It's worth highlighting that gas supplies in the Northeast are so low relative to demand that gas-fired power plants cannot be used in the coldest part of winter. So on cold days, the supply of electricity shifts towards oil, which is much dirtier. (See the ISO graphs below).
This factor, combined with retiring Indian Point and Vermont Yankee, have pushed electricity prices up dramatically - and this, in turn, makes it unattractive to switch from oil heat to heat pumps. (MA this winter started heavily subsidizing electric heat in an attempt to make it more economically attractive.)
You need to be careful about lumping the Northeast and New England into one bucket. The pipeline constraints in New England are much larger and the problem is bigger than in the rest of the northeast, where we're mostly just talking about smallish local bottlenecks like the one Matt's pipeline is proposing to fix in NYC.
Also, one key challenge with the pipeline capacity problem is that the overall economics of building more pipeline capacity into New England are terrible. Current pipeline capacity is only exceeded on a handful of days per year at most, so the new pipeline would end up seeing about 5% average utilization.
My sense is that other sources of new capacity would likely be much cheaper for New England. One big issue is that NIMBYs have been successful in blocking transmission lines from Canada that were supposed to bring gigawatts of flexible hydro down. Also, offshore wind, while expensive, would have helped a lot with winter capacity since it's much less variable than onshore wind (generally 60% capacity factor, higher in winter). The NIMBYs and now Trump have been hugely successful in stymying those projects. If the transmission and offshore wind hadn't been blocked by NIMBYs (and Trump) things wouldn't be looking nearly as bleak as they are now for New England electricity prices.
One other huge problem with getting a pipeline built into New England is how it'll get paid for. Gas utilities serving heating customers use fixed/guaranteed pipeline delivery contracts and there's plenty of pipeline capacity for them to get all the secured delivery they need. So they're not going to pay for extra capacity.
Gas power generators generally don't use fixed gas delivery contracts. Instead they buy most of their gas on the spot market and pay whatever the market wants, or just choose not to run during the limited peaks if they don't think the power prices would support paying the high spot prices for gas. Basically, their model is to just pass gas costs along to electricity users in their electricity offer prices.
Getting a pipeline built (and financed) would require enough fixed offtake contracts to convince lenders that there's enough guaranteed cash flow from the pipeline to pay for the debt. Since there isn't enough demand for long term offtake contracts, states would have to get involved to make the pipeline finance work. The main proposals have involved the New England states banding together and they themselves signing offtake agreements with the pipeline developers and rate-basing the cost of these agreements into electricity bills. This is very risky because if states can't resell all the capacity they bought to gas generators, electricity ratepayers end up paying for lots of unneeded gas delivery contracts. For example, if the transmission lines from Canada and lots of offshore wind eventually do get built in the future, electricity ratepayers end up forced to pay for pipeline capacity that goes unused. Another problem with this approach is that if any states don't participate, they'd still get the benefit of the extra supply on the grid (and thus lower prices) without paying for it. So there's a huge incentive for states to not sign onto the project and just free-ride.
None of these issues are of relevance to granting permission to build or not. If it does not make commercial sense it wond get built, permissionor no permission,
Sure, but the problem for New England is that unless states pony up with promises of firm commitments for offtake, which they haven't done yet, there's no one out there who can/will formally ask for the permission that's needed.
IMO, this whole thing is basically just a huge political quagmire and in a way is a smaller version of the same problem that's preventing new nuclear from getting built, especially in states with deregulated electricity markets.
In the pipeline case, the risk is about long term utilization rates which are highly uncertain. In the nuclear case, the risk is about construction cost overruns. In both cases, unless those risks can get pushed onto ratepayers or taxpayers by the government, the projects will have a tough time getting built by just market forces.
I think so. I know recently in MA, they forced the state's gas utilities to sign offtake agreements with an LNG terminal in Everett that was going to close because no one wanted to sign firm offtake agreements needed to keep the plant open.
This was a controversial and I think completely unprecedented deal because the LNG is only needed/used for electricity generation and isn't needed to supply gas customers (since they have reserved pipeline capacity).
So in the end, MA gas customers are being forced to pay for capacity guarantees that will be used for power generation. The guarantees add something like 3% to gas bills, so I guess it wasn't seen as that big of a deal even though it's a pretty big cross subsidy and I think totally unprecedented.
See my other comment. There actually isn't a firm that wants to built it without the states stepping in and signing firm above-market offtake agreements on behalf of their electricity customers.
Gas generators don't want to hold the risk of long term fixed gas delivery contracts and they won't sign. The pipeline only gets built if states intervene to push the long term risks onto electricity ratepayers through an out of market mechanism.
I wish climate people would take electricity prices seriously, IMO by far the largest drag on getting people to switch to heat pumps is the fact that electricity prices have been going up like crazy (not sure if this is a renewables issue or other factors, in California it’s mostly the liability situation wrt wildfires).
The cost-benefit math for switching from propane or oil heat to heat pumps is usually workable in most places (although MA has crazy high electricity costs which don't help). The math for gas to heat pump conversions is a whole other thing though, especially in places where shale gas keeps gas prices so low like the northeast and where electricity costs are much higher than average.
Here's a handy table that shows operating costs for each heat source in NH (compare $/MBTU for each source)
Just as an aside--thank you for this link! We're just starting to crank up the heat here in southern NH and I never know whether to prioritize the minisplits (not really warm enough but easy, responsive) or fire up the heating oil boiler (really warm but sluggish to respond). At least now I know the electric is a little cheaper.
Keep in mind those numbers assume your heat pump is running at a COP or efficiency level of 2.5. This is a reasonable assumption for an average year round (or seasonal) COP for a modern heat pump in NH. It means for every kwh of electricity your heat pump uses it moves 2.5 kwhs of heat into your house. But heat pump efficiency is temperature (and model) dependent, so if you're making a real-time decision you need to consider the current outside temperature.
Below is a link with a chart on the right that shows the COP at various temps for a common Mitsubishi heat pump. That unit's COP is 4.0 at 47F, 2.5 at 17F, and 2.2 at 5F. So its $/MBTU is $17 at 47F, around $26 at 17F, and around $31 at 5F.
How old are the minisplits? I put in a new Daikin system last year and it's amazingly toasty even down well below freezing. (Please tell me NH is not that cold yet, I'm getting PTSD from my childhood.)
Are ground-source heat pumps common in NH? They're getting installed in some new builds in Wisconsin, but the water table in WI is like 20 feet down so GSHP install costs are a bit controlled.
It's used some, but they're not that common, especially now that cold climate air source models have gotten so capable.
Part of it might be that we have lots of granite and usually need to use drilled wells for the heat transfer loop instead of just digging cheaper trenches.
I'm guessing you're joking, but seriously - wood heating is really really dirty in terms of particulate matter.
I'm in a rural subdivision and just a couple of homes in the neighborhood use wood stoves regularly. When they're going strong, the air quality in the neighborhood goes to hell pretty quickly.
Sure, it smells nice and homey when you first step outside. Then later you see your indoor air quality monitor reporting much higher than average PM 2.5 numbers and wonder what it's doing to your lungs day after day.
I was mostly joking, along the lines of "what's viable in NH is not really viable for the rest of the country." But also I grew up in VT (near the NH border) and *in that region with its low density of population* wood is amazingly cheap and efficient.
MA is (or let's be honest, was, before Trump) building a ton of new offshore wind. At least 2GW, with room for a lot more in the pipeline. Connecticut has 704 MW under construction. New York has 9,000MW planned by 2035. It's really important that we differentiate short term crunches from *long term building strategy.*
Or let me put it another way: if this was a discussion about building a huge number of new highways to supply low-density exurbs *during a short-term housing crunch*, would a YIMBY writer like Matt Y. be so supportive? Or would he correctly point out that this kind of infrastructure tackles a short term housing problem by locking in decades of long-term bad housing policy?
Did you mean 704 GW? That's over half of total US production. I'm seeing 1.2 GW of procurement and I don't know if that's realistically getting built anytime soon. There's a mandate for 4 GW by 2030, but again, is that actually going to pencil out?
I would pose the same question back, is it politically expedient for climate supporters to get back control of the federal government now or to have this one pipeline canceled? Will the act of Democratic House/Senate Leadership saying no to a pipeline put Congressional seats at risk in 2026? Should climate supporters plug their nose and say yes so they can obtain the keys to bringing renewable energy online in ways that the current admin has removed/restricted?
No, I definitely meant MW. I edited the post. Here's a list of what's built and what's under construction across the whole east coast:
1. Block Island (RI) – 30 MW.
2. South Fork Wind (NY) – 132 MW, fully operational since Mar 14, 2024.
3. Vineyard Wind 1 (MA) – ~half the 806 MW project sending power as of Oct 2025 (≥30 turbines online). Full COD targeted for late 2025.
4. Revolution Wind (RI/CT) – 704 MW; construction ~80% complete; August stop-work order later lifted; work resumed Sept 2025.
5. Sunrise Wind (NY) – 924 MW; construction underway, completion now expected 2026–27.
6. Empire Wind 1 (NY) – 810 MW; offshore construction halted by federal order in 2025 (onshore terminal work continues).
7. Ocean Wind 1 & 2, would have been another 2.25 GW (completion 2026, 2028), but both were canceled by Orsted due to supply chain shocks and interest rates, and then the renewals were blocked by Trump (ensuring that they can't be restarted.)
So about 560 MW operating now, and another 2.1GW or so under construction. Another near-term 2.25 GW could be added on top of that except for Trump (and still can be in the future, once Trump goes away or gets bought off.) All completion dates in the 2025-2028 range, so nothing really long-term or speculative, aside from Trump's nonsense.
This is all super-near term stuff. Still quite a bit of additional capacity we could build, so "by 2035" numbers should be quite a bit higher, assuming the policy environment doesn't prevent it.
ETA: I was focusing on the northeast, but there's an additional 2.6GW under construction in VA, aimed for completion in 2026.
I got that wrong and I'll update the post: they were cancelled in 2023 due to supply chain shocks and interest rate increases, but then Trump blocked renewal of the permits, preventing future development. So if energy prices rise and the projects become viable again, they won't be built.
But all that wind still needs off-peak generation. Utilities who would be buying the gas ought be abe to figure out what their futures gas needs will be. State permission to build does not oblige anyone to buy the gas. [The permitting process should, of course. ensure that the utilities were factoring in their decision the cost of the tax on net emissions (of the gas burned) that we do not have yet.]
Off peak generation does not mean large amounts of actual gas being imported or burned, though. With enough renewables and storage, gas generation could be as low as 10% of the electrical supply, which means a lot of our pipeline infrastructure (the subject of Matt's article) could actually be reduced rather than expanded.
Maybe so. What is the externality tht is preventing utilities from taking that into condideration if the willingness to but gas that a prospective pipeline commpany want to sell? What is the value added of the permission process?
I’d say approval processes have two purposes. First, someone needs to dig a huge damn trench across the countryside and fill it with high-pressure methane, so there had better be some approval processes in place for that project.
But second, regional utilities and regulators need to make huge long-term decisions about investment, involving tax subsidies and long-term PPAs. If you decide to invest in (for example) a new multi-billion dollar nuclear plant, you need to make sure your ratepayers will pay for those costs. If you just toss this problem to the free market, you can end up with a market that has huge supply problems or that is temporarily cheap and can’t support long-term investments, but then explodes in price when conditions change (think Texas having blackouts during an ice storm because nobody forced plants to winterize, or cheap gas preventing long-term investment but then prices surging a few years down the line when gas isn’t cheap anymore.) In this case regulators are making long-term investments into a renewable grid, but those long-term investments are pretty easy to undermine if people bypass the long-term planning and start making short-term hacks.
Sorry, I meant about the issue of gas use and net CO2 emissions. As Iread the news reports the pipeline safety issues were just cover. If this is not an emissions issue, then my post was based on a falty understanding.
Even there, however, the reporting was faltly in that it did not discuss the present value of the hazards avoided compared to benefits.
On rates, I don’t really unerstnd how that issue works except that the pipeline approval process looks to an outsider like a rounabout way of making rate decisions.
For all the justified criticicim made of "environmental" groups for failing to promote the lowest cost policies to reduce net CO2 emissions, the MSM, the NYT being the most MS of all, fail to raise the issue either. When researching this post [ https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-decision-making-1] I noticed that the coverage never mentioned how much mor or less CO2 would go into the atomosphere as a result of a decision one way or the othere and at what cost cost or benefit. It DID mention the politics of the decision, but not the costs and benefits. That's just bad journalism.
The publishers and writers at Christianity Today magazine don't spend much time discussing or debating the foundational beliefs of their religion. The NYT is not much different.
I would describe the foundational belief to be "if someone cites climate change as a reason for something, then it is good and true." Like how a very devout catholic might react to something their priest or bishop might say.
I think this is the combination of (1) the journalistic practice of quoting advocates to illustrate the pros and cons and (2) the phenomenon Matt writes about here that the advocates on this issue don’t do this analysis to make their case.
See also immigration policy where the views of the immigration lawyer community anchor one side of the coverage. So you get lots of process arguments rather than accounting of the projected effects of a policy on immigration levels.
I think this is related to the fact that journalists, like Wikipedia editors, are expected not to do any original research, and to just pass on the words of “reputable sources” for Wikipedia and “the disputants” in the case of news.
Hm. There's nothing stopping the NYT from calling up a professor of economics or civil engineering or geophysics at NYU (or really, anywhere) and asking "What do you think the environmental impacts of this pipeline will be?" I don't think that counts as "original research" in the journalistic sense (it certainly wouldn't be WP:OR), and news stories used to add context like that. Now, maybe NYT actually couldn't find an academic willing to speculate. But I doubt it.
You're right, but they hardly ever do that on any issue because they think it's too boring and not "newsy." The typical newspaper reporter has a template in mind for how these stories are supposed to be written, because that's how they've always been taught to do it by their editors. The people you get quotes from are the people whose job it is to give you quotes. Sometimes those people have real expertise but if so it's a coincidence.
It isn't just politics reporters, it's everybody. Sports journalism was like this for decades and has only recently changed. You get some mostly-substance-less quotes from team officials, and if you wanted to do "analysis," you'd get some anonymous quotes from scouts around the league. You'd never do any real statistical analysis or interview anyone who knew how to do it. Now some scouts do have real expertise in talent evaluation so it's not like every quote would be worthless, but little effort would be put in to finding out what the majority viewpoint among scouts was, or which scouts were right about the issue in question. You'd just have a handful of quotable scouts in your rolodex and you'd quote one who gave one opinion and quote another one who gave the opposite opinion and that would be that.
Sports journalism is usually so dire. I can count the number of insightful comments I've heard from after-the-game interviews of athletes and coaches on one hand.
I don't really think its fair to criticize journalists for not raising this issue. Not all journalism needs to be opinion journalism. Its okay just to report that politicians are considering blocking a pipeline.
If journalists shouldn't be highlighting releveant considerations for the stories they report on then what exactly are they doing? Might as well just allow the politicians to put out a press release and reprint it verbatim at that point.
I would buy that argument if NYT coverage of RFK Jr and vaccines had a similar “he said, she said” content. However, in that case, they do point out usually that there are no good studies showing a link between vaccines and autism. If you include the technical argument in one case, why not in the other?
I mean at least one reason is that there is well-established scientific literature on the link between vaccines and autism and there's very little scientific literature or, more realistically, modeling on the climate impacts of building a pipeline. As Matt says, we don't really know whether or not the pipeline will raise overall emissions one way or the other so journalistically it may make sense to ignore the question (though I think acknowledging the lack of modeling would be better). Not so with vaccines.
Matt says that we don’t really know, but also says why it’s hard to believe that emissions would rise. I would support mentioning this in the article “There are reasons to believe that this would actually reduce emissions (state here the reasons Matt uses), and opponents of the project don’t offer any model about how it could increase emissions.”.
Without a relevant factual analysis done by qualified individuals, I can understand the hesitance of a reporter to include a verdict or even really analysis of the question in the context of a story largely focused on the politics. I certainly think some sort of inclusion of language stating the factuality of the claims of "climate impacts" could not be verified, but not wanting to wade into further analysis of the climate impacts is understandable and in my opinion, the right call.
We don't know. It is totally fine for an opinion writer like Matt to weigh in with some analysis, and I find his analysis is pretty convincing. But a beat reporter? I think the better decision is to just say "the politicians provided no evidence to back up their claims of climate impacts" and move on with the story. Because again, we do not know.
But if MORE net CO2 emissions are doubtful, the project should just go ahead becasue a businessman thinks he can sell gas to people in the NE. Although it’s hard to see how gas does not displace other fossil fuels as ways of increasing power output. It basically makes solar and wind less costly untill storage and or CCS costs fall suffiently.
I think the way the style guide instructs reporters to write this is “NYC House Democrats claimed, without evidence, that the pipeline would increase emissions…”
If all that was done was he said she said it woud not be bad except as boring journalism. But you can’t read these accounts without seeing that the journalist just does not see that there is a cost benefit issue lying there as opposed to only a political issue.
The opposition to the pipeline is aesthetic and philosophical. Pipeline = “dirty fossil fuels”. Therefore, it must be opposed, even though gas will still be extracted and sold on the open market. New York will just have to pay higher prices as the gas is shipped elsewhere. It’s of a piece with the opposition to nuclear power. Nuclear power was associated by the left with nuclear weapons during the Cold War, long before climate change was an issue. I recall that the Sierra Club opposed nuclear power…in favor of coal. Even if you don’t want to build a new nuclear power plant in New York, Indian point was a perfectly good nuclear plant that was already built.
The fact that the anti-nuclear energy movement lasted so long into the climate change era with so little questioning is really quite astounding. Up until maybe two or three years ago the climate trade offs of campaigning against nuclear was like a verboten topic in political environmental circles.
I guess seeing what actually happened in Germany after Frau Merkel closed theirs made it too hard to ignore.
I am only anti nuclear when people say that we should be spending capital on projects with 15 year timelines instead of dispatching solar and wind technologies.
Basically, anti renewables people use “but nuclear” to argue against building new transmission and renewable infrastructure.
I think we should invest more in advanced geothermal. For nuclear we should expand the lifespan of our existing fleets and work on ways to bring on new capacity at the margins.
One big reason to do nuclear is precisely that environmentalists hate it.
A lot of people deny global warming and say we are just trying to use it as a phony theory to make America more European and socialist. If we loudly and proudly screw over the environmental movement with a massive buildout of nuclear, it sends a powerful message to the deniers that they are wrong and this is real.
I have had conversations with people who were conservative, skeptical of climate change and didn't like environmentalists and when I said I thought we needed more nuclear power, I became more credible in their minds. Nuclear was far more acceptable to them than solar.
To be honest about this whole thing, global warming is obviously a massive and real crisis but it was also grafted onto preexisting goals of the environmentalist movement, which contained a lot of people who felt that energy conservation is super-important and that humans are spoiling the planet. So it was and is their strong hope that global warming can be used to force humans to cut consumption, and not only did they never like nuclear plants to begin with, but if the solution includes a lot of nuclear, then it won't include as much (or any) cuts in cosumption.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have been the targets of a propaganda campaign by the fossil fuel industry that this is all a big hoax. And when they see environmentalist groups opposing nuclear, it confirms their priors that this is in fact a hoax, because it looks like environmentalists are just asserting global warming as a way to force us to conserve energy rather than treating it as a pull-out-all-stops environmental threat.
So the result is, to cut that Gordian Knot, you basically have to expand nuclear. It convinces the conservatives that we are seriously in fear of global warming and not just trying to force left-wing energy policies on the country, and it prevents environmentalists from trying to use global warming to pursue disastrous degrowth policies that would be bad for humanity and bad for liberals' electoral prospects.
Yeah, I was reading something about degrowth and back in the '70's it was the solution to rivers being so polluted that they caught fire. We fixed that without degrowth, so now we need degrowth to stop climate change even though we didn't need degrowth to fix the previous problem. It did help me understand why even some sensible people roll their eyes at the environmental movement.
Cuts in consumption were never realistic, but thanks to AI they are completely out the window now. Electric usage is going nowhere but up, exponentially. And it turns out renewables aren’t necessarily “green” in the sense that solar, at least, pits electric generation against plant growth in many places.
Well to be a bit tediously nitpicking - if cut in consumption = energy consumption only, that was on electrification not per se impossible (from simple fact that elec processes are signficantly more efficient than combustion).
I would also not allow that solar pits generation against plant growth as besides agri-voltaics pasturage is entirely actionable for ground mounted solar and beneficial (water loss avoidance, partial shading). not compatible with forestry but quite economically actionable for paturage and agrivoltiics for particularly direct-sun sensitive crops [as like high value ones like berries] (the latter seems to have interesting potential scaling for which it interests me professionally although early in development).
- of course one can do solar as if it needs a parking lot but that's more bone headedness than economics
However to refute my own nitpick - the Green enviro Left really wants/wanted cuts in human consumption period, outright degrowth.
and in any case exploding demand also means the grid upgrading that's been put off in developed markets for decades on flat / no net growth in elec demand is now no longer a pure RE driven fact.
One of the weaknesses in this article is failing to distinguish between shutting down existing energy infrastructure (generally bad, particularly for nuclear) and failing to build new energy infrastructure (it depends, even strictly from a costs perspective)
We should not be for or against any category of net zero CO2 emissions technology. Specidic decisions have to be made in a time and geopraphy context. We don’t know how fast the cost curves for each technology will fall.
My issue is there has been a rhetorical spike of people repeating narratives about renewables that sound like they are from 2006 and then claiming that nuclear is the solution. It’s a very particular narrative popular among contrarian and more conservative men/boys I have seen online that forgoes basic benefit-cost analysis.
They pretend there is capital scarcity when it is more of a question of timelines and permitting processes being bottlenecks.
I don't think I should support taxation to subsidize concentrated solar electricity generation (I generally agree with you, let cost benefit analysis do the work instead of tribal teams or mandates).
One issue here is that as technology matures, we need to phase out the subsidies. Twenty years ago, subsidies might be the only way to get much uptake of electric cars, but now, things are probably pretty different.
Something that I realized talking to older people in the nuclear industry rather late into the Obama administration is that they were really slow to realize that a lot of climate-focused professionals were becoming actively pro-nuclear. A lot of those old industry hands had come of age in the wake of the 1970's anti-nuclear movement and hadn't updated their cultural priors, so were slow to realize when their side was starting to win climate people over.
I appreciate this is not the way to do climate policy. But isn’t this really just NIMYism rather than climate policy. The NESE pipeline just drawing a lot of the same criticism that any pipeline near an urban area would? This just strikes me as more about people being pipeline phobic than a climate issue. My guess is very few constituents are calling in favor of the pipeline. So this is just politicians reacting to constituents.
This sort of banal local issue problems says less about climate or climate policy and more about how politics actually works. Much us Jared Golden and Gluzenkamp-Perez support tarrifs due to manufacturing and lumber legacies, city members of congress are going to oppose pipeline developments because it’s what their constituents want. I really don’t think this has much to do with the “groups” or UN climate targets and is more daily politics. I think reckoning with that is more meaningful.
Anyway, I just don’t think this example quite says what the article wants it to say. When you work for a members of congress you routinely side with constituents on local matters even if they’re dumb. As someone who worked for a vaunted moderate congressman I can assure you we supported idiotic local positions on development that might be cloaked as climate issues but were really just that something was very unpopular. Popularism is a hell of a drug.
It's both. Climate activists aren't (necessarily) stupid: they know their ambitions to obstruct energy abundance will find plenty of natural allies among affluent NIMBY homeowners. And the latter, of course, will pat themselves on the back as they tell themselves they're not really engaging in NIMBYism. No, they're trying to save the planet!
As someone in politics I just don’t think this is what is happening. Pipeline projects are just deeply unappealing to urban voters particularly in the the northeast. Positing some much more deep seated political dynamic is inaccurate. The letter barely touches on any of the issues Matt wants to debate on. Honestly, this screams local politicians support local residents concerns regarding unpopular local project — probably nothing more. This is just how politics works frequently; local electeds support local voters interests.
I’d love some city specific congressional district polling. Yes, I am familiar with the project. The idea that the ocean floor obviates it for voters doesn’t seem important. People frequently don’t like pipelines. I think the project is merited but I’m not a voter in those districts.
So we are assuming the green cabal made them all sign this paper against there voters demands for an oceanic people line through Brooklyn and queens? Again, this seems like an obvious response to constituents
I would love to read an analysis that sets climate and environment concerns aside (momentarily), assumes (assumes!) we have rational actors on all sides, and gets to:
1. National Grid is a regulated monopoly.
2. They are not allowed to increase profits by selling more gas to the same set of people or by raising rates.
3. The are paid at a rate of "total value of their assets" X some fixed percentage.
4. The _only_ way to increase profits is to increase "total value of their assets".
5. The only way to do that is to build new main lines/junctions whatever to hook up to new buildings.
6. They cant do that without more gas.
7. They want more pipelines -- which might be pretty good for everyone involved or might be uneven for everyone involved, and this is fairly technical.
So any proposal to do (7) raises competing technical analyses. National Grid says its critical, NRDC says you are just trying to increase your rate base. The incentives are all screwed up. So what needs to give?
Gas utilities can only increase profit by increasing their "rate-base" -- the value of installed assets. They recover the cost of those assets, via depreciation, over a period of 60 to 85 years. They also assume that the state and ratepayers will bail them out if current demand doesn't allow rates high enough to generate the desired profit. Given these assumptions, utilities have no motivation to even ask if their new assets will really be used until the next century. They only need to justify new assets today and can ignore the long-term economics.
It is important to realize that in many areas, the "delivery" charge for gas is higher than the charge for the gas itself. As gas demand declines, delivery charges must increase. In fact, because infrastructure costs are largely fixed and independent of demand, any decline in demand will result in an equivalent increase in cost-per-unit-delivered. (e.g. A 50% decline in demand requires a doubling of delivery-cost-per-unit.) This simple math sets up the dynamic for a "death-spiral." As we learn to use gas more efficiently, or replace its use with heat pumps, the decline in gas demand will drive up cost-per-unit. That increase in cost-per-unit will encourage additional efficiency of use and more rapid abandonment of gas. The feedback will force gas rates to skyrocket. Even if the gas commodity itself became free, we would still see a dramatic rise in gas rates due to the increased cost-per-unit for gas delivery.
Yeah I think it’s the flaw in “popularism” that Matt doesn’t wrestle with enough; a lot of “popularist” ideas are terrible policy. An example of a right wing version right now see efforts afoot in FL to eliminate property taxes.
Worked in politics and can confirm your observation. I’ll take it step further and note it’s a version of the same issue as NIMBYism, something Matt is more acutely aware of but doesn’t really do the next step of realizing it applies to lots of issues. Namely, local politicians often here from a small slice of constituents on a particular issue who don’t necessarily represent the majority opinion of all voters or in some cases have agendas at odds with the best interest of voters. But they show up, they call, they make a stink so their interests win the day. In this case it wouldn’t at all shock me if these politicians got a lot of calls from affluent older libs who have the mental heuristic of pipeline = evil rich man twirling is moustache while doing the evil laugh. And that’s the motivation to oppose almost on instinct this pipeline.
Yeah that’s what I’m getting at. Is that Matt really doesn’t wrestle with how politicians make decisions. This article sort of is straw man where Matt gets to debate his frustrations with the 2009-era climate ambitions, something I’m acutely aware of. But it’s not really clear that the opposition to this project has anything to do with thst. And to the extent this has to do with climate policy at all, it’s extremely marginal at best. Rather this is local politicians siding with constituents, and getting a handle on that at a macro level is more important than the 100 post on how annoying climate activists are. Members of congress will continue to make bad decisions based on local politics. In fact, the greatest impediments to abundance may likely be driven by this dynamic rather than squabbles between 501cs in DC.
Generally agreed -- but is the local *Republican* representative (Nicole Malliotakis) also opposed to the pipeline due to NIMBY pressures? How about the neighboring moderate Dem from the D+2 district that she just flipped in '24 (Laura Gillen)? I think in addition to the NIMBY stuff there is something else going on here, where people who aren't even close to this project (Ocasio-Cortez, Torres, Espaillat) are weighing in due to ideological reasons, and someone like Jeffries is signing on to language like "poses significant and far-reaching implications for... environmental justice communities" to not be outflanked, but he should know better if he actually wants to be a national leader of the party.
The merits of the decision should weigh for something. Presumably that is what the letter writers “climate concers” mean. If its just politics they could have written saying, “in our constituencies, approving the pipeline will loose us votes the votes we need to take back the Senate.” They are not climate change concers at all.
This is a reasonable explanation of local politicians, but not someone like AOC. There isn’t any doubt that environmental groups leverage what’s available to them, whether it’s NIMBYism or sovereignty of native peoples. But the organizing and money behind the scenes is much more focused on preventing any expansion of energy infrastructure associated with O&G.
They are clearly laying out their climate concerns over the very first paragraphs! And they are going out of their way to emphasize how their "climate concerns" are LOCAL climate concerns, first and foremost. They're concerned about seabeds, toxic substances, methane leakages, marine ecosystems, tourism, commercial fishing... you get the idea.
They are also talking about climate goals and stuff like that, but only in the last part of the letter. They put more emphasis on the argument that in their view, it's not clear if there is a need for more gas given the flatlining demand over the last few years. In that case, the financial burden could be put on the taxpayers.
I think it's fine to dismiss the local environmental concerns as run-of-the-mill NIMBYism, and all that stuff about climate goals is obviously not very substantiated, as you said. But I also think it's important to be honest about what the letter is actually arguing. The NYT isn't very honest about that, and neither are you.
(There is one good climate argument the letter actually doesn't touch on, by the way: Lock-in effects due to long-term purchase agreements, artificially delaying the energy transition. That's a problem Europe now has after hastily switching to LNG deliveries from the US due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
This is a good point. Based on the letter, the environmental concerns seem to be more around the dredging around Staten Island and the Rockaways and harm to the marine ecosystem rather than global climate change. Now, some of that is clearly NIMBY-ism and I'm sure there's some pipeline=fossil fuels=bad vibes driving it, but they raised concrete concerns.
I do still hope Hochul votes "yes". As a New Yorker, I want lower energy prices and less oil and coal used. The noise and disturbance at the Rockaways doesn't sound great, but it's a beach that, while lovely, is both large and near JFK so can probably handle it.
"Daily life in the United States would look more like it does in Europe, where energy is more expensive and there is a lot more emphasis on efficiency."
This is precisely where the environmentalists want to take America toward, and probably even more ascetic than Europe is now. But due to the lower quality of life that would entail, they slide the political unpopularity by checking off every source of new energy for different reasons. No fossil fuels (not a single additional molecule of greenhouse gas can enter the atmosphere, plus all kinds of mining/refinery/transportation damage), no nuclear (waste/meltdown risk), no hydro (marine biology damage), no solar & onshore wind (ecosystem damage/less aesthetic wilderness), no offshore wind (marine biology damage/scenic views ruined). So what's left? Just sip on energy much less and suffer. Which isn't acceptable for the grand majority of humans.
I don't think the people in Europe necessarily understood what a shift into renewables meant for them: extortionate electricity. Only today, the British regulator has suggested writing off the debt owed by many people on their electricity and gas bills, and adding the cost onto people who can pay.
I'm trying to imagine a modern, industrialized society where anyone but the most destitute owes a significant amount of debt to service their basic, well, services.
Yes, but that's a ridiculous definition that nobody serious would propose. It's easy to imagine racking up hundred thousands of dollars in very legitimately-priced medical expenses--septuple bypass surgery or whatever. Nobody has a hundred-thousand-dollar home electric bill.
I’m from Europe and I very wholeheartedly agree that European energy policy is dumb, but I also can’t imagine a legitimate way of racking up more than 10k in medical bills. I suspect that only Americans can imagine that.
You can't? Get hit by a bus and have your pelvis crushed and land in a coma for a month, what does that treatment cost? Not what is your personal /bill/, but what does that /cost/ on a hospital's balance sheet?
'Environmentalist' is a label I've been happy to own, but I don't recognize myself in the characterizations I've read in these comments. I'm not anti-abundance, de-growth nor anti-nuclear. I recognize that it's too late to make the reductions in GHGs required to avoid the worst climate outcomes without a lot of harm to many species and ecosystems. Tradeoffs are a necessity. These are truly crucial years. We need to use every tool available to limit global warming as it's essentially a one-way street. Tipping points are real. Extinction is real. If we don't move much faster humans will survive, but in an increasingly impoverished world. Heat absorbed by the oceans will take a millennium to equilibrate after we reach net zero. That's right. A thousand years. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0812721106 Every fraction of a degree of temperature rise is essentially irreversible from a human perspective. To me, being an environmentalist now means keeping that fact paramount in all policy decisions.
Matt. Can I ask you read the comment from Florian Reiter? Because he makes the very important point that the New York Times article does an awful job of summarizing the letter in question. Apparently, the letter lays out in the very beginning why they think the pipeline is a bad idea. There are worries about leakages and possible damage to local ecosystem.
Now this isn’t necessarily a good reason to stop a pipeline. What it really shows is the upteenth example that “local control” is often a very real impediment to good policy. As many commentators have noted the banal explanation for this letter is the politicians in question are just looking out for their local constituents (or as I noted, likely a small subset who called their offices) and just shows why a lot of “abundance” agenda really depends on putting decision making more on the state level as opposed to neighborhood level.
The environmental groups nationally aren't opposing carbon energy distribution because of the damage to Rockaway beach. As other commenters have pointed out, their counterfactual is the green new deal and net-zero 2050 and no 'carbon-based but less intensive' argument has any meaning in that context. It's not surprising that local politicians would wheel out a bunch of localist issues, but it's also not credible to say that the national anti-pipeline movement is driven by localism. I would take the letter seriously but not literally if what we're talking about is the American debate over clean energy and pipelines.
"As many commentators have noted the banal explanation for this letter is the politicians in question are just looking out for their local constituents"
I question this part though. Electricity prices in the NE are significantly higher than the rest of the country. For example, in 2024 NY was at 18.33 cents per kWh compared to 10.16 cents in TX at retail price average. 80% more! It seems like people looking out for their local constituents would focus on bringing those prices down.
I mean you're describing the banal reality of politics since modern politics began. Prices for all sorts of things are higher than they need to be due to stuff like "rent seeking", "Public choice theory" and "regulatory capture". I think there some libertarian commentators over emphasize their importance to political outcomes, but it definitely describes at least some of the reason certain political outcomes occur the way they do*.
Matt didn't really say explicitly in his post, but I think this is a good reason that it would be smart politically for Hochul to not reject this pipeline. People clearly care a lot about the rising cost of living and especially lower electricity prices. It's just smart politics for Hochul to show she's trying to address these concerns**
* The probably ultimate example of this is car dealership owners. As much as I'm loathe to say anything nice about Elon in this moment, he's right to say that Tesla should be able to sell cars directly to consumers without need to go through car dealerships. It's pure rent seeking and a relic of a time when cars were still a relatively new technology. It would absolutely bring down the cost of purchasing car to cut out this unnecessary middle man. So why doesn't this happen? Because every legislative district in America has at least one car dealership. More important every state legislative district has a car dealership. Meaning by lobbying together, they can get the ear of literally every state legislator. And because this not an issue on most regular people's radar, they don't have a clue they overpaying for their car; diffuse costs and concentrated benefits and all that.
** This is where Matt goes way too far to me as far as his contention that Democrats have literally nothing to learn from Mamdani's successful primary campaign. It's a 100% true that NYC has one of the more unique political cultures in the country. If you're talking about specific policy points, than yeah, talking about free buses is not going to be a winner in some exurban swing district where basically nobody rides the bus. But besides the fact there is something to be learned from his fresh up to date campaign (especially his willingness to do non traditional media. I find it absolutely wild the lack of attention paid to the fact that in 2024 Trump spent a ton of time going on all sorts of podcasts that appealed to young men and then sure enough he overperforms with this group). His obsessive focus on prices and cost of living is so so clearly a huge part of his success. Now his specific ideas may be dumb and not applicable to other districts (the "rent freeze" on rent stabilized apartments is a terrible idea right now and obviously most places in America don't have rent stabilization), but should Dems make affordability and prices (especially electric prices given you can pin at least some of it on the Trump administration's stupid culture war against wind and green energy) a central part of 2026 midterms? 100%.
Rents in NYC are literally the highest in the country but city council members still obstruct new housing in their district. That's politics. (For what it's worth, it's not entirely clear that this would reduce prices for ratepayers on net and in the short run it might raise them--I don't fully understand the mechanics but the reporting suggests that the costs of the pipeline would be passed on to consumers.)
Florian's comment was good. Matt should have described the letter differently, or used a different anecdote as the lead-in to his argument. At the same time I think the underlying point of the article is still valid. The letter is not the only possible example one could cite of climate advocates opposing pipelines (or whatever) regardless of whether emissions will go up or down. Those people do exist, and they do exert influence within the D coalition. And it's not as if Matt disagrees with you about local control and nimbyism being bad, or is unwilling to focus criticism on that.
“even though it sounds hard to believe that anyone would fail to ask that question, I truly believe that they are failing to”.
Could someone, anyone, provide a well-reasoned argument for either a) why that is, or b) why the pipeline will hurt our carbon emissions and climate goals, that can be reconciled with the foundational reality that Matt lays out.
In good faith, I think their argument is that investment in carbon-based energy infrastructure will stay in place for decades, so it is a commitment to ongoing pollution.
Matt is right that the question should be "compared to what", but for these people that tends to something like "compared to a Green New Deal"
To look at it from another perspective, their strategy to take the natural gas option off the table *so that* the only two remaining options are high emissions and zero emissions, as that will maximize the probability of zero emissions prevailing.
The compared to what question is the very deep flaw in but for causation. There is no obvious baseline, there are arbitrarily many counterfactual worlds.
It is tautologically impossible to rigorously model the effects of not building the pipeline.
Genuinely the backwards reasoning that Matt describes at the end is the answer. To put it a little more generously: if we build this pipeline, it creates more new infrastructure and gives people more incentive to oppose a crash decarbonization program in 2029 when AOC is elected, which is our only chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees.
It's probably true that it makes that scenario less likely in some miniscule way, but that isn't going to happen and so we need to be focusing on other scenarios in which the emissions question is more like what Matt laid out.
The short term and calls for immediate solutions to problems by voters is so unhelpful.
Climate change degrades the environment and is a drag on long term growth. The practical solutions are boring. The technological solutions are less boring (solar radiation management).
This is right. The most boring way to describe it is that they have a different expected-value calculation than normal people do. The question is which is better, [(probability of doing the pipeline) x (benefit of the pipeline)] or [(probability of crash decarbonization) x (benefit of decarbonization)]. They think (benefit of the pipeline) is zero because decreasing emissions by 10% or whatever still renders the earth uninhabitable. They also think (probability of crash decarbonization) is higher than anyone here does. We see is as essentially zero. Some of them may see that probability as extremely low and others may see it as somewhat high, but either way, as long as it's at least a little bit higher than zero, crash decarbonization will pencil out as having a higher expected value than the pipeline option does because of how they calculate the other variables.
Yeah and the point there is they're doing it for the purpose of boosting electrical generation, not for any culture war reason or to lower emissions. They made solar and wind cheap but they also have lots of coal so they're just making it happen.
"We're gonna win the AI race with manly coal hur dur" is really one of the dumbest sentiments of our age along with "we're not allowed to have energy abundance until net zero because we must suffer for our sins".
Charitable interpretations covered by the good folk at Slow Boring, so I'll offer a less charitable explanation which I think carries some weight: Because they think about carbon emissions in terms of inherent goodness and badness, like it's karma, not in terms of bayesian expected outcomes.
I think the best way to explain the pipeline policy is that fossil fuel infrastructure triggers a disgust response.
The human brain's disgust response is wired to interpret any amount of contaminant as completely contaminated. Ask people how many hairs they are willing to find in their soup before they won't eat it anymore. Anyone who answers "five" is probably insane. This response is actually a good idea when we're talking about viral and bacterial disease vectors that actually do multiply from tiny amounts of contaminants.
But this brain wiring does not work for modern chemical contaminants like petrochemicals or pesticides, and it especially doesn't work for carbon dioxide. For chemicals, harm reduction works. Trading a bad chemical for a less bad chemical is an improvement. Trading more of a bad chemical for less of a bad chemical is an improvement. But it's very hard to train ourselves to think that way.
My home is heated by an electric HVAC system. So I have $300 a month heating bills, and that's living in Western OR where are most nights only get down to around 30 degrees or so (rarely we get some that hit 20, but that's only a handful of times a year)
You have a pretty big house though, right? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
We have a similar climate, and with a diesel “oil” furnace, we spend about $3000 a year on fuel to heat our 1600sf house. I think gas would cost half that! Electric, maybe less, but inferior heat. I want a gas stove anyway. Maybe someday we’ll bite the bullet and replace the furnace, but it’s 80 years old and going strong, and it’s hard to justify fixing what ain’t broken since there’s so much on the old house that’s actually broken!
That was basically my immediate thought too. I don't think the opponents give it much more thought than "the pipeline moves natural gas, natural gas is a fossil fuel, fossil fuels are bad, the pipeline is bad."
If we do not replace or renew any fossil fuel infrastructure ever, then eventually it will all wear out and we'll have to go fully renewable. Therefore opposing all fossil fuel infrastructure will result in a decline in emissions in 2050.
One problem with this is that it's all about "getting to NetZero by a particular date" rather than "minimising total emissions on the path to NetZero" (the other is that it won't work because they won't win the argument against renewal once the constraints start to really bite).
This example is a bit of stretch but if you want to buy a car you have three options, new, used or lease. And depending on market conditions on any given day any of those options could be the best choice. But a ton of people have an iron clad assumption that new and leasing is bad and used it always best. It's not.
In the same way that certain folks have it in their mind that pipeline = bad for the environment. And it's going to take a lot of persuading to get them to come around to the idea that pipeline = good.
It would depend on the price of the used one vs. the new one. If a new one is $30k and a used one with 20k miles is $28k that wouldn't make any sense, would it?
And as I'm sure you're aware $2000 vehicles with 120k exists on a bell curve like distribution with some dying 500 miles later and at the other extreme making it to 300k.
The emissions impact is dependent on the future energy trajectory, which is not absolutely knowable--it's big capital project so we are talking about potentially many years into the future. If you are optimistic about the future energy trajectory, the less-bad argument for natural gas is weaker. You might be optimistic for good reasons or bad ones but it really does just depend on the facts.
The intuition pumps for (b) are presumably “Jevons paradox exists” (viz., price-elasticity of demand can be such that demand increases superlinearly with decreases in price) and “renewables and electricity are substitutes rather than complements for natural gas Northeastern electricity and heat generation options.” These are both empirical claims but they’re not facially invalid.
Also what Miles said about entrenching an economic constituency that’s invested in an emissions-creating status quo.
I suspect that part of it has to do with the fact that calculating the effect on carbon emissions would require a significant amount of technical expertise. Most environmental groups do not have a lot of people with the relevant technical expertise to do these calculations.
Good article. I work in this industry, so a few small nitpicks:
Compressing natural gas to turn it into LNG is extremely energy intensive. So intensive, in fact, that the Texas electricity market meaningfully shifted when the Freeport LNG facility came online. This means that it is a net positive for the climate to use pipeline gas as opposed to LNG.
Second, hearing a home with electricity is only more efficient if it is using a heat pump. Old-timey electric space heating is incredibly inefficient, and you are much better off burning the gas to heat your home than turning the gas into electricity and THEN heating the home.
Simply put... Every time you switch energy from one form to another, there is a loss.
On the second point, maybe I missed where anyone said that wasn't true. Or maybe Matt didn't add that clarification because with respect to the Northeast virtually no one uses any type of electric space heating in a meaningful way; it would be insanely expensive to do so, and as a Northeasterner Matt just assumes that fact.
I lived in an apartment with electric space heating not long ago in upstate NY (the utility bills were atrocious). The landlord didn't pay the utility bill and you could always turn off the heat!
On the flip side, there's a good landlord in the area who installs heat pumps and central air in his buildings that combine with oil or gas furnaces.
There is still a considerable amount of older housing that does use old school space heat. Many folks also buy portable space heaters when their boilers or central air systems break.
Supplemental yes, primary heat man that's bad. Given the push back I checked and it's like 15%, which seems really high to me. I grew up in a lower working class house built in 1868, we at least had cast iron radiators and an oil heater. We also still had a coal chute with about 1/2 an inch of coal.
And I've been in a lot of also older, poorer homes, throughout the region. Electric space heating is a terrible way to go.
I want to know the history. When I lived in a building using electric space heat, the radiators seemed to be newer than the most old school cast iron radiators. The building itself seemed to be older than the radiators. Curious to learn anything here as you're in the industry.
The general history is coal in stoves and or fireplaces, followed by radiators which could be either hot water or steam. The steam or hot water would initially have been coal, but could have been switched over to home heating oil in the late 30s or immediately post WWII.
If you had radiators, there was almost certainly a boiler/hot water heater in the basement. Either it crapped out and he didn't want to fix it, or he couldn't figure out how to split the costs of the fuel and electricity (for the circulating pump) between multiple apartments since it would have been a whole house system.
Or he was just an asshole that didn't want to deal with it.
I guess the unstated argument is that we need to raise the price of fossil fuels to encourage the use of renewables, but we can’t do this explicitly through a carbon tax because that’s politically impossible.
If your biggest priorities are making things more affordable and protecting democracy, then supporting climate initiatives that raise the price of energy in a roundabout way to avoid voter input is kind of an awkward fit.
The irony is that, if you only raise energy costs in the regions where you have the political power to do so (basically CA, the northeast and parts of the pacific northwest), you negatively polarize your own base, allow the energy abundant states to whatever carbon-intensive projects they want, and come no closer to a national net reduction in GHG emissions.
Overall a reasonably good piece and I agree with the conclusion but a few items that I think you could have discussed: (1) the importance of gas reliability to a densely populated area like NYC, i.e., it would be better if gas reliability margins are a little fat; (2) you should discuss the methane concern of climate activists that cause them to believe that natural gas isn't much better than oil for GHG emissions (I think this concern is overstated but you should at least acknowledge that it exists); and, finally, (3) that Hochul could at least make the environmentalists happy that because this pipeline will result in a good reliability margin it is likely that she won't need to approve another downstate gas pipeline for a long time.
Thanks for the question. Here I mean Matt. I mean that he could have discussed this issue more fully by discussing matters that fall outside the letter.
Matt failed to mention that replacing LNG with pipeline gas would not only be cheaper but result in less emissions because LNG conversion and transport is less efficient.
If we're currently running our LNG export terminals at capacity, I think this wouldn't matter. Less LNG going to the northeastern US just means more LNG going to other global markets, not that they shut down the LNG export terminals.
I sometimes think back to all the choices we have collectively made politically in my lifetime only to realize that we are experiencing the consequences decades later.
The whole Keystone Pipeline debate really set unproductive expectations and discourse regarding climate politics.
The apparent gross mismanagement of energy policy over decades should indicate to everyone to be wary of forecast and policy recommendations that originate from environmental groups.
It would be interesting to go back and look at the historical record with the avowed preferences of environmentalists and figure out exactly what year it should have been obvious they should be pushing nuclear power, for example. I imagine it’s at least sometime in the 1980s if not before.
As a very early subscriber to Slow Boring, there's never been a moment when I even had a thought about canceling.
Today's post pushed me a little closer to changing that.
I saw the headline and my first thought was "okay, let's see what he has." My second thought was "please please don't use this as yet another stick to beat people over the head with while arguing that increasing natural gas consumption is *the* key to achieving our climate goals."
Natural gas is better than worse fossil fuels. Got it. I got it the first two hundred times Yglesias beat that message into us. But it's still a carbon emitter and our end goal is not to rely on it -- someday!
So what's the strategy for getting to no fossil fuels (or absolute minimum -- who knows about jet fuel, cement, etc.)? What's the role of policy, at various levels of government? Are we at free market takeoff and there's less need for government?
Nope, nothing, nada.
I don't give a damn about some stupid pipeline in New York. Build it, don't build it. I don't care. But don't waste our time on this trivia and let's have a full discussion about what we actually do need to do.
"Climate activism is bad and counterproductive" is to Matt Y as "Educational interventions can't compensate for innate differences in learning ability" is to Freddie deBoer. There's truth in the statement, but also, you have beaten this particular horse to a paste by now, we get it already.
We shouldn't expect any kind of affirmative climate policy from the professional centrists like Matt who confuse gravy-train inertia with an acknowledgement of trade-offs and hard-nosed realism.
The centrist policy on climate change at this point is "Let's hope climate tipping points don't exist and slop video generating AI will become sentient and solve climate change because recursive self-improvement something something".
In all fairness, I too hope with all my heart that climate tipping points don't exist, because we sure as hell aren't convincing the Median Undecided Swing Voter to make any semblance of a sacrifice or suffer any inconvenience for the sake of fighting climate change.
I too get frustrated with Matt Y for beating the climate dead horse to a pulp (see my reply to Marc above), but he's not the problem; he's just a messenger.
I agree with this. Matt "the messenger" has clearly run out of useful things to say on Climate so can we just stop already with the pretense that he and the rest of "Inertia Incorporated" somehow are more meaningfully "serious" compared to the activists? Its a distinction without a difference at this point.
It's worth highlighting that gas supplies in the Northeast are so low relative to demand that gas-fired power plants cannot be used in the coldest part of winter. So on cold days, the supply of electricity shifts towards oil, which is much dirtier. (See the ISO graphs below).
This factor, combined with retiring Indian Point and Vermont Yankee, have pushed electricity prices up dramatically - and this, in turn, makes it unattractive to switch from oil heat to heat pumps. (MA this winter started heavily subsidizing electric heat in an attempt to make it more economically attractive.)
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/where-we-are-going/power-plant-retirements
You need to be careful about lumping the Northeast and New England into one bucket. The pipeline constraints in New England are much larger and the problem is bigger than in the rest of the northeast, where we're mostly just talking about smallish local bottlenecks like the one Matt's pipeline is proposing to fix in NYC.
Also, one key challenge with the pipeline capacity problem is that the overall economics of building more pipeline capacity into New England are terrible. Current pipeline capacity is only exceeded on a handful of days per year at most, so the new pipeline would end up seeing about 5% average utilization.
My sense is that other sources of new capacity would likely be much cheaper for New England. One big issue is that NIMBYs have been successful in blocking transmission lines from Canada that were supposed to bring gigawatts of flexible hydro down. Also, offshore wind, while expensive, would have helped a lot with winter capacity since it's much less variable than onshore wind (generally 60% capacity factor, higher in winter). The NIMBYs and now Trump have been hugely successful in stymying those projects. If the transmission and offshore wind hadn't been blocked by NIMBYs (and Trump) things wouldn't be looking nearly as bleak as they are now for New England electricity prices.
One other huge problem with getting a pipeline built into New England is how it'll get paid for. Gas utilities serving heating customers use fixed/guaranteed pipeline delivery contracts and there's plenty of pipeline capacity for them to get all the secured delivery they need. So they're not going to pay for extra capacity.
Gas power generators generally don't use fixed gas delivery contracts. Instead they buy most of their gas on the spot market and pay whatever the market wants, or just choose not to run during the limited peaks if they don't think the power prices would support paying the high spot prices for gas. Basically, their model is to just pass gas costs along to electricity users in their electricity offer prices.
Getting a pipeline built (and financed) would require enough fixed offtake contracts to convince lenders that there's enough guaranteed cash flow from the pipeline to pay for the debt. Since there isn't enough demand for long term offtake contracts, states would have to get involved to make the pipeline finance work. The main proposals have involved the New England states banding together and they themselves signing offtake agreements with the pipeline developers and rate-basing the cost of these agreements into electricity bills. This is very risky because if states can't resell all the capacity they bought to gas generators, electricity ratepayers end up paying for lots of unneeded gas delivery contracts. For example, if the transmission lines from Canada and lots of offshore wind eventually do get built in the future, electricity ratepayers end up forced to pay for pipeline capacity that goes unused. Another problem with this approach is that if any states don't participate, they'd still get the benefit of the extra supply on the grid (and thus lower prices) without paying for it. So there's a huge incentive for states to not sign onto the project and just free-ride.
None of these issues are of relevance to granting permission to build or not. If it does not make commercial sense it wond get built, permissionor no permission,
Sure, but the problem for New England is that unless states pony up with promises of firm commitments for offtake, which they haven't done yet, there's no one out there who can/will formally ask for the permission that's needed.
IMO, this whole thing is basically just a huge political quagmire and in a way is a smaller version of the same problem that's preventing new nuclear from getting built, especially in states with deregulated electricity markets.
In the pipeline case, the risk is about long term utilization rates which are highly uncertain. In the nuclear case, the risk is about construction cost overruns. In both cases, unless those risks can get pushed onto ratepayers or taxpayers by the government, the projects will have a tough time getting built by just market forces.
So are the LNG terminals mainly supplying spot sales for electricity generation or industrial use (if pipeline capacity is already fine)?
I think so. I know recently in MA, they forced the state's gas utilities to sign offtake agreements with an LNG terminal in Everett that was going to close because no one wanted to sign firm offtake agreements needed to keep the plant open.
This was a controversial and I think completely unprecedented deal because the LNG is only needed/used for electricity generation and isn't needed to supply gas customers (since they have reserved pipeline capacity).
So in the end, MA gas customers are being forced to pay for capacity guarantees that will be used for power generation. The guarantees add something like 3% to gas bills, so I guess it wasn't seen as that big of a deal even though it's a pretty big cross subsidy and I think totally unprecedented.
If the pipeline will mainly sit idle, there woud not be a firm that wants to build it.
See my other comment. There actually isn't a firm that wants to built it without the states stepping in and signing firm above-market offtake agreements on behalf of their electricity customers.
Gas generators don't want to hold the risk of long term fixed gas delivery contracts and they won't sign. The pipeline only gets built if states intervene to push the long term risks onto electricity ratepayers through an out of market mechanism.
I wish climate people would take electricity prices seriously, IMO by far the largest drag on getting people to switch to heat pumps is the fact that electricity prices have been going up like crazy (not sure if this is a renewables issue or other factors, in California it’s mostly the liability situation wrt wildfires).
The cost-benefit math for switching from propane or oil heat to heat pumps is usually workable in most places (although MA has crazy high electricity costs which don't help). The math for gas to heat pump conversions is a whole other thing though, especially in places where shale gas keeps gas prices so low like the northeast and where electricity costs are much higher than average.
Here's a handy table that shows operating costs for each heat source in NH (compare $/MBTU for each source)
https://www.energy.nh.gov/energy-information/nh-fuel-prices
Aside: I think the exact formula for heat pump cost in $/MBTU is
electricity rate * (10000 / (3412*COP) )
so the calculation for the default from the NH site is .23 * (10000/(3412*2.5))
Just as an aside--thank you for this link! We're just starting to crank up the heat here in southern NH and I never know whether to prioritize the minisplits (not really warm enough but easy, responsive) or fire up the heating oil boiler (really warm but sluggish to respond). At least now I know the electric is a little cheaper.
Keep in mind those numbers assume your heat pump is running at a COP or efficiency level of 2.5. This is a reasonable assumption for an average year round (or seasonal) COP for a modern heat pump in NH. It means for every kwh of electricity your heat pump uses it moves 2.5 kwhs of heat into your house. But heat pump efficiency is temperature (and model) dependent, so if you're making a real-time decision you need to consider the current outside temperature.
Below is a link with a chart on the right that shows the COP at various temps for a common Mitsubishi heat pump. That unit's COP is 4.0 at 47F, 2.5 at 17F, and 2.2 at 5F. So its $/MBTU is $17 at 47F, around $26 at 17F, and around $31 at 5F.
https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/208464/7/25000/95/7500/0///0
How old are the minisplits? I put in a new Daikin system last year and it's amazingly toasty even down well below freezing. (Please tell me NH is not that cold yet, I'm getting PTSD from my childhood.)
Are ground-source heat pumps common in NH? They're getting installed in some new builds in Wisconsin, but the water table in WI is like 20 feet down so GSHP install costs are a bit controlled.
It's used some, but they're not that common, especially now that cold climate air source models have gotten so capable.
Part of it might be that we have lots of granite and usually need to use drilled wells for the heat transfer loop instead of just digging cheaper trenches.
I wish we could all heat our homes with wood ;(
I'm guessing you're joking, but seriously - wood heating is really really dirty in terms of particulate matter.
I'm in a rural subdivision and just a couple of homes in the neighborhood use wood stoves regularly. When they're going strong, the air quality in the neighborhood goes to hell pretty quickly.
Sure, it smells nice and homey when you first step outside. Then later you see your indoor air quality monitor reporting much higher than average PM 2.5 numbers and wonder what it's doing to your lungs day after day.
I was mostly joking, along the lines of "what's viable in NH is not really viable for the rest of the country." But also I grew up in VT (near the NH border) and *in that region with its low density of population* wood is amazingly cheap and efficient.
Does this differ as between ground- and air-based heat pump systems?
Conversion efficiency of 2.5 at that link is almost certainly air-source. Ground source are more efficient, but with much higher up-front costs.
MA is (or let's be honest, was, before Trump) building a ton of new offshore wind. At least 2GW, with room for a lot more in the pipeline. Connecticut has 704 MW under construction. New York has 9,000MW planned by 2035. It's really important that we differentiate short term crunches from *long term building strategy.*
Or let me put it another way: if this was a discussion about building a huge number of new highways to supply low-density exurbs *during a short-term housing crunch*, would a YIMBY writer like Matt Y. be so supportive? Or would he correctly point out that this kind of infrastructure tackles a short term housing problem by locking in decades of long-term bad housing policy?
Did you mean 704 GW? That's over half of total US production. I'm seeing 1.2 GW of procurement and I don't know if that's realistically getting built anytime soon. There's a mandate for 4 GW by 2030, but again, is that actually going to pencil out?
I would pose the same question back, is it politically expedient for climate supporters to get back control of the federal government now or to have this one pipeline canceled? Will the act of Democratic House/Senate Leadership saying no to a pipeline put Congressional seats at risk in 2026? Should climate supporters plug their nose and say yes so they can obtain the keys to bringing renewable energy online in ways that the current admin has removed/restricted?
No, I definitely meant MW. I edited the post. Here's a list of what's built and what's under construction across the whole east coast:
1. Block Island (RI) – 30 MW.
2. South Fork Wind (NY) – 132 MW, fully operational since Mar 14, 2024.
3. Vineyard Wind 1 (MA) – ~half the 806 MW project sending power as of Oct 2025 (≥30 turbines online). Full COD targeted for late 2025.
4. Revolution Wind (RI/CT) – 704 MW; construction ~80% complete; August stop-work order later lifted; work resumed Sept 2025.
5. Sunrise Wind (NY) – 924 MW; construction underway, completion now expected 2026–27.
6. Empire Wind 1 (NY) – 810 MW; offshore construction halted by federal order in 2025 (onshore terminal work continues).
7. Ocean Wind 1 & 2, would have been another 2.25 GW (completion 2026, 2028), but both were canceled by Orsted due to supply chain shocks and interest rates, and then the renewals were blocked by Trump (ensuring that they can't be restarted.)
So about 560 MW operating now, and another 2.1GW or so under construction. Another near-term 2.25 GW could be added on top of that except for Trump (and still can be in the future, once Trump goes away or gets bought off.) All completion dates in the 2025-2028 range, so nothing really long-term or speculative, aside from Trump's nonsense.
This is all super-near term stuff. Still quite a bit of additional capacity we could build, so "by 2035" numbers should be quite a bit higher, assuming the policy environment doesn't prevent it.
ETA: I was focusing on the northeast, but there's an additional 2.6GW under construction in VA, aimed for completion in 2026.
How did the Trump administration stop those? Was it cutting federal funding, or revoking some kind of permission, or some other thing?
I got that wrong and I'll update the post: they were cancelled in 2023 due to supply chain shocks and interest rate increases, but then Trump blocked renewal of the permits, preventing future development. So if energy prices rise and the projects become viable again, they won't be built.
But all that wind still needs off-peak generation. Utilities who would be buying the gas ought be abe to figure out what their futures gas needs will be. State permission to build does not oblige anyone to buy the gas. [The permitting process should, of course. ensure that the utilities were factoring in their decision the cost of the tax on net emissions (of the gas burned) that we do not have yet.]
Off peak generation does not mean large amounts of actual gas being imported or burned, though. With enough renewables and storage, gas generation could be as low as 10% of the electrical supply, which means a lot of our pipeline infrastructure (the subject of Matt's article) could actually be reduced rather than expanded.
Maybe so. What is the externality tht is preventing utilities from taking that into condideration if the willingness to but gas that a prospective pipeline commpany want to sell? What is the value added of the permission process?
I’d say approval processes have two purposes. First, someone needs to dig a huge damn trench across the countryside and fill it with high-pressure methane, so there had better be some approval processes in place for that project.
But second, regional utilities and regulators need to make huge long-term decisions about investment, involving tax subsidies and long-term PPAs. If you decide to invest in (for example) a new multi-billion dollar nuclear plant, you need to make sure your ratepayers will pay for those costs. If you just toss this problem to the free market, you can end up with a market that has huge supply problems or that is temporarily cheap and can’t support long-term investments, but then explodes in price when conditions change (think Texas having blackouts during an ice storm because nobody forced plants to winterize, or cheap gas preventing long-term investment but then prices surging a few years down the line when gas isn’t cheap anymore.) In this case regulators are making long-term investments into a renewable grid, but those long-term investments are pretty easy to undermine if people bypass the long-term planning and start making short-term hacks.
Sorry, I meant about the issue of gas use and net CO2 emissions. As Iread the news reports the pipeline safety issues were just cover. If this is not an emissions issue, then my post was based on a falty understanding.
Even there, however, the reporting was faltly in that it did not discuss the present value of the hazards avoided compared to benefits.
On rates, I don’t really unerstnd how that issue works except that the pipeline approval process looks to an outsider like a rounabout way of making rate decisions.
For all the justified criticicim made of "environmental" groups for failing to promote the lowest cost policies to reduce net CO2 emissions, the MSM, the NYT being the most MS of all, fail to raise the issue either. When researching this post [ https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-decision-making-1] I noticed that the coverage never mentioned how much mor or less CO2 would go into the atomosphere as a result of a decision one way or the othere and at what cost cost or benefit. It DID mention the politics of the decision, but not the costs and benefits. That's just bad journalism.
The publishers and writers at Christianity Today magazine don't spend much time discussing or debating the foundational beliefs of their religion. The NYT is not much different.
Is the foundational belief really that every policy will reduce emissions? Or that no policy will reduce emissions? Or something else?
I would describe the foundational belief to be "if someone cites climate change as a reason for something, then it is good and true." Like how a very devout catholic might react to something their priest or bishop might say.
Presumably, "the fossil fuel industry is evil and anything it wants will make the worse."
I think this is the combination of (1) the journalistic practice of quoting advocates to illustrate the pros and cons and (2) the phenomenon Matt writes about here that the advocates on this issue don’t do this analysis to make their case.
See also immigration policy where the views of the immigration lawyer community anchor one side of the coverage. So you get lots of process arguments rather than accounting of the projected effects of a policy on immigration levels.
I think this is related to the fact that journalists, like Wikipedia editors, are expected not to do any original research, and to just pass on the words of “reputable sources” for Wikipedia and “the disputants” in the case of news.
Hm. There's nothing stopping the NYT from calling up a professor of economics or civil engineering or geophysics at NYU (or really, anywhere) and asking "What do you think the environmental impacts of this pipeline will be?" I don't think that counts as "original research" in the journalistic sense (it certainly wouldn't be WP:OR), and news stories used to add context like that. Now, maybe NYT actually couldn't find an academic willing to speculate. But I doubt it.
You're right, but they hardly ever do that on any issue because they think it's too boring and not "newsy." The typical newspaper reporter has a template in mind for how these stories are supposed to be written, because that's how they've always been taught to do it by their editors. The people you get quotes from are the people whose job it is to give you quotes. Sometimes those people have real expertise but if so it's a coincidence.
It isn't just politics reporters, it's everybody. Sports journalism was like this for decades and has only recently changed. You get some mostly-substance-less quotes from team officials, and if you wanted to do "analysis," you'd get some anonymous quotes from scouts around the league. You'd never do any real statistical analysis or interview anyone who knew how to do it. Now some scouts do have real expertise in talent evaluation so it's not like every quote would be worthless, but little effort would be put in to finding out what the majority viewpoint among scouts was, or which scouts were right about the issue in question. You'd just have a handful of quotable scouts in your rolodex and you'd quote one who gave one opinion and quote another one who gave the opposite opinion and that would be that.
Sports journalism is usually so dire. I can count the number of insightful comments I've heard from after-the-game interviews of athletes and coaches on one hand.
I don't really think its fair to criticize journalists for not raising this issue. Not all journalism needs to be opinion journalism. Its okay just to report that politicians are considering blocking a pipeline.
If journalists shouldn't be highlighting releveant considerations for the stories they report on then what exactly are they doing? Might as well just allow the politicians to put out a press release and reprint it verbatim at that point.
I would buy that argument if NYT coverage of RFK Jr and vaccines had a similar “he said, she said” content. However, in that case, they do point out usually that there are no good studies showing a link between vaccines and autism. If you include the technical argument in one case, why not in the other?
I mean at least one reason is that there is well-established scientific literature on the link between vaccines and autism and there's very little scientific literature or, more realistically, modeling on the climate impacts of building a pipeline. As Matt says, we don't really know whether or not the pipeline will raise overall emissions one way or the other so journalistically it may make sense to ignore the question (though I think acknowledging the lack of modeling would be better). Not so with vaccines.
Matt says that we don’t really know, but also says why it’s hard to believe that emissions would rise. I would support mentioning this in the article “There are reasons to believe that this would actually reduce emissions (state here the reasons Matt uses), and opponents of the project don’t offer any model about how it could increase emissions.”.
Without a relevant factual analysis done by qualified individuals, I can understand the hesitance of a reporter to include a verdict or even really analysis of the question in the context of a story largely focused on the politics. I certainly think some sort of inclusion of language stating the factuality of the claims of "climate impacts" could not be verified, but not wanting to wade into further analysis of the climate impacts is understandable and in my opinion, the right call.
We don't know. It is totally fine for an opinion writer like Matt to weigh in with some analysis, and I find his analysis is pretty convincing. But a beat reporter? I think the better decision is to just say "the politicians provided no evidence to back up their claims of climate impacts" and move on with the story. Because again, we do not know.
But if MORE net CO2 emissions are doubtful, the project should just go ahead becasue a businessman thinks he can sell gas to people in the NE. Although it’s hard to see how gas does not displace other fossil fuels as ways of increasing power output. It basically makes solar and wind less costly untill storage and or CCS costs fall suffiently.
I think the way the style guide instructs reporters to write this is “NYC House Democrats claimed, without evidence, that the pipeline would increase emissions…”
That would require other reporting and likely lacks such a clear answer. That’s an article on its own
This is the NYT, not a middle school book report. I kind of don't care if it requires extra reporting to check into whether the claims have any basis?
If all that was done was he said she said it woud not be bad except as boring journalism. But you can’t read these accounts without seeing that the journalist just does not see that there is a cost benefit issue lying there as opposed to only a political issue.
The opposition to the pipeline is aesthetic and philosophical. Pipeline = “dirty fossil fuels”. Therefore, it must be opposed, even though gas will still be extracted and sold on the open market. New York will just have to pay higher prices as the gas is shipped elsewhere. It’s of a piece with the opposition to nuclear power. Nuclear power was associated by the left with nuclear weapons during the Cold War, long before climate change was an issue. I recall that the Sierra Club opposed nuclear power…in favor of coal. Even if you don’t want to build a new nuclear power plant in New York, Indian point was a perfectly good nuclear plant that was already built.
My crusade is to make CO2 accumulation reduction policy (like immigrtion) an economic issue, not a culture war issue.
Okay.
The fact that the anti-nuclear energy movement lasted so long into the climate change era with so little questioning is really quite astounding. Up until maybe two or three years ago the climate trade offs of campaigning against nuclear was like a verboten topic in political environmental circles.
I guess seeing what actually happened in Germany after Frau Merkel closed theirs made it too hard to ignore.
I am only anti nuclear when people say that we should be spending capital on projects with 15 year timelines instead of dispatching solar and wind technologies.
Basically, anti renewables people use “but nuclear” to argue against building new transmission and renewable infrastructure.
I think we should invest more in advanced geothermal. For nuclear we should expand the lifespan of our existing fleets and work on ways to bring on new capacity at the margins.
One big reason to do nuclear is precisely that environmentalists hate it.
A lot of people deny global warming and say we are just trying to use it as a phony theory to make America more European and socialist. If we loudly and proudly screw over the environmental movement with a massive buildout of nuclear, it sends a powerful message to the deniers that they are wrong and this is real.
I have had conversations with people who were conservative, skeptical of climate change and didn't like environmentalists and when I said I thought we needed more nuclear power, I became more credible in their minds. Nuclear was far more acceptable to them than solar.
Of course!
To be honest about this whole thing, global warming is obviously a massive and real crisis but it was also grafted onto preexisting goals of the environmentalist movement, which contained a lot of people who felt that energy conservation is super-important and that humans are spoiling the planet. So it was and is their strong hope that global warming can be used to force humans to cut consumption, and not only did they never like nuclear plants to begin with, but if the solution includes a lot of nuclear, then it won't include as much (or any) cuts in cosumption.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have been the targets of a propaganda campaign by the fossil fuel industry that this is all a big hoax. And when they see environmentalist groups opposing nuclear, it confirms their priors that this is in fact a hoax, because it looks like environmentalists are just asserting global warming as a way to force us to conserve energy rather than treating it as a pull-out-all-stops environmental threat.
So the result is, to cut that Gordian Knot, you basically have to expand nuclear. It convinces the conservatives that we are seriously in fear of global warming and not just trying to force left-wing energy policies on the country, and it prevents environmentalists from trying to use global warming to pursue disastrous degrowth policies that would be bad for humanity and bad for liberals' electoral prospects.
Yeah, I was reading something about degrowth and back in the '70's it was the solution to rivers being so polluted that they caught fire. We fixed that without degrowth, so now we need degrowth to stop climate change even though we didn't need degrowth to fix the previous problem. It did help me understand why even some sensible people roll their eyes at the environmental movement.
Cuts in consumption were never realistic, but thanks to AI they are completely out the window now. Electric usage is going nowhere but up, exponentially. And it turns out renewables aren’t necessarily “green” in the sense that solar, at least, pits electric generation against plant growth in many places.
Well to be a bit tediously nitpicking - if cut in consumption = energy consumption only, that was on electrification not per se impossible (from simple fact that elec processes are signficantly more efficient than combustion).
I would also not allow that solar pits generation against plant growth as besides agri-voltaics pasturage is entirely actionable for ground mounted solar and beneficial (water loss avoidance, partial shading). not compatible with forestry but quite economically actionable for paturage and agrivoltiics for particularly direct-sun sensitive crops [as like high value ones like berries] (the latter seems to have interesting potential scaling for which it interests me professionally although early in development).
- of course one can do solar as if it needs a parking lot but that's more bone headedness than economics
However to refute my own nitpick - the Green enviro Left really wants/wanted cuts in human consumption period, outright degrowth.
and in any case exploding demand also means the grid upgrading that's been put off in developed markets for decades on flat / no net growth in elec demand is now no longer a pure RE driven fact.
One of the weaknesses in this article is failing to distinguish between shutting down existing energy infrastructure (generally bad, particularly for nuclear) and failing to build new energy infrastructure (it depends, even strictly from a costs perspective)
We should not be for or against any category of net zero CO2 emissions technology. Specidic decisions have to be made in a time and geopraphy context. We don’t know how fast the cost curves for each technology will fall.
My issue is there has been a rhetorical spike of people repeating narratives about renewables that sound like they are from 2006 and then claiming that nuclear is the solution. It’s a very particular narrative popular among contrarian and more conservative men/boys I have seen online that forgoes basic benefit-cost analysis.
They pretend there is capital scarcity when it is more of a question of timelines and permitting processes being bottlenecks.
Yeah, there is a big difference between "the government won't let me build this" and "This project doesn't pencil out."
I don't think I should support taxation to subsidize concentrated solar electricity generation (I generally agree with you, let cost benefit analysis do the work instead of tribal teams or mandates).
One issue here is that as technology matures, we need to phase out the subsidies. Twenty years ago, subsidies might be the only way to get much uptake of electric cars, but now, things are probably pretty different.
*Taking off political hat and putting on an econ looking one*... I think trying to price carbon is better than subsidies
Something that I realized talking to older people in the nuclear industry rather late into the Obama administration is that they were really slow to realize that a lot of climate-focused professionals were becoming actively pro-nuclear. A lot of those old industry hands had come of age in the wake of the 1970's anti-nuclear movement and hadn't updated their cultural priors, so were slow to realize when their side was starting to win climate people over.
I appreciate this is not the way to do climate policy. But isn’t this really just NIMYism rather than climate policy. The NESE pipeline just drawing a lot of the same criticism that any pipeline near an urban area would? This just strikes me as more about people being pipeline phobic than a climate issue. My guess is very few constituents are calling in favor of the pipeline. So this is just politicians reacting to constituents.
This sort of banal local issue problems says less about climate or climate policy and more about how politics actually works. Much us Jared Golden and Gluzenkamp-Perez support tarrifs due to manufacturing and lumber legacies, city members of congress are going to oppose pipeline developments because it’s what their constituents want. I really don’t think this has much to do with the “groups” or UN climate targets and is more daily politics. I think reckoning with that is more meaningful.
Anyway, I just don’t think this example quite says what the article wants it to say. When you work for a members of congress you routinely side with constituents on local matters even if they’re dumb. As someone who worked for a vaunted moderate congressman I can assure you we supported idiotic local positions on development that might be cloaked as climate issues but were really just that something was very unpopular. Popularism is a hell of a drug.
It's both. Climate activists aren't (necessarily) stupid: they know their ambitions to obstruct energy abundance will find plenty of natural allies among affluent NIMBY homeowners. And the latter, of course, will pat themselves on the back as they tell themselves they're not really engaging in NIMBYism. No, they're trying to save the planet!
Basically an unholy alliance.
As someone in politics I just don’t think this is what is happening. Pipeline projects are just deeply unappealing to urban voters particularly in the the northeast. Positing some much more deep seated political dynamic is inaccurate. The letter barely touches on any of the issues Matt wants to debate on. Honestly, this screams local politicians support local residents concerns regarding unpopular local project — probably nothing more. This is just how politics works frequently; local electeds support local voters interests.
This is under the ocean floor. Awfully big backyard!
And to the extent polling exists on this, its pretty popular. Local resident concern doesn't add up?
I’d love some city specific congressional district polling. Yes, I am familiar with the project. The idea that the ocean floor obviates it for voters doesn’t seem important. People frequently don’t like pipelines. I think the project is merited but I’m not a voter in those districts.
So we are assuming the green cabal made them all sign this paper against there voters demands for an oceanic people line through Brooklyn and queens? Again, this seems like an obvious response to constituents
> made them sign this paper against ..
Copied from my top level comment:
I would love to read an analysis that sets climate and environment concerns aside (momentarily), assumes (assumes!) we have rational actors on all sides, and gets to:
1. National Grid is a regulated monopoly.
2. They are not allowed to increase profits by selling more gas to the same set of people or by raising rates.
3. The are paid at a rate of "total value of their assets" X some fixed percentage.
4. The _only_ way to increase profits is to increase "total value of their assets".
5. The only way to do that is to build new main lines/junctions whatever to hook up to new buildings.
6. They cant do that without more gas.
7. They want more pipelines -- which might be pretty good for everyone involved or might be uneven for everyone involved, and this is fairly technical.
So any proposal to do (7) raises competing technical analyses. National Grid says its critical, NRDC says you are just trying to increase your rate base. The incentives are all screwed up. So what needs to give?
Gas utilities can only increase profit by increasing their "rate-base" -- the value of installed assets. They recover the cost of those assets, via depreciation, over a period of 60 to 85 years. They also assume that the state and ratepayers will bail them out if current demand doesn't allow rates high enough to generate the desired profit. Given these assumptions, utilities have no motivation to even ask if their new assets will really be used until the next century. They only need to justify new assets today and can ignore the long-term economics.
It is important to realize that in many areas, the "delivery" charge for gas is higher than the charge for the gas itself. As gas demand declines, delivery charges must increase. In fact, because infrastructure costs are largely fixed and independent of demand, any decline in demand will result in an equivalent increase in cost-per-unit-delivered. (e.g. A 50% decline in demand requires a doubling of delivery-cost-per-unit.) This simple math sets up the dynamic for a "death-spiral." As we learn to use gas more efficiently, or replace its use with heat pumps, the decline in gas demand will drive up cost-per-unit. That increase in cost-per-unit will encourage additional efficiency of use and more rapid abandonment of gas. The feedback will force gas rates to skyrocket. Even if the gas commodity itself became free, we would still see a dramatic rise in gas rates due to the increased cost-per-unit for gas delivery.
>Positing some much more deep seated political dynamic is inaccurate<
I don't think "NIMBYism" is that deep. Do you? People don't like energy infrastructure near them. News at 11.
No, but I don’t think climate activists are very relevant in the formulation is the point
They provide a cover story.
Higher minded reasoning?
Local voters also value affordable electricity prices
If this supplies only NYC and is deeply un popular, why is the local utility even willing to buy from the pipeline?
This is the story of 21st-century Asheville politics.
Yeah I think it’s the flaw in “popularism” that Matt doesn’t wrestle with enough; a lot of “popularist” ideas are terrible policy. An example of a right wing version right now see efforts afoot in FL to eliminate property taxes.
Worked in politics and can confirm your observation. I’ll take it step further and note it’s a version of the same issue as NIMBYism, something Matt is more acutely aware of but doesn’t really do the next step of realizing it applies to lots of issues. Namely, local politicians often here from a small slice of constituents on a particular issue who don’t necessarily represent the majority opinion of all voters or in some cases have agendas at odds with the best interest of voters. But they show up, they call, they make a stink so their interests win the day. In this case it wouldn’t at all shock me if these politicians got a lot of calls from affluent older libs who have the mental heuristic of pipeline = evil rich man twirling is moustache while doing the evil laugh. And that’s the motivation to oppose almost on instinct this pipeline.
Yeah that’s what I’m getting at. Is that Matt really doesn’t wrestle with how politicians make decisions. This article sort of is straw man where Matt gets to debate his frustrations with the 2009-era climate ambitions, something I’m acutely aware of. But it’s not really clear that the opposition to this project has anything to do with thst. And to the extent this has to do with climate policy at all, it’s extremely marginal at best. Rather this is local politicians siding with constituents, and getting a handle on that at a macro level is more important than the 100 post on how annoying climate activists are. Members of congress will continue to make bad decisions based on local politics. In fact, the greatest impediments to abundance may likely be driven by this dynamic rather than squabbles between 501cs in DC.
Generally agreed -- but is the local *Republican* representative (Nicole Malliotakis) also opposed to the pipeline due to NIMBY pressures? How about the neighboring moderate Dem from the D+2 district that she just flipped in '24 (Laura Gillen)? I think in addition to the NIMBY stuff there is something else going on here, where people who aren't even close to this project (Ocasio-Cortez, Torres, Espaillat) are weighing in due to ideological reasons, and someone like Jeffries is signing on to language like "poses significant and far-reaching implications for... environmental justice communities" to not be outflanked, but he should know better if he actually wants to be a national leader of the party.
The merits of the decision should weigh for something. Presumably that is what the letter writers “climate concers” mean. If its just politics they could have written saying, “in our constituencies, approving the pipeline will loose us votes the votes we need to take back the Senate.” They are not climate change concers at all.
This is a reasonable explanation of local politicians, but not someone like AOC. There isn’t any doubt that environmental groups leverage what’s available to them, whether it’s NIMBYism or sovereignty of native peoples. But the organizing and money behind the scenes is much more focused on preventing any expansion of energy infrastructure associated with O&G.
But maybe I’m wrong. Can you explain how the specific letter from Velázqu, Torres, Cortez, etc. fits your framing?
In that case, why do Congressional democrts bother getting involved?
They get votes from the voters to get into and stay in office
I think the problem is that the NYT article is doing a very bad job at summarizing the letter.
https://nadler.house.gov/uploadedfiles/ny_delegation_letter_on_nese_10.15.25.pdf
They are clearly laying out their climate concerns over the very first paragraphs! And they are going out of their way to emphasize how their "climate concerns" are LOCAL climate concerns, first and foremost. They're concerned about seabeds, toxic substances, methane leakages, marine ecosystems, tourism, commercial fishing... you get the idea.
They are also talking about climate goals and stuff like that, but only in the last part of the letter. They put more emphasis on the argument that in their view, it's not clear if there is a need for more gas given the flatlining demand over the last few years. In that case, the financial burden could be put on the taxpayers.
I think it's fine to dismiss the local environmental concerns as run-of-the-mill NIMBYism, and all that stuff about climate goals is obviously not very substantiated, as you said. But I also think it's important to be honest about what the letter is actually arguing. The NYT isn't very honest about that, and neither are you.
(There is one good climate argument the letter actually doesn't touch on, by the way: Lock-in effects due to long-term purchase agreements, artificially delaying the energy transition. That's a problem Europe now has after hastily switching to LNG deliveries from the US due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
This is a good point. Based on the letter, the environmental concerns seem to be more around the dredging around Staten Island and the Rockaways and harm to the marine ecosystem rather than global climate change. Now, some of that is clearly NIMBY-ism and I'm sure there's some pipeline=fossil fuels=bad vibes driving it, but they raised concrete concerns.
I do still hope Hochul votes "yes". As a New Yorker, I want lower energy prices and less oil and coal used. The noise and disturbance at the Rockaways doesn't sound great, but it's a beach that, while lovely, is both large and near JFK so can probably handle it.
It was not US LNG lock-in that led Germany to blow up the cooling towers like so many Taliban defacing the Buddist images.
"Daily life in the United States would look more like it does in Europe, where energy is more expensive and there is a lot more emphasis on efficiency."
This is precisely where the environmentalists want to take America toward, and probably even more ascetic than Europe is now. But due to the lower quality of life that would entail, they slide the political unpopularity by checking off every source of new energy for different reasons. No fossil fuels (not a single additional molecule of greenhouse gas can enter the atmosphere, plus all kinds of mining/refinery/transportation damage), no nuclear (waste/meltdown risk), no hydro (marine biology damage), no solar & onshore wind (ecosystem damage/less aesthetic wilderness), no offshore wind (marine biology damage/scenic views ruined). So what's left? Just sip on energy much less and suffer. Which isn't acceptable for the grand majority of humans.
I don't think the people in Europe necessarily understood what a shift into renewables meant for them: extortionate electricity. Only today, the British regulator has suggested writing off the debt owed by many people on their electricity and gas bills, and adding the cost onto people who can pay.
I'm trying to imagine a modern, industrialized society where anyone but the most destitute owes a significant amount of debt to service their basic, well, services.
It's hard!
Our observer from abroad didn’t say “a modern, industrialized society.”
He said Britain.
Indeed. Sad.
Depending on your definition of basic services, the American version is medical debt.
Yes, but that's a ridiculous definition that nobody serious would propose. It's easy to imagine racking up hundred thousands of dollars in very legitimately-priced medical expenses--septuple bypass surgery or whatever. Nobody has a hundred-thousand-dollar home electric bill.
I’m from Europe and I very wholeheartedly agree that European energy policy is dumb, but I also can’t imagine a legitimate way of racking up more than 10k in medical bills. I suspect that only Americans can imagine that.
You can't? Get hit by a bus and have your pelvis crushed and land in a coma for a month, what does that treatment cost? Not what is your personal /bill/, but what does that /cost/ on a hospital's balance sheet?
'Environmentalist' is a label I've been happy to own, but I don't recognize myself in the characterizations I've read in these comments. I'm not anti-abundance, de-growth nor anti-nuclear. I recognize that it's too late to make the reductions in GHGs required to avoid the worst climate outcomes without a lot of harm to many species and ecosystems. Tradeoffs are a necessity. These are truly crucial years. We need to use every tool available to limit global warming as it's essentially a one-way street. Tipping points are real. Extinction is real. If we don't move much faster humans will survive, but in an increasingly impoverished world. Heat absorbed by the oceans will take a millennium to equilibrate after we reach net zero. That's right. A thousand years. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0812721106 Every fraction of a degree of temperature rise is essentially irreversible from a human perspective. To me, being an environmentalist now means keeping that fact paramount in all policy decisions.
Matt. Can I ask you read the comment from Florian Reiter? Because he makes the very important point that the New York Times article does an awful job of summarizing the letter in question. Apparently, the letter lays out in the very beginning why they think the pipeline is a bad idea. There are worries about leakages and possible damage to local ecosystem.
Now this isn’t necessarily a good reason to stop a pipeline. What it really shows is the upteenth example that “local control” is often a very real impediment to good policy. As many commentators have noted the banal explanation for this letter is the politicians in question are just looking out for their local constituents (or as I noted, likely a small subset who called their offices) and just shows why a lot of “abundance” agenda really depends on putting decision making more on the state level as opposed to neighborhood level.
The environmental groups nationally aren't opposing carbon energy distribution because of the damage to Rockaway beach. As other commenters have pointed out, their counterfactual is the green new deal and net-zero 2050 and no 'carbon-based but less intensive' argument has any meaning in that context. It's not surprising that local politicians would wheel out a bunch of localist issues, but it's also not credible to say that the national anti-pipeline movement is driven by localism. I would take the letter seriously but not literally if what we're talking about is the American debate over clean energy and pipelines.
"As many commentators have noted the banal explanation for this letter is the politicians in question are just looking out for their local constituents"
I question this part though. Electricity prices in the NE are significantly higher than the rest of the country. For example, in 2024 NY was at 18.33 cents per kWh compared to 10.16 cents in TX at retail price average. 80% more! It seems like people looking out for their local constituents would focus on bringing those prices down.
I mean you're describing the banal reality of politics since modern politics began. Prices for all sorts of things are higher than they need to be due to stuff like "rent seeking", "Public choice theory" and "regulatory capture". I think there some libertarian commentators over emphasize their importance to political outcomes, but it definitely describes at least some of the reason certain political outcomes occur the way they do*.
Matt didn't really say explicitly in his post, but I think this is a good reason that it would be smart politically for Hochul to not reject this pipeline. People clearly care a lot about the rising cost of living and especially lower electricity prices. It's just smart politics for Hochul to show she's trying to address these concerns**
* The probably ultimate example of this is car dealership owners. As much as I'm loathe to say anything nice about Elon in this moment, he's right to say that Tesla should be able to sell cars directly to consumers without need to go through car dealerships. It's pure rent seeking and a relic of a time when cars were still a relatively new technology. It would absolutely bring down the cost of purchasing car to cut out this unnecessary middle man. So why doesn't this happen? Because every legislative district in America has at least one car dealership. More important every state legislative district has a car dealership. Meaning by lobbying together, they can get the ear of literally every state legislator. And because this not an issue on most regular people's radar, they don't have a clue they overpaying for their car; diffuse costs and concentrated benefits and all that.
** This is where Matt goes way too far to me as far as his contention that Democrats have literally nothing to learn from Mamdani's successful primary campaign. It's a 100% true that NYC has one of the more unique political cultures in the country. If you're talking about specific policy points, than yeah, talking about free buses is not going to be a winner in some exurban swing district where basically nobody rides the bus. But besides the fact there is something to be learned from his fresh up to date campaign (especially his willingness to do non traditional media. I find it absolutely wild the lack of attention paid to the fact that in 2024 Trump spent a ton of time going on all sorts of podcasts that appealed to young men and then sure enough he overperforms with this group). His obsessive focus on prices and cost of living is so so clearly a huge part of his success. Now his specific ideas may be dumb and not applicable to other districts (the "rent freeze" on rent stabilized apartments is a terrible idea right now and obviously most places in America don't have rent stabilization), but should Dems make affordability and prices (especially electric prices given you can pin at least some of it on the Trump administration's stupid culture war against wind and green energy) a central part of 2026 midterms? 100%.
Rents in NYC are literally the highest in the country but city council members still obstruct new housing in their district. That's politics. (For what it's worth, it's not entirely clear that this would reduce prices for ratepayers on net and in the short run it might raise them--I don't fully understand the mechanics but the reporting suggests that the costs of the pipeline would be passed on to consumers.)
Florian's comment was good. Matt should have described the letter differently, or used a different anecdote as the lead-in to his argument. At the same time I think the underlying point of the article is still valid. The letter is not the only possible example one could cite of climate advocates opposing pipelines (or whatever) regardless of whether emissions will go up or down. Those people do exist, and they do exert influence within the D coalition. And it's not as if Matt disagrees with you about local control and nimbyism being bad, or is unwilling to focus criticism on that.
“even though it sounds hard to believe that anyone would fail to ask that question, I truly believe that they are failing to”.
Could someone, anyone, provide a well-reasoned argument for either a) why that is, or b) why the pipeline will hurt our carbon emissions and climate goals, that can be reconciled with the foundational reality that Matt lays out.
In good faith, I think their argument is that investment in carbon-based energy infrastructure will stay in place for decades, so it is a commitment to ongoing pollution.
Matt is right that the question should be "compared to what", but for these people that tends to something like "compared to a Green New Deal"
Right, this is LNG export terminals are labeled as carbon bombs.
The Green New Deal is a B level essay listing a bunch of sentiments and then with a bunch of unrelated labor policies tacked on at the end.
Anyone can read it. It’s literally policy absent.
Yup. Plus: "trains", as if the US is not far more spread out than Europe.
There is no reason the NEC or California shouldn’t have as robust of passenger rail service as Japan or Italy. (Purely from a geographic perspective.)
The US has a great rail freight system though.
I don't know California as well, but agree on NEC. But those are regional systems - national passenger rail, not so much.
Basically long skinny countries are good for building rail.
Which is why "Green New Scam" is such rubbish... It wasn't an actual program, it was barely an aspiration, like Infrastructure Week.
To look at it from another perspective, their strategy to take the natural gas option off the table *so that* the only two remaining options are high emissions and zero emissions, as that will maximize the probability of zero emissions prevailing.
a "no half-measures" strategy, I guess
Yes. You could think of it as the high-risk/high-reward play. Or sacrificing the short run to win in the long run.
"The worse the better."
The compared to what question is the very deep flaw in but for causation. There is no obvious baseline, there are arbitrarily many counterfactual worlds.
It is tautologically impossible to rigorously model the effects of not building the pipeline.
The reality is that Humans will be using fossil fuels and polluting well into the future
Genuinely the backwards reasoning that Matt describes at the end is the answer. To put it a little more generously: if we build this pipeline, it creates more new infrastructure and gives people more incentive to oppose a crash decarbonization program in 2029 when AOC is elected, which is our only chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees.
It's probably true that it makes that scenario less likely in some miniscule way, but that isn't going to happen and so we need to be focusing on other scenarios in which the emissions question is more like what Matt laid out.
The short term and calls for immediate solutions to problems by voters is so unhelpful.
Climate change degrades the environment and is a drag on long term growth. The practical solutions are boring. The technological solutions are less boring (solar radiation management).
This is right. The most boring way to describe it is that they have a different expected-value calculation than normal people do. The question is which is better, [(probability of doing the pipeline) x (benefit of the pipeline)] or [(probability of crash decarbonization) x (benefit of decarbonization)]. They think (benefit of the pipeline) is zero because decreasing emissions by 10% or whatever still renders the earth uninhabitable. They also think (probability of crash decarbonization) is higher than anyone here does. We see is as essentially zero. Some of them may see that probability as extremely low and others may see it as somewhat high, but either way, as long as it's at least a little bit higher than zero, crash decarbonization will pencil out as having a higher expected value than the pipeline option does because of how they calculate the other variables.
" which is our only chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees."
there is zero chance of that anyway because most of the new CO2 is coming from China, India etc. And they aren't going to limit their emissions enough
China is blowing us away in building renewable capacity.
But at the same time they continue to add coal power plants as well. Thus their emissions keep rising
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
Yeah and the point there is they're doing it for the purpose of boosting electrical generation, not for any culture war reason or to lower emissions. They made solar and wind cheap but they also have lots of coal so they're just making it happen.
"We're gonna win the AI race with manly coal hur dur" is really one of the dumbest sentiments of our age along with "we're not allowed to have energy abundance until net zero because we must suffer for our sins".
More recent data suggest a plateauing or even the beginning a decline. (Too lazy to look for a link.)
Maybe but they already emit over twice what we do. And of course India emissions will continue to grow as they develop
look how low their per capita emissions are
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~USA~IND
I just don't see a realistic scenario where their increasing emissions don't swamp whatever cuts we might make
Let's add some more context, look at China vs the US
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~USA
Charitable interpretations covered by the good folk at Slow Boring, so I'll offer a less charitable explanation which I think carries some weight: Because they think about carbon emissions in terms of inherent goodness and badness, like it's karma, not in terms of bayesian expected outcomes.
I think the best way to explain the pipeline policy is that fossil fuel infrastructure triggers a disgust response.
The human brain's disgust response is wired to interpret any amount of contaminant as completely contaminated. Ask people how many hairs they are willing to find in their soup before they won't eat it anymore. Anyone who answers "five" is probably insane. This response is actually a good idea when we're talking about viral and bacterial disease vectors that actually do multiply from tiny amounts of contaminants.
But this brain wiring does not work for modern chemical contaminants like petrochemicals or pesticides, and it especially doesn't work for carbon dioxide. For chemicals, harm reduction works. Trading a bad chemical for a less bad chemical is an improvement. Trading more of a bad chemical for less of a bad chemical is an improvement. But it's very hard to train ourselves to think that way.
I would happily hook my home up to natural gas to replace my electric stove
Get induction, it's great
I'm sorry you are apparently having a bad experience. I replaced my natural gas stove with an induction stove and couldn't be happier. It's fantastic.
I don't have an induction stove, just a regular electric stove. It sucks
Yes, they're terrible.
Absolutely! And to gas to replace my oil furnace, too, though that’s mainly due to cost, not pollution
My home is heated by an electric HVAC system. So I have $300 a month heating bills, and that's living in Western OR where are most nights only get down to around 30 degrees or so (rarely we get some that hit 20, but that's only a handful of times a year)
You have a pretty big house though, right? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
We have a similar climate, and with a diesel “oil” furnace, we spend about $3000 a year on fuel to heat our 1600sf house. I think gas would cost half that! Electric, maybe less, but inferior heat. I want a gas stove anyway. Maybe someday we’ll bite the bullet and replace the furnace, but it’s 80 years old and going strong, and it’s hard to justify fixing what ain’t broken since there’s so much on the old house that’s actually broken!
Heat pump + gas is the way to go (hooked up to a smart thermostat). Even better if you've got solar to supplement the electricity end.
Given where you live I'm guessing there just isn't the infrastructure?
That was basically my immediate thought too. I don't think the opponents give it much more thought than "the pipeline moves natural gas, natural gas is a fossil fuel, fossil fuels are bad, the pipeline is bad."
If we do not replace or renew any fossil fuel infrastructure ever, then eventually it will all wear out and we'll have to go fully renewable. Therefore opposing all fossil fuel infrastructure will result in a decline in emissions in 2050.
One problem with this is that it's all about "getting to NetZero by a particular date" rather than "minimising total emissions on the path to NetZero" (the other is that it won't work because they won't win the argument against renewal once the constraints start to really bite).
This example is a bit of stretch but if you want to buy a car you have three options, new, used or lease. And depending on market conditions on any given day any of those options could be the best choice. But a ton of people have an iron clad assumption that new and leasing is bad and used it always best. It's not.
In the same way that certain folks have it in their mind that pipeline = bad for the environment. And it's going to take a lot of persuading to get them to come around to the idea that pipeline = good.
You are going to need to show me a LOT of math to prove that a new option is better than a used one.
For example, I bought my used 91 Honda accord for $2,000 it had 120,000 miles on it. I sold it years later for $600, when it had 300,000 miles on it.
And no I didn't spend that much on repairs. You just can't get value like that with a new car.
It would depend on the price of the used one vs. the new one. If a new one is $30k and a used one with 20k miles is $28k that wouldn't make any sense, would it?
And as I'm sure you're aware $2000 vehicles with 120k exists on a bell curve like distribution with some dying 500 miles later and at the other extreme making it to 300k.
I'll agree that there is some variability, but if you get a Toyota or Honda you are probably good.
My 2002 Toyota Prius is now at about 270,000 miles.
The emissions impact is dependent on the future energy trajectory, which is not absolutely knowable--it's big capital project so we are talking about potentially many years into the future. If you are optimistic about the future energy trajectory, the less-bad argument for natural gas is weaker. You might be optimistic for good reasons or bad ones but it really does just depend on the facts.
The intuition pumps for (b) are presumably “Jevons paradox exists” (viz., price-elasticity of demand can be such that demand increases superlinearly with decreases in price) and “renewables and electricity are substitutes rather than complements for natural gas Northeastern electricity and heat generation options.” These are both empirical claims but they’re not facially invalid.
Also what Miles said about entrenching an economic constituency that’s invested in an emissions-creating status quo.
I suspect that part of it has to do with the fact that calculating the effect on carbon emissions would require a significant amount of technical expertise. Most environmental groups do not have a lot of people with the relevant technical expertise to do these calculations.
Good article. I work in this industry, so a few small nitpicks:
Compressing natural gas to turn it into LNG is extremely energy intensive. So intensive, in fact, that the Texas electricity market meaningfully shifted when the Freeport LNG facility came online. This means that it is a net positive for the climate to use pipeline gas as opposed to LNG.
Second, hearing a home with electricity is only more efficient if it is using a heat pump. Old-timey electric space heating is incredibly inefficient, and you are much better off burning the gas to heat your home than turning the gas into electricity and THEN heating the home.
Simply put... Every time you switch energy from one form to another, there is a loss.
On the second point, maybe I missed where anyone said that wasn't true. Or maybe Matt didn't add that clarification because with respect to the Northeast virtually no one uses any type of electric space heating in a meaningful way; it would be insanely expensive to do so, and as a Northeasterner Matt just assumes that fact.
I lived in an apartment with electric space heating not long ago in upstate NY (the utility bills were atrocious). The landlord didn't pay the utility bill and you could always turn off the heat!
On the flip side, there's a good landlord in the area who installs heat pumps and central air in his buildings that combine with oil or gas furnaces.
There is still a considerable amount of older housing that does use old school space heat. Many folks also buy portable space heaters when their boilers or central air systems break.
Supplemental yes, primary heat man that's bad. Given the push back I checked and it's like 15%, which seems really high to me. I grew up in a lower working class house built in 1868, we at least had cast iron radiators and an oil heater. We also still had a coal chute with about 1/2 an inch of coal.
And I've been in a lot of also older, poorer homes, throughout the region. Electric space heating is a terrible way to go.
I want to know the history. When I lived in a building using electric space heat, the radiators seemed to be newer than the most old school cast iron radiators. The building itself seemed to be older than the radiators. Curious to learn anything here as you're in the industry.
The general history is coal in stoves and or fireplaces, followed by radiators which could be either hot water or steam. The steam or hot water would initially have been coal, but could have been switched over to home heating oil in the late 30s or immediately post WWII.
If you had radiators, there was almost certainly a boiler/hot water heater in the basement. Either it crapped out and he didn't want to fix it, or he couldn't figure out how to split the costs of the fuel and electricity (for the circulating pump) between multiple apartments since it would have been a whole house system.
Or he was just an asshole that didn't want to deal with it.
More efficient assuming that the electricity is generated from natural gas, right?
Assuming the fuel mix is natural gas: heat pump > heating with gas > old school resistor space heat.
I guess the unstated argument is that we need to raise the price of fossil fuels to encourage the use of renewables, but we can’t do this explicitly through a carbon tax because that’s politically impossible.
If your biggest priorities are making things more affordable and protecting democracy, then supporting climate initiatives that raise the price of energy in a roundabout way to avoid voter input is kind of an awkward fit.
The irony is that, if you only raise energy costs in the regions where you have the political power to do so (basically CA, the northeast and parts of the pacific northwest), you negatively polarize your own base, allow the energy abundant states to whatever carbon-intensive projects they want, and come no closer to a national net reduction in GHG emissions.
Ah, regulate something so much it goes someplace where you can't regulate it at all. Classic.
It's like squeezing something slippery. You can do it but you have to be careful.
Overall a reasonably good piece and I agree with the conclusion but a few items that I think you could have discussed: (1) the importance of gas reliability to a densely populated area like NYC, i.e., it would be better if gas reliability margins are a little fat; (2) you should discuss the methane concern of climate activists that cause them to believe that natural gas isn't much better than oil for GHG emissions (I think this concern is overstated but you should at least acknowledge that it exists); and, finally, (3) that Hochul could at least make the environmentalists happy that because this pipeline will result in a good reliability margin it is likely that she won't need to approve another downstate gas pipeline for a long time.
Rich Miller
NYC Energy Policy Chief from 1998 to 2003.
“You” meaning itms that the letter writers could have raised if they thought they were important in the cost benefit analysis.
Thanks for the question. Here I mean Matt. I mean that he could have discussed this issue more fully by discussing matters that fall outside the letter.
Matt failed to mention that replacing LNG with pipeline gas would not only be cheaper but result in less emissions because LNG conversion and transport is less efficient.
If we're currently running our LNG export terminals at capacity, I think this wouldn't matter. Less LNG going to the northeastern US just means more LNG going to other global markets, not that they shut down the LNG export terminals.
I sometimes think back to all the choices we have collectively made politically in my lifetime only to realize that we are experiencing the consequences decades later.
The whole Keystone Pipeline debate really set unproductive expectations and discourse regarding climate politics.
The apparent gross mismanagement of energy policy over decades should indicate to everyone to be wary of forecast and policy recommendations that originate from environmental groups.
It would be interesting to go back and look at the historical record with the avowed preferences of environmentalists and figure out exactly what year it should have been obvious they should be pushing nuclear power, for example. I imagine it’s at least sometime in the 1980s if not before.
It's a real kick in the gonads that heightened awareness of the greenhouse effect happened almost just right after the Three Mile Island meltdown.
It would be very funny if the answer was "1986, the same year as Chernobyl"
As a very early subscriber to Slow Boring, there's never been a moment when I even had a thought about canceling.
Today's post pushed me a little closer to changing that.
I saw the headline and my first thought was "okay, let's see what he has." My second thought was "please please don't use this as yet another stick to beat people over the head with while arguing that increasing natural gas consumption is *the* key to achieving our climate goals."
Natural gas is better than worse fossil fuels. Got it. I got it the first two hundred times Yglesias beat that message into us. But it's still a carbon emitter and our end goal is not to rely on it -- someday!
So what's the strategy for getting to no fossil fuels (or absolute minimum -- who knows about jet fuel, cement, etc.)? What's the role of policy, at various levels of government? Are we at free market takeoff and there's less need for government?
Nope, nothing, nada.
I don't give a damn about some stupid pipeline in New York. Build it, don't build it. I don't care. But don't waste our time on this trivia and let's have a full discussion about what we actually do need to do.
What a terrible waste today's post was.
"Climate activism is bad and counterproductive" is to Matt Y as "Educational interventions can't compensate for innate differences in learning ability" is to Freddie deBoer. There's truth in the statement, but also, you have beaten this particular horse to a paste by now, we get it already.
We shouldn't expect any kind of affirmative climate policy from the professional centrists like Matt who confuse gravy-train inertia with an acknowledgement of trade-offs and hard-nosed realism.
The centrist policy on climate change at this point is "Let's hope climate tipping points don't exist and slop video generating AI will become sentient and solve climate change because recursive self-improvement something something".
In all fairness, I too hope with all my heart that climate tipping points don't exist, because we sure as hell aren't convincing the Median Undecided Swing Voter to make any semblance of a sacrifice or suffer any inconvenience for the sake of fighting climate change.
I too get frustrated with Matt Y for beating the climate dead horse to a pulp (see my reply to Marc above), but he's not the problem; he's just a messenger.
I agree with this. Matt "the messenger" has clearly run out of useful things to say on Climate so can we just stop already with the pretense that he and the rest of "Inertia Incorporated" somehow are more meaningfully "serious" compared to the activists? Its a distinction without a difference at this point.
Reading this article makes me want to give Chamber of Commerce Republicans a hug.