It’s funny, I actually just read Noah’s post on this subject (from the other day) about an hour ago—so it was quite the coincidence to then check out today’s Slow Boring post and see that it’s on the same topic!
The (perhaps) only good thing about Trump is that he unifies the Democratic Party in a way that encourages people like David Roberts and Bill McKibben to pipe down and get in line.
Relatedly, today's Axios posting¹ leads with "Dozens of immigration and progressive groups believe Vice President Harris' recent hawkish immigration policy pledges are 'harmful' and part of a 'MAGA anti-immigrant agenda' — but many are backing her anyway."
The coming intra-party fights, post-Trump, are going to be epic.
The majority of the political capital Biden won through his election victory was spent on climate change. If climate change and DEI are the focus of the Democratic party, I’m out.
Is this true? As opposed to dealing with Covid and the economic aftermath, semiconductor policy and the IRA which was about climate but also about geopolitics and lower cost medication?
Au contraire. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed inflation was over 9%. Now it's 2.5%. Perhaps the most successful legislation based on its name ever.
a lot of it was spent on leaving Afghanistan .... his poll numbers never recovered from that, unfortunately, and he doesn't really get credit anymore for getting something like a hundred thousand people out in a matter of weeks
Because losing a war is humiliating and bad. You don’t get points for capitulating in an efficient fashion, even if cutting out losses was the right move.
My concern is that after the whole Haitian debacle, even if Harris wins & Dems win the House, it'll be impossible to push through say changes to asylum laws. It'll be a repeat of the 2017-2021 dynamic all over again- it'll be impossible for Dems in the House to pivot to the center on an issue, in this case immigration, because Trumpism has totally salted the earth around it. We Can't Restrict Immigration In Any Way Because Trump Wants To Do That. You're A White Supremacist If You Cut Back Asylum. Very very bad dynamic for the US
I can’t think of a time when a Democratic Congress refused a Democratic President a legislative win for left-wing reasons. Democrats don’t all represent Brooklyn and Berkeley; lots of them want to show constituents action on the border.
I think your first sentence happens literally all the time, though not always publicly because of behind-the-scenes negotiating. In general Congress bucks a President from their own party quite a bit.
I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong in this case, and I'm not making a prediction- just sharing my stated concern. And noting the general tenor of 2017-2021, when the left felt like if Trump said the sky was blue they had to say it was red
I think the Democrats would try to do something on immigration that is pretty centrist. I doubt it would be the Lankford bill. At the time, Biden signed onto it because it was the only way to get the Republicans to send aid to Ukraine. And then supporting it became a great stick to hit Trump over the head with in the campaign.
With a Democratic trifecta in 2025, there will be less reason for Harris to sign the exact bill, but she might sign some modified version. Even more so if the Republicans take the Senate.
I think people underestimate the push by the Democrats to seize the center vacated by the Republicans. This doesn't seem to be the party of 2020-2021 anymore.
During Trump's 1st administration it unified the Democats in the direction of the "resistance" framework where deviations from progressive purity was seen as aiding Trump. The shenanigans in Springfield Ohio kind of highlights the dynamics where the Trumpsters stake out such extreme version of the anti immigration position and rhetoric where the takes are pushed to maximum polarization. Campaigns can be more disciplined, but the cable news and social media discourse eats that stuff up.
I think we can also thank Trump for waking us up to the fact that it was time to deal with the problem that China has become. Now if only his downsides weren't 100x worse than the things we can thank him for.
The climate movement can't act like it's done persuading people because they have significant sway in one of the two major parties. In order to make politically viable the types of changes I hope for and they hope for, the climate movement can't just try to strong-arm Dems. That runs the risk of what happened with anti-abortion advocates and the Republican party. They stopped trying to persuade anyone other than Republicans and lost the argument among the public. We need to still be in the persuasion game for normies on the issue of "is climate change something that matters enough to do something about?"
I think this is spot on. If I were the leader of a climate movement group, I would say what can we do to make the IRA into something with the legacy of Obamacare.
Dems should frame climate stuff in abundance agenda terms "unlocking the cleanest, most abundant resources we have" and as unleashing cool futuristic tech, "we're solving the Western water crisis with clean tech" "this new home heating system will cut your monthly utility costs in half". I listen to Volts regularly. The stuff these companies are doing is awesome. The climate-focused folks have the goods to make it a winning issue, they just need to have the right message around it, and to not let crazy activists be the face of it.
I’ve moved from mild support to hostility towards “the climate movement”. They’re interested in virtue signaling not solving the climate crisis. They have become a significant hurdle in dealing with the problem.
There are two "climate movements", the Sunrise-like one that is obnoxious and unpractical, and the one made up of people that sincerely believe in the problem and are working on solutions for it. Both are big, but the first one is louder. Roberts kinda floats between the two camps.
Elected Dems should work to elevate the people making the new tech that are making a difference and tell the people throwing paint on art to come back when they're serious.
Agreed. It's perfectly fine to see climate change as a challenge we need to work hard to overcome and to ignore the shrill obnoxious groups like Sunrise.
It’s hard to strong arm anyone when you are less than 45% of the electorate and it’s a high salience issue. There are many more pro life than climate voters.
Except for saying, "I will not ban fracking" and making a deceptive statement about what she said in 2020 (which was really just "I'll be vice president, so I'll go along with Biden's policy not to ban fracking"), Harris hasn't made any clear statement in support of fracking. In the debate, she could easily have expressed a simplified version of the argument expressed here. But she did not; she was just evasive. As such, it is a bit of propaganda to say she is right on the merits.
Another important point. The president can not outright ban fracking. They can ban it on federal leases with account for less than a quarter of the total number of wells, but they can't ban it on private land.
Yes and no. The courts may say that rules proposed by the agency aren't valid, but an agency tasked to enforce laws can make a company spend a lot of time and money jumping through hoops to demonstrate compliance.
But Congress (with the President's support) conceivably could, right? The President also can't unilaterally enact a ban on price-gouging, and she can't unilaterally enact many other policies. However, it's an important statement of principle for Harris and her party to come out against or in favor of fracking.
She also said she would ban fracking - and much more directly than she has since said she won't ban fracking. And I don't think she will try to ban fracking, but my confidence levels in that are low...
she said repeatedly she won't ban fracking during the debate and bragged about increased gas production while answering the debate question about climate, she has said it repeatedly in interviews ... it is literally the most unequivocal and unconditional statement she has made about anything, including abortion (where she tries to avoid making statements including specific timelines and defers to roe v wade).
My point is not that she didn't clearly state during the debate that she would not ban fracking. She did clearly state that.
But when asked why she had changed her point of view since 2019, she did not in any way explicate any rationale for supporting fracking, along the lines of the rationale MY describes here. So she is not "right on the merits": as far as I know, she's just supporting fracking for political expediency, since she hasn't mentioned any of its merits (which she easily could have).
When I read the title of this piece, I actually thought it was going to argue that Harris is right: fracking is bad, but she has to say she supports it to win Pennsylvania.
that interpretation genuinely didn't cross my mind... can you point me to the most recent clip where she has made the argument that fracking is bad? (a genuine question... given her rhetorical style, i'm assuming it is some clip where she made an emotional argument about it polluting water, or causing earthquakes or some such...) i looked though her 2019 book that she wrote, presumably, as part of the presidential campaign, there are a few pages on climate change bun none of them mention fracking and i couldn't find the word anywhere in it
edit: fwiiw, below is a clip from 2019. she says she is against fracking because of health effects on nearby communities and has worked on this in california.
in a recent cnn interview, she said something like "i believe we can hit our climate change targets without banning fracking''.
so, my interpretation is that she still believes it is bad for public health but not a climate change issue, and is also willing to publicly and loudly commit to not banning it, but is not willing to say she was wrong on the health aspects, or doesn't want to get into an extended public argument about the tradeoffs. (so yeah, notwhat matt's headline says).
maybe matt or noah can write a ''yes to fracking in my backyard'' article addressing those concerns?
I have no idea what her actual opinion is about fracking. In 2019, she clearly said she would ban fracking. In 2024, she clearly said she would not ban fracking. When given opportunities to explain why her position has changed, she has obfuscated. She could easily say some anodyne but true things (Russia invaded Ukraine, for example) about this, or she could say some things along the lines of what MY wrote here.
There are no merits to her argument in support of fracking, because she has not made such an argument. Her repeated refusal to make the case for it is what made me think that she truly doesn't support fracking.
I think this article is absolutely correct, though I think it's worth remembering that we actually have an incredible amount of green technology that we can totally deploy to decarbonize Earth entirely, and we don't really have to wait for new technology, we just have to scale existing technology to reach net zero emissions. Though Elon Musk is busy being an enormous pain in the ass lately, I really recommend reading through Tesla's published paper on what it would take to make all of Earth's energy sustainable. It's pretty inspiring IMO. https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
I share your enthusiasm for this paper and the work Tesla Inc. is doing and trying best to ignore the current drug-addict leading the company. But these statements: "Both continental and intercontinental ocean shipping can be electrified by optimizing design speed and routes to enable smaller batteries with more frequent charge stops on long routes." -- feel much closer to assume-a-can-opener than scaling existing tech.
I don’t know much about that business, but it seems pretty clear to me that longer trips are more expensive than shorter trips. Since the technology is thus far notional, no one really knows if the energy cost could offset the higher per-trip costs.
depends what youre shipping, but the part of the tradeoff that matters is less "are you using more or less gas" and more "how many days do you need to buy insurance for cargo" and "for how long do you need to hedge your exposure to commodity XYZ while it is in transit"
Yeah. Normal route transoceanic by electric is probably infeasible for a long time due to battery tonnage needs displacing cargo tonnage. There are not that many places to stop between Shanghai and LA. But most inland and short-haul electric shipping (e.g., the electric cargo ships on the Yangtze) will pencil out. The biggest single driver of reduced transoceanic shipping emissions over the long term will be the reduction in oil, gas and coal bulks, which currently comprise about 40% of total shipping tonnage. In the nearer term, the IMO's introduction of carbon pricing on shipping (expected by 2025) will make (properly sourced) biodiesel the most viable alternative to current fuels.
I can't speak to how feasible that is, but they do cite this more detailed study on ocean shipping (as they do for most everything in this overview paper). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
Yeah that was my main criticism of this article even though in general I agree with it; despite what Sunrise says there's not really any chance of having zero fossil fuel usage today. And even if natural gas isn't our ideal long term solution it's still better than freaking coal.
Having said that, I'm actually a pretty big optimist as far as progress of green technology. I've read multiple posts/articles about breakthroughs in battery technology. And I think we really are at a tipping point with EV(s); if we can actually get permitting reform passed I think it can be a game changer with EV take up. My analogy is that EV(s) are the same point internal combustion cars were in 1918.
Again, call me naive but I think peak oil/gas consumption happens faster than we think and which means the base case Matt is making is a weaker (although again still a decent enough argument).
The main difference between cars in 1918 and EV's today is the magnitude of the increase in consumer value versus the other technology. Replacing a horse and buggy with a Model T was a dramatic increase in utility, whereas the EV replacing the ICE is either a modest increase (or modest decline) in consumer utility. It is why EVs require so much government support to even get to their current 8% market share.
Now, if the charging issues, battery degradation over time and cold weather performance issues can be overcome, then I can see the tipping point in the future. But I think we are still quite a long time from that happening.
Also re-degradation ... Tesla has more or less solved this. The real life tests are coming back at 85-88% retained capacity after 200,000 miles. The battery tech is just amazing.
Most projections into the future have been unduly pessimistic. I assume that's the case here. The only thing that will prevent EVs from dominating is Republican control of the levers of power.
We've been subsidizing EVs for over a decade. They are going to be required (or something like it) in California by 2030. And people still don't prefer them. "Republican control of the levers of power", whatever that means, has nothing to do with it.
I want to like EVs. Driving them is really enjoyable. But they need to get a lot better!
There are multiple reasons to subsidize EVs, including encouraging domestic manufacturers to develop product lines they will absolutely need to be able to compete in the global market (which the big 2 may or may not be smart enough to pull off), as well as encouraging the public to avoid carbon emissions. At EPA social cost of carbon rates, the current Fed tax subsidies are about right considering the SCC increase over the projected life of a new EV. I agree that an accurate carbon tax would be a better approach to encourage emissions avoidance, but we are not going to see a $1.70 carbon tax on a gallon of gasoline anytime soon, so subsidy is how we collectively pay for the emissions avoidance from which we collectively benefit. (One gallon of gas produces approximately 20lb of CO2e when combusted in a car; SCC at $190/MT = $0.086 /lb = $1.72/gallon.)
I do think it's worth noting that the U.S. is somewhat of a laggard on EV deployment. Market penetration is much higher in the E.U. and especially China. China is especially impressive given that 40% of new sales there are EVs despite Chinese automakers being largely irrelevant as recently as 5 years ago.
This is likely the case in the US, but meanwhile the rest of the world is well past the tipping point. In China, over 50% of all new passenger vehicles sold are now EVs compared to like 8% in the US. Europe is at around 25%.
What we do in the US around EVs will matter less and less as the world moves to EVs without us. Given the nature of our auto and oil industries, and our love of huge vehicles, I suspect we'll eventually be an outlier with continued ICE usage and a somewhat insular auto industry that can't compete outside our own borders.
It's not even clear US auto (non-Tesla) will be able to compete inside our borders after losing all their foreign markets in China, Europe and eventually ROW by remaining incompetent EV producers...
I don't know that I'd be "that" pessimistic about them. The government will put a lot of effort into keeping the Chinese out for geopolitical reasons and we really aren't that far behind anyone else from a manufacturing standpoint.
Point well taken; marginal utility for everyday activities is quite small compared to current cars.
A few things. I think we need to distinguish between marginal utility to the country (and world) as a whole vs. marginal utility to individuals as consumers. Given global warming is real (I know Matt has pushed back on how serious global warming and has noted we've made real progress. But I would also say he's made quite clear he thinks global warming is a serious issue), I would suggest the marginal utility to increasing green tech is quite high. I'm well aware this isn't a view held by a lot of swing voters (let alone right wing voters), but that doesn't make it less true; it really is an "inconvenient truth". To analogize, reducing the budget deficit is not sexy and involves tradeoffs no one wants to make, but that doesn't mean it can't have very real negative effects to your life in the form of higher interest rates and reduced private investment.
But the other thing I would note is a world where people don't have fill up at gas stations (or at the very least not need to fill up nearly as often) is a world that people will notice the positive difference; both literal in the sense people would have more money in their pocket and also for "time tax" reasons. I fully admit there are hurdles here, but I think it is worth saying there are marginal utility gains to be had that people would notice even if it doesn't involve the very obvious "look how much easier and faster it is to get from point A to point B".
The path to electrifying the fleet will be from making the product clearly better than ICE vehicles. A consumer paying for a new car wants what they want, so the job of the car companies is to make better EV cars.
It's not an "either / or" -- carmakers will make always try to make their EVs better because they are competing with one another for sales. Governments should continue to encourage EV sales generally as a way to avoid the costs of CO2e emissions to society.
None of these claims seem plausible. Worth noting that he US as a whole is a notable global under-achiever in this area, especially when you subtract California's 25% of new car sales that are EVs. China is approaching 40% and the EU is over 20%, with the cold climates of Sweden (60%) and Norway (93%) leading the way and even the UK (24%) and Germany (24%) at triple US rates. You would not expect to see this disparity if there were some kind of pervasive technological limitation. As David-in Chicago notes below, battery degradation over the useful life of the car is not a real thing, and Tesla, BYD and CATL batteries going into cars today will twice as long as first generation EVs. "Charging issues" covers a lot of things, some of which are real impediments (access to charging in urban environments for non-householders), some of which are organizational / management growing pains (broken non-Tesla chargers), and some of which are technological but already have proven solutions (DC fast charging at 350-600kW).
For the longest time, Europe had diesel cars at a rate much (much!) higher than the US. But that was a result of higher gas taxes and a regulatory environment that pushed consumers toward diesel.
Today, higher penetration rates of EV are due to the same underlying factors. I don't see those being policy choices being the case here in the foreseeable future, so the path to higher rates in the US is making the experience better.
"properly-priced" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
EVs need to get better so the consumer experience is superior to an ICE vehicle, rendering government intervention an unnecessary requirement to their success.
There's also time to take up. Our 2 cars are both about 10 years old. At our current rates of driving we probably won't replace them for a while.
10 years ago we didn't think the EVs were worth the expense, and we don't think they're worth replacing a perfectly good car, but I expect that when we replace our sedan it will be with an EV (our minivan I'm less sure of - I would like to have one gas car and then focus on primarily driving our EV)
Edit: David_in_Chicago points out that the 8% market share is new vehicle sales so I would be increasing that, just the 1% total share.
We have been living with 2 EVs and no gas car for a few years now. With normal daily driving and home charging (swapping cars to charge overnight every couple days) it has not been a challenge. We do a few long road trips per year (800-1200 miles RT) and have found it very easy to charge on the Tesla network -- can't speak to other systems. WRT minivans, I know a couple people who have only good things to say about the Kia EV9 seven-seater SUV. I believe they will begin to manufacture them in Georgia in 2025, making them eligible for a larger Fed tax credit.
There are zero battery powered excavators on the market. Technically you can build one with existing technology, but there are real reasons no one has done it yet. You can't really know if a technology is working until you deploy it at scale, so no the technology doesn't exist yet.
Excavators are one of those use cases where it may make more sense to go with hydrogen than batteries. The technology for that exists, but the infrastructure mostly doesn't.
It can't be batteries because the primary use case for heavy equipment is in places where there is no existing infrastructure and you're building it, or repairing it, or you're doing resources extraction, again, far away from electric lines. There might be edge cases where you can count on charging, I guess, but generally any down time at all is a loss. You run your equipment for as many hours as possible because any large scale project is burning money from start to finish and there are many choke points that can hold up all the work that needs to follow.
It could be batteries. You'd just be charging them off a generator instead of the grid. Does it make sense to do that? Depends on the efficiencies of the systems. Diesel electric trains essentially already do this without the battery as an intermediary to take advantage of the essentially flat torque curve of an electric motor. I would not be at all shocked if it turns out that the best case for heavy equipment was battery electric being recharged off a generator running on hydrogen.
You have to refuel machines now. They don't just run forever. How long charging takes is a relevant concern, but the mere fact that they do is vacuous.
As I wait for an Uber to take me to the airport so I can fly to a natural gas powerplant, let me just say that Harris will not ban fracking because she wants to be reelected.
Your link for “an average car lasts 12 years” links to an article that makes the same claim. But the article it links to states it correctly, the average age of a car on the road is 12 years.
That means 24 years is a better (if imperfect) estimate of how long a car typically lasts.
Here's how Harris throws down hard to prove her cred on fracking:
She publicly calls out Schumer and Gillibrand, and tells them to open New York State to fracking.
On the one hand, she runs very little risk of not winning NYS's EC votes. On the other hand, going against the Democratic bigs and opening up a Blue state to fracking makes it look like she is willing to piss off the right people. On the third hand, it changes the minds of some of the Upstate Trumpists who then move a few House seats blue. And, yes, her vote share in AOC's district drops from 95% down to 85%.
It would be a power move. I hope she doesn't do it.
It is silly to get bogged down on one specific method of producing energy. It should be energy abundance by any means possible. Texas shows in a market free from many regulatory hurdles; oil, gas, solar, wind and maybe even geothermal can thrive. Over time you just have to believe a magic rock that can make electricity from the sky is going to win in a free market.
Possibly. But I think the term "fracking" cuts through the media noise in a way that the much more focus group-sounding "energy abundance" doesn't. I think getting precision messaging out there has to be pretty challenging in our tsunami-of-information-and-diversions age. Especially when you're up against an opponent who is utterly unmatched at getting the media to avoid focusing on things he doesn't want it to focus on (hence cat-eating; Rachel Maddow calls it "made to order outrage").
Energy abundance, after all, could mean solar panels, say, or wind turbines. There's no mistaking what "fracking" refers to: burly guys in very dirty work gear with heavy equipment blasting the shit out of the landscape so we don't have to buy from foreigners to heat our homes, cook our breakfasts, our fill our SUVs.
The risk is even lower than you think because the New York state Democratic party is (rightfully) seen as pretty incompetent. I know that's the a lament from any party when election results go particularly badly for them in a state. But I really do think its the case in NY. The fact that NY is probably the only place that saw the predicted GOP red wave in 2022 is a testament to this.
Point being, making hay against NY Democrats is probably not that electorally damaging. Furthermore, given the prominence of national news media in NYC, it's a move that would likely generate pretty disproportional volume of news coverage.
Latest poll data about NY is quite interesting. Apparently Harris is "only" up 13 in NY. She's definitely (or 95%) likely going to win NY, but may explain why her national poll numbers don't seem to be as favorable as here state poll numbers.
Living in Long Island I actually speak to why Harris may not be as up by as much as we might expect in NY. I mentioned before but the "crime is out of control" story in 2022 carried more punch in NY than any where else in part because so many of these stories were so NYC focused. Second, just read anything about Eric Adams; like literally everyday. Now add Hochul and stunts like suspending congestion pricing. Also don't think people realize too much of politics here carry echoes of old school machine politics; more so than a lot of other places. Think that dynamic is really starting to become more of a problem.
It's actually kind of possibly good news, maybe. Harris can afford to lose a lot of support in NY and win the state handily. The real worry is the House. My district should not be represented by a Republican based on 2020 voting numbers. And yet if there really is a red shift in NY then he may have better chance of reelection than I thought.
The upstate seats are pretty safe Rs, it’s the ones on Long Island that are winnable, and supporting fracking won’t help much there. In any event, New York State is epiphenomenal, it’s PA that matters
I agree wholeheartedly with this analysis, very well laid out. One minor point worth emphasizing: methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So stricter regulations on its capture do a lot more good than any sort of CO2 regulation. By the same token though, if you're going to capture it as part of the tracking process, you might as well burn it and use the energy to displace coal (as you say).
"...stricter regulations on its capture do a lot more good than any sort of CO2 regulation"
I think that is an oversimplification. Of course, it depends on *how much* CO2 you'll reduce by regulation and *how much* methane you can cause to be captured by regulation.
I'm not trying to give you grief, but even that is an oversimplification. I wish I knew more about it, but it depends on how difficult and costly it is to get that incremental bit of methane captured. You may be totally right, and methane capture may be low-hanging fruit, but I don't think the question is so easy to answer based on the greenhouse index (or whatever) of methane vs CO2.
If anything, the math cuts more strongly in favor of methane capture since methane escape primarily happens at the source (fracking or other oil production) or through pipeline leaks. The biggest source outside of that is through animal emissions, whereas CO2 emissions are so widespread that mitigation or capture efforts require a wide variety of methods to have a substantial effect.
Capturing methane at the source rather than flaring it or leaking it does appear to is low hanging fruit from an economic perspective. RMI has done a lot of work on this. Satellite images and tracking also seem to show that a relatively small number of wells (1%) are responsible for 50% or more of fugitive emissions, so targeting the big leakers seems relatively straightforward.
And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's a much more potent greenhouse gas. And given that it converts into a less potent but longer lived greenhouse gas, the arguments for not adding it to the atmosphere are strengthened, not weakened.
It traps many times more heat, which remains in the biosphere, even after the particular batch of methane you are concerned with has degraded. The heat energy is reabsorbed and re-radiated (both toward earth and out into space) by the still-growing GHG blanket surrounding the atmosphere. This heat trapping effect is not "short lived" as long as there is an excess concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere to capture the heat. If we continue to emit methane at the current rate indefinitely, that concentration of GHGs will go up, not down.
Not really. Methane only lasts ~10 years in the atmosphere. Even if you believe the catastrophic predictions of climate change, the next 10 years are going to be fine.
Even taking that statement at face value, that's an argument in favor of ignoring the methane in the atmosphere currently, not for mitigating its future release. Given that it's ~100x more potent of a greenhouse gas and the methane in the atmosphere is estimated to be responsible for 30-50% of our current warming, mitigation efforts here would have a significant impact while we buy time to look at CO2 reduction.
I think they have to be treated as somewhat separate for the reasons already mentioned: methane’s high global warming potential *and* relatively short residence time and the opposite for CO2.
No disagreement from me; I am not arguing that we shouldn't regulate or tax CO2 production, merely that the value from methane regulations is significant.
It should be a no-brainer for O&G to crack down on leaks. Capped wells owned by Small Oil is a bit a problem to solve though I gather (finding the money).
It's relatively inexpensive to capture and sell at productive gas wells in operation. But a lot of methane is produced in shale oil fracking operations, which are set up for oil production and don't want to capture gas or build gas pipelines to move it. Abandoned oil and gas wells (often shifted to subsidiaries that file bankruptcy) are another source. So it's really a classic pollution problem for which fines and taxes are the way to combat the externality.
We are doing that! It kind of depends on whether environmental regulation should be subject to Pigouvian tax or fines or otherwise to incentive this behavior. Given the costs of climate change, I'd argue that these incentives are worth it.
If you're asking me what the exact number is or should be, I don't have a good answer for you (I'm sure a few hours of research would get me to a good estimate).
The IRA's Methane Emissions Charge for fugitive emissions from oil and gas operations is set at $900/metric ton in 2024 rising to $1,500 in 2026. ($36/ mt equivalent CO2e going to $60/mt)
Maybe I'm behind on the latest news cycle, but how does Kamala Harris REALLY drive home the message to Pennsylvanians* that she's pro fracking? Are they even aware of it? I hope there's a compelling way for her to get out this message. They key is to be strong and convincing while avoiding a "Michael Dukakis in a tank" moment. There's no doubt that plenty of pro-fracking folks are irredeemably MAGA—you can't persuade everyone to vote for you. But this issue could be a difference-maker in winning enough gettable votes.
*I'd imagine getting across her pro domestic energy stance wouldn't hurt in other swing states, either, even those where there's not much of a fossil fuel sector. And Texas (where energy obviously IS a big business) might even be in play. And there are also downticket races to consider, especially that Senate race in Montana, and the House race in Alaska. Voter perceptions about the top of ticket affect such races, don't they?
I feel like making the climate case in favor of fracking as Matt does here would be believeable to voters. Voters that are skeptical of Kamala’s pro-fracking bonafides likely believe she cares about climate change, so if she can make the case that she is pro-fracking because it is a pro-climate move I think that would be believable to voters who might not otherwise care about climate. Likewise for Ukraine—voters believe she cares about Ukraine, so make the pro-Ukraine case for fracking and they will believe that she believes it. But just pandering and saying she like fracking now I don’t think would be as credible.
>I feel like making the climate case in favor of fracking as Matt does here would be believable to voters.<
Maybe. But I guess what I'm really wondering about is the *mechanics* of how this is done. Run ads? Earn some free media coverage? (if so, how, deliver a speech?). I'm inclined to think if she could pull it off, the most credible approach might be to goad some climate rainbow warriors into attacking her. That would grab a few headlines. Then she could mount a defense: "I'm proud of my record on climate issues, and I look forward to the day when we have abundant green energy. But until that day arrives, I want my gasoline dollars going to hard working Pennsylvania families instead of Saudi princes. How about you?"
I'd be even blunter with the hippie punching here. The hardworking PA families over Saudi princes line is good, and what should also be included is making explicit that these people want a worse quality of life for Americans, and that we will not stand for that. And if they're the type engaging in lawless actions, that'd be a good time to play the prosecutor card against them, too.
I think this is her only option. She already carries the stereotypes of San Francisco and, predictably, she took a bunch of dumb progressive positions while she was out there on issues she knows nothing about. Hippy punching is the clear and visible signal that she is a sensible person.
I live in Philadelphia and no one here has talked about fracking since Gasland came out in 2010. I understand that fracking happens in PA and is good for rural parts of the state, but I doubt it is even a top 20 issue for standard issue voters in the Philadelphia region.
All she has to do with standard issue voters in Philadelphia is ensure they have really easy access to the polls. That is her base. But she also needs some swing voters.
valorize the work of the blue collar men who extract energy. I love the phrase “hydrocarbon hero’s.”. Maybe it’s too wonky for the discourse or maybe it could become an alliterative meme. By valorizing blue collar men, Harris can also deflect some of the college educated female odor that is holding her back electorally.
I find it implausible that Harris would ever valorize anything related to fossil-fuel extraction. Blue states are suing energy companies for being energy companies, and demonizing Big Oil is religion for a certain Harris-adjacent constituency right now.
Great point about supply reductions being something that will make you as unpopular as carbon pricing without raising revenue.
I think we need carbon pricing, badly. Part of the issue is a little error you made, “ A power plant is much more efficient than an internal combustion engine or a little furnace in your basement” the furnace in my basement has an efficiency of 93%. EIA says a newer methane power plant is closer to 50% but the older plants are still in use, so the average is below that. This puts my furnace at a huge cost advantage, relative to electricity. Even a heat pump with a COP a bit above 2 is just a wash on carbon production if it’s being run off a power plant running methane.
The article is confusing different types of efficiency. A power plant is fundamentally a heat engine, converting heat into mechanical work, the efficiency of which is bounded by the Carnot efficiency and the subject of very sophisticated thermal engineering. The efficiency of a furnace is just the fraction of the heat produced that goes into the living space, as opposed to out the chimney.
There are related issues that are often glossed over, when the ultimate use of energy is just heating: burning natural gas in a power plant to generate electricity and then using this electricity to generate heat is less efficient than just using the heat from burning the natural gas in the first place. Things like heat pumps and induction ranges make the calculations a bit more complicated, and there are transmission losses and various efficiencies along the way, but when someone either implicitly presumes that our present electricity is all 100% green, or ignores the waste heat at generation, I have trouble taking them seriously.
This really varies a lot depending on location. In most places, renewables are encroaching on ng generation almost as fast as ng encroached on coal following the fracking revolution. I expect that within 5-10 years, very few electricity grids will use ng for more than 20-25% of generation and the rest will be renewables and nuclear.
Also, achieving an SCOP above 2 is trivially easy in most of the US and really in most of the world. Modern cold climate heat pumps run with a COP above 2 down to -5 F and do much better than that during the majority of the heating season. For much of the US, achieving an SCOP between 2.5 and 4.0 is very doable.
"Modern cold climate heat pumps run with a COP above 2 down to -5 F and do much better than that during the majority of the heating season."
I live in a cold climate. Tell me about the dis/advantages of ground-loop heat-pumps over air-mass only heat pumps. Some of my neighbors have brought in drilling rigs in order to use earth-mass, and I can see why from a heating/cooling standpoint it is much more efficient to extract heat from warm earth than from cold air (and in the summer, to pump heat into cool earth than hot air).
But the difference in installation costs is huge. Is it worth it?
I'm not positive about the current state of the art in ground loop tech, but the gist of what I've heard is that air based systems have gotten so good that it all but the toughest climates, the extra cost of a ground loop doesn't pay off.
I'm in NH and replaced an old AC only unit with a heat pump a couple of years ago. I still have oil for backup (and for the zones the old AC didn't cover). The install cost was $3k more for a variable speed high efficiency heat pump versus a contractor grade AC only unit. I got around $2,750 of that back in rebates and credits, but even if I didn't, the payback would be just a few years. Plus I got a much nicer and quieter variable speed unit instead of a noisier contractor grade AC only unit.
This state website shows the cost difference for heating with various fuels (look at $/MBTU).
Basically, it's impossible to beat the cheap gas we have here, especially with our very high electricity prices. OTOH, if you can't get gas, a heat pump is likely to cost much less to run compared to oil or propane.
Got a link for this claim? "Modern cold climate heat pumps run with a COP above 2 down to -5 F and do much better than that during the majority of the heating season." Even Mitsubishis venerated H2i in the more efficient mini-split configuration claims a COP < 2 at 5F and they don't offer a COP that I can find at -5F. But keep in mind mini splits cost more to install so probably aren't a great way to solve our problem across the board. link for COP. Search for COP to find the COP of 1.47 for one system and another with 1.90, both at 5F https://pacificairconditioner.com/files/Mitsubishi_H2i_Hyper_heating_inverter_brochure.pdf
I thought the NEEP tables included -5F, but it looks like they jump from 5F down to the minimum supported temp. In any case, I was thinking of something like these:
(If you interpolate, there are units that get a 2.0 cop at -5F)
But really, my point was just that there aren't many climates where a modern heat pump would get an SCOP less than 2.5 or even 3.0. There just aren't many places in the US where the average temperature across the entire winter is anywhere near -5F or even 5F.
An average across the winter in the 20-40F range is probably more the norm, and in that range you'd likely see SCOPs in the 2.5 to 4.0 range.
It's hard to tell what the COP of those systems are. There's a lot of BS on that website, like checkout the 5F COP on this unit at max at 6.81, much better than at 17F where it's 2.42.
And this has been that way for a very long time without getting fixed. Is there a reliable source, like the manufacturer's website, that makes claims like this?
which is the only m-series that is in their most efficient line for cold heating. It has a COP at 2.3 at 5F. That's almost going to break even in January in my hometown of Madison WI, so, yeah, the SCOP would be over 2.5 for sure.
Matt isn't comparing your furnace to burning natural gas for electricity and then using the electricity to heat your home with an electric furnace. He's comparing if you had a car that runs on natural gas compared to a power plant converting gas to electricity.
"And, of course, a big part of the climate solution is precisely to electrify things like home heat and transportation."
He's(probably - I'm unsure about transmission loss) right on transportation but wrong (for the reasons stated) on home heat, as long as its natural gas on both ends.
An ICE can get 40% efficiency (energy burned transferred to wheels).
That's about the average installed generator from natural gas, but you also have 10% electricity transmission lost, and 15% energy loss in the electric car, so here too the ICE comes out ahead on efficiency.
This is a good article but is also kind of a no-brainer for anybody who isn't a monomaniacal activist. We're not going to go to 100% renewables overnight, natural gas isn't perfect, but it's better than oil, and the alternative isn't "zero emissions," it's "oil from somewhere else."
I think there are some that don't have activist brain but can still struggle intuitively with the idea of increasing cleaner fossil fuel production domestically being better than dirtier production increasing globally. It's easier to just assume that less production means less emissions in all cases.
Something that was mostly left out of this article (other than a brief aside on methane leaks) is that much of the more local opposition to fracking is driven not by lofty global environmental concerns about CO2 but about more traditionally local environmental concerns. The really big one is that fracking will contaminate the water supply. The chemicals they have to pump into the ground to force the gas out are not great stuff. The secondary one is that this could potentially cause fracking induced earthquakes.
Some of the most alarmist predictions don't seem to have been borne out, but when we say that "fracking is popular in PA" well that's a little more nuanced than it sounds. The money that fracking brings in is certainly popular in PA, but people still worry about the local environmental effects.
One analysis I haven’t seen that would be helpful in the LNG debate is the proportion of coal plants globally that are logistically accessible by gas and the cost/benefit of new infrastructure to support converting the ones that currently not. Please link if you’re familiar with anything on this.
In NH, they're in the process of closing the last 2 coal plants in all of New England and instead of replacing them with gas, they're getting replaced with grid batteries (and a little bit of solar).
I think the idea is that while the grid connections are super valuable, you don't really need to have gas piped in to make good use of those existing connections. Apparently, there's enough time and enough excess grid capacity available to get the batteries filled up for when they're needed to handle peaks.
One major issue that poorer less industrialized countries have is a premium on the cost of clean energy financing. I haven’t heard much lately on this but pretty sure the IEA has a report out on the topic…
I generally agree with this article’s stance, especially that zero-growth policies (attempting to suppress all new energy initiatives unless they are carbon-zero) are non starters, and that it’s gas for America’s interim.
But maybe a good way to “take Pennsylvania” would be to address the low gas prices at the Pennsylvania well head because of the lack of transport infrastructure in Western Pennsylvania to Eastern coastal markets.
Big Energy Issue in Pennsylvania Is Low Natural Gas Prices. Not Fracking.
Energy businesses and farmers in western Pennsylvania are struggling because of prices, an issue that has not figured prominently in the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris.
NYT, September 16.
Sure, advocating fast tracking regulatory approval for a pipeline to those fields’ PA network would infuriate the eco wing, but it might just tip the state to the Dems. Strategic gas pipeline builds, plus support for accelerated nuclear generation approval, and development of white hydrogen sources would still demonstrate Dems’ eco bonafides. Dems should not waste the general abhorrence of Trump to bring in good policies that might infuriate one of their many wings.
Environmentalists often claim one problem with fracking is not just that it contributes to climate change but that it also causes local environmental harms resulting from the chemicals used to frack which are left in the ground and may leak into water supplies. I’ve never done a deep dive on this - anyone got links to good data on how real these risks are?
I am not a fracking shill (since I don't know enough about it), but I got linked to this interesting citation that claims that effects of fracking on groundwater are less than those for conventional drilling:
you and noah smith are right on this, and nice to see the centrist-left pivot away from the viscerally anti-fossil fuel enviros.
yglesias award winners :)
It’s funny, I actually just read Noah’s post on this subject (from the other day) about an hour ago—so it was quite the coincidence to then check out today’s Slow Boring post and see that it’s on the same topic!
reupping my comment to noah's post here: putin is against fracking
The (perhaps) only good thing about Trump is that he unifies the Democratic Party in a way that encourages people like David Roberts and Bill McKibben to pipe down and get in line.
Relatedly, today's Axios posting¹ leads with "Dozens of immigration and progressive groups believe Vice President Harris' recent hawkish immigration policy pledges are 'harmful' and part of a 'MAGA anti-immigrant agenda' — but many are backing her anyway."
The coming intra-party fights, post-Trump, are going to be epic.
¹ Link: https://www.axios.com/2024/09/18/harris-border-shift-immigration
The majority of the political capital Biden won through his election victory was spent on climate change. If climate change and DEI are the focus of the Democratic party, I’m out.
I have good news for you! Kamala and any Democrat running in a D +10 district or less is definitely not making that the main focus of their messaging.
I think David A. is referring to their policy focus, not their messaging focus.
Fair. But I don't think DEI is a central policy focus of the Democratic party.
How many elected Democrats proudly oppose affirmative action?
Did you hurt your back lifting those goal posts?
Is this true? As opposed to dealing with Covid and the economic aftermath, semiconductor policy and the IRA which was about climate but also about geopolitics and lower cost medication?
Au contraire. When the Inflation Reduction Act was passed inflation was over 9%. Now it's 2.5%. Perhaps the most successful legislation based on its name ever.
If only it could work like that for a bunch of other problems!
Well, we long ago won the War on Drugs, for instance.
Literally laughed out loud at this.
a lot of it was spent on leaving Afghanistan .... his poll numbers never recovered from that, unfortunately, and he doesn't really get credit anymore for getting something like a hundred thousand people out in a matter of weeks
i give him huge credit for his foreign
policy. A-
i wonder how the polling looks on kamala's afghanistan debate answer, since she chose to own that withdrawal
Because losing a war is humiliating and bad. You don’t get points for capitulating in an efficient fashion, even if cutting out losses was the right move.
at the beginning and end of the day, wasn’t that war all about bin laden? he is no longer
My concern is that after the whole Haitian debacle, even if Harris wins & Dems win the House, it'll be impossible to push through say changes to asylum laws. It'll be a repeat of the 2017-2021 dynamic all over again- it'll be impossible for Dems in the House to pivot to the center on an issue, in this case immigration, because Trumpism has totally salted the earth around it. We Can't Restrict Immigration In Any Way Because Trump Wants To Do That. You're A White Supremacist If You Cut Back Asylum. Very very bad dynamic for the US
She’s committed to signing that border bill, and Republicans seemed open to passing it.
My point is, a Democratic House may not be though
I can’t think of a time when a Democratic Congress refused a Democratic President a legislative win for left-wing reasons. Democrats don’t all represent Brooklyn and Berkeley; lots of them want to show constituents action on the border.
I think your first sentence happens literally all the time, though not always publicly because of behind-the-scenes negotiating. In general Congress bucks a President from their own party quite a bit.
I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong in this case, and I'm not making a prediction- just sharing my stated concern. And noting the general tenor of 2017-2021, when the left felt like if Trump said the sky was blue they had to say it was red
I think the Democrats would try to do something on immigration that is pretty centrist. I doubt it would be the Lankford bill. At the time, Biden signed onto it because it was the only way to get the Republicans to send aid to Ukraine. And then supporting it became a great stick to hit Trump over the head with in the campaign.
With a Democratic trifecta in 2025, there will be less reason for Harris to sign the exact bill, but she might sign some modified version. Even more so if the Republicans take the Senate.
Yeah, I dunno. They had the deal worked out for Biden, they’d definitely work it out for Harris at least as easily.
I think people underestimate the push by the Democrats to seize the center vacated by the Republicans. This doesn't seem to be the party of 2020-2021 anymore.
please let this be correct....!
Bruh, if we have a Democratic House and somehow a Democratic Senate we can tell Republicans to pound potatoes.
"Seemed" is the operative word there.
During Trump's 1st administration it unified the Democats in the direction of the "resistance" framework where deviations from progressive purity was seen as aiding Trump. The shenanigans in Springfield Ohio kind of highlights the dynamics where the Trumpsters stake out such extreme version of the anti immigration position and rhetoric where the takes are pushed to maximum polarization. Campaigns can be more disciplined, but the cable news and social media discourse eats that stuff up.
I still think Omnicausers self immolating and people just tired of outrage politics are going to temper intraparty fights.
I think we can also thank Trump for waking us up to the fact that it was time to deal with the problem that China has become. Now if only his downsides weren't 100x worse than the things we can thank him for.
The climate movement can't act like it's done persuading people because they have significant sway in one of the two major parties. In order to make politically viable the types of changes I hope for and they hope for, the climate movement can't just try to strong-arm Dems. That runs the risk of what happened with anti-abortion advocates and the Republican party. They stopped trying to persuade anyone other than Republicans and lost the argument among the public. We need to still be in the persuasion game for normies on the issue of "is climate change something that matters enough to do something about?"
I think this is spot on. If I were the leader of a climate movement group, I would say what can we do to make the IRA into something with the legacy of Obamacare.
Dems should frame climate stuff in abundance agenda terms "unlocking the cleanest, most abundant resources we have" and as unleashing cool futuristic tech, "we're solving the Western water crisis with clean tech" "this new home heating system will cut your monthly utility costs in half". I listen to Volts regularly. The stuff these companies are doing is awesome. The climate-focused folks have the goods to make it a winning issue, they just need to have the right message around it, and to not let crazy activists be the face of it.
I’ve moved from mild support to hostility towards “the climate movement”. They’re interested in virtue signaling not solving the climate crisis. They have become a significant hurdle in dealing with the problem.
There are two "climate movements", the Sunrise-like one that is obnoxious and unpractical, and the one made up of people that sincerely believe in the problem and are working on solutions for it. Both are big, but the first one is louder. Roberts kinda floats between the two camps.
Elected Dems should work to elevate the people making the new tech that are making a difference and tell the people throwing paint on art to come back when they're serious.
Yes, but also people vandalizing immortal art should be in prison.
This.
Agreed. It's perfectly fine to see climate change as a challenge we need to work hard to overcome and to ignore the shrill obnoxious groups like Sunrise.
It’s hard to strong arm anyone when you are less than 45% of the electorate and it’s a high salience issue. There are many more pro life than climate voters.
The title of this piece seems deceptive to me.
Except for saying, "I will not ban fracking" and making a deceptive statement about what she said in 2020 (which was really just "I'll be vice president, so I'll go along with Biden's policy not to ban fracking"), Harris hasn't made any clear statement in support of fracking. In the debate, she could easily have expressed a simplified version of the argument expressed here. But she did not; she was just evasive. As such, it is a bit of propaganda to say she is right on the merits.
Another important point. The president can not outright ban fracking. They can ban it on federal leases with account for less than a quarter of the total number of wells, but they can't ban it on private land.
No, but they can bleed it with a thousand cuts through regulatory agency scrutiny.
This Supreme Court might have something to say about that in our post-Chevron world....
Yes and no. The courts may say that rules proposed by the agency aren't valid, but an agency tasked to enforce laws can make a company spend a lot of time and money jumping through hoops to demonstrate compliance.
But Congress (with the President's support) conceivably could, right? The President also can't unilaterally enact a ban on price-gouging, and she can't unilaterally enact many other policies. However, it's an important statement of principle for Harris and her party to come out against or in favor of fracking.
She said she won't ban fracking. That's pretty clear.
She also said she would ban fracking - and much more directly than she has since said she won't ban fracking. And I don't think she will try to ban fracking, but my confidence levels in that are low...
she said repeatedly she won't ban fracking during the debate and bragged about increased gas production while answering the debate question about climate, she has said it repeatedly in interviews ... it is literally the most unequivocal and unconditional statement she has made about anything, including abortion (where she tries to avoid making statements including specific timelines and defers to roe v wade).
My point is not that she didn't clearly state during the debate that she would not ban fracking. She did clearly state that.
But when asked why she had changed her point of view since 2019, she did not in any way explicate any rationale for supporting fracking, along the lines of the rationale MY describes here. So she is not "right on the merits": as far as I know, she's just supporting fracking for political expediency, since she hasn't mentioned any of its merits (which she easily could have).
When I read the title of this piece, I actually thought it was going to argue that Harris is right: fracking is bad, but she has to say she supports it to win Pennsylvania.
that interpretation genuinely didn't cross my mind... can you point me to the most recent clip where she has made the argument that fracking is bad? (a genuine question... given her rhetorical style, i'm assuming it is some clip where she made an emotional argument about it polluting water, or causing earthquakes or some such...) i looked though her 2019 book that she wrote, presumably, as part of the presidential campaign, there are a few pages on climate change bun none of them mention fracking and i couldn't find the word anywhere in it
edit: fwiiw, below is a clip from 2019. she says she is against fracking because of health effects on nearby communities and has worked on this in california.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DibvhzmbrTA
in a recent cnn interview, she said something like "i believe we can hit our climate change targets without banning fracking''.
so, my interpretation is that she still believes it is bad for public health but not a climate change issue, and is also willing to publicly and loudly commit to not banning it, but is not willing to say she was wrong on the health aspects, or doesn't want to get into an extended public argument about the tradeoffs. (so yeah, notwhat matt's headline says).
maybe matt or noah can write a ''yes to fracking in my backyard'' article addressing those concerns?
I have no idea what her actual opinion is about fracking. In 2019, she clearly said she would ban fracking. In 2024, she clearly said she would not ban fracking. When given opportunities to explain why her position has changed, she has obfuscated. She could easily say some anodyne but true things (Russia invaded Ukraine, for example) about this, or she could say some things along the lines of what MY wrote here.
There are no merits to her argument in support of fracking, because she has not made such an argument. Her repeated refusal to make the case for it is what made me think that she truly doesn't support fracking.
It's OK to assume that a politician is better on an issue than they state explicitly.
Agreed, he's being very generous with this framing.
I think this article is absolutely correct, though I think it's worth remembering that we actually have an incredible amount of green technology that we can totally deploy to decarbonize Earth entirely, and we don't really have to wait for new technology, we just have to scale existing technology to reach net zero emissions. Though Elon Musk is busy being an enormous pain in the ass lately, I really recommend reading through Tesla's published paper on what it would take to make all of Earth's energy sustainable. It's pretty inspiring IMO. https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
I share your enthusiasm for this paper and the work Tesla Inc. is doing and trying best to ignore the current drug-addict leading the company. But these statements: "Both continental and intercontinental ocean shipping can be electrified by optimizing design speed and routes to enable smaller batteries with more frequent charge stops on long routes." -- feel much closer to assume-a-can-opener than scaling existing tech.
“…more frequent charge stops on long routes…”
…presumably that would result in a lower average speed, and therefore higher personnel and capital costs.
I haven't read the paper, but I wonder if the authors have a clue about how the economics and logistics of international shipping work.
I don’t know much about that business, but it seems pretty clear to me that longer trips are more expensive than shorter trips. Since the technology is thus far notional, no one really knows if the energy cost could offset the higher per-trip costs.
depends what youre shipping, but the part of the tradeoff that matters is less "are you using more or less gas" and more "how many days do you need to buy insurance for cargo" and "for how long do you need to hedge your exposure to commodity XYZ while it is in transit"
Yeah. Normal route transoceanic by electric is probably infeasible for a long time due to battery tonnage needs displacing cargo tonnage. There are not that many places to stop between Shanghai and LA. But most inland and short-haul electric shipping (e.g., the electric cargo ships on the Yangtze) will pencil out. The biggest single driver of reduced transoceanic shipping emissions over the long term will be the reduction in oil, gas and coal bulks, which currently comprise about 40% of total shipping tonnage. In the nearer term, the IMO's introduction of carbon pricing on shipping (expected by 2025) will make (properly sourced) biodiesel the most viable alternative to current fuels.
I can't speak to how feasible that is, but they do cite this more detailed study on ocean shipping (as they do for most everything in this overview paper). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
Yeah that was my main criticism of this article even though in general I agree with it; despite what Sunrise says there's not really any chance of having zero fossil fuel usage today. And even if natural gas isn't our ideal long term solution it's still better than freaking coal.
Having said that, I'm actually a pretty big optimist as far as progress of green technology. I've read multiple posts/articles about breakthroughs in battery technology. And I think we really are at a tipping point with EV(s); if we can actually get permitting reform passed I think it can be a game changer with EV take up. My analogy is that EV(s) are the same point internal combustion cars were in 1918.
Again, call me naive but I think peak oil/gas consumption happens faster than we think and which means the base case Matt is making is a weaker (although again still a decent enough argument).
The main difference between cars in 1918 and EV's today is the magnitude of the increase in consumer value versus the other technology. Replacing a horse and buggy with a Model T was a dramatic increase in utility, whereas the EV replacing the ICE is either a modest increase (or modest decline) in consumer utility. It is why EVs require so much government support to even get to their current 8% market share.
Now, if the charging issues, battery degradation over time and cold weather performance issues can be overcome, then I can see the tipping point in the future. But I think we are still quite a long time from that happening.
Also re-degradation ... Tesla has more or less solved this. The real life tests are coming back at 85-88% retained capacity after 200,000 miles. The battery tech is just amazing.
https://insideevs.com/news/723734/tesla-model-3y-battery-capacity-degradation-200000miles/
Well said. Probably worth clarifying too that the 8% market share is just on new vehicle sales with the total EV share of US vehicles still just 1%.
Daily reminder that EVs will keep getting better. Today's EVs are the worst they will ever be.
EVs are already a superior product across some dimensions, and the gap will widen.
Most projections into the future have been unduly pessimistic. I assume that's the case here. The only thing that will prevent EVs from dominating is Republican control of the levers of power.
We've been subsidizing EVs for over a decade. They are going to be required (or something like it) in California by 2030. And people still don't prefer them. "Republican control of the levers of power", whatever that means, has nothing to do with it.
I want to like EVs. Driving them is really enjoyable. But they need to get a lot better!
They also need some old grouch versions with knobs, buttons and minimal screens.
There are multiple reasons to subsidize EVs, including encouraging domestic manufacturers to develop product lines they will absolutely need to be able to compete in the global market (which the big 2 may or may not be smart enough to pull off), as well as encouraging the public to avoid carbon emissions. At EPA social cost of carbon rates, the current Fed tax subsidies are about right considering the SCC increase over the projected life of a new EV. I agree that an accurate carbon tax would be a better approach to encourage emissions avoidance, but we are not going to see a $1.70 carbon tax on a gallon of gasoline anytime soon, so subsidy is how we collectively pay for the emissions avoidance from which we collectively benefit. (One gallon of gas produces approximately 20lb of CO2e when combusted in a car; SCC at $190/MT = $0.086 /lb = $1.72/gallon.)
A lot better at what? I'm genuinely curious.
I do think it's worth noting that the U.S. is somewhat of a laggard on EV deployment. Market penetration is much higher in the E.U. and especially China. China is especially impressive given that 40% of new sales there are EVs despite Chinese automakers being largely irrelevant as recently as 5 years ago.
This is likely the case in the US, but meanwhile the rest of the world is well past the tipping point. In China, over 50% of all new passenger vehicles sold are now EVs compared to like 8% in the US. Europe is at around 25%.
What we do in the US around EVs will matter less and less as the world moves to EVs without us. Given the nature of our auto and oil industries, and our love of huge vehicles, I suspect we'll eventually be an outlier with continued ICE usage and a somewhat insular auto industry that can't compete outside our own borders.
It's not even clear US auto (non-Tesla) will be able to compete inside our borders after losing all their foreign markets in China, Europe and eventually ROW by remaining incompetent EV producers...
I don't know that I'd be "that" pessimistic about them. The government will put a lot of effort into keeping the Chinese out for geopolitical reasons and we really aren't that far behind anyone else from a manufacturing standpoint.
Keep hope alive...
Point well taken; marginal utility for everyday activities is quite small compared to current cars.
A few things. I think we need to distinguish between marginal utility to the country (and world) as a whole vs. marginal utility to individuals as consumers. Given global warming is real (I know Matt has pushed back on how serious global warming and has noted we've made real progress. But I would also say he's made quite clear he thinks global warming is a serious issue), I would suggest the marginal utility to increasing green tech is quite high. I'm well aware this isn't a view held by a lot of swing voters (let alone right wing voters), but that doesn't make it less true; it really is an "inconvenient truth". To analogize, reducing the budget deficit is not sexy and involves tradeoffs no one wants to make, but that doesn't mean it can't have very real negative effects to your life in the form of higher interest rates and reduced private investment.
But the other thing I would note is a world where people don't have fill up at gas stations (or at the very least not need to fill up nearly as often) is a world that people will notice the positive difference; both literal in the sense people would have more money in their pocket and also for "time tax" reasons. I fully admit there are hurdles here, but I think it is worth saying there are marginal utility gains to be had that people would notice even if it doesn't involve the very obvious "look how much easier and faster it is to get from point A to point B".
The path to electrifying the fleet will be from making the product clearly better than ICE vehicles. A consumer paying for a new car wants what they want, so the job of the car companies is to make better EV cars.
It's not an "either / or" -- carmakers will make always try to make their EVs better because they are competing with one another for sales. Governments should continue to encourage EV sales generally as a way to avoid the costs of CO2e emissions to society.
What the government should not do is to subsidize EVs.
None of these claims seem plausible. Worth noting that he US as a whole is a notable global under-achiever in this area, especially when you subtract California's 25% of new car sales that are EVs. China is approaching 40% and the EU is over 20%, with the cold climates of Sweden (60%) and Norway (93%) leading the way and even the UK (24%) and Germany (24%) at triple US rates. You would not expect to see this disparity if there were some kind of pervasive technological limitation. As David-in Chicago notes below, battery degradation over the useful life of the car is not a real thing, and Tesla, BYD and CATL batteries going into cars today will twice as long as first generation EVs. "Charging issues" covers a lot of things, some of which are real impediments (access to charging in urban environments for non-householders), some of which are organizational / management growing pains (broken non-Tesla chargers), and some of which are technological but already have proven solutions (DC fast charging at 350-600kW).
For the longest time, Europe had diesel cars at a rate much (much!) higher than the US. But that was a result of higher gas taxes and a regulatory environment that pushed consumers toward diesel.
Today, higher penetration rates of EV are due to the same underlying factors. I don't see those being policy choices being the case here in the foreseeable future, so the path to higher rates in the US is making the experience better.
That's another way of saying "the EU believes in properly-priced emissions avoidance while the US does not", which I agree with.
"properly-priced" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
EVs need to get better so the consumer experience is superior to an ICE vehicle, rendering government intervention an unnecessary requirement to their success.
There's also time to take up. Our 2 cars are both about 10 years old. At our current rates of driving we probably won't replace them for a while.
10 years ago we didn't think the EVs were worth the expense, and we don't think they're worth replacing a perfectly good car, but I expect that when we replace our sedan it will be with an EV (our minivan I'm less sure of - I would like to have one gas car and then focus on primarily driving our EV)
Edit: David_in_Chicago points out that the 8% market share is new vehicle sales so I would be increasing that, just the 1% total share.
We have been living with 2 EVs and no gas car for a few years now. With normal daily driving and home charging (swapping cars to charge overnight every couple days) it has not been a challenge. We do a few long road trips per year (800-1200 miles RT) and have found it very easy to charge on the Tesla network -- can't speak to other systems. WRT minivans, I know a couple people who have only good things to say about the Kia EV9 seven-seater SUV. I believe they will begin to manufacture them in Georgia in 2025, making them eligible for a larger Fed tax credit.
Plenty of reason for optimism but when you see what has to be done in detail it’s daunting https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/the-hard-stuff-navigating-the-physical-realities-of-the-energy-transition
There are zero battery powered excavators on the market. Technically you can build one with existing technology, but there are real reasons no one has done it yet. You can't really know if a technology is working until you deploy it at scale, so no the technology doesn't exist yet.
Technically not true:
https://www.jcb.com/en-gb/electric-solutions/mini-excavators
Excavators are one of those use cases where it may make more sense to go with hydrogen than batteries. The technology for that exists, but the infrastructure mostly doesn't.
It can't be batteries because the primary use case for heavy equipment is in places where there is no existing infrastructure and you're building it, or repairing it, or you're doing resources extraction, again, far away from electric lines. There might be edge cases where you can count on charging, I guess, but generally any down time at all is a loss. You run your equipment for as many hours as possible because any large scale project is burning money from start to finish and there are many choke points that can hold up all the work that needs to follow.
It could be batteries. You'd just be charging them off a generator instead of the grid. Does it make sense to do that? Depends on the efficiencies of the systems. Diesel electric trains essentially already do this without the battery as an intermediary to take advantage of the essentially flat torque curve of an electric motor. I would not be at all shocked if it turns out that the best case for heavy equipment was battery electric being recharged off a generator running on hydrogen.
If the machine is charging, it's not working. That's down time.
You have to refuel machines now. They don't just run forever. How long charging takes is a relevant concern, but the mere fact that they do is vacuous.
As I wait for an Uber to take me to the airport so I can fly to a natural gas powerplant, let me just say that Harris will not ban fracking because she wants to be reelected.
Your link for “an average car lasts 12 years” links to an article that makes the same claim. But the article it links to states it correctly, the average age of a car on the road is 12 years.
That means 24 years is a better (if imperfect) estimate of how long a car typically lasts.
Wouldn't it still be accurate to say that 12 years is the average replacement age though? That's basically the same thing.
No. 24-ish.
Here's how Harris throws down hard to prove her cred on fracking:
She publicly calls out Schumer and Gillibrand, and tells them to open New York State to fracking.
On the one hand, she runs very little risk of not winning NYS's EC votes. On the other hand, going against the Democratic bigs and opening up a Blue state to fracking makes it look like she is willing to piss off the right people. On the third hand, it changes the minds of some of the Upstate Trumpists who then move a few House seats blue. And, yes, her vote share in AOC's district drops from 95% down to 85%.
It would be a power move. I hope she doesn't do it.
It is silly to get bogged down on one specific method of producing energy. It should be energy abundance by any means possible. Texas shows in a market free from many regulatory hurdles; oil, gas, solar, wind and maybe even geothermal can thrive. Over time you just have to believe a magic rock that can make electricity from the sky is going to win in a free market.
Possibly. But I think the term "fracking" cuts through the media noise in a way that the much more focus group-sounding "energy abundance" doesn't. I think getting precision messaging out there has to be pretty challenging in our tsunami-of-information-and-diversions age. Especially when you're up against an opponent who is utterly unmatched at getting the media to avoid focusing on things he doesn't want it to focus on (hence cat-eating; Rachel Maddow calls it "made to order outrage").
Energy abundance, after all, could mean solar panels, say, or wind turbines. There's no mistaking what "fracking" refers to: burly guys in very dirty work gear with heavy equipment blasting the shit out of the landscape so we don't have to buy from foreigners to heat our homes, cook our breakfasts, our fill our SUVs.
Shoutout to the prescience of Frederik Pohl.
I think most "swingy" Pennsylvanians care about fracking not in the abstract but purely as a local economic issue.
And we need to use a close cousin of "fracking" for the most economically viable forms of new generation geothermal...
The risk is even lower than you think because the New York state Democratic party is (rightfully) seen as pretty incompetent. I know that's the a lament from any party when election results go particularly badly for them in a state. But I really do think its the case in NY. The fact that NY is probably the only place that saw the predicted GOP red wave in 2022 is a testament to this.
Point being, making hay against NY Democrats is probably not that electorally damaging. Furthermore, given the prominence of national news media in NYC, it's a move that would likely generate pretty disproportional volume of news coverage.
NY Dems really did fuck up 2022 for everybody.
Latest poll data about NY is quite interesting. Apparently Harris is "only" up 13 in NY. She's definitely (or 95%) likely going to win NY, but may explain why her national poll numbers don't seem to be as favorable as here state poll numbers.
Living in Long Island I actually speak to why Harris may not be as up by as much as we might expect in NY. I mentioned before but the "crime is out of control" story in 2022 carried more punch in NY than any where else in part because so many of these stories were so NYC focused. Second, just read anything about Eric Adams; like literally everyday. Now add Hochul and stunts like suspending congestion pricing. Also don't think people realize too much of politics here carry echoes of old school machine politics; more so than a lot of other places. Think that dynamic is really starting to become more of a problem.
It's actually kind of possibly good news, maybe. Harris can afford to lose a lot of support in NY and win the state handily. The real worry is the House. My district should not be represented by a Republican based on 2020 voting numbers. And yet if there really is a red shift in NY then he may have better chance of reelection than I thought.
ugh
The upstate seats are pretty safe Rs, it’s the ones on Long Island that are winnable, and supporting fracking won’t help much there. In any event, New York State is epiphenomenal, it’s PA that matters
"The upstate seats are pretty safe Rs, it’s the ones on Long Island that are winnable, and supporting fracking won’t help much there...."
Agree. It's far too much of a bank-shot, and the angles are not quite there.
Probably true of a lot of boss moves, no matter how boss they look.
In general attacking vanilla members of your own party is not a good strategy. I don't think this is the Sister Souljah moment she's looking for.
You think Harris should make a clear and controversial statement that pisses off the left wing of her party?
My pager would explode before that would happen.
"You think Harris should make a clear and controversial statement that pisses off the left wing of her party?"
No, the risks are too high and the potential rewards too low.
That's why I said "I hope she doesn't do it."
I also hope your pager does not explode.
Unless you are a member of a terrorist organization?
I agree wholeheartedly with this analysis, very well laid out. One minor point worth emphasizing: methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So stricter regulations on its capture do a lot more good than any sort of CO2 regulation. By the same token though, if you're going to capture it as part of the tracking process, you might as well burn it and use the energy to displace coal (as you say).
"...stricter regulations on its capture do a lot more good than any sort of CO2 regulation"
I think that is an oversimplification. Of course, it depends on *how much* CO2 you'll reduce by regulation and *how much* methane you can cause to be captured by regulation.
Yes, poor phrasing on my part. I should have said something like "you get a lot more ROI for each ton of methane out of the atmosphere vs. CO2."
I'm not trying to give you grief, but even that is an oversimplification. I wish I knew more about it, but it depends on how difficult and costly it is to get that incremental bit of methane captured. You may be totally right, and methane capture may be low-hanging fruit, but I don't think the question is so easy to answer based on the greenhouse index (or whatever) of methane vs CO2.
If anything, the math cuts more strongly in favor of methane capture since methane escape primarily happens at the source (fracking or other oil production) or through pipeline leaks. The biggest source outside of that is through animal emissions, whereas CO2 emissions are so widespread that mitigation or capture efforts require a wide variety of methods to have a substantial effect.
Capturing methane at the source rather than flaring it or leaking it does appear to is low hanging fruit from an economic perspective. RMI has done a lot of work on this. Satellite images and tracking also seem to show that a relatively small number of wells (1%) are responsible for 50% or more of fugitive emissions, so targeting the big leakers seems relatively straightforward.
Methane changes into CO2 over time in the atmosphere, so its effects are short-lived.
And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's a much more potent greenhouse gas. And given that it converts into a less potent but longer lived greenhouse gas, the arguments for not adding it to the atmosphere are strengthened, not weakened.
It traps many times more heat, which remains in the biosphere, even after the particular batch of methane you are concerned with has degraded. The heat energy is reabsorbed and re-radiated (both toward earth and out into space) by the still-growing GHG blanket surrounding the atmosphere. This heat trapping effect is not "short lived" as long as there is an excess concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere to capture the heat. If we continue to emit methane at the current rate indefinitely, that concentration of GHGs will go up, not down.
Not really. Methane only lasts ~10 years in the atmosphere. Even if you believe the catastrophic predictions of climate change, the next 10 years are going to be fine.
Even taking that statement at face value, that's an argument in favor of ignoring the methane in the atmosphere currently, not for mitigating its future release. Given that it's ~100x more potent of a greenhouse gas and the methane in the atmosphere is estimated to be responsible for 30-50% of our current warming, mitigation efforts here would have a significant impact while we buy time to look at CO2 reduction.
I think they have to be treated as somewhat separate for the reasons already mentioned: methane’s high global warming potential *and* relatively short residence time and the opposite for CO2.
No disagreement from me; I am not arguing that we shouldn't regulate or tax CO2 production, merely that the value from methane regulations is significant.
It should be a no-brainer for O&G to crack down on leaks. Capped wells owned by Small Oil is a bit a problem to solve though I gather (finding the money).
“…mitigation efforts here would have a significant impact…”
Maybe, but at what cost? If it were cost-effective to capture methane and combust it to make electricity, wouldn’t someone already be doing that?
It's relatively inexpensive to capture and sell at productive gas wells in operation. But a lot of methane is produced in shale oil fracking operations, which are set up for oil production and don't want to capture gas or build gas pipelines to move it. Abandoned oil and gas wells (often shifted to subsidiaries that file bankruptcy) are another source. So it's really a classic pollution problem for which fines and taxes are the way to combat the externality.
We are doing that! It kind of depends on whether environmental regulation should be subject to Pigouvian tax or fines or otherwise to incentive this behavior. Given the costs of climate change, I'd argue that these incentives are worth it.
If you're asking me what the exact number is or should be, I don't have a good answer for you (I'm sure a few hours of research would get me to a good estimate).
The IRA's Methane Emissions Charge for fugitive emissions from oil and gas operations is set at $900/metric ton in 2024 rising to $1,500 in 2026. ($36/ mt equivalent CO2e going to $60/mt)
“Given the costs of climate change, I'd argue that these incentives are worth it”
Maybe, maybe not.
Not how that works...
I agree 110% with this post.
Maybe I'm behind on the latest news cycle, but how does Kamala Harris REALLY drive home the message to Pennsylvanians* that she's pro fracking? Are they even aware of it? I hope there's a compelling way for her to get out this message. They key is to be strong and convincing while avoiding a "Michael Dukakis in a tank" moment. There's no doubt that plenty of pro-fracking folks are irredeemably MAGA—you can't persuade everyone to vote for you. But this issue could be a difference-maker in winning enough gettable votes.
*I'd imagine getting across her pro domestic energy stance wouldn't hurt in other swing states, either, even those where there's not much of a fossil fuel sector. And Texas (where energy obviously IS a big business) might even be in play. And there are also downticket races to consider, especially that Senate race in Montana, and the House race in Alaska. Voter perceptions about the top of ticket affect such races, don't they?
I feel like making the climate case in favor of fracking as Matt does here would be believeable to voters. Voters that are skeptical of Kamala’s pro-fracking bonafides likely believe she cares about climate change, so if she can make the case that she is pro-fracking because it is a pro-climate move I think that would be believable to voters who might not otherwise care about climate. Likewise for Ukraine—voters believe she cares about Ukraine, so make the pro-Ukraine case for fracking and they will believe that she believes it. But just pandering and saying she like fracking now I don’t think would be as credible.
>I feel like making the climate case in favor of fracking as Matt does here would be believable to voters.<
Maybe. But I guess what I'm really wondering about is the *mechanics* of how this is done. Run ads? Earn some free media coverage? (if so, how, deliver a speech?). I'm inclined to think if she could pull it off, the most credible approach might be to goad some climate rainbow warriors into attacking her. That would grab a few headlines. Then she could mount a defense: "I'm proud of my record on climate issues, and I look forward to the day when we have abundant green energy. But until that day arrives, I want my gasoline dollars going to hard working Pennsylvania families instead of Saudi princes. How about you?"
I'd be even blunter with the hippie punching here. The hardworking PA families over Saudi princes line is good, and what should also be included is making explicit that these people want a worse quality of life for Americans, and that we will not stand for that. And if they're the type engaging in lawless actions, that'd be a good time to play the prosecutor card against them, too.
Do some loud, prominent hippie punching against the degrowthers.
I think this is her only option. She already carries the stereotypes of San Francisco and, predictably, she took a bunch of dumb progressive positions while she was out there on issues she knows nothing about. Hippy punching is the clear and visible signal that she is a sensible person.
Made a similar comment a minute before yours.
I live in Philadelphia and no one here has talked about fracking since Gasland came out in 2010. I understand that fracking happens in PA and is good for rural parts of the state, but I doubt it is even a top 20 issue for standard issue voters in the Philadelphia region.
Sure. But you're in Pennsyl not in Tucky.
All she has to do with standard issue voters in Philadelphia is ensure they have really easy access to the polls. That is her base. But she also needs some swing voters.
The best messaging strategy is to
valorize the work of the blue collar men who extract energy. I love the phrase “hydrocarbon hero’s.”. Maybe it’s too wonky for the discourse or maybe it could become an alliterative meme. By valorizing blue collar men, Harris can also deflect some of the college educated female odor that is holding her back electorally.
I find it implausible that Harris would ever valorize anything related to fossil-fuel extraction. Blue states are suing energy companies for being energy companies, and demonizing Big Oil is religion for a certain Harris-adjacent constituency right now.
and those kind of democrats can bugger off
Great point about supply reductions being something that will make you as unpopular as carbon pricing without raising revenue.
I think we need carbon pricing, badly. Part of the issue is a little error you made, “ A power plant is much more efficient than an internal combustion engine or a little furnace in your basement” the furnace in my basement has an efficiency of 93%. EIA says a newer methane power plant is closer to 50% but the older plants are still in use, so the average is below that. This puts my furnace at a huge cost advantage, relative to electricity. Even a heat pump with a COP a bit above 2 is just a wash on carbon production if it’s being run off a power plant running methane.
The article is confusing different types of efficiency. A power plant is fundamentally a heat engine, converting heat into mechanical work, the efficiency of which is bounded by the Carnot efficiency and the subject of very sophisticated thermal engineering. The efficiency of a furnace is just the fraction of the heat produced that goes into the living space, as opposed to out the chimney.
There are related issues that are often glossed over, when the ultimate use of energy is just heating: burning natural gas in a power plant to generate electricity and then using this electricity to generate heat is less efficient than just using the heat from burning the natural gas in the first place. Things like heat pumps and induction ranges make the calculations a bit more complicated, and there are transmission losses and various efficiencies along the way, but when someone either implicitly presumes that our present electricity is all 100% green, or ignores the waste heat at generation, I have trouble taking them seriously.
This really varies a lot depending on location. In most places, renewables are encroaching on ng generation almost as fast as ng encroached on coal following the fracking revolution. I expect that within 5-10 years, very few electricity grids will use ng for more than 20-25% of generation and the rest will be renewables and nuclear.
Also, achieving an SCOP above 2 is trivially easy in most of the US and really in most of the world. Modern cold climate heat pumps run with a COP above 2 down to -5 F and do much better than that during the majority of the heating season. For much of the US, achieving an SCOP between 2.5 and 4.0 is very doable.
"Modern cold climate heat pumps run with a COP above 2 down to -5 F and do much better than that during the majority of the heating season."
I live in a cold climate. Tell me about the dis/advantages of ground-loop heat-pumps over air-mass only heat pumps. Some of my neighbors have brought in drilling rigs in order to use earth-mass, and I can see why from a heating/cooling standpoint it is much more efficient to extract heat from warm earth than from cold air (and in the summer, to pump heat into cool earth than hot air).
But the difference in installation costs is huge. Is it worth it?
I'm not positive about the current state of the art in ground loop tech, but the gist of what I've heard is that air based systems have gotten so good that it all but the toughest climates, the extra cost of a ground loop doesn't pay off.
I'm in NH and replaced an old AC only unit with a heat pump a couple of years ago. I still have oil for backup (and for the zones the old AC didn't cover). The install cost was $3k more for a variable speed high efficiency heat pump versus a contractor grade AC only unit. I got around $2,750 of that back in rebates and credits, but even if I didn't, the payback would be just a few years. Plus I got a much nicer and quieter variable speed unit instead of a noisier contractor grade AC only unit.
This state website shows the cost difference for heating with various fuels (look at $/MBTU).
https://www.energy.nh.gov/energy-information/nh-fuel-prices
Basically, it's impossible to beat the cheap gas we have here, especially with our very high electricity prices. OTOH, if you can't get gas, a heat pump is likely to cost much less to run compared to oil or propane.
Got a link for this claim? "Modern cold climate heat pumps run with a COP above 2 down to -5 F and do much better than that during the majority of the heating season." Even Mitsubishis venerated H2i in the more efficient mini-split configuration claims a COP < 2 at 5F and they don't offer a COP that I can find at -5F. But keep in mind mini splits cost more to install so probably aren't a great way to solve our problem across the board. link for COP. Search for COP to find the COP of 1.47 for one system and another with 1.90, both at 5F https://pacificairconditioner.com/files/Mitsubishi_H2i_Hyper_heating_inverter_brochure.pdf
I thought the NEEP tables included -5F, but it looks like they jump from 5F down to the minimum supported temp. In any case, I was thinking of something like these:
https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/67793/7/25000/95/7500/0///0
https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/67809/7/25000/95/7500/0///0
(If you interpolate, there are units that get a 2.0 cop at -5F)
But really, my point was just that there aren't many climates where a modern heat pump would get an SCOP less than 2.5 or even 3.0. There just aren't many places in the US where the average temperature across the entire winter is anywhere near -5F or even 5F.
An average across the winter in the 20-40F range is probably more the norm, and in that range you'd likely see SCOPs in the 2.5 to 4.0 range.
It's hard to tell what the COP of those systems are. There's a lot of BS on that website, like checkout the 5F COP on this unit at max at 6.81, much better than at 17F where it's 2.42.
https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/34007/7/25000/95/7500/0///0
And this has been that way for a very long time without getting fixed. Is there a reliable source, like the manufacturer's website, that makes claims like this?
Here's on the Mitsubishi website and found this
https://www.richaircomfort.com/mt-content/uploads/2023/11/m_submittal_mxz-sm36nam2_en.pdf
which is the only m-series that is in their most efficient line for cold heating. It has a COP at 2.3 at 5F. That's almost going to break even in January in my hometown of Madison WI, so, yeah, the SCOP would be over 2.5 for sure.
Matt isn't comparing your furnace to burning natural gas for electricity and then using the electricity to heat your home with an electric furnace. He's comparing if you had a car that runs on natural gas compared to a power plant converting gas to electricity.
The line right before the excerpt is:
"And, of course, a big part of the climate solution is precisely to electrify things like home heat and transportation."
He's(probably - I'm unsure about transmission loss) right on transportation but wrong (for the reasons stated) on home heat, as long as its natural gas on both ends.
An ICE can get 40% efficiency (energy burned transferred to wheels).
That's about the average installed generator from natural gas, but you also have 10% electricity transmission lost, and 15% energy loss in the electric car, so here too the ICE comes out ahead on efficiency.
This is a good article but is also kind of a no-brainer for anybody who isn't a monomaniacal activist. We're not going to go to 100% renewables overnight, natural gas isn't perfect, but it's better than oil, and the alternative isn't "zero emissions," it's "oil from somewhere else."
I think there are some that don't have activist brain but can still struggle intuitively with the idea of increasing cleaner fossil fuel production domestically being better than dirtier production increasing globally. It's easier to just assume that less production means less emissions in all cases.
Something that was mostly left out of this article (other than a brief aside on methane leaks) is that much of the more local opposition to fracking is driven not by lofty global environmental concerns about CO2 but about more traditionally local environmental concerns. The really big one is that fracking will contaminate the water supply. The chemicals they have to pump into the ground to force the gas out are not great stuff. The secondary one is that this could potentially cause fracking induced earthquakes.
Some of the most alarmist predictions don't seem to have been borne out, but when we say that "fracking is popular in PA" well that's a little more nuanced than it sounds. The money that fracking brings in is certainly popular in PA, but people still worry about the local environmental effects.
They may worry - but the environmental impacts are pretty ambiguous.
One analysis I haven’t seen that would be helpful in the LNG debate is the proportion of coal plants globally that are logistically accessible by gas and the cost/benefit of new infrastructure to support converting the ones that currently not. Please link if you’re familiar with anything on this.
In NH, they're in the process of closing the last 2 coal plants in all of New England and instead of replacing them with gas, they're getting replaced with grid batteries (and a little bit of solar).
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/28/solar-and-storage-to-replace-the-last-coal-plants-in-new-england/
I think the idea is that while the grid connections are super valuable, you don't really need to have gas piped in to make good use of those existing connections. Apparently, there's enough time and enough excess grid capacity available to get the batteries filled up for when they're needed to handle peaks.
One major issue that poorer less industrialized countries have is a premium on the cost of clean energy financing. I haven’t heard much lately on this but pretty sure the IEA has a report out on the topic…
https://www.iea.org/reports/scaling-up-private-finance-for-clean-energy-in-emerging-and-developing-economies
The financing premium is real, but as I understand it, the higher costs apply to all generation sources.
So as long as demand is growing, new demand likely be met with the cheapest sources which in most places are wind, solar, and storage.
The financing premium causes existing stuff, especially coal, to get used a lot longer than it would be if financing was easier.
OTOH, solar and batteries are getting so cheap that there's a ton of it getting installed behind the meter that isn't even getting tracked.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/silent-solar
I generally agree with this article’s stance, especially that zero-growth policies (attempting to suppress all new energy initiatives unless they are carbon-zero) are non starters, and that it’s gas for America’s interim.
But maybe a good way to “take Pennsylvania” would be to address the low gas prices at the Pennsylvania well head because of the lack of transport infrastructure in Western Pennsylvania to Eastern coastal markets.
Big Energy Issue in Pennsylvania Is Low Natural Gas Prices. Not Fracking.
Energy businesses and farmers in western Pennsylvania are struggling because of prices, an issue that has not figured prominently in the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris.
NYT, September 16.
Sure, advocating fast tracking regulatory approval for a pipeline to those fields’ PA network would infuriate the eco wing, but it might just tip the state to the Dems. Strategic gas pipeline builds, plus support for accelerated nuclear generation approval, and development of white hydrogen sources would still demonstrate Dems’ eco bonafides. Dems should not waste the general abhorrence of Trump to bring in good policies that might infuriate one of their many wings.
Environmentalists often claim one problem with fracking is not just that it contributes to climate change but that it also causes local environmental harms resulting from the chemicals used to frack which are left in the ground and may leak into water supplies. I’ve never done a deep dive on this - anyone got links to good data on how real these risks are?
I am not a fracking shill (since I don't know enough about it), but I got linked to this interesting citation that claims that effects of fracking on groundwater are less than those for conventional drilling:
https://news.arizona.edu/news/fracking-has-less-impact-groundwater-traditional-oil-and-gas-production
That’s good bc they’re going to start fracking for geothermal too (Fervo).
Good question, but even with some harm, fracking+burning gas has got to be much better than mining+burning coal. Surprised MY didn't address this.