This post is so incorrect and infuriating that I am quitting as a subscriber. As we have seen with the rise and fall of new energy and coal, the markets grow and shrink as functions of both supply AND demand (and successful PR). Fracking enabled gas. As a policy, yeah it can’t be ended on day 1 or whatever, but a full throated endorsement of it is such a stupid, old straw man. It’s literally the point of the stupid movie Don’t Look Up. Even Leonardo Dicaprio understands that it’s a stupid argument.
Goodbye Matt and I hope you graduate from climate kindergarten soon.
I work to elect Democrats and I'm on the other side of this issue. Two reasons summarize why: fugitive emissions and water-table pollution.
First, fugitive emissions. Yes, natural gas burns far cleaner than coal, producing less than 50% of CO2 per electricity generated and without emitting noxious chemicals such as sulfur dioxide. That's huge, and replacing coal with natural gas has been the primary driver of emissions reductions from electricity generation in the US.
But methane (which for the uninformed is natural gas, or CH4) is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. On a 20-year timeline, it causes 80X the warming; at 100-years, about 30X. So do the math: if just 1% of the methane escapes during the process of hydraulic fracking, then the climate impact from natural gas is worse than burning coal.
Now consider the process of hydraulic fracking, where a slurry of highly pressurized chemicals is shot into shale formations through a narrow pipe, with the intended design of shattering the shale formation and allowing natural gas to escape. Ask: is it reasonable to assume that all of the gas escapes back up the well? Consider the ample scientific research that fracking (as well as wastewater reinjection) induces low-level earthquakes. Consider the anecdotal evidence of rural residents turning on their water taps and seeing methane escape the pipes. Because fugitive emissions are difficult to measure and pinpoint, we have no idea how much methane is escaping but common sense ought to tell us it is.
Second, water pollution. Early attempts at fracking pre-2005 failed because fracking kept contaminating residential water wells, and citizens sued to stop it. Fracking happens today because of the 2005 energy bill that exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act -- the infamous Halliburton Loophole. If I run a car repair shop that leaks small amounts of ethylene glycol into the local water supply, I might expect to be fined. But under current law, fracking outfits are allowed to pump millions of gallons of this stuff and other otherwise-regulated chemicals (including PFAS) into ground.
I'm not going to list the litany of chemicals used in fracking and their documented health effects, but I will say this. Because of climate change and migration our kids are going to need clean water they can find over the next century or two. Hedge funds and university endowments are buying up water rights. Why are we fooling around?
The progressive left and DC's institutional left have each made plenty of mistakes on climate -- opposition to nuclear and permitting madness come to mind. But fracking is something we should all oppose. At this point, natural gas is the only fossil fuel that can compete with solar and wind on price. But those deliciously cheap MWh come with the externalities of unaccounted climate pollution and destruction of our water resources. What a shame if we continue to drill wells because we ignore the true costs.
New Mexico is also an important O&G producer, and one never hears the end of the left's demands that we phase out production. They need to read this. Also, to read MIT climatologist Kerry Emmanuel's little essay on nuclear, here:
As far as cutting our emissions, we could do a lot simply by adding a carbon tax to gasoline, analogous to the consumption-reducing taxes the Europeans have been imposing for years, in order to cut down on the demand for those ponderous American cars, SUVs, and light trucks.
I agree, this goes way beyond picking up Pennsylvania in the election.
Democrats and the Left in general need to fully embrace increased natural gas production and distribution (including fracking). Natural gas is the only energy source that can cost-effectively replace all uses of coal, which is the real polluter and carbon emitter. Solar and wind cannot replace coal, but natural gas can, and the US has massive reserves.
Natural gas is good for the economy, keeps electricity cheap, and is good for the environment. It is also far better foundation for electric vehicles than solar or wind.
I think I finally put my finger on what bugs me about this article. I think what you are actually claiming in substance is something like: while the best solution might be passing a substantial carbon tax next year given that's not possible fracking is better than the alternative of using more coal or importing oil.
Fine, I agree. But that's a few sentence note especially for someone as gifted in communication as you are. So it seems like the real function of most of the article isn't to better convey that claim but to reframe it so it doesn't sound like you are still saying fracking is bad but we're stuck with it.
And sure, I'm all for Kamala playing that kind of game but that's something I want from my politicians but I don't want to feel managed/emotionally massaged by my substack authors.
Yes, if you decide we won't take action to substantially raise the cost of fossil fuels we'll need plenty of fossil fuel production. And that will be true at **every** point in the future too. That 15 year outlook isn't some extrinsic natural phenomena it's a result of our policy choices and if we implement a large carbon tax next year I guarantee it looks very different.
Fossil fuels have all sorts of advantages that will make substantial use (eg 5+ deg temp increase) economically advantageous for the foreseeable future absent something like a carbon tax. And that's just in the developed world, the case for fossil fuels is stronger in countries with less infrastructure and their government's sure as hell won't act if we won't.
Fine, maybe the costs of the radical cuts the moderate environmentalists want isn't worth the benefit. But let's not delude ourselves then. Admit we aren't going to do it and get to work on geoengineering. It sounds cool anyway. But it still seems to me like even a very substantial carbon tax is a very low cost. Governments need money so if it's revenue nuetral we just trade a negative externality (reducing the profit incentive) for a positive one (reducing carbon emissions).
--
To be clear, I don't disagree that given the real political constraints that make passing that carbon tax -- no matter how good an idea it is -- politically infeasible we shouldn't stop fracking. But that's still a way of saying support for fracking is an unfortunate political compromise and we shouldn't try to pretend otherwise by using a confusing hybrid idealization rather than the intuitive one where we ask how we should behave if we had complete legislative/executive fiat.
So by all means be pragmatic but let's just be honest about the fact it's a much worse solution...at least in this kind of forum Kamala should lie her ass off if it helps.
I don't think anyone is being dishonest with themselves. Otherwise, why would we talk about green energy infrastructure at all? If we all felt there was nothing wrong with oil and gas, there wouldn't be much reason to use any other form of energy outside a small handful of niche cases because it's cheap and plentiful.
I didn't mean that in the sense of literally lying but in the sense of not squarely and bluntly confronting the choice you are making — for instance you might say “let's be honest we are deciding whether to kill this man” if people kept talking about ‘kinetic action’ or ‘sending a message’.
I think the charitable reading of the article is that it claims: given we aren't going to actually adopt a major carbon tax in the near future fracking is better than not (it doesn't argue for the claim we’d need the fracking if we did). That's a reasonable claim and one I agree with but that could have been expressed in a sentence. The only reason for the full piece is to recast that statement in a way that doesn't sound like one is saying “yah absolutely more fracking is bad and in principle we should try and stop it but it's better than the other politically feasible outcomes”.
I think he's assuming that his readers are educated enough on the issue to understand the environmental issues with fracking and also why a carbon tax is not politically viable in the US without having to waste time explaining it all.
You seem to be educated on these issues and you seem to understand that he understands these issues, hence why you broadly agree with him here, so I don't understand the point of your criticism.
There’s also the fact that fracking technology is now being utilized to allow geothermal energy to be practical and many more places than it historically has been.
Note that it was well known all the way back in the 1970s (if not earlier) about the huge gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale. Growing up in the area, I remember it being described as the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” but before fracking became practical, wells were dug and then capped because they had trouble getting consistent supply due to the nature of the rock strata.
Fracking was the solution to that problem, and fracking is now looking to be the solution to geothermal issues caused by similar problems with the rock.
While Harris has stated she will not ban fracking, her position differs from Trump’s. If fracking were my sole concern, Trump remains the better choice. Why? Because Harris’s appointees are more likely to impose regulatory burdens on fracking that Trump would avoid. One could argue they are not banning fracking but are aiming to protect the environment through stricter policies. However, this means Harris is more likely to support regulations that could hinder fracking, unlike Trump and the Republicans. Support for fracking exists on a spectrum, and Harris falls on the more regulatory side.
The ban had been lauded here as protecting nearby residents from the harmful pollution from said drilling and, wait for it, the need to fight global warming. Maybe the first is arguable but is your standard NIMBY stuff -- protect us and let someone far away suffer the negative consequences instead. But the second makes me do a face plant. Need I say that such performative bans do not a thing for reducing demand for fossil fuels among Angelenos? And so does not a thing for fighting climate change? But such is the catechism.
Los Angeles, you want to fight climate change by reducing the demand for fossil fuels here? Then implement a mass program to install cheap reliable EV chargers *everywhere*, including for apartment buildings and street parking. Until then, STFU.
The bottom line, no the top line is that we (the US, the world) should not try to reduce net CO2 emissions by reducing the supply of sources of fossil fuels, but by reducing demand. It would be good if the last profitably produced (or efficiently used, taking account of the harm done by the emission) barrel of oil and cubic foot of natural gas and ton of coal is produced in the United States. Consequently the entire push of US “environmentalists” to ban and place obstacles into the production and transportation and or export of fossil fuels is per se misguided besides being an enormous waste of intellectual and political effort that could go into reducing demand by advocating for taxing net emissions, or subsidizing the production of substitutes for CO2 emitting technologies, investing in R&R for net zero CO2 producing technologies, and removing regulatory obstacles for the deployment of said technologies. [It should be clear that CO2 capture and sequestration and energy storage is part of this approach.]
I’d add two points that Matt did not make. We should be taxing NET emissions of CO2, meaning that we should give just a much subsidy to the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere as to avoiding emission. Technology could develop to the point that some high value, hard to substitute uses of fossil fuels could continue with the CO2 emissions removed by CCS.
The same approach –- demand suppression not supply restriction – shoud be the US position in international climate talks like the upcoming COP.
Yglesias Thought on decarbonization is strong and has moved my opinion away from Dave Roberts Thought. I also believe that it can be improved.
0. This essay is 95% of the way to a great takedown of the accuracy and utility of referring to warming as an "emergency". A follow up which attacks that rhetoric would be straightforward and valuable IMHO (but see next two points).
1. He doesn't explicitly grapple with the consequences of the 2.3°+ warmer world we are headed to. In other pieces he says we'll adapt, but the details of life in South Asia, Florida, Houston, Arizona are quite grim.
2. His Econ-101 perspective fails to practice its own virtues and grapple with the *marginal* impact of additional warming. A world that stops at +2.3° is a much nicer world than one that continues to, say, +2.6°. Plus, tipping points.
3. Speaking of self-contradictory Econ 101, he has a weakness for the *vibes* of nuclear and natural gas and against the *vibes* of solar and wind. California and Northen Europe really did leverage renewables to decarbonize their grids. Yes, they needed gas peakers, but to listen to Matt you would think that gas was the story and renewables the detail. California has started turning off gas by using batteries to shift solar production into the evening, and wind-heavy Europe is doing even better at 24/7 clean electricity. Related: gas really is much better than coal for non-warming emissions, but the warming emissions gap is debatable and debated—Matt tends to cite one side of that debate.
4. Matt has admirably added Tim Latimer (geothermal), Tyler Norris (transmission), and Jesse Jenkins (everything) to his posting-as-praxis habits. His audience is probably unaware of the incredible potential of thermal energy storage across multiple decarbonization domains. One of nuclear's biggest challenges is its clean energy competition. Jenkins is a role model here: he started as a BTI fellow but as the facts have changed he has updated his priors a little faster than Matt has. I think Matt can catch up, should he choose to.
5. The whole "interdicting supply has the political and economic downsides of a carbon tax w/o generating revenue" is overstated IMHO. The political cost of raising explicit gasoline taxes is demonstrably higher than the political cost of opposing particular pipelines. That said, I agree with the larger strategy of increasing American supply and thank him for it.
6. Decarbonization is downstream of political cohesion, which we need to incur current societal costs to better serve our children. Matt could easily connect his climate writing with his other writing on, for example, building bridges to the oil-loving Alaskans.
Those of us committed to the environment need to be realistic in advocating policies that have popular appeal or we will marginalize ourselves.
There are popular and unpopular ways to reduce emissions.
Limiting extraction imo is not very effective or popular as higher gas prices are the political kiss of death. If we ban oil or gas OPEC will take up the slack, so we are likely just helping Russia, Saudi, Iran, and Venezuela and punishing American consumers. And in terms of public acceptance of policy, doing something that will raise gas prices is not a way to win support. Better to limit consumption in ways that do not make life worse for consumers.
On the other hand there is no great backlash against raising fuel efficiency standards and if world treaties could support that it would be much more effective. Get all world manufacturers of cars to stop building cars that get less than 40mpg or 30 for SUVs. Have countries agree to use tax as incentives to own more fuel efficient cars and houses. The reason I stress the world is that the US only consumes a small amount of the worlds fossil fuels. Per capita it is one of the highest, but given the population, we are not going to solve the problem through our use but through treaties. And the biggest expansion in ff use is in the developing world in countries with growing middle classes who want the same things that Americans have - cars, air conditioning. Any world agreement needs to offer incentives to lower the use of these things- such as international support for public transportation.
This post is so incorrect and infuriating that I am quitting as a subscriber. As we have seen with the rise and fall of new energy and coal, the markets grow and shrink as functions of both supply AND demand (and successful PR). Fracking enabled gas. As a policy, yeah it can’t be ended on day 1 or whatever, but a full throated endorsement of it is such a stupid, old straw man. It’s literally the point of the stupid movie Don’t Look Up. Even Leonardo Dicaprio understands that it’s a stupid argument.
Goodbye Matt and I hope you graduate from climate kindergarten soon.
"Democrats haven't given up on growth?" Name a sector other than health or education whose growth they favor?
>an enormous share of the world’s population continues to live in a state of dire energy poverty, from which we would like them to escape.
I dream of a day when helping actual people gets 1/1,000th of the energy of (climate, AI, etc.) Doomism.
(I know Open Philanthropy Project is doing a lot of great work and humanity has made a lot of progress.)
I work to elect Democrats and I'm on the other side of this issue. Two reasons summarize why: fugitive emissions and water-table pollution.
First, fugitive emissions. Yes, natural gas burns far cleaner than coal, producing less than 50% of CO2 per electricity generated and without emitting noxious chemicals such as sulfur dioxide. That's huge, and replacing coal with natural gas has been the primary driver of emissions reductions from electricity generation in the US.
But methane (which for the uninformed is natural gas, or CH4) is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. On a 20-year timeline, it causes 80X the warming; at 100-years, about 30X. So do the math: if just 1% of the methane escapes during the process of hydraulic fracking, then the climate impact from natural gas is worse than burning coal.
Now consider the process of hydraulic fracking, where a slurry of highly pressurized chemicals is shot into shale formations through a narrow pipe, with the intended design of shattering the shale formation and allowing natural gas to escape. Ask: is it reasonable to assume that all of the gas escapes back up the well? Consider the ample scientific research that fracking (as well as wastewater reinjection) induces low-level earthquakes. Consider the anecdotal evidence of rural residents turning on their water taps and seeing methane escape the pipes. Because fugitive emissions are difficult to measure and pinpoint, we have no idea how much methane is escaping but common sense ought to tell us it is.
Second, water pollution. Early attempts at fracking pre-2005 failed because fracking kept contaminating residential water wells, and citizens sued to stop it. Fracking happens today because of the 2005 energy bill that exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act -- the infamous Halliburton Loophole. If I run a car repair shop that leaks small amounts of ethylene glycol into the local water supply, I might expect to be fined. But under current law, fracking outfits are allowed to pump millions of gallons of this stuff and other otherwise-regulated chemicals (including PFAS) into ground.
I'm not going to list the litany of chemicals used in fracking and their documented health effects, but I will say this. Because of climate change and migration our kids are going to need clean water they can find over the next century or two. Hedge funds and university endowments are buying up water rights. Why are we fooling around?
The progressive left and DC's institutional left have each made plenty of mistakes on climate -- opposition to nuclear and permitting madness come to mind. But fracking is something we should all oppose. At this point, natural gas is the only fossil fuel that can compete with solar and wind on price. But those deliciously cheap MWh come with the externalities of unaccounted climate pollution and destruction of our water resources. What a shame if we continue to drill wells because we ignore the true costs.
You’re aware that people living around fracking sites have worse health and fracking has also caused earthquakes, right?
New Mexico is also an important O&G producer, and one never hears the end of the left's demands that we phase out production. They need to read this. Also, to read MIT climatologist Kerry Emmanuel's little essay on nuclear, here:
https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Nuclear_Salvation.pdf
As far as cutting our emissions, we could do a lot simply by adding a carbon tax to gasoline, analogous to the consumption-reducing taxes the Europeans have been imposing for years, in order to cut down on the demand for those ponderous American cars, SUVs, and light trucks.
I agree, this goes way beyond picking up Pennsylvania in the election.
Democrats and the Left in general need to fully embrace increased natural gas production and distribution (including fracking). Natural gas is the only energy source that can cost-effectively replace all uses of coal, which is the real polluter and carbon emitter. Solar and wind cannot replace coal, but natural gas can, and the US has massive reserves.
Natural gas is good for the economy, keeps electricity cheap, and is good for the environment. It is also far better foundation for electric vehicles than solar or wind.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-simple-and-cost-effective-plan
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-wonders-of-ccgt
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/16-reasons-why-greens-should-love
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-greens-should-love-fracking
I think I finally put my finger on what bugs me about this article. I think what you are actually claiming in substance is something like: while the best solution might be passing a substantial carbon tax next year given that's not possible fracking is better than the alternative of using more coal or importing oil.
Fine, I agree. But that's a few sentence note especially for someone as gifted in communication as you are. So it seems like the real function of most of the article isn't to better convey that claim but to reframe it so it doesn't sound like you are still saying fracking is bad but we're stuck with it.
And sure, I'm all for Kamala playing that kind of game but that's something I want from my politicians but I don't want to feel managed/emotionally massaged by my substack authors.
OT: Federal Reserve 50 basis point rate cut? The stock markets are going to be blowing up like a Lebanese shopping mall consumer electronics kiosk!
Yes, if you decide we won't take action to substantially raise the cost of fossil fuels we'll need plenty of fossil fuel production. And that will be true at **every** point in the future too. That 15 year outlook isn't some extrinsic natural phenomena it's a result of our policy choices and if we implement a large carbon tax next year I guarantee it looks very different.
Fossil fuels have all sorts of advantages that will make substantial use (eg 5+ deg temp increase) economically advantageous for the foreseeable future absent something like a carbon tax. And that's just in the developed world, the case for fossil fuels is stronger in countries with less infrastructure and their government's sure as hell won't act if we won't.
Fine, maybe the costs of the radical cuts the moderate environmentalists want isn't worth the benefit. But let's not delude ourselves then. Admit we aren't going to do it and get to work on geoengineering. It sounds cool anyway. But it still seems to me like even a very substantial carbon tax is a very low cost. Governments need money so if it's revenue nuetral we just trade a negative externality (reducing the profit incentive) for a positive one (reducing carbon emissions).
--
To be clear, I don't disagree that given the real political constraints that make passing that carbon tax -- no matter how good an idea it is -- politically infeasible we shouldn't stop fracking. But that's still a way of saying support for fracking is an unfortunate political compromise and we shouldn't try to pretend otherwise by using a confusing hybrid idealization rather than the intuitive one where we ask how we should behave if we had complete legislative/executive fiat.
So by all means be pragmatic but let's just be honest about the fact it's a much worse solution...at least in this kind of forum Kamala should lie her ass off if it helps.
I don't think anyone is being dishonest with themselves. Otherwise, why would we talk about green energy infrastructure at all? If we all felt there was nothing wrong with oil and gas, there wouldn't be much reason to use any other form of energy outside a small handful of niche cases because it's cheap and plentiful.
I didn't mean that in the sense of literally lying but in the sense of not squarely and bluntly confronting the choice you are making — for instance you might say “let's be honest we are deciding whether to kill this man” if people kept talking about ‘kinetic action’ or ‘sending a message’.
I think the charitable reading of the article is that it claims: given we aren't going to actually adopt a major carbon tax in the near future fracking is better than not (it doesn't argue for the claim we’d need the fracking if we did). That's a reasonable claim and one I agree with but that could have been expressed in a sentence. The only reason for the full piece is to recast that statement in a way that doesn't sound like one is saying “yah absolutely more fracking is bad and in principle we should try and stop it but it's better than the other politically feasible outcomes”.
I think he's assuming that his readers are educated enough on the issue to understand the environmental issues with fracking and also why a carbon tax is not politically viable in the US without having to waste time explaining it all.
You seem to be educated on these issues and you seem to understand that he understands these issues, hence why you broadly agree with him here, so I don't understand the point of your criticism.
Cross posted from Noah’s article’s comments:
There’s also the fact that fracking technology is now being utilized to allow geothermal energy to be practical and many more places than it historically has been.
Note that it was well known all the way back in the 1970s (if not earlier) about the huge gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale. Growing up in the area, I remember it being described as the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” but before fracking became practical, wells were dug and then capped because they had trouble getting consistent supply due to the nature of the rock strata.
Fracking was the solution to that problem, and fracking is now looking to be the solution to geothermal issues caused by similar problems with the rock.
While Harris has stated she will not ban fracking, her position differs from Trump’s. If fracking were my sole concern, Trump remains the better choice. Why? Because Harris’s appointees are more likely to impose regulatory burdens on fracking that Trump would avoid. One could argue they are not banning fracking but are aiming to protect the environment through stricter policies. However, this means Harris is more likely to support regulations that could hinder fracking, unlike Trump and the Republicans. Support for fracking exists on a spectrum, and Harris falls on the more regulatory side.
A couple years ago, Los Angeles enacted a ban on local oil drilling (recently overturned by a judge) https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/la-oil-drilling-ban-overturned
The ban had been lauded here as protecting nearby residents from the harmful pollution from said drilling and, wait for it, the need to fight global warming. Maybe the first is arguable but is your standard NIMBY stuff -- protect us and let someone far away suffer the negative consequences instead. But the second makes me do a face plant. Need I say that such performative bans do not a thing for reducing demand for fossil fuels among Angelenos? And so does not a thing for fighting climate change? But such is the catechism.
Los Angeles, you want to fight climate change by reducing the demand for fossil fuels here? Then implement a mass program to install cheap reliable EV chargers *everywhere*, including for apartment buildings and street parking. Until then, STFU.
The bottom line, no the top line is that we (the US, the world) should not try to reduce net CO2 emissions by reducing the supply of sources of fossil fuels, but by reducing demand. It would be good if the last profitably produced (or efficiently used, taking account of the harm done by the emission) barrel of oil and cubic foot of natural gas and ton of coal is produced in the United States. Consequently the entire push of US “environmentalists” to ban and place obstacles into the production and transportation and or export of fossil fuels is per se misguided besides being an enormous waste of intellectual and political effort that could go into reducing demand by advocating for taxing net emissions, or subsidizing the production of substitutes for CO2 emitting technologies, investing in R&R for net zero CO2 producing technologies, and removing regulatory obstacles for the deployment of said technologies. [It should be clear that CO2 capture and sequestration and energy storage is part of this approach.]
I’d add two points that Matt did not make. We should be taxing NET emissions of CO2, meaning that we should give just a much subsidy to the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere as to avoiding emission. Technology could develop to the point that some high value, hard to substitute uses of fossil fuels could continue with the CO2 emissions removed by CCS.
The same approach –- demand suppression not supply restriction – shoud be the US position in international climate talks like the upcoming COP.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-28-and-counting
Yglesias Thought on decarbonization is strong and has moved my opinion away from Dave Roberts Thought. I also believe that it can be improved.
0. This essay is 95% of the way to a great takedown of the accuracy and utility of referring to warming as an "emergency". A follow up which attacks that rhetoric would be straightforward and valuable IMHO (but see next two points).
1. He doesn't explicitly grapple with the consequences of the 2.3°+ warmer world we are headed to. In other pieces he says we'll adapt, but the details of life in South Asia, Florida, Houston, Arizona are quite grim.
2. His Econ-101 perspective fails to practice its own virtues and grapple with the *marginal* impact of additional warming. A world that stops at +2.3° is a much nicer world than one that continues to, say, +2.6°. Plus, tipping points.
3. Speaking of self-contradictory Econ 101, he has a weakness for the *vibes* of nuclear and natural gas and against the *vibes* of solar and wind. California and Northen Europe really did leverage renewables to decarbonize their grids. Yes, they needed gas peakers, but to listen to Matt you would think that gas was the story and renewables the detail. California has started turning off gas by using batteries to shift solar production into the evening, and wind-heavy Europe is doing even better at 24/7 clean electricity. Related: gas really is much better than coal for non-warming emissions, but the warming emissions gap is debatable and debated—Matt tends to cite one side of that debate.
4. Matt has admirably added Tim Latimer (geothermal), Tyler Norris (transmission), and Jesse Jenkins (everything) to his posting-as-praxis habits. His audience is probably unaware of the incredible potential of thermal energy storage across multiple decarbonization domains. One of nuclear's biggest challenges is its clean energy competition. Jenkins is a role model here: he started as a BTI fellow but as the facts have changed he has updated his priors a little faster than Matt has. I think Matt can catch up, should he choose to.
5. The whole "interdicting supply has the political and economic downsides of a carbon tax w/o generating revenue" is overstated IMHO. The political cost of raising explicit gasoline taxes is demonstrably higher than the political cost of opposing particular pipelines. That said, I agree with the larger strategy of increasing American supply and thank him for it.
6. Decarbonization is downstream of political cohesion, which we need to incur current societal costs to better serve our children. Matt could easily connect his climate writing with his other writing on, for example, building bridges to the oil-loving Alaskans.
Great stuff, keep going!
Those of us committed to the environment need to be realistic in advocating policies that have popular appeal or we will marginalize ourselves.
There are popular and unpopular ways to reduce emissions.
Limiting extraction imo is not very effective or popular as higher gas prices are the political kiss of death. If we ban oil or gas OPEC will take up the slack, so we are likely just helping Russia, Saudi, Iran, and Venezuela and punishing American consumers. And in terms of public acceptance of policy, doing something that will raise gas prices is not a way to win support. Better to limit consumption in ways that do not make life worse for consumers.
On the other hand there is no great backlash against raising fuel efficiency standards and if world treaties could support that it would be much more effective. Get all world manufacturers of cars to stop building cars that get less than 40mpg or 30 for SUVs. Have countries agree to use tax as incentives to own more fuel efficient cars and houses. The reason I stress the world is that the US only consumes a small amount of the worlds fossil fuels. Per capita it is one of the highest, but given the population, we are not going to solve the problem through our use but through treaties. And the biggest expansion in ff use is in the developing world in countries with growing middle classes who want the same things that Americans have - cars, air conditioning. Any world agreement needs to offer incentives to lower the use of these things- such as international support for public transportation.