Matt, as you've pointed out that it is good politics to fight racial inequity with anti-poverty measures that are not race specific, i suggest that it is good politics to address climate change by measures that seek to make the air that we breath now healthier. We should be talking about particulate matter more than sea levels in 2050.
Also: We should be replacing coal plants with nuclear because nuclear puts less radiation into the environment. As a nice side effect nuclear also emits less CO2.
The fact that multiple reactors got hit by an extreme earthquake and subsequent tsunami and only the one with the most outdated safety features went down is frankly an argument for bog-standard nuclear plants.
I still would recommend not building one on a Tsunami hazard zone, but that leaves a lot of options.
I knew coal was a horrific health hazard from extraction to use, but I did not know this. There is just something about nuclear power that freaks people out beyond all proportion (including me, though I try to reason with my fears).
1. I’m assuming the usual boring comments thing is you being ironic. Following you on Twitter, I feel like these days you are totally channeling your inner cranky old guy. Which to tell the truth, I dig.
2. I wonder how much the heat wave out west, especially the northwest, is going to affect the publics support for climate change actions. I was sort of agnostic about it. However, after two weeks of 100-ish or plus weather, I am a believer. I just had my daughters with me for two weeks in Boise. It sucked. Even my cabin in the mountains it was pretty damn hot.
3. Still, I’m sort of cynical about all the US base climate activists. A carbon tax in the United States, won’t even make a dent in the global issue. Noah Smith is spot on when he says that it is research and technology that is going to save us. The developing world, especially Africa, is going to need energy. Now solar and wind can fill a big part of it, but we western countries need to help subsidize this. (Apparently he has a rant about China this morning, I will read after this)
4. The anti-nuclear thing sort of drives me crazy. I work in the energy field. I hate working in nuclear power plants, luckily they’re not my specialty, but they beat the hell out of coal plants.
5. My job is actually inspecting gas turbine power plants. I work for Siemens energy which is one of the three big producers of gas turbine’s. While sales have dropped off from maybe 10 years ago, we are still building new plants. One of the things that I’m proud of, is we have been more instrumental in replacing call plants than renewable energy.
6. This is a point where I could go on a long rant about how people are overestimating, or is it underestimating, some of the engineering and technical challenges of solar and wind power. People always say “the cost of wind and solar energy is the lowest”… but it never tells the full story, especially when it comes to peak power.
7. Continuing my gas turbine sales pitch, you would be amazed at how efficient the new ones are when built in a combined cycle plant. The other big thing is you guessed her brains are built to run on Hydrogen/Natgas mixes. In fact, many could be adapted to run on pure hydrogen. I am bullish on hydrogen technology.
Anyway. I wish I was more interesting this morning. I’m on my way to Pittsburgh for one day of training, and then off to Brazil for 2 1/2 weeks. I get to spend a week of it in Urugiana. I love obscure places.
Parent Brag follows: just dropped my daughter off at the South Carolina Governors of Science and Math. A two year public boarding school. It’s for 11th and 12th graders. Daughter applied as a 9th grader and got in. 300 of the brightest kids in South Carolina. Her goal is to be an engineer. I’m trying to steer her to energy. Maybe she will be the one to have the breakthrough that saves us.
Have a great day folks.
As always. Typed on my phone while on a plane. Forgive the grammar and spelling.
As someone who works in NG and NGL for a company who also does distribution...i am very bearish on hydrogen. People are already exceedingly freaked out about natural gas pipelines and pipelines are becoming a bigger and bigger target for protests (namely crude, but i'm sure it will expand to other products at some point).
Frankly, I can think of nothing scarier than living next to an older pipeline carrying a explosive fuel.
Additionally, hydrogen piping in an industrial setting is handled with WAY more caution than natural gas lines are...i do wonder at what point people start to get spooked off by the implications of leaks, etc.
At the end of the day, hydrogen is just a smaller molecule and more difficult gas to deal with from a storage / transportation standpoint. It’s not like it can’t be done…but the arbitrary risk tolerances for how to deal with it will near being insurmountable if other options exist, etc.
We are starting to study and focus on some of these options now as a company (a bit late IMO and im not certain how seriously yet)…but that’s just my gut take.
With the price increase / scarcity in helium, i have seen some interest in using hydrogen as a carrier gas and trying to navigate the additional concerns that come with it as someone who deals with natural gas day in and day out just sets those priors for me. People always seem spooked at the idea of hydrogen use…
Part of the point of the carbon tax is to make the research and development more economically feasible sooner. If fossil fuels are really cheap, you don't spend a lot of money researching alternatives, but if fossil fuels are gradually getting more expensive, it becomes economically important to invest in discovering alternatives sooner.
Yea John writes a lot of stuff like that. I rained on his parades often enough that he blocked me. He is quite enthusiastic about things he does not quite understand. Usually he never gets around to considering that hydrogen as a transportation fuel has very low energy density and is very explosive and must be carried in heavy pressure vessels that carry a heavy transport cost themselves in weight. Personally I can never see these being allowed to operate at highway speeds regardless of whether of not the fuel is combusted or used to feed fuel cells. Low speed urban buses maybe. If properly designed to deal with collisions. Generating and storing large quantities of hydrogen also present some quite impressive engineering obstacles.
The general dynamic seems to be that there was a flash in the pan with certain far left environmental groups being founded and/or becoming more vocal right around the time of the 2018 midterm and the rise in Democratic expectations during the 2020 presidential primary.
But there's not a lot of adequate gate keeping among all environmental organizations, the big Greens like League of Conservation Voters, NRDC, Sierra Club, etc. They are competing with Sunrise, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and others for attention as "environmentalists" without a reasonably easy measurement of success outside of media coverage--which as Matt notes is very easy to manipulate top down with funding and staged public events.
At the same time, established environmental organizations have been questioning their own privilege, their historical legacies of having been linked in the past to some right-wing causes of nativism and xenophobia and eugenics. I think they themselves feel very vulnerable to charges of inadequacy of environmental justice.
Anecdotally, I find the entire environmental movement very weird for a shared approach to politics as prioritizing a certain holier than thou attitude and emphasis on working in the movement. Specifically, as a senior Congressional staffer I've several times in my career poked my toes into the water to see if I wanted to make the jump to working for environmental organizations, and found that they all tended to share the world view that it was better to hire someone from within environmentalism, with a background in hard science or commitment to progressive activism, and teach that person how the Hill works and how to lobby, than it is to follow the example of every other sector or industry trying to influence politics and hire people from the Hill and then teach them the specific issues to advocate on.
In general I think environmentalists, broadly, perform poorly in providing legislative subsidy to Congress. Which means major climate progress is occurring despite, not because of, environmental groups and their behaviors.
"Anecdotally, I find the entire environmental movement very weird for a shared approach to politics as prioritizing a certain holier than thou attitude and emphasis on working in the movement."
I think that carries over from the PETA groups and the like. They are way more into the performance than succeeding at anything. (Very much lifted from Moscow Centre-funded and controlled pro-communist activism of the 30's, where the main enemy was the non-communist left.) Meantime, the right keeps putting the screws to any nascent interest in the environment on the right, and then overall set of pressure keeps squeezing the middle.
Interesting, would make sense to me. I'll say that in my field, climate and climate adjacent scientists do not have a strong understanding of the political process. Not in the didn't take civics sense, but they scientists as a class are kind of the grill meme, they just want to research for gods sake
Welding climate change to all those other left-wing causes makes it really hard to see how you're going to convince anyone who isn't already in your corner to work with you.
For instance, we've seen several surveys showing that younger Repulicans aren't as anti-environment as older ones, but this approach seems almost custom made to avoid bringing cross-pressured voters into your corner.
But is the goal to win over voters, or to win over politicians. I think Matt's point is that Democratic politicians are already prioritizing climate change to a higher degree than our system would indicate based just on public polling and prioritization. The problem is getting legislation passed in a system with a lot of veto points. Marginally winning over a handful of younger Republican voters isn't necessarily going to lead to fundamental shifts in the legislative process.
And that's assuming you can convince younger Republicans to make the environment a deciding issue for them to swing to vote Democratic. Parties, because they have a range of issues to prioritize, can win over voters. But causes have far less ability to make their individual issue the deciding issue. No amount of messaging from environmental organizations will convince a young anti-choice Republican to prioritize climate change over judges, for example.
I think the argument is that climate should try to win Republican primaries. Get people who support doing things about climate change, but are also pro-life, pro-gun and anti-anti-racism to run in primaries and so make climate the sort of thing that can go through Secret Congress as a bipartisan deal.
But in general there aren't people who support doing things on climate change and who are otherwise affiliated with conservative politics. Polarization is sorting people to align with the GOP on cultural identity, and then they adopt the top-down messaging of GOP elites, which is climate change isn't real.
A discussion at the end of the most recent Weeds interview (regarding a new book about the Trump era) has left me thinking quite a bit about the self-prophesying narrative around polarization both parties have spun themselves into. Matt observed that even in DC, which is obviously overwhelmingly Democratic, there are still people who could be responsive to traditional Republican policy messages--e.g., business owners who hate regulation, people who support increased investment in cops and public safety, etc.--and that moderate politics still prevail in practice. Living in Chicago, I would make the same observation.
The problem is that Republicans have basically given up on trying to reach those voters and convinced themselves that all cities are left-wing hellscapes where you will be taxed out of existence if you aren't murdered first. It seems like the photonegative of this mindset has filtered into the left, and progressive issue-based organizations have convinced themselves its better to align their issue with other left-wing issues rather than focus on advocating for their issue in a way that generates broad and diverse support. (In other words, the focus is on cultivating the appropriate progressive identity rather than trying to make progress on an issue they believe it's important.)
Maybe this approach works, maybe it doesn't, but it doesn't make sense to give up trying on the assumption that GOP voters are beyond salvation.
That was a very good conversation. I think one additional factor though is that the parties are not symmetrical. The Democratic Party contains a large enough share of self-identifying moderate and conservative voters, so that the business interests or other factions that lean GOP nationally have some groups they can try to work with in a Democratic primary. You don't have the same in the GOP primary, where the number of moderate and liberal Republicans is much smaller.
I think that's probably right, but my contention is that by collapsing "conservative," "moderate," and "liberal" into a set of fixed policy preferences, you're obscuring potential opportunities where an *environmentally targeted* message could otherwise fit into a conservative ideology. Like, I dunno, there's probably a young, good-looking Nebraskan out there who goes to church every Sunday and owns 10 guns but cares about clean water because he grew up going fishing with his Dad and thinks wind energy is a great opportunity to bring in jobs and grow the tax base in his rural district. If some national environmental groups pour money into his primary campaign he could have a shot. And if they pour money into 20-30 similar campaigns around the country odds are that a few will be successful. And even if most are unsuccessful, it will develop pro-climate messaging and talking points that are not the Green New Deal.
If elites want to throw money at climate change advocacy, and actually care about *addressing climate change* (and not progressive virtue signaling) it seems like targeted funding at these kinds of campaigns has a much better ROI in terms of tangible political outcomes.
But wedding all these issues to climate change has to be _increasing_ that polarization, right?
If <climate change org on left> decides that if you support climate change action, you must also support a bunch of other priorities, then that makes it harder for a Republican to support climate change action because it's easy for any primary opponents to tie them to all the OTHER left wing causes.
That isn't to say it would be easy to win primaries as a Republican who wanted to take action on climate change, but this can't help but make it harder.
I think you're making the mistake of seeing the current debate and assuming "both sides" have been working equally to produce this degree of polarization and issue clustering.
This isn't a chicken and the egg situation where it's not clear what happened first. Political science literature and shown that the first step in the 1980s and 1990s was decline in Republican support for a host of environmental issues. This was driven through industry opposition to environmental regulation. This was heightened in the opposition to the cap and trade bill in 2009 and 2010, industry decided to work with the GOP and Tea Party groups to push outright opposition to what was a negotiated and compromised bill. At the same time, all the elite signaling on the GOP/conservative side has been to demonize environmentalism and deny climate change.
Matt feels like it was wrong for environmental groups to respond to 2009 and 2010 by trying to fund fake grassroots groups. But another decision may be more reasonable, which is if the other side is going to demonize you, you need to build stronger ties with the rest of the Democratic establishment so your agenda is prioritized.
It's now possible that the system has built it's own feedback loop, where the decision by environmental groups to double down on the left will reinforce the GOP push to demonize environmentalism, which will lead to more leftist policies, which will lead to GOP demonization ... rinse and repeat.
But given that any climate proposal is going to be demonized as the Green New Deal, it's not clear what the best move for environmentalists (who are also not a monolithic group) is.
Again, voters are weird, they don't always have consistent views. There's lots of diversity. Conservative voters who support taking action on climate change don't matter if they don't either A- Support Democrats in significant numbers to shift more elections to Democrats or B- Find ways to actually win GOP primaries.
For A, the problem by and large isn't environmental messaging, it's that these voters are voting based on their own conservative views.
For B, well, as a minority, it's not clear how climate change supporting Republicans win primaries.
Right, it's a hard problem to solve. Putting energy into electing Democrats is one way and pretty much the default. But I'd argue that attempting the challenge of gaining conservative allies is a worthwhile one for committed climate change activists and one where they could potentially move the needle a great deal. It would n't be easy for the reasons you mentioned, but it's not the same as saying it's impossible. Polling on younger GOP voters, for example, and the $ benefits of solar and wind suggests to me that there are ways to make inroads.
I'm not sure this approach wins over anyone, to be honest.
I think there's room in the Republican coalition for candidates the hate critical race theory, but love selling out to Big Windmill. The left-wing grab-bag approach feels it makes things more difficult, by welding climate stuff too closely to the culture war.
I think hypothetical scenarios, brainstorming, conjecture, and all that have their place in politics. But at a certain point you have to be a little empirical and start to look at what's actually happening with the GOP. There was room for action on climate change, even if a little weird, in the 2000s, but overall there had been a significant decline in support for overall environmentalism among the GOP throughout the 1990s with the polarization of the parties. But even one of the primary drivers of that polarization--Newt Gingrich--was also a figure open to some action on climate change. But he, as well as the rest of the GOP, has retreated more and more into climate change paranoia and denialism.
The best way to win over politicians is by winning over voters in swing districts. Defund the police is okay if you're AOC in Queens but suicide for Abigail Spanberger, never mind Joe Manchin,
Well yeah this gets to Matt's criticism specifically of Sunrise for picking up other leftist positions (although still Spanberger just complains too much given that essentially ran the same as Joe Biden). But in reality the environmental movement for years has had polling showing that everyone loves clean energy, but that doesn't move voters.
He argues that the left had agreed on an approach (standards, justice, inclusion). But, I wonder if that approach was well suited to a 54-46 Senate (or a 49-51 Senate where nothing would happen) but not a 50-50 Senate, and groups are in a tough spot between the longer term coalition and the short term political landscape.
The main problem I see with groups like the Sunrise Movement is that they are anti-science. They always say that we could go carbon free if only corrupt politicians didn't interfere. Well, no, there are still hard technical problems to solve before this is possible.
I once worked on a related project and while walking towards my office one day, I saw some protesters close to my building. One of the signs said something like "We must abolish capitalism to save the planet". How could we get people who believe this to trust the science? Maybe have them read engineering papers?
I have lost track of the number of times where an activist group has opposed a reasonable solution because “it’s not fixing the real problem” which is inevitably technology or capitalism or insufficient respect for the earth. All I care about is fixing the problem. And that’s almost certainly true for the many people in the global south whine they claim to be fighting for and are suffering the worst of it.
I agree on this, but I would also like to point out that the existence of reasonable solutions is the good case. There are problems for which we don't have a clear answer yet despite what the Sunrise Movement or anyone else may say.
For example, I would love to see more interviews of Mechanical/Electrical/Chemical Engineering professors and professionals, and fewer interviews of policy people. While I bet that we will see people in the future be like "Wait a minute, batteries really contain all these dangerous chemicals? Let's ban them!", I would like to focus first on the currently existing technical problems with batteries (and how they delay the 100% carbon free future we want). A good amount of the activism I have seen just ignores all the technical hurdles and blames politicians for everything.
Yes I agree there are a lot of techincal challenges and I think we should be throwing a ton of money and brain power at finding solutions to those technical challenges.
For instance, biological systems are pretty easy to scale up, can be pretty efficient and use waste products (hello sewage) and it would be a very good idea to invest more money in biotech carbon removal.
I think too many details make people’s eyes glaze over though, especially in something as broad and deep as climate science.
I’m fine with an activist group doing very simple, punchy, emotionally charged things, as long as they are helpful things. Maybe they can hold talks for people who want to go deeper into it.
The Sunrise movement isn't anti-science; it's orthogonal to science. Climate activists who want to "abolish capitalism" want to radically diminish consumption, which is anathema to capitalism. For eco-radicals, "abolish capitalism" is not a move toward communist utopia, it's a step toward "abolish (most} people"
What makes them anti-science in my view is that they ignore technical realities. It's like how I would consider anti-vaxxers as anti-science regardless of whether they reached this position because of opposition to Big Pharma, for example.
The technical difficulties in replacing fossil fuels supports their premise that there is no alternative to reducing consumption. For them, it's a feature, not a bug.
When progressives are not proclaiming their concern for the poor, they are railing against "consumption". Well, the surefire cure for consumption is poverty.
I've long thought that climate activists should take a page from Wayne Wheeler, who ran the Anti-Saloon League and got Prohibition through a hard-drinking country *by Constitutional Amendment.* Imagine that, he got a majority of boozer state legislators in 3/5 of the states to ban alcoholic beverages. What was the lesson? Wheeler backed any politician who voted dry, regardless of their position on other topics. He delivered them votes and money, and did not care about their other position. American climate activists could make a lot of progress if they single-mindedly backed *all* politicians who support carbon-reducing policies. If a pro-life or pro-gun politician supported a game-changing carbon tax, would the climate activists today support her? Probably not, but Wayne Wheeler (in that position) would have done, and that is how Prohibition got passed. (Never mind that Prohibition turned out to be mostly a failed policy, the value of the lesson was in the passing of it.)
Rural over representation in state legislatures so that even states that had majority opposition to Prohibition in statewide referendum were dominated by Prohibition majorities in the state legislature helped.
The thing is, climate change itself has become so polarized a pro-gun politician who supports a carbon tax is shooting themselves in the foot. They wouldn't want help in a GOP primary to survive.
Well, all true, and you may be right that at this point our politics is so extremely siloed that there is nothing here. Ten or fifteen years ago, though, I think the climate activists missed a big opportunity. Before the fracking revolution, there was a real opportunity to merge national security hawks (concerned about energy security) and climate activism. We could have built wind and solar and put turbines on dams and built nukes to save the planet and screw the Russians. Then the fracking revolution occurred and broke that potential alliance. Opportunity lost, over ideology.
Ten or fifteen years ago would put that either at the end of the debate over Waxman Markey or shortly before. I welcome revisionists approaches when they help highlight themes or topics missed out, but I think blaming the failure of Waxman Markey or something like it on climate activism, when as Matt notes there were a lot of reasons why the bill failed in the Senate, is off.
In 2008, climate activists had secured bipartisan support for a cap and trade system. They had support from moderate Republicans like John Warner and Lindsey Graham and leading moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman. Cap and trade was part of the GOP platform under moderate Republican John McCain. They did indeed have support from national security hawks.
It all fell apart. The post-mortem on that matters. As Matt notes, there was a recognition that the climate push was too top-down, too elite centric, with a focus on winning over heads of trade associations and the very serious people in the Beltway. When the GOP walked away because of intense opposition to the entirety of Obama's legislative agenda, there was no grassroots pressure to push the bill over the finish line.
While Matt notes that the response, to build a fake grassroots movement, was wrong, I think his post is also important for noting how bad faith behaviors by Republican politicians and the business community were a key part of the failures from a decade ago.
The United States is unique in the developed world in having its major center-right party embrace outright climate change denialism. Given our political system and the veto points involved, that makes it almost impossible to have significant action on climate change. When history is written about why the United States failed to act, the blame needs to be put on the Republican Party. Weird environmental groups are secondary to that, and I think a lot of their weirdness is explained by their frustrations with a system that won't save the planet.
To prove the point, in 2010 environmental groups did indeed rally to and support in the general election Republican members who had voted for Waxman Markey. They upheld their end of the bargain in approaching the vote like Wheeler.
I feel like it's a really unnatural alignment. I'm a native of Iowa, which should elect fairly green politicians--it's a national leader in wind and biofuels and does not produce many fossil fuels (though it does grow corn for ethanol). There's no good electoral reason why Chuck Grassley should be hostile to green energy stuff.
This post was so good, it got me to pay for a subscription. Free previews work!
I’ll never forget my local chapter of Sunrise working hard to try and unseat our State Senator, who has been excellent on climate, with their preferred candidate who was objectively worse on climate issues, but was to the incumbent’s left on some other issues. They’re just fundamentally unserious as an environmental group and I wish the media would stop paying attention to them and start paying attention to groups actually trying to make a difference about climate change.
My suspicion is that some of these groups are either getting funded very discreetly by right-wing interests (e.g. oil companies) and/or some of them have been infiltrated - either by disguised Rs (a real thing happening), or by activists for other causes seizing a platform to push their actual issues using climate policy money.
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there's also just baseline stupidity, and trying to prove your activist bona fides to your innamorato/a
Wow…love this. The anti-nuclear greens are insane. I can vaguely understand how the greens can be against geoengineering, but against carbon capture? Are you kidding me? Just insane.
A former member of extinction rebellion Zion Lights is now a pro-nuclear activist. It’s really interesting to listen to her talk about how she changed her mind
Not necessarily insane, just very mistrustful of capitalist/industrial solutions to problems, and that mistrust is...*checks record of capitalist/industrial solutions to society's problems*...entirely justified. Climate change is the unintended consequence of large scale, industrial burning of hydrocarbon fuel for energy, which was the solution for the previous problem.
Just to add a bit so my reply doesn't seem too much like twitter, there are a number of attempts out there of a counterfactual history without fossil fuels, e.g.,
Wood and other biomass can be a decent source of energy (not quite as dense though) but can't scale up enough to meet the demands of the industrial revolution, let alone now. So it's not that we would have completely stagnated necessarily, but growth would have been dramatically slower.
I'm not saying the folks who are opposed to technological solutions to climate change are correct - just that their suspicion is not entirely without merit, and that rolling out a big change to fix a big problem warrants an amount of care that has so far not been in evidence. Hand-waving the externalities has not worked out well for us so far.
I personally think that technology is going to be an important part of the solution to climate change, and would just argue that if that technology gets deployed with the same lack of humility that went into wrecking the place, I'd be surprised if we end up better off in the long run.
Possibly with the right energy sources and legal framework, re-industrialization would be part of the solution too; maybe smaller, more local firms, farms, and factories would limit risk, and employ more people to boot.
I see what you’re saying, but I think ‘mistrust’ of various entities taken as responsible is just a cop-out, a way to avoid actually responding to arguments or evaluating evidence. Once you go down the road of suspicion and mistrust, you’re one step away from just picking and choosing what to believe based on one’s own preexisting beliefs. Do these mistrustful individuals believe in global warming? Then they trust climate scientists, presumably. But they don’t trust other scientists who propose various solutions? Look, as Matt has said, the solution isn’t to blindly believe ‘experts’ but should be to believe what makes sense based on one’s own reading of the evidence. Opposing the removal of CO2 to prevent CO2-caused warming just doesn’t make sense.
Hm...we're not going back to pre-industrial technology anytime soon, but if the robots running on green energy take all the hard work away maybe we'll get to post-industrial, and then we can get on to fixing the problems caused by that solution. Hope they're easier than the prior problems, but we'll see.
Also, I think it's important to draw a distinction between free-market and capitalist.
I think "environmental organizations themselves don’t consistently prioritize [climate change]" is putting it too kindly. The principle behind the environmental justice movement is fairly incompatible with treating climate change as a crisis: the idea in EJ is "we can't solve this unless we solve every other hard problem first". We can't do reforestation unless it doesn't displace current tenants of reforested land; we can't do electric vehicles unless the lithium ion battery industry is morally pure as the driven snow; we can't nominate the single best policymaker on climate to head the EPA because she maximized for emissions reductions instead of social equity; we can't do urban density unless everyone gets to live next to a tree – all leading up to the thrilling thesis statement, "we can't solve the climate crisis unless we first abolish capitalism", in which case we're all fucked.
There is a steelman case for EJ, though (and I'm not just saying that because many/maybe a majority of the policy jobs I'm currently applying for ask for experience with EJ or at least mention it in the listing, though that is in fact the case). For one thing, they have a point about the reforestation thing, where the benefits are more tenuous than on nuclear or lithium ion batteries. For another thing, an EJ framework – using the already-in-place concept of "environmental issues" as a whole – theoretically stands a chance of getting working class voters of color engaged in prioritizing the environment, if voters can see that activists care about addressing issues like air and water pollution that are primarily local and have obvious racially inequitable effects. This is kind of a racial-justice-left phrasing of the "blue-green alliance", and the rationale behind the Green New Deal.
But I don't think those coalition-building predictions have really been borne out at the federal level, as this post basically shows. As concerns priorities, of course we should be addressing air and water pollution with an eye towards reducing racial inequities AND addressing the climate crisis; I think any state with a Democratic majority can basically do both, and anywhere without one basically can't do either except for some investment in wind and solar. And we don't have time to do deep canvassing on everyone in the country and have a heart-to-heart about why they should care about climate change even more than healthcare; we certainly don't have time to end capitalism before we act. And the infuriating part is because the climate crisis ITSELF has racially and economically inequitable effects, maximizing for emissions reductions in the wealthy west IS the most equitable policy! Gaaaaaah.
I can see the logic to the EJ theory of trying to broaden the appeal of environmental policy, but it feels like it's gotten caught up in the LatinX problem where they align themselves with ideological activists and academics who aren't really representative of the larger community.
In theory, it should be directly connected to real people's concerns – "a huge percent of our neighbors develop asthma after living here for a while" / "we constantly need to fight the utility to give us water that isn't brown and oily" / "why are they building another factory that causes toxic runoffs right next to our school" are really immediate issues that you don't need an ideological lens to feel outraged about.
You probably do need to lash "thing people want" to emissions reduction policy to succeed, the problem is that the American political system is so laden with local veto points that there's no issue so universally popular and high salience that it can produce an unbreakable national majority.
This then means green groups aren't disciplined about what they want allowing them to adopt parochial views. This is how you get from where they started to sunrise saying stopping gentrification in park slope is climate. It's also more psychically nourishing for the activist, as for them its peanut butter in their chocolate.
It's the funhouse mirror of Republicans madness, where if the system is sufficiently tilted against your views you're not playing with live ammo so then do whatever.
And it’s always seemed to me that climate change works a lot like exercise. Any amount of exercise provides a health benefit so 5 min > 0 min. Even if you go sit on the couch for the rest of the day it doesn’t negate the benefits of your 5 minutes exercise. With climate any amount of carbon not emitted or captured is 1 less ton we have to deal with later even if we don’t hit our warming targets. That’s the opposite of a problem that must be solved all at once. Doing anything is always better than doing nothing. But you probably know more about it than me so I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Well, the thing about the 5 minutes of exercise is that some people use it to justify eating a bowl of ice cream, and the costs of that might outweigh the benefits of the 5 minutes of exercise. It's the same with climate change where you have to make sure that people don't use one virtuous act (e.g. riding public transit, skipping meat for a meal) to justify something that has a much larger emissions cost.
I pretty much agree! With the caveat that I’m sure there are people in this comments section who know a lot more than I do. But yeah, any action on climate is good, even if we should keep pushing for more.
Regarding legislative dynamics, doesn't the fact that the climate change left is angrily attacking Biden improve the chances of a bipartisan bill? Getting ten Republican votes in the Senate was always going to be a struggle; but it seems to me it would be even a bigger struggle if the hard left was uncorking Champagne bottles in their glee at the awesome progressiveness of the proposal.
I agree that uncorking champagne would be counterproductive. But I don't think that shitting on the bill is productive either. It would be better to just be talking about stuff they want to do in future bills.
The problem with having an “activist class” entrenched in an increasing number of paid sinecures at non-profits is that they’re no longer there out of genuine belief, but because their bread is buttered in some way.
When that’s the case, the answer is NEVER “shut up and do nothing”, not for even a single day, because they need to justify their existence.
And it’s always easy to round up some well-meaning folks to astroturf actions that are taken out of self-interest.
It seems that the 0.01% now realizes even their privileges will erode rapidly if we don’t pump the breaks on climate change, which is why we finally see real movement in markets and investment priorities.
That needs to be backstopped by large-scale government intervention if we’re to avoid destroying the tropics, but might be enough on its own to preserve technological civilization in the temperate zones.
These same people who are actually starting to move and make markets also fund the activist class. How their priorities haven't translated to the non-profits, whose purported raison d'être is solving this problem, is beyond me.
If I were spending ten million a year on advocacy for this, I’d have everyone who signed off on these protests fired and blacklisted, because they’re clearly too stupid to be involved, let alone lead.
Well then I guess I stand corrected. I was thinking maybe hard-left opposition might make the optics of supporting Biden more palatable to people like Mitt Romney or Susan Collins.
The dynamic reaches to the point of being counterproductive when they are pressuring Democratic Senators to come out against the deal entirely, putting at risk that the package only needs 10 Republican votes. Either they need more than 10 Republican votes, and that pushes the deal further to the right, or Biden is able to pressure Democratic Senators who have come out strongly against the deal to flip, and it feeds into the narrative that Democrats are stabbing environmentalists in the back.
I don't think very many Democratic Senators fear this crowd, at least not to the point they'd strike a very serious blow against a Democratic President. But I guess we'll soon find out.
Big (in the weeds) test is at Wednesday’s energy committee markup: Hirono, Sanders, Heinrich and others who’ve signaled on this front will need to decide if they’re voting for or against..
Is there a Democratic Senator who might flip for this reason? Sanders would be my main worry here, and possibly Feinstein (despite her not actually being particularly left).
I think with Sanders (or any of his ilk) they'll definitely vote to pass a bipartisan bill IF they're confident they can keep Sinema/Manchin on board for a reconciliation bill. Also, there's the added assurance/protection provided by Nancy Pelosi. I'm skeptical it'll actually come to this, but she has vowed not to vote on a stand alone bipartisan bill before a reconciliation bill is passed by the Senate.
And beyond the Senate, things are going to get extremely dicey on the house side. This definitely doesn’t help in that regard - silence was the best option so various sides could at least feel “ok” and have some cover.
Groups like Sunrise are not climate advocacy groups, they are Leftist agitprop organizations that sometimes talk about climate issues. Climate just happens to be an issue the left cares about in this country do they have to make noise.
Real question for you: beyond the Very Online, how much play do these groups get in coverage?
I didn't know about the protest until you wrote about it. My primary front pages are NYTimes and NPR, and I didn't see any coverage of the protest either. You're a DC guy, and much more active on twitter, so did this get play locally/in the tweets? I just wonder if this is getting less play beyond the Very Online bubble than within it. In my (much Less Online) life, these climate left groups don't get much attention, other than some brief mentions in the Times and concern trolling on the right. Could just be me though.
Not what you were asking, but in policy circles and politics they get a lot of “coverage” - trade journals, direct contact, sending out their letters, etc.
Much like a Twitter bubble, I think it’s easier for policy makers to confuse the groups with the “real world”.
Noah Smith in his Substack today posits that China is the real enemy, not just geopolitically but also on climate control issues. China is extremely hesitant to sign on to any deal that could impact their economic growth. Smith says that the US is not the bad guy here as China is the aggressive party in any trade negotiations.
Maybe? I think it is hard to actually know what goes on in trade negotiations.
One thing I said in One Billion Americans is that I think the United States has a credibility problem here. We are clearly intending to continue to be the world's hegemonic power indefinitely -- that's the stated policy of the United States. And we have one third of China's population. So the only way to achieve that is for China to stay poor. So to a Chinese official, anything we say across a negotiating table is going to look like "aha, this is America's plot to keep China poor."
Now I know that's probably not actually what American negotiators are thinking. But we can't assume the Chinese understand us as well as we do, or that we necessarily understand them.
At this point I’m unsure that America needs to “plot” to keep China poor, or at least middle-income.
They’ve made some grave missteps recently, and there’s an increasing unwillingness to reform in any way that might disrupt employment, even as the workforce shrinks and physical infrastructure needs go into decline.
The CCP probably can’t carry the economic transition they started through to a successful soft landing. In fact, I have my doubts over whether any potential government can do so without getting strung up before major reforms come to fruition.
Why limit this argument to just China? If America expects to continue to use a vastly disproportionate percentage of the world's resources and anybody else who thinks competing for these resources to achieve your lifestyle is the enemy then we are all your enemies.
In general I'm a Smith fan. But I find on China he's a bit hawkish for my tastes. Given that country's massive disadvantage in wealth, income and living standards vis-à-vis the West, China possess a non-trivial degree of standing in my view to insist that rich countries be the prime movers on climate change. But despite all this, Chinese leadership (as awful as it is in so many areas) is at least as enlightened as America's on the subject of decarbonization. They're spending eyes-watering amounts on new nuclear power plants. And solar plants. And wind power. They're putting obscene sums into EVs (forgetting getting a license plate in Beijing now if your vehicle isn't electricity-powered). Chinese supermarkets are, like 80 degrees inside in July. Chinese houses often don't get above 65 degrees in winter. In China escalators slow to a crawl when no one is on them (I still haven't seen this in the US). In China, lighting in public areas is nearly always motion-sensitive. And so on.
Chinese people use a lot less energy than Americans and their government is deadly serious about transitioning to a decarbonized future (although sure, they're not willing to take a massive hit on living standards to get there).
I've seen intermittent escalators several places and they take some getting used to since you initially assume they are broken (an assumption justifiable for any regular user of the DC Metro). Pretty sure they are now mandatory for new construction but the installed base of standard escalators is so huge that it will take a long time for them to become common. Which is an advantage developing economies have over established ones and way Asian megacities look so sparkling and new. Because they are.
I'm glad to hear the US is implementing such a no-brainer energy saving technology. Maybe I'll see an example on my next trip home. In fairness, I didn't hit up many shopping malls when I was in the States during 2020. So perhaps it's become a bit more widespread than I'd imagined.
China has much lower CO2 per capita than the US, but higher than some European countries that have higher GDP per capita, so I would say their performance is probably just OK.
At the same time, and they have every right to from an energy security standpoint, China is building about 75GW of new coal capacity right now…. About 5 times more than the rest of the world combined (and clearly the opposite of the west’s rapid decarbonification via decommissioning coal plants).
China's big! So sure, anything they do (or don't do adequately) has an outsized effect. Still, Americans use about three times more energy than Chinese people do. It's a tough problem, and it makes it awfully difficult to lecture them. I honestly think big-picture wise, China's doing a creditable job building their decarbonized sector (in recent years China has been bringing a new nuclear plant on line every 90 days), although given the country's massive size and (still) rather undeveloped economy, they're sadly not going to be in a position to completely eschew an increase in fossil fuel use.
Economically, they actually are. They could stop building new coal plants AND start gradually reducing active time at existing ones without harming grid reliability at all.
Socially, the immense number of jobs wrapped up the SOE-dominated power generation and power construction sectors makes it impossible to move quickly on the issue.
It’s the same fundamental issue that has them shifting growth in credit overseas/off-books via the BRI to prop up construction employment in materials, equipment, and site operations.
It’s always amusing to watch Western media refer to BRI as a foreign policy initiative. It’s not, at all. It’s an attempt to avoid major disruption to employment structures and attendant damage to 维稳 (social stability maintenance).
That was the weakest part of a really, really weak Noah Smith article. Note that he has to go back to 2009 to find an example of serious Chinese climate obstructionism. Chinese manufacturing (and a lot of German subsidies) drove solar prices down by like 90% over the past decade. It's true that their coal plants are still expanding by more than anyone should be comfortable with, but China has done vastly more on climate than the US has. The "China is a bad climate actor" is a decade stale argument in my view, and Smith should know better than to trot it out.
A tax on net emissions need not have a big impact on growth; that depends on whether the deadweight loss of the tax and complimentary policies and taxes falls on consumption or investment.
As a high energy user, they are competition for fossil fuels. As a low energy producer, they will want to cooperate in our goals of producing a lot of renewable energy sources.
The best description I've seen of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - it is not tell you *to* shut up, but explaining to you *that* "shut up".
One hard thing about climate change is that for most it has characteristics of a religious faith - you're told to trust the authorities on a matter about which you do not have, and cannot have, any direct personal knowledge. The authorities say if you do or don't do certain things now, bad or good things will happen later, probably after you're dead, but maybe even in this lifetime.
As a lot of American preachers and TV evangelists know, trying to convert people by threatening hellfire and brimstone is less successful than by promising prosperity.
That would counsel selling climate change policies as the smart strategy to position the United States as a market leader in what will be the most in-demand technologies of coming decades - the prosperity gospel version, not hellfire and brimstone. And lean into the competition-with-China angle, not away from it, as a way for us to come out ahead of them.
“Democrat elites are convinced (rightly) that the mass public is too short-sighted and too parochial about climate change, and they are trying to drive the pace of change ahead of what pure popularism would suggest”
Democratic elites aren’t making many personal sacrifices. They continue to fly on airplanes and go on carbon intensive vacations. Al Gore had a 20,000 square foot house with a huge carbon foot print. How many Democratic elites live in a one bedroom apartment to keep their footprint small? Only poor ones. Bernie has three residences and has flown millions of miles.
Democratic elites support carbon pricing for very selfish reasons— they have enough disposable income to maintain their lifestyles even if flights and utility bills cost more. Conversely, these measures would force poorer people to actually cut back on travel, bump up the thermostat and car pool.
If Democratic elites were serious about climate change, they would support carbon rationing— a cap on individual/family carbon emissions that the rich can’t buy out of. Needless to say, there isn’t much elite support for rationing because there isn’t much elite willingness to make personal sacrifices for climate goals. They want the invisible hand of the market to force others to sacrifice while they feel good about buying green energy stocks.
Elite opinion is only more “progressive” on climate because it is more able to buy out of its proposed solutions.
I've never agreed with this take. "Personal sacrifice" is almost always inadequate for effecting change. The United States is home to a third of a billion souls and a $22 trillion economy. What is going to change things isn't Al Gore living like a pauper. What is going to change things is policy. I personally see no tension whatsoever between A) driving an air-conditioned Hummer on my way to the steakhouse, and B) pushing for the most far-reaching climate change policies possible (and working like heck to elect lawmakers who will bring this vision to fruition). Also, it looks increasingly unlikely in any event that the people are wiling to engage in meaningful "sacrifice" to achieve decarbonization. So I'm not sure what showy symbolism on the part of famous progressives is supposed to accomplish. In other words, more and more it appears we're going to have to get much, much more energy from non-carbon sources, as opposed to simply doing with a lot less energy.
Im not sure that elite sacrifice would be sufficient to inspire working class sacrifice, but elite sacrifice is definitely necessary for broader buy in.
I agree that the focus should be on electrification and adaptation. However, lots of climate advocates are against nuclear and view adaptation as defeatism, so the whole thing stinks of angst driven virtue signaling
Perhaps I am a fish swimming in the same water as Al Gore, but I’ve always wondered why the question of elite sacrifice is such a big deal to people. Something is either a good idea or it isn’t, or it’s somewhere in between. Americans seem to pay a lot of attention to what others are doing.
The lizard brain that guides our gut-level reactions to a lot of things runs a pretty rudimentary fairness algorithm, so if we see someone moralizing and being a hypocrite, the rhetorical force is lost. Theoretically, ideas should be evaluated independently of the presenter, and that may work good in philosophy class, but it works for shit out in the world.
A while back, my place of work moved my department from 'traditional' cubicles to open-office floor plan. Which was not popular, but, the management all the way up to VP-level was out on the floor with the rest of us, and that deflated a lot of criticism. There was nobody saying "Oh, if this is so great, why aren't *they* doing it?", because they were. And because they were, they could hear you complaining. ;)
But presumably Gore is campaigning for a carbon tax that he would pay if he continued to fly and heat a big home, not a carbon tax that he would be exempt from. Did management at your company move into open office *before* they moved everyone else to it, or only at the same time?
Presumably, agreed. The right-wing accusations of Gore as a hypocrite may be without merit, but unfortunately they have the desired effect among the folks who aren't willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
We all moved at the same time - my department was first; our director volunteered us (and herself) to be the guinea pigs. As other floors in the building were upgraded to newer furniture they took our constructive criticism seriously and made design improvements. Our floor ended up being pretty crowded by that original design; hopefully there's no major outbreak of airborne infectious diseases.
"Perhaps I am a fish swimming in the same water as Al Gore, but I’ve always wondered why the question of elite sacrifice is such a big deal to people."
It's the basis for the claim that somebody like Gore wants people to suffer for no reason, which is raw culture war material. Why Gore is important when he hasn't been active in politics in pretty much any way in more than a decade ... is a hint that some folks are pimping old Fox News memes.
elm
for reasons that are very environmentally unfriendly
Isn't Al Gore still important because he won a Nobel Prize 14 years ago and there hasn't really been a "face of the climate movement" to replace him in that time? Maybe Greta Thunberg now has that role?
Completely agreed. Framing climate issues as a matter of personal sacrifice is especially absurd when you take the developing world into account. I think it's an overwhelming moral imperative to develop climate-friendly technology to the point where everyone in the world can have AC, refrigerators, fast transportation, and everything else without impacting the climate--and if we get to that point then there's no reason the rich world should have to make sacrifices either.
More generally, telling people to make symbolic personal sacrifices without having a government coordinating everyone making the same sacrifice is completely unreasonable. I for one will never, ever do it, no matter how strongly I believe in the end goal, and I'm completely ethically comfortable with this.
Don't we always point out the hypocrisy of the "pro family values" people supporting the adulterous, boorish Trump? Does personal behavior and leading by example only matter when it's the other side?
Does it actually matter on *either* side? Is the left any happier with the non-hypocritical Rick Santorum than with the hypocritical Trump, and is the right any happier with the non-hypocritical Greta Thunberg than with the hypocritical Gore?
I mean, isn't the simple answer that the hypocrisy makes it really easy for the opposition to criticize you? I agree that our climate change politics cannot be built around demanding personal sacrifice from ordinary people, but if you're seen as the putative "leader" of a climate change movement it's not a good look to disregard the carbon impact of your own lifestyle.
But if we do it right there shouldn't be any credible charge of hypocrisy. The left (and pro-science center) shouldn't be hectoring people not to take flights or live in big houses or eat steaks. The left, rather, should be telling people: we shouldn't let China beat America to the decarbonized future, or, these awesome new electric vehicles might enable our grandkids not to live in Death Valley-like conditions, or, green energy jobs pay an average of 28 bucks an hours, or...
I see your point and I honestly find this to be a challenging question. Because while on the one hand it's appealing (and perhaps true) to say we can have the green energy future without any changes in lifestyle, it's also much, much easier to achieve it in the time we need if we change our energy consumption habits. So for those reasons I tend to favor a both/and approach where we encourage electric vehicle production and tout the benefits of wind and solar jobs in rural communities while also pushing for sensible reforms to urban infrastructure like dedicated bus lanes or congestion pricing in major cities.
It's also important to consider that there are other environmental problems we need to address besides climate change. It's smart politics at the federal level to decouple the one from the other, but we shouldn't totally ignore the fact that, for example, electric vehicle production still consumes massive amounts of scarce raw materials or that cattle ranching is just really environmentally destructive.
If Joe Biden or John Tester or whomever needs to add a layer of (literal) red meat to their climate message to get beneficial reforms passed, that makes sense. But I think moral activism around this issue is still important and necessary, and in that space it's really important for elite leaders to live out their message in a way that isn't blatantly hypocritical.
"it's also much, much easier to achieve it in the time we need if we change our energy consumption habits"
But it's actually not, if you take into account the human factor.
Has there ever in history been an example of people banding together at a large national level, let alone globally, to solve a collective action problem thorough voluntary individual sacrifice, when it wasn't in response to some obvious, imminent external threat, such as a war?
All I mean when I say that it's "easier" is that, mathematically, it's easier to use less energy if you consume less of it. As I acknowledged above, I don't think it's politically viable to only take this approach because of the "human factor," but to the extent moral activism around this issue matters (which I think it does), then it's useful for activists to evaluate the moral consequences of their own actions.
"electric vehicle production still consumes massive amounts of scarce raw materials"
Rare earths aren't scarce - they are pretty common. To mine them profitably requires find locations of high density ... and then you have a problem of relatively small market demand reducing the profitability of large scale mining. Attempt to produce very large number of big car batteries and demand will grow and then rare earth mines at scale will be profitable and someone will build out production capacity.
Rare earth mines do have a pollution problem, and taking care of that also reduces profitability. So you need to subsidize production to get ahead of the demand curve, plus maybe outright paying for the anti-pollution controls.
Perfectly doable.
elm
you need to want to do it, and you'd need to then do it, of course
I agree with touting clean electrification, eco nationalism and good paying green jobs. There is broad center/left consensus for those things.
However, carbon taxes, cap and trade and the like are all aimed at making working stiffs change their lifestyle. And yet many elected Dems support carbon taxes.
You're conflating two different issues - reordering the distribution of wealth and good things in society; and reducing carbon emissions. Those issues aren't inherently linked.
If your priority is reducing carbon emissions, the only reason to link it to any other issue should be that the linkage makes reducing carbon emissions a politically easier sell, not a harder one.
Climate change has a social and economic context. The question “how much carbon should working stiffs get to consume” is both politically salient and physically important. Unless and until working stiffs are willing to reduce their emissions, only undemocratic governments will be able to blunt climate change.
Furthermore, this is fundamentally a coordination problem. Any individuals actions have a trivial effect upon climate. Reducing my carbon footprint does no good unless hundreds of millions of others buy in. Even a big state like New York has a trivial effect upon climate. Unless and until there is a global consensus, individual reductions are futile. Thus, elite selfishness really is antithetical to emissions curbs.
There is also the broader question of “how important is it to reduce emissions.”. My take is that cold still causes somewhat more human misery than heat, that there are vast uninhabited swaths of Siberia and Canada that would be verdant if the planet gets warmer, and that an increase of a few degrees is manageable. However, a 5-10 degree increase would be hard to manage, which is why we should invest in affordable solar, wind and nuclear and deploy them on an industrial scale.
I’ll believe the greens are serious when they learn to love hydro and nuclear, Until then, they are just engaging in a silly purity contest.
Agree the social and economic context is all-important. But I just don't it's realistic to think a global collective action problem like this will be solved by calling for individual sacrifice now, for distant gains to be realized years in the future by other people.
It's not going to happen that way. One, because humans don't respond to collective action problems by doing things that are good for the species but not themselves or their immediate community, without being forced to.
Second, as you note in point about the vast uninhabited areas of Canada and Siberia that will be more habitable in a warmer climate, this isn't in fact an existential crisis for humanity, and won't be for a long time if it ever is. It will be devastating for some people and work out well for others. In that way, climate change isn't so different than most other distributional issues people fight and argue about.
Elsewhere in the thread, you complain about carbon taxes because they disrupt the lifestyle of the working stiffs. However, those people are imposing a cost on people living in other countries.
It's all well and good to say that Siberia and Canada will become more inhabitable, but I suspect that you would be pretty upset if someone built a loud factory next to your home that employed lots of working class folks and told you that you could move someplace else that is much quieter.
I don't think that is his argument. His position seems to be a skeptical public will not view carbon emissions as the serious problem elites claim, if elites continue to live high GHG emissions lifestyles.
Climate actors engaging in symbolism isn't sufficient for change but it probably matters on the margin. A zero population growther with 4 kids will get less attention than one with 2.
Does every family get the same ration? Asking for every farmer or anybody who lives in a northern climate and doesn't want to freeze to death when their ration expires in midwinter. This is just my way of pointing out how goofy the carbon ration is.
"If Democratic elites were serious about climate change, they would support carbon rationing— a cap on individual/family carbon emissions that the rich can’t buy out of. "
Hah. Classic fossil fuel astroturfing - 'If Democratic elites were serious' they'd support the thing the oil company execs proposes and the public deeply opposes so that the whole thing blows up and nothing is ever done that reduces fossil fuel profits.
The Al Gore take from 2006 (or is it 2003?) is kind of a giveaway of where this comment is originating.
Which fossil fuel execs support rationing? MY wrote last week that Exxon supports a carbon tax, for the types of cynical reasons you suggest.
I’m quite aware that rationing will never pass, nor do I support it. I do think that elite support for carbon taxes in lieu of rationing is revealing because it shows that they want working stiffs to take the lifestyle hit.
During World War Two, elites could have ensured adequate supplies for soldiers through a food tax. They chose rationing because they didn’t want the most vulnerable to take the nutritional hit, they wanted to ensure that everyone got a basic diet and to put the economy on a war footing by reducing culinary luxury. Today’s elites say that global warming is an existential threat but sure don’t act like it.
Matt, as you've pointed out that it is good politics to fight racial inequity with anti-poverty measures that are not race specific, i suggest that it is good politics to address climate change by measures that seek to make the air that we breath now healthier. We should be talking about particulate matter more than sea levels in 2050.
This is absolutely true
Also: We should be replacing coal plants with nuclear because nuclear puts less radiation into the environment. As a nice side effect nuclear also emits less CO2.
Anyone who thinks climate change is a threat to civilization needs to concede that avoiding it would be worth a few Chernobyls.
Of course, whenever anyone says “existential threat,” my first thought is “drama queen.”
The fact that multiple reactors got hit by an extreme earthquake and subsequent tsunami and only the one with the most outdated safety features went down is frankly an argument for bog-standard nuclear plants.
I still would recommend not building one on a Tsunami hazard zone, but that leaves a lot of options.
I knew coal was a horrific health hazard from extraction to use, but I did not know this. There is just something about nuclear power that freaks people out beyond all proportion (including me, though I try to reason with my fears).
1. I’m assuming the usual boring comments thing is you being ironic. Following you on Twitter, I feel like these days you are totally channeling your inner cranky old guy. Which to tell the truth, I dig.
2. I wonder how much the heat wave out west, especially the northwest, is going to affect the publics support for climate change actions. I was sort of agnostic about it. However, after two weeks of 100-ish or plus weather, I am a believer. I just had my daughters with me for two weeks in Boise. It sucked. Even my cabin in the mountains it was pretty damn hot.
3. Still, I’m sort of cynical about all the US base climate activists. A carbon tax in the United States, won’t even make a dent in the global issue. Noah Smith is spot on when he says that it is research and technology that is going to save us. The developing world, especially Africa, is going to need energy. Now solar and wind can fill a big part of it, but we western countries need to help subsidize this. (Apparently he has a rant about China this morning, I will read after this)
4. The anti-nuclear thing sort of drives me crazy. I work in the energy field. I hate working in nuclear power plants, luckily they’re not my specialty, but they beat the hell out of coal plants.
5. My job is actually inspecting gas turbine power plants. I work for Siemens energy which is one of the three big producers of gas turbine’s. While sales have dropped off from maybe 10 years ago, we are still building new plants. One of the things that I’m proud of, is we have been more instrumental in replacing call plants than renewable energy.
6. This is a point where I could go on a long rant about how people are overestimating, or is it underestimating, some of the engineering and technical challenges of solar and wind power. People always say “the cost of wind and solar energy is the lowest”… but it never tells the full story, especially when it comes to peak power.
7. Continuing my gas turbine sales pitch, you would be amazed at how efficient the new ones are when built in a combined cycle plant. The other big thing is you guessed her brains are built to run on Hydrogen/Natgas mixes. In fact, many could be adapted to run on pure hydrogen. I am bullish on hydrogen technology.
Anyway. I wish I was more interesting this morning. I’m on my way to Pittsburgh for one day of training, and then off to Brazil for 2 1/2 weeks. I get to spend a week of it in Urugiana. I love obscure places.
Parent Brag follows: just dropped my daughter off at the South Carolina Governors of Science and Math. A two year public boarding school. It’s for 11th and 12th graders. Daughter applied as a 9th grader and got in. 300 of the brightest kids in South Carolina. Her goal is to be an engineer. I’m trying to steer her to energy. Maybe she will be the one to have the breakthrough that saves us.
Have a great day folks.
As always. Typed on my phone while on a plane. Forgive the grammar and spelling.
As someone who works in NG and NGL for a company who also does distribution...i am very bearish on hydrogen. People are already exceedingly freaked out about natural gas pipelines and pipelines are becoming a bigger and bigger target for protests (namely crude, but i'm sure it will expand to other products at some point).
Frankly, I can think of nothing scarier than living next to an older pipeline carrying a explosive fuel.
Additionally, hydrogen piping in an industrial setting is handled with WAY more caution than natural gas lines are...i do wonder at what point people start to get spooked off by the implications of leaks, etc.
How about point production of Hydrogen? Siemens has a plant that uses wind/solar to make hydrogen with renewable. Store it. Then burn when needed.
I’ve read a few articles about adapting hydrogen to current gas lines. Apparently embrittlement is a big issue with older pipes.
Definitely a challenge to be overcome.
At the end of the day, hydrogen is just a smaller molecule and more difficult gas to deal with from a storage / transportation standpoint. It’s not like it can’t be done…but the arbitrary risk tolerances for how to deal with it will near being insurmountable if other options exist, etc.
We are starting to study and focus on some of these options now as a company (a bit late IMO and im not certain how seriously yet)…but that’s just my gut take.
With the price increase / scarcity in helium, i have seen some interest in using hydrogen as a carrier gas and trying to navigate the additional concerns that come with it as someone who deals with natural gas day in and day out just sets those priors for me. People always seem spooked at the idea of hydrogen use…
"One moon circles"
"Eyes in the dark"
Part of the point of the carbon tax is to make the research and development more economically feasible sooner. If fossil fuels are really cheap, you don't spend a lot of money researching alternatives, but if fossil fuels are gradually getting more expensive, it becomes economically important to invest in discovering alternatives sooner.
BTW Rory -- great news on your daughter's current path!
Thanks David. You’re the only one that got it. It was obvious that the first 12 paragraphs were just an excuse for
Me to mention that.
Maybe he’ll write a post about women in stem, and I’ll get to talk about it more. Lol.
Hope you’re having a great day man.
So I just read the John Robert’s article and it reinforces my… bullishness on Hydrogen.
Yea John writes a lot of stuff like that. I rained on his parades often enough that he blocked me. He is quite enthusiastic about things he does not quite understand. Usually he never gets around to considering that hydrogen as a transportation fuel has very low energy density and is very explosive and must be carried in heavy pressure vessels that carry a heavy transport cost themselves in weight. Personally I can never see these being allowed to operate at highway speeds regardless of whether of not the fuel is combusted or used to feed fuel cells. Low speed urban buses maybe. If properly designed to deal with collisions. Generating and storing large quantities of hydrogen also present some quite impressive engineering obstacles.
I mean, I see quite a few of the hydrogen Toyota Mirais wandering around, they seem to be approved enough.
Remember the Hindenburg....
Well I appreciate your point of view. Good to have perspectives even if I don’t like them.
The general dynamic seems to be that there was a flash in the pan with certain far left environmental groups being founded and/or becoming more vocal right around the time of the 2018 midterm and the rise in Democratic expectations during the 2020 presidential primary.
But there's not a lot of adequate gate keeping among all environmental organizations, the big Greens like League of Conservation Voters, NRDC, Sierra Club, etc. They are competing with Sunrise, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and others for attention as "environmentalists" without a reasonably easy measurement of success outside of media coverage--which as Matt notes is very easy to manipulate top down with funding and staged public events.
At the same time, established environmental organizations have been questioning their own privilege, their historical legacies of having been linked in the past to some right-wing causes of nativism and xenophobia and eugenics. I think they themselves feel very vulnerable to charges of inadequacy of environmental justice.
Anecdotally, I find the entire environmental movement very weird for a shared approach to politics as prioritizing a certain holier than thou attitude and emphasis on working in the movement. Specifically, as a senior Congressional staffer I've several times in my career poked my toes into the water to see if I wanted to make the jump to working for environmental organizations, and found that they all tended to share the world view that it was better to hire someone from within environmentalism, with a background in hard science or commitment to progressive activism, and teach that person how the Hill works and how to lobby, than it is to follow the example of every other sector or industry trying to influence politics and hire people from the Hill and then teach them the specific issues to advocate on.
In general I think environmentalists, broadly, perform poorly in providing legislative subsidy to Congress. Which means major climate progress is occurring despite, not because of, environmental groups and their behaviors.
"Anecdotally, I find the entire environmental movement very weird for a shared approach to politics as prioritizing a certain holier than thou attitude and emphasis on working in the movement."
I think that carries over from the PETA groups and the like. They are way more into the performance than succeeding at anything. (Very much lifted from Moscow Centre-funded and controlled pro-communist activism of the 30's, where the main enemy was the non-communist left.) Meantime, the right keeps putting the screws to any nascent interest in the environment on the right, and then overall set of pressure keeps squeezing the middle.
elm
something stupid this way comes
Interesting, would make sense to me. I'll say that in my field, climate and climate adjacent scientists do not have a strong understanding of the political process. Not in the didn't take civics sense, but they scientists as a class are kind of the grill meme, they just want to research for gods sake
This. Saved me a lot of typing!
Welding climate change to all those other left-wing causes makes it really hard to see how you're going to convince anyone who isn't already in your corner to work with you.
For instance, we've seen several surveys showing that younger Repulicans aren't as anti-environment as older ones, but this approach seems almost custom made to avoid bringing cross-pressured voters into your corner.
But is the goal to win over voters, or to win over politicians. I think Matt's point is that Democratic politicians are already prioritizing climate change to a higher degree than our system would indicate based just on public polling and prioritization. The problem is getting legislation passed in a system with a lot of veto points. Marginally winning over a handful of younger Republican voters isn't necessarily going to lead to fundamental shifts in the legislative process.
And that's assuming you can convince younger Republicans to make the environment a deciding issue for them to swing to vote Democratic. Parties, because they have a range of issues to prioritize, can win over voters. But causes have far less ability to make their individual issue the deciding issue. No amount of messaging from environmental organizations will convince a young anti-choice Republican to prioritize climate change over judges, for example.
I think the argument is that climate should try to win Republican primaries. Get people who support doing things about climate change, but are also pro-life, pro-gun and anti-anti-racism to run in primaries and so make climate the sort of thing that can go through Secret Congress as a bipartisan deal.
But in general there aren't people who support doing things on climate change and who are otherwise affiliated with conservative politics. Polarization is sorting people to align with the GOP on cultural identity, and then they adopt the top-down messaging of GOP elites, which is climate change isn't real.
A discussion at the end of the most recent Weeds interview (regarding a new book about the Trump era) has left me thinking quite a bit about the self-prophesying narrative around polarization both parties have spun themselves into. Matt observed that even in DC, which is obviously overwhelmingly Democratic, there are still people who could be responsive to traditional Republican policy messages--e.g., business owners who hate regulation, people who support increased investment in cops and public safety, etc.--and that moderate politics still prevail in practice. Living in Chicago, I would make the same observation.
The problem is that Republicans have basically given up on trying to reach those voters and convinced themselves that all cities are left-wing hellscapes where you will be taxed out of existence if you aren't murdered first. It seems like the photonegative of this mindset has filtered into the left, and progressive issue-based organizations have convinced themselves its better to align their issue with other left-wing issues rather than focus on advocating for their issue in a way that generates broad and diverse support. (In other words, the focus is on cultivating the appropriate progressive identity rather than trying to make progress on an issue they believe it's important.)
Maybe this approach works, maybe it doesn't, but it doesn't make sense to give up trying on the assumption that GOP voters are beyond salvation.
That was a very good conversation. I think one additional factor though is that the parties are not symmetrical. The Democratic Party contains a large enough share of self-identifying moderate and conservative voters, so that the business interests or other factions that lean GOP nationally have some groups they can try to work with in a Democratic primary. You don't have the same in the GOP primary, where the number of moderate and liberal Republicans is much smaller.
I think that's probably right, but my contention is that by collapsing "conservative," "moderate," and "liberal" into a set of fixed policy preferences, you're obscuring potential opportunities where an *environmentally targeted* message could otherwise fit into a conservative ideology. Like, I dunno, there's probably a young, good-looking Nebraskan out there who goes to church every Sunday and owns 10 guns but cares about clean water because he grew up going fishing with his Dad and thinks wind energy is a great opportunity to bring in jobs and grow the tax base in his rural district. If some national environmental groups pour money into his primary campaign he could have a shot. And if they pour money into 20-30 similar campaigns around the country odds are that a few will be successful. And even if most are unsuccessful, it will develop pro-climate messaging and talking points that are not the Green New Deal.
If elites want to throw money at climate change advocacy, and actually care about *addressing climate change* (and not progressive virtue signaling) it seems like targeted funding at these kinds of campaigns has a much better ROI in terms of tangible political outcomes.
But wedding all these issues to climate change has to be _increasing_ that polarization, right?
If <climate change org on left> decides that if you support climate change action, you must also support a bunch of other priorities, then that makes it harder for a Republican to support climate change action because it's easy for any primary opponents to tie them to all the OTHER left wing causes.
That isn't to say it would be easy to win primaries as a Republican who wanted to take action on climate change, but this can't help but make it harder.
I think you're making the mistake of seeing the current debate and assuming "both sides" have been working equally to produce this degree of polarization and issue clustering.
This isn't a chicken and the egg situation where it's not clear what happened first. Political science literature and shown that the first step in the 1980s and 1990s was decline in Republican support for a host of environmental issues. This was driven through industry opposition to environmental regulation. This was heightened in the opposition to the cap and trade bill in 2009 and 2010, industry decided to work with the GOP and Tea Party groups to push outright opposition to what was a negotiated and compromised bill. At the same time, all the elite signaling on the GOP/conservative side has been to demonize environmentalism and deny climate change.
Matt feels like it was wrong for environmental groups to respond to 2009 and 2010 by trying to fund fake grassroots groups. But another decision may be more reasonable, which is if the other side is going to demonize you, you need to build stronger ties with the rest of the Democratic establishment so your agenda is prioritized.
It's now possible that the system has built it's own feedback loop, where the decision by environmental groups to double down on the left will reinforce the GOP push to demonize environmentalism, which will lead to more leftist policies, which will lead to GOP demonization ... rinse and repeat.
But given that any climate proposal is going to be demonized as the Green New Deal, it's not clear what the best move for environmentalists (who are also not a monolithic group) is.
Maybe in general that's true, especially as the sorting and filtering works it's way all the way up the chain to DC.
But in a 330,000,000 person country you can certainly find conservative types who support taking action on the climate. I know a few of them myself.
Again, voters are weird, they don't always have consistent views. There's lots of diversity. Conservative voters who support taking action on climate change don't matter if they don't either A- Support Democrats in significant numbers to shift more elections to Democrats or B- Find ways to actually win GOP primaries.
For A, the problem by and large isn't environmental messaging, it's that these voters are voting based on their own conservative views.
For B, well, as a minority, it's not clear how climate change supporting Republicans win primaries.
Right, it's a hard problem to solve. Putting energy into electing Democrats is one way and pretty much the default. But I'd argue that attempting the challenge of gaining conservative allies is a worthwhile one for committed climate change activists and one where they could potentially move the needle a great deal. It would n't be easy for the reasons you mentioned, but it's not the same as saying it's impossible. Polling on younger GOP voters, for example, and the $ benefits of solar and wind suggests to me that there are ways to make inroads.
I'm not sure this approach wins over anyone, to be honest.
I think there's room in the Republican coalition for candidates the hate critical race theory, but love selling out to Big Windmill. The left-wing grab-bag approach feels it makes things more difficult, by welding climate stuff too closely to the culture war.
I think hypothetical scenarios, brainstorming, conjecture, and all that have their place in politics. But at a certain point you have to be a little empirical and start to look at what's actually happening with the GOP. There was room for action on climate change, even if a little weird, in the 2000s, but overall there had been a significant decline in support for overall environmentalism among the GOP throughout the 1990s with the polarization of the parties. But even one of the primary drivers of that polarization--Newt Gingrich--was also a figure open to some action on climate change. But he, as well as the rest of the GOP, has retreated more and more into climate change paranoia and denialism.
If there's room for Republicans who hate critical race theory and love selling out to Big Windmill, why don't we see them? Why instead has the last ten years seen things like this? https://newrepublic.com/article/119672/koch-brothers-changed-sam-brownbacks-opinion-wind-power
“…Democratic politicians are already prioritizing climate change…”
But they are doing it stupidly. Canceling KeystoneXL, for instance.
The best way to win over politicians is by winning over voters in swing districts. Defund the police is okay if you're AOC in Queens but suicide for Abigail Spanberger, never mind Joe Manchin,
Well yeah this gets to Matt's criticism specifically of Sunrise for picking up other leftist positions (although still Spanberger just complains too much given that essentially ran the same as Joe Biden). But in reality the environmental movement for years has had polling showing that everyone loves clean energy, but that doesn't move voters.
The OP linked to a David Roberts article, I find myself thinking about a different one: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21252892/climate-change-democrats-joe-biden-renewable-energy-unions-environmental-justice
He argues that the left had agreed on an approach (standards, justice, inclusion). But, I wonder if that approach was well suited to a 54-46 Senate (or a 49-51 Senate where nothing would happen) but not a 50-50 Senate, and groups are in a tough spot between the longer term coalition and the short term political landscape.
Sorry, "Investment " Not inclusion for the "I".
The main problem I see with groups like the Sunrise Movement is that they are anti-science. They always say that we could go carbon free if only corrupt politicians didn't interfere. Well, no, there are still hard technical problems to solve before this is possible.
I once worked on a related project and while walking towards my office one day, I saw some protesters close to my building. One of the signs said something like "We must abolish capitalism to save the planet". How could we get people who believe this to trust the science? Maybe have them read engineering papers?
I have lost track of the number of times where an activist group has opposed a reasonable solution because “it’s not fixing the real problem” which is inevitably technology or capitalism or insufficient respect for the earth. All I care about is fixing the problem. And that’s almost certainly true for the many people in the global south whine they claim to be fighting for and are suffering the worst of it.
I agree on this, but I would also like to point out that the existence of reasonable solutions is the good case. There are problems for which we don't have a clear answer yet despite what the Sunrise Movement or anyone else may say.
For example, I would love to see more interviews of Mechanical/Electrical/Chemical Engineering professors and professionals, and fewer interviews of policy people. While I bet that we will see people in the future be like "Wait a minute, batteries really contain all these dangerous chemicals? Let's ban them!", I would like to focus first on the currently existing technical problems with batteries (and how they delay the 100% carbon free future we want). A good amount of the activism I have seen just ignores all the technical hurdles and blames politicians for everything.
Yes I agree there are a lot of techincal challenges and I think we should be throwing a ton of money and brain power at finding solutions to those technical challenges.
For instance, biological systems are pretty easy to scale up, can be pretty efficient and use waste products (hello sewage) and it would be a very good idea to invest more money in biotech carbon removal.
I think too many details make people’s eyes glaze over though, especially in something as broad and deep as climate science.
I’m fine with an activist group doing very simple, punchy, emotionally charged things, as long as they are helpful things. Maybe they can hold talks for people who want to go deeper into it.
The Sunrise movement isn't anti-science; it's orthogonal to science. Climate activists who want to "abolish capitalism" want to radically diminish consumption, which is anathema to capitalism. For eco-radicals, "abolish capitalism" is not a move toward communist utopia, it's a step toward "abolish (most} people"
What makes them anti-science in my view is that they ignore technical realities. It's like how I would consider anti-vaxxers as anti-science regardless of whether they reached this position because of opposition to Big Pharma, for example.
The technical difficulties in replacing fossil fuels supports their premise that there is no alternative to reducing consumption. For them, it's a feature, not a bug.
Well, without their having all the Infinity Stones, it really doesn't matter what they think
When progressives are not proclaiming their concern for the poor, they are railing against "consumption". Well, the surefire cure for consumption is poverty.
I work in the energy field. You are absolutely correct. Transmission. Storage. Peak power.
I've long thought that climate activists should take a page from Wayne Wheeler, who ran the Anti-Saloon League and got Prohibition through a hard-drinking country *by Constitutional Amendment.* Imagine that, he got a majority of boozer state legislators in 3/5 of the states to ban alcoholic beverages. What was the lesson? Wheeler backed any politician who voted dry, regardless of their position on other topics. He delivered them votes and money, and did not care about their other position. American climate activists could make a lot of progress if they single-mindedly backed *all* politicians who support carbon-reducing policies. If a pro-life or pro-gun politician supported a game-changing carbon tax, would the climate activists today support her? Probably not, but Wayne Wheeler (in that position) would have done, and that is how Prohibition got passed. (Never mind that Prohibition turned out to be mostly a failed policy, the value of the lesson was in the passing of it.)
Rural over representation in state legislatures so that even states that had majority opposition to Prohibition in statewide referendum were dominated by Prohibition majorities in the state legislature helped.
The thing is, climate change itself has become so polarized a pro-gun politician who supports a carbon tax is shooting themselves in the foot. They wouldn't want help in a GOP primary to survive.
Well, all true, and you may be right that at this point our politics is so extremely siloed that there is nothing here. Ten or fifteen years ago, though, I think the climate activists missed a big opportunity. Before the fracking revolution, there was a real opportunity to merge national security hawks (concerned about energy security) and climate activism. We could have built wind and solar and put turbines on dams and built nukes to save the planet and screw the Russians. Then the fracking revolution occurred and broke that potential alliance. Opportunity lost, over ideology.
Ten or fifteen years ago would put that either at the end of the debate over Waxman Markey or shortly before. I welcome revisionists approaches when they help highlight themes or topics missed out, but I think blaming the failure of Waxman Markey or something like it on climate activism, when as Matt notes there were a lot of reasons why the bill failed in the Senate, is off.
In 2008, climate activists had secured bipartisan support for a cap and trade system. They had support from moderate Republicans like John Warner and Lindsey Graham and leading moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman. Cap and trade was part of the GOP platform under moderate Republican John McCain. They did indeed have support from national security hawks.
It all fell apart. The post-mortem on that matters. As Matt notes, there was a recognition that the climate push was too top-down, too elite centric, with a focus on winning over heads of trade associations and the very serious people in the Beltway. When the GOP walked away because of intense opposition to the entirety of Obama's legislative agenda, there was no grassroots pressure to push the bill over the finish line.
While Matt notes that the response, to build a fake grassroots movement, was wrong, I think his post is also important for noting how bad faith behaviors by Republican politicians and the business community were a key part of the failures from a decade ago.
The United States is unique in the developed world in having its major center-right party embrace outright climate change denialism. Given our political system and the veto points involved, that makes it almost impossible to have significant action on climate change. When history is written about why the United States failed to act, the blame needs to be put on the Republican Party. Weird environmental groups are secondary to that, and I think a lot of their weirdness is explained by their frustrations with a system that won't save the planet.
To prove the point, in 2010 environmental groups did indeed rally to and support in the general election Republican members who had voted for Waxman Markey. They upheld their end of the bargain in approaching the vote like Wheeler.
More of a nitpick but I don't think the Australian Liberal Party is any better than the GOP on this.
I feel like it's a really unnatural alignment. I'm a native of Iowa, which should elect fairly green politicians--it's a national leader in wind and biofuels and does not produce many fossil fuels (though it does grow corn for ethanol). There's no good electoral reason why Chuck Grassley should be hostile to green energy stuff.
This post was so good, it got me to pay for a subscription. Free previews work!
I’ll never forget my local chapter of Sunrise working hard to try and unseat our State Senator, who has been excellent on climate, with their preferred candidate who was objectively worse on climate issues, but was to the incumbent’s left on some other issues. They’re just fundamentally unserious as an environmental group and I wish the media would stop paying attention to them and start paying attention to groups actually trying to make a difference about climate change.
My suspicion is that some of these groups are either getting funded very discreetly by right-wing interests (e.g. oil companies) and/or some of them have been infiltrated - either by disguised Rs (a real thing happening), or by activists for other causes seizing a platform to push their actual issues using climate policy money.
elm
there's also just baseline stupidity, and trying to prove your activist bona fides to your innamorato/a
Wow…love this. The anti-nuclear greens are insane. I can vaguely understand how the greens can be against geoengineering, but against carbon capture? Are you kidding me? Just insane.
A former member of extinction rebellion Zion Lights is now a pro-nuclear activist. It’s really interesting to listen to her talk about how she changed her mind
Not necessarily insane, just very mistrustful of capitalist/industrial solutions to problems, and that mistrust is...*checks record of capitalist/industrial solutions to society's problems*...entirely justified. Climate change is the unintended consequence of large scale, industrial burning of hydrocarbon fuel for energy, which was the solution for the previous problem.
And it created the greatest and fastest advancement in human welfare the world has ever seen. Let's only hope the next one is as successful.
Just to add a bit so my reply doesn't seem too much like twitter, there are a number of attempts out there of a counterfactual history without fossil fuels, e.g.,
https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
Wood and other biomass can be a decent source of energy (not quite as dense though) but can't scale up enough to meet the demands of the industrial revolution, let alone now. So it's not that we would have completely stagnated necessarily, but growth would have been dramatically slower.
I'm not saying the folks who are opposed to technological solutions to climate change are correct - just that their suspicion is not entirely without merit, and that rolling out a big change to fix a big problem warrants an amount of care that has so far not been in evidence. Hand-waving the externalities has not worked out well for us so far.
I get your point if you mean something like geoengineering. But if not technology broadly speaking, the only solution is deindustrialization, no?
I personally think that technology is going to be an important part of the solution to climate change, and would just argue that if that technology gets deployed with the same lack of humility that went into wrecking the place, I'd be surprised if we end up better off in the long run.
Possibly with the right energy sources and legal framework, re-industrialization would be part of the solution too; maybe smaller, more local firms, farms, and factories would limit risk, and employ more people to boot.
I see what you’re saying, but I think ‘mistrust’ of various entities taken as responsible is just a cop-out, a way to avoid actually responding to arguments or evaluating evidence. Once you go down the road of suspicion and mistrust, you’re one step away from just picking and choosing what to believe based on one’s own preexisting beliefs. Do these mistrustful individuals believe in global warming? Then they trust climate scientists, presumably. But they don’t trust other scientists who propose various solutions? Look, as Matt has said, the solution isn’t to blindly believe ‘experts’ but should be to believe what makes sense based on one’s own reading of the evidence. Opposing the removal of CO2 to prevent CO2-caused warming just doesn’t make sense.
I don't think we're getting rid of the industrial capitalist system anytime soon, so it's our only hope for a solution
Hm...we're not going back to pre-industrial technology anytime soon, but if the robots running on green energy take all the hard work away maybe we'll get to post-industrial, and then we can get on to fixing the problems caused by that solution. Hope they're easier than the prior problems, but we'll see.
Also, I think it's important to draw a distinction between free-market and capitalist.
I think "environmental organizations themselves don’t consistently prioritize [climate change]" is putting it too kindly. The principle behind the environmental justice movement is fairly incompatible with treating climate change as a crisis: the idea in EJ is "we can't solve this unless we solve every other hard problem first". We can't do reforestation unless it doesn't displace current tenants of reforested land; we can't do electric vehicles unless the lithium ion battery industry is morally pure as the driven snow; we can't nominate the single best policymaker on climate to head the EPA because she maximized for emissions reductions instead of social equity; we can't do urban density unless everyone gets to live next to a tree – all leading up to the thrilling thesis statement, "we can't solve the climate crisis unless we first abolish capitalism", in which case we're all fucked.
There is a steelman case for EJ, though (and I'm not just saying that because many/maybe a majority of the policy jobs I'm currently applying for ask for experience with EJ or at least mention it in the listing, though that is in fact the case). For one thing, they have a point about the reforestation thing, where the benefits are more tenuous than on nuclear or lithium ion batteries. For another thing, an EJ framework – using the already-in-place concept of "environmental issues" as a whole – theoretically stands a chance of getting working class voters of color engaged in prioritizing the environment, if voters can see that activists care about addressing issues like air and water pollution that are primarily local and have obvious racially inequitable effects. This is kind of a racial-justice-left phrasing of the "blue-green alliance", and the rationale behind the Green New Deal.
But I don't think those coalition-building predictions have really been borne out at the federal level, as this post basically shows. As concerns priorities, of course we should be addressing air and water pollution with an eye towards reducing racial inequities AND addressing the climate crisis; I think any state with a Democratic majority can basically do both, and anywhere without one basically can't do either except for some investment in wind and solar. And we don't have time to do deep canvassing on everyone in the country and have a heart-to-heart about why they should care about climate change even more than healthcare; we certainly don't have time to end capitalism before we act. And the infuriating part is because the climate crisis ITSELF has racially and economically inequitable effects, maximizing for emissions reductions in the wealthy west IS the most equitable policy! Gaaaaaah.
I can see the logic to the EJ theory of trying to broaden the appeal of environmental policy, but it feels like it's gotten caught up in the LatinX problem where they align themselves with ideological activists and academics who aren't really representative of the larger community.
In theory, it should be directly connected to real people's concerns – "a huge percent of our neighbors develop asthma after living here for a while" / "we constantly need to fight the utility to give us water that isn't brown and oily" / "why are they building another factory that causes toxic runoffs right next to our school" are really immediate issues that you don't need an ideological lens to feel outraged about.
Yeah! Or working to make sure that people currently employed by the fossil fuels industry would have options installing solar panels or whatever.
You probably do need to lash "thing people want" to emissions reduction policy to succeed, the problem is that the American political system is so laden with local veto points that there's no issue so universally popular and high salience that it can produce an unbreakable national majority.
This then means green groups aren't disciplined about what they want allowing them to adopt parochial views. This is how you get from where they started to sunrise saying stopping gentrification in park slope is climate. It's also more psychically nourishing for the activist, as for them its peanut butter in their chocolate.
It's the funhouse mirror of Republicans madness, where if the system is sufficiently tilted against your views you're not playing with live ammo so then do whatever.
And it’s always seemed to me that climate change works a lot like exercise. Any amount of exercise provides a health benefit so 5 min > 0 min. Even if you go sit on the couch for the rest of the day it doesn’t negate the benefits of your 5 minutes exercise. With climate any amount of carbon not emitted or captured is 1 less ton we have to deal with later even if we don’t hit our warming targets. That’s the opposite of a problem that must be solved all at once. Doing anything is always better than doing nothing. But you probably know more about it than me so I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Well, the thing about the 5 minutes of exercise is that some people use it to justify eating a bowl of ice cream, and the costs of that might outweigh the benefits of the 5 minutes of exercise. It's the same with climate change where you have to make sure that people don't use one virtuous act (e.g. riding public transit, skipping meat for a meal) to justify something that has a much larger emissions cost.
I pretty much agree! With the caveat that I’m sure there are people in this comments section who know a lot more than I do. But yeah, any action on climate is good, even if we should keep pushing for more.
Regarding legislative dynamics, doesn't the fact that the climate change left is angrily attacking Biden improve the chances of a bipartisan bill? Getting ten Republican votes in the Senate was always going to be a struggle; but it seems to me it would be even a bigger struggle if the hard left was uncorking Champagne bottles in their glee at the awesome progressiveness of the proposal.
I agree that uncorking champagne would be counterproductive. But I don't think that shitting on the bill is productive either. It would be better to just be talking about stuff they want to do in future bills.
The problem with having an “activist class” entrenched in an increasing number of paid sinecures at non-profits is that they’re no longer there out of genuine belief, but because their bread is buttered in some way.
When that’s the case, the answer is NEVER “shut up and do nothing”, not for even a single day, because they need to justify their existence.
And it’s always easy to round up some well-meaning folks to astroturf actions that are taken out of self-interest.
Hard to say.
It seems that the 0.01% now realizes even their privileges will erode rapidly if we don’t pump the breaks on climate change, which is why we finally see real movement in markets and investment priorities.
That needs to be backstopped by large-scale government intervention if we’re to avoid destroying the tropics, but might be enough on its own to preserve technological civilization in the temperate zones.
These same people who are actually starting to move and make markets also fund the activist class. How their priorities haven't translated to the non-profits, whose purported raison d'être is solving this problem, is beyond me.
If I were spending ten million a year on advocacy for this, I’d have everyone who signed off on these protests fired and blacklisted, because they’re clearly too stupid to be involved, let alone lead.
Agreed. Not saying protests are bad, but these protests were bad.
Protests were not the right tool here, but when you have idiots with hammers in charge everything gets treated like a nail.
Well then I guess I stand corrected. I was thinking maybe hard-left opposition might make the optics of supporting Biden more palatable to people like Mitt Romney or Susan Collins.
The dynamic reaches to the point of being counterproductive when they are pressuring Democratic Senators to come out against the deal entirely, putting at risk that the package only needs 10 Republican votes. Either they need more than 10 Republican votes, and that pushes the deal further to the right, or Biden is able to pressure Democratic Senators who have come out strongly against the deal to flip, and it feeds into the narrative that Democrats are stabbing environmentalists in the back.
I don't think very many Democratic Senators fear this crowd, at least not to the point they'd strike a very serious blow against a Democratic President. But I guess we'll soon find out.
I mean, the outside groups are tracking which Senators are critical of the deal, and framing it as Democratic Senators who are going to vote no. https://www.evergreenaction.com/blog/no-climate-no-deal
And this is supposedly the hard nosed, serious thinking groups founded by former Inslee staffers.
Big (in the weeds) test is at Wednesday’s energy committee markup: Hirono, Sanders, Heinrich and others who’ve signaled on this front will need to decide if they’re voting for or against..
Is there a Democratic Senator who might flip for this reason? Sanders would be my main worry here, and possibly Feinstein (despite her not actually being particularly left).
I think with Sanders (or any of his ilk) they'll definitely vote to pass a bipartisan bill IF they're confident they can keep Sinema/Manchin on board for a reconciliation bill. Also, there's the added assurance/protection provided by Nancy Pelosi. I'm skeptical it'll actually come to this, but she has vowed not to vote on a stand alone bipartisan bill before a reconciliation bill is passed by the Senate.
And beyond the Senate, things are going to get extremely dicey on the house side. This definitely doesn’t help in that regard - silence was the best option so various sides could at least feel “ok” and have some cover.
Silence or "grumpy statements" would have been vastly better. "This is a small step that needs to be followed up with more action."
Groups like Sunrise are not climate advocacy groups, they are Leftist agitprop organizations that sometimes talk about climate issues. Climate just happens to be an issue the left cares about in this country do they have to make noise.
Real question for you: beyond the Very Online, how much play do these groups get in coverage?
I didn't know about the protest until you wrote about it. My primary front pages are NYTimes and NPR, and I didn't see any coverage of the protest either. You're a DC guy, and much more active on twitter, so did this get play locally/in the tweets? I just wonder if this is getting less play beyond the Very Online bubble than within it. In my (much Less Online) life, these climate left groups don't get much attention, other than some brief mentions in the Times and concern trolling on the right. Could just be me though.
Not what you were asking, but in policy circles and politics they get a lot of “coverage” - trade journals, direct contact, sending out their letters, etc.
Much like a Twitter bubble, I think it’s easier for policy makers to confuse the groups with the “real world”.
Noah Smith in his Substack today posits that China is the real enemy, not just geopolitically but also on climate control issues. China is extremely hesitant to sign on to any deal that could impact their economic growth. Smith says that the US is not the bad guy here as China is the aggressive party in any trade negotiations.
Maybe? I think it is hard to actually know what goes on in trade negotiations.
One thing I said in One Billion Americans is that I think the United States has a credibility problem here. We are clearly intending to continue to be the world's hegemonic power indefinitely -- that's the stated policy of the United States. And we have one third of China's population. So the only way to achieve that is for China to stay poor. So to a Chinese official, anything we say across a negotiating table is going to look like "aha, this is America's plot to keep China poor."
Now I know that's probably not actually what American negotiators are thinking. But we can't assume the Chinese understand us as well as we do, or that we necessarily understand them.
Not that it changes the point but I think the US population is a bit less than a quarter of China's. 332 Million to 1,398 million.
At this point I’m unsure that America needs to “plot” to keep China poor, or at least middle-income.
They’ve made some grave missteps recently, and there’s an increasing unwillingness to reform in any way that might disrupt employment, even as the workforce shrinks and physical infrastructure needs go into decline.
The CCP probably can’t carry the economic transition they started through to a successful soft landing. In fact, I have my doubts over whether any potential government can do so without getting strung up before major reforms come to fruition.
Why limit this argument to just China? If America expects to continue to use a vastly disproportionate percentage of the world's resources and anybody else who thinks competing for these resources to achieve your lifestyle is the enemy then we are all your enemies.
We can just become four time richer.
In general I'm a Smith fan. But I find on China he's a bit hawkish for my tastes. Given that country's massive disadvantage in wealth, income and living standards vis-à-vis the West, China possess a non-trivial degree of standing in my view to insist that rich countries be the prime movers on climate change. But despite all this, Chinese leadership (as awful as it is in so many areas) is at least as enlightened as America's on the subject of decarbonization. They're spending eyes-watering amounts on new nuclear power plants. And solar plants. And wind power. They're putting obscene sums into EVs (forgetting getting a license plate in Beijing now if your vehicle isn't electricity-powered). Chinese supermarkets are, like 80 degrees inside in July. Chinese houses often don't get above 65 degrees in winter. In China escalators slow to a crawl when no one is on them (I still haven't seen this in the US). In China, lighting in public areas is nearly always motion-sensitive. And so on.
Chinese people use a lot less energy than Americans and their government is deadly serious about transitioning to a decarbonized future (although sure, they're not willing to take a massive hit on living standards to get there).
I've seen intermittent escalators several places and they take some getting used to since you initially assume they are broken (an assumption justifiable for any regular user of the DC Metro). Pretty sure they are now mandatory for new construction but the installed base of standard escalators is so huge that it will take a long time for them to become common. Which is an advantage developing economies have over established ones and way Asian megacities look so sparkling and new. Because they are.
I'm glad to hear the US is implementing such a no-brainer energy saving technology. Maybe I'll see an example on my next trip home. In fairness, I didn't hit up many shopping malls when I was in the States during 2020. So perhaps it's become a bit more widespread than I'd imagined.
China has much lower CO2 per capita than the US, but higher than some European countries that have higher GDP per capita, so I would say their performance is probably just OK.
Except US emissions actually went down
China doesn't seem that amazing when you look at CO2 per capita vs GDP per capita either:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp
...just average, really.
At the same time, and they have every right to from an energy security standpoint, China is building about 75GW of new coal capacity right now…. About 5 times more than the rest of the world combined (and clearly the opposite of the west’s rapid decarbonification via decommissioning coal plants).
China's big! So sure, anything they do (or don't do adequately) has an outsized effect. Still, Americans use about three times more energy than Chinese people do. It's a tough problem, and it makes it awfully difficult to lecture them. I honestly think big-picture wise, China's doing a creditable job building their decarbonized sector (in recent years China has been bringing a new nuclear plant on line every 90 days), although given the country's massive size and (still) rather undeveloped economy, they're sadly not going to be in a position to completely eschew an increase in fossil fuel use.
Economically, they actually are. They could stop building new coal plants AND start gradually reducing active time at existing ones without harming grid reliability at all.
Socially, the immense number of jobs wrapped up the SOE-dominated power generation and power construction sectors makes it impossible to move quickly on the issue.
It’s the same fundamental issue that has them shifting growth in credit overseas/off-books via the BRI to prop up construction employment in materials, equipment, and site operations.
It’s always amusing to watch Western media refer to BRI as a foreign policy initiative. It’s not, at all. It’s an attempt to avoid major disruption to employment structures and attendant damage to 维稳 (social stability maintenance).
What is "SOE" and "BRI"? (in before telling me to google... I came here to lead, not to read)
Sorry.
State owned enterprise
And
Belt and Road Initiative
Well maybe Americans can't lecture them. Could, say, the French?
5/8th the CO2 emissions per capita and 2.5x the GDP per capita (PPP).
That was the weakest part of a really, really weak Noah Smith article. Note that he has to go back to 2009 to find an example of serious Chinese climate obstructionism. Chinese manufacturing (and a lot of German subsidies) drove solar prices down by like 90% over the past decade. It's true that their coal plants are still expanding by more than anyone should be comfortable with, but China has done vastly more on climate than the US has. The "China is a bad climate actor" is a decade stale argument in my view, and Smith should know better than to trot it out.
A tax on net emissions need not have a big impact on growth; that depends on whether the deadweight loss of the tax and complimentary policies and taxes falls on consumption or investment.
As a high energy user, they are competition for fossil fuels. As a low energy producer, they will want to cooperate in our goals of producing a lot of renewable energy sources.
Can’t decide if “get a grip” breaks your rule about not needing a recap/conclusion on an article and instead just ending it.
Probably should have just ended it
The post-Vox explainer:
"Fuck you," he explained.
The best description I've seen of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - it is not tell you *to* shut up, but explaining to you *that* "shut up".
Now, *that* is funny.
One hard thing about climate change is that for most it has characteristics of a religious faith - you're told to trust the authorities on a matter about which you do not have, and cannot have, any direct personal knowledge. The authorities say if you do or don't do certain things now, bad or good things will happen later, probably after you're dead, but maybe even in this lifetime.
As a lot of American preachers and TV evangelists know, trying to convert people by threatening hellfire and brimstone is less successful than by promising prosperity.
That would counsel selling climate change policies as the smart strategy to position the United States as a market leader in what will be the most in-demand technologies of coming decades - the prosperity gospel version, not hellfire and brimstone. And lean into the competition-with-China angle, not away from it, as a way for us to come out ahead of them.
Taking the saul griffith energy abundance pill
“Democrat elites are convinced (rightly) that the mass public is too short-sighted and too parochial about climate change, and they are trying to drive the pace of change ahead of what pure popularism would suggest”
Democratic elites aren’t making many personal sacrifices. They continue to fly on airplanes and go on carbon intensive vacations. Al Gore had a 20,000 square foot house with a huge carbon foot print. How many Democratic elites live in a one bedroom apartment to keep their footprint small? Only poor ones. Bernie has three residences and has flown millions of miles.
Democratic elites support carbon pricing for very selfish reasons— they have enough disposable income to maintain their lifestyles even if flights and utility bills cost more. Conversely, these measures would force poorer people to actually cut back on travel, bump up the thermostat and car pool.
If Democratic elites were serious about climate change, they would support carbon rationing— a cap on individual/family carbon emissions that the rich can’t buy out of. Needless to say, there isn’t much elite support for rationing because there isn’t much elite willingness to make personal sacrifices for climate goals. They want the invisible hand of the market to force others to sacrifice while they feel good about buying green energy stocks.
Elite opinion is only more “progressive” on climate because it is more able to buy out of its proposed solutions.
I've never agreed with this take. "Personal sacrifice" is almost always inadequate for effecting change. The United States is home to a third of a billion souls and a $22 trillion economy. What is going to change things isn't Al Gore living like a pauper. What is going to change things is policy. I personally see no tension whatsoever between A) driving an air-conditioned Hummer on my way to the steakhouse, and B) pushing for the most far-reaching climate change policies possible (and working like heck to elect lawmakers who will bring this vision to fruition). Also, it looks increasingly unlikely in any event that the people are wiling to engage in meaningful "sacrifice" to achieve decarbonization. So I'm not sure what showy symbolism on the part of famous progressives is supposed to accomplish. In other words, more and more it appears we're going to have to get much, much more energy from non-carbon sources, as opposed to simply doing with a lot less energy.
Im not sure that elite sacrifice would be sufficient to inspire working class sacrifice, but elite sacrifice is definitely necessary for broader buy in.
I agree that the focus should be on electrification and adaptation. However, lots of climate advocates are against nuclear and view adaptation as defeatism, so the whole thing stinks of angst driven virtue signaling
Perhaps I am a fish swimming in the same water as Al Gore, but I’ve always wondered why the question of elite sacrifice is such a big deal to people. Something is either a good idea or it isn’t, or it’s somewhere in between. Americans seem to pay a lot of attention to what others are doing.
The lizard brain that guides our gut-level reactions to a lot of things runs a pretty rudimentary fairness algorithm, so if we see someone moralizing and being a hypocrite, the rhetorical force is lost. Theoretically, ideas should be evaluated independently of the presenter, and that may work good in philosophy class, but it works for shit out in the world.
A while back, my place of work moved my department from 'traditional' cubicles to open-office floor plan. Which was not popular, but, the management all the way up to VP-level was out on the floor with the rest of us, and that deflated a lot of criticism. There was nobody saying "Oh, if this is so great, why aren't *they* doing it?", because they were. And because they were, they could hear you complaining. ;)
But presumably Gore is campaigning for a carbon tax that he would pay if he continued to fly and heat a big home, not a carbon tax that he would be exempt from. Did management at your company move into open office *before* they moved everyone else to it, or only at the same time?
Presumably, agreed. The right-wing accusations of Gore as a hypocrite may be without merit, but unfortunately they have the desired effect among the folks who aren't willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
We all moved at the same time - my department was first; our director volunteered us (and herself) to be the guinea pigs. As other floors in the building were upgraded to newer furniture they took our constructive criticism seriously and made design improvements. Our floor ended up being pretty crowded by that original design; hopefully there's no major outbreak of airborne infectious diseases.
"Perhaps I am a fish swimming in the same water as Al Gore, but I’ve always wondered why the question of elite sacrifice is such a big deal to people."
It's the basis for the claim that somebody like Gore wants people to suffer for no reason, which is raw culture war material. Why Gore is important when he hasn't been active in politics in pretty much any way in more than a decade ... is a hint that some folks are pimping old Fox News memes.
elm
for reasons that are very environmentally unfriendly
Isn't Al Gore still important because he won a Nobel Prize 14 years ago and there hasn't really been a "face of the climate movement" to replace him in that time? Maybe Greta Thunberg now has that role?
Completely agreed. Framing climate issues as a matter of personal sacrifice is especially absurd when you take the developing world into account. I think it's an overwhelming moral imperative to develop climate-friendly technology to the point where everyone in the world can have AC, refrigerators, fast transportation, and everything else without impacting the climate--and if we get to that point then there's no reason the rich world should have to make sacrifices either.
More generally, telling people to make symbolic personal sacrifices without having a government coordinating everyone making the same sacrifice is completely unreasonable. I for one will never, ever do it, no matter how strongly I believe in the end goal, and I'm completely ethically comfortable with this.
Don't we always point out the hypocrisy of the "pro family values" people supporting the adulterous, boorish Trump? Does personal behavior and leading by example only matter when it's the other side?
Does it actually matter on *either* side? Is the left any happier with the non-hypocritical Rick Santorum than with the hypocritical Trump, and is the right any happier with the non-hypocritical Greta Thunberg than with the hypocritical Gore?
I mean, isn't the simple answer that the hypocrisy makes it really easy for the opposition to criticize you? I agree that our climate change politics cannot be built around demanding personal sacrifice from ordinary people, but if you're seen as the putative "leader" of a climate change movement it's not a good look to disregard the carbon impact of your own lifestyle.
But if we do it right there shouldn't be any credible charge of hypocrisy. The left (and pro-science center) shouldn't be hectoring people not to take flights or live in big houses or eat steaks. The left, rather, should be telling people: we shouldn't let China beat America to the decarbonized future, or, these awesome new electric vehicles might enable our grandkids not to live in Death Valley-like conditions, or, green energy jobs pay an average of 28 bucks an hours, or...
I see your point and I honestly find this to be a challenging question. Because while on the one hand it's appealing (and perhaps true) to say we can have the green energy future without any changes in lifestyle, it's also much, much easier to achieve it in the time we need if we change our energy consumption habits. So for those reasons I tend to favor a both/and approach where we encourage electric vehicle production and tout the benefits of wind and solar jobs in rural communities while also pushing for sensible reforms to urban infrastructure like dedicated bus lanes or congestion pricing in major cities.
It's also important to consider that there are other environmental problems we need to address besides climate change. It's smart politics at the federal level to decouple the one from the other, but we shouldn't totally ignore the fact that, for example, electric vehicle production still consumes massive amounts of scarce raw materials or that cattle ranching is just really environmentally destructive.
If Joe Biden or John Tester or whomever needs to add a layer of (literal) red meat to their climate message to get beneficial reforms passed, that makes sense. But I think moral activism around this issue is still important and necessary, and in that space it's really important for elite leaders to live out their message in a way that isn't blatantly hypocritical.
"it's also much, much easier to achieve it in the time we need if we change our energy consumption habits"
But it's actually not, if you take into account the human factor.
Has there ever in history been an example of people banding together at a large national level, let alone globally, to solve a collective action problem thorough voluntary individual sacrifice, when it wasn't in response to some obvious, imminent external threat, such as a war?
I mean, no?
All I mean when I say that it's "easier" is that, mathematically, it's easier to use less energy if you consume less of it. As I acknowledged above, I don't think it's politically viable to only take this approach because of the "human factor," but to the extent moral activism around this issue matters (which I think it does), then it's useful for activists to evaluate the moral consequences of their own actions.
"electric vehicle production still consumes massive amounts of scarce raw materials"
Rare earths aren't scarce - they are pretty common. To mine them profitably requires find locations of high density ... and then you have a problem of relatively small market demand reducing the profitability of large scale mining. Attempt to produce very large number of big car batteries and demand will grow and then rare earth mines at scale will be profitable and someone will build out production capacity.
Rare earth mines do have a pollution problem, and taking care of that also reduces profitability. So you need to subsidize production to get ahead of the demand curve, plus maybe outright paying for the anti-pollution controls.
Perfectly doable.
elm
you need to want to do it, and you'd need to then do it, of course
I agree with touting clean electrification, eco nationalism and good paying green jobs. There is broad center/left consensus for those things.
However, carbon taxes, cap and trade and the like are all aimed at making working stiffs change their lifestyle. And yet many elected Dems support carbon taxes.
You're conflating two different issues - reordering the distribution of wealth and good things in society; and reducing carbon emissions. Those issues aren't inherently linked.
If your priority is reducing carbon emissions, the only reason to link it to any other issue should be that the linkage makes reducing carbon emissions a politically easier sell, not a harder one.
Climate change has a social and economic context. The question “how much carbon should working stiffs get to consume” is both politically salient and physically important. Unless and until working stiffs are willing to reduce their emissions, only undemocratic governments will be able to blunt climate change.
Furthermore, this is fundamentally a coordination problem. Any individuals actions have a trivial effect upon climate. Reducing my carbon footprint does no good unless hundreds of millions of others buy in. Even a big state like New York has a trivial effect upon climate. Unless and until there is a global consensus, individual reductions are futile. Thus, elite selfishness really is antithetical to emissions curbs.
There is also the broader question of “how important is it to reduce emissions.”. My take is that cold still causes somewhat more human misery than heat, that there are vast uninhabited swaths of Siberia and Canada that would be verdant if the planet gets warmer, and that an increase of a few degrees is manageable. However, a 5-10 degree increase would be hard to manage, which is why we should invest in affordable solar, wind and nuclear and deploy them on an industrial scale.
I’ll believe the greens are serious when they learn to love hydro and nuclear, Until then, they are just engaging in a silly purity contest.
Agree the social and economic context is all-important. But I just don't it's realistic to think a global collective action problem like this will be solved by calling for individual sacrifice now, for distant gains to be realized years in the future by other people.
It's not going to happen that way. One, because humans don't respond to collective action problems by doing things that are good for the species but not themselves or their immediate community, without being forced to.
Second, as you note in point about the vast uninhabited areas of Canada and Siberia that will be more habitable in a warmer climate, this isn't in fact an existential crisis for humanity, and won't be for a long time if it ever is. It will be devastating for some people and work out well for others. In that way, climate change isn't so different than most other distributional issues people fight and argue about.
Elsewhere in the thread, you complain about carbon taxes because they disrupt the lifestyle of the working stiffs. However, those people are imposing a cost on people living in other countries.
It's all well and good to say that Siberia and Canada will become more inhabitable, but I suspect that you would be pretty upset if someone built a loud factory next to your home that employed lots of working class folks and told you that you could move someplace else that is much quieter.
I don't think that is his argument. His position seems to be a skeptical public will not view carbon emissions as the serious problem elites claim, if elites continue to live high GHG emissions lifestyles.
Climate actors engaging in symbolism isn't sufficient for change but it probably matters on the margin. A zero population growther with 4 kids will get less attention than one with 2.
Does every family get the same ration? Asking for every farmer or anybody who lives in a northern climate and doesn't want to freeze to death when their ration expires in midwinter. This is just my way of pointing out how goofy the carbon ration is.
"If Democratic elites were serious about climate change, they would support carbon rationing— a cap on individual/family carbon emissions that the rich can’t buy out of. "
Hah. Classic fossil fuel astroturfing - 'If Democratic elites were serious' they'd support the thing the oil company execs proposes and the public deeply opposes so that the whole thing blows up and nothing is ever done that reduces fossil fuel profits.
The Al Gore take from 2006 (or is it 2003?) is kind of a giveaway of where this comment is originating.
elm
matthew, we have us a live one here
Which fossil fuel execs support rationing? MY wrote last week that Exxon supports a carbon tax, for the types of cynical reasons you suggest.
I’m quite aware that rationing will never pass, nor do I support it. I do think that elite support for carbon taxes in lieu of rationing is revealing because it shows that they want working stiffs to take the lifestyle hit.
During World War Two, elites could have ensured adequate supplies for soldiers through a food tax. They chose rationing because they didn’t want the most vulnerable to take the nutritional hit, they wanted to ensure that everyone got a basic diet and to put the economy on a war footing by reducing culinary luxury. Today’s elites say that global warming is an existential threat but sure don’t act like it.