from earthquakes and pandemics. We could do a lot more to prepare for a Carrington-level solar storm. These risks are not intractable.
The argument seems to be "despite all of the technical progress, we still aren't ready for reduction in fossil fuel production, imposing limits would be too costly. At some point in the future, we will have the technology such that we can start reducing, but until then we need to accept increasing production."
I'm not sure I buy it. Is it not the case that no matter how much technology we develop, reducing fossil fuel production will always be an economic drag that voters won't be happy with? Why in 20 years would we not just be in exactly the same scenario, with the technical capacity but not the political will to sacrifice?
One might think otherwise if one conceived of fossil fuels like horse power, a fundamentally inferior technology that would be replaced naturally, but fossil fuel is a technology too, and one that can get more productive with technical developments in parallel with renewables.
Coal vs Natural Gas is a useful example, but I think not as an exemplar of inevitable progress. Despite all of the success of natural gas, the end state is not the decline of coal, whose production hits new highs every year. Additionally coal is a technology that can improve, e.g. by adding particulate scrubbers that reduce the air quality impact (while doing nothing for CO2 emissions).
It is possible that coal gives way to nat gas gives way to renewables without intervention, but it's also equally possible that coal or natural gas come back on top in terms of economic efficiency as long as CO2 impacts are not explicitly prioritized through policy.
I agree that it is likely that the natural course favors the rollout of nat gas and perhaps renewables, but to me the question is that course one toward displacement or mere reduction c.f. hypothetical alternative paths. I suppose another way to frame my skepticism for the green tech investment approach is that I believe coal power will only disappear when the cost per watt-hour of operating the mines and infrastructure is higher than the market value of electricity per watt-hour. That could either happen because the operating cost goes up or the market value of electricity goes down. I believe without intervention, the cost to operate will go down (technology improvements) and the market value of electricity will go up (skyrocketing power demand, which I suspect no amount of alternative power source rollout can counteract, barring a truly transformative unforeseen development).