Good piece. One thing I'd say more broadly is that, like, degrowth & asceticism & depriving yourself of airplane flights & eating vegan meals and blah blah blah is just not a scaleable solution that billions of people are going to undertake. The US, as I never tire of noting, only emits about 15% of global carbon emissions. And no matter what country you live in, what your standard of living is there- people are just not realistically going to accept big cuts in their lifestyle, however that gets defined. People in India and China (who emit the large majority of carbon emissions) are not going to accept a reduced standard of living. I know that hysterical climate activists are going to freak out that this Will Lead To The End Of the World, but even if that's true.... much of humanity is not gonna accept an ascetic, carbon-neutral lifestyle. This is not scaleable behavior.
Basically, we have to either invent some brand-new carbon capture technology, or we're screwed. The endless shrill hectoring of Greta whatever her name is is a behavioral dead end- it's bizarre & useless. Let it go
Activists who push de-growth seem to not understand or not care that in places like China and India, that very growth they want to reverse allowed a lot of people to have much better lives and move away from subsistence farming. They can romanticize subsistence farming all they want but I’m pretty sure that after a couple of years trying their hands at it they would understand why so many people are so happy to leave it. People in low and middle income countries are not going to be willing to go back and nobody should expect them to.
"They can romanticize subsistence farming all they want but I’m pretty sure that after a couple of years trying their hands at it they would understand why so many people are so happy to leave it."
It wouldn't take a couple of years, I give it a week or two at most
Note there are a few activists out there - call them intersectional degrowthers, if you will - who take the position that the Indias and Chinas of the world should be allowed to emit, and the West should be extra, extra degrowthy to compensate for it. That would theoretically get around the problem you describe, at the cost of possibly being the most unpopular political position ever devised by man.
Planting trees gets way too *much* attention. If a place can support trees, then letting trees grow naturally there will sink carbon just as quickly as planting saplings. If it can’t support trees, then planting trees causes more emissions than it sinks.
I don’t know much about this, but are they really aiming to plant trees in places trees can’t naturally thrive? I always figured part of the aim was to replace trees lost to logging and the like, and faster than nature would do it.
It depends on the project in question. Many of the big “tree planting” initiatives are greenwashing by using the very visible *act* of planting trees to claim they are doing something. There are surely some that are doing it in the right place, and supplementing the act with the long term protection needed. But even in those cases, there’s a question of how much that act actually speeds things up compared to natural growth. If your goal is to reach a stable climax forest, it’s not clear that planting a billion trees without the natural mix of underbrush and wildlife and so on actually speeds things up by a lot compared to letting it go through the succession of initial ecosystems that start in damaged areas and eventually get replaced by the climax forest cover.
Thanks for your response. I understand what you mean about “greenwashing.” At the same time, I’m sometimes suspicious that certain activists use that and similar rhetoric to oppose helpful measures that are too incremental for their taste (not accusing you of this, to be clear).
But it sounds like, as in many areas of life, when it comes to planting a bunch of trees there’s no free lunch—in other words, man can’t necessarily create an ecosystem overnight by simply carpet bombing an area with saplings.
“…when it comes to planting a bunch of trees there’s no free lunch…”
That’s true, of course. But it is possible to figure out what it will cost to plant trees that wouldn’t otherwise grow and then estimate the resulting amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere over some number of years.
Kenny -- What do you make of this statement from the below NASA link? I took it as proactive planting in these areas with marginal agricultural potential greatly expanded the forest coverage over just natural growth.
<Saatchi pointed to some recent examples that show what might be possible.
Over the past 15 years or so, China has planted millions of trees and created millions of hectares of new forest cover, much of it in areas with marginal agricultural potential. “China’s land use policy increased forest cover in southern China between 10 and 20 percent, turning these areas into intense managed forests,” he said. “As a result, they created close to a carbon sink (an area that stores carbon) in their forests, almost doubling their carbon uptake. The effort has offset 20 percent of China’s annual fossil fuel emissions, and since 2012 that percentage has increased to 33 percent. So that’s a success story.”>
Overall, it seems that changing land use is the big thing, but the act of planting trees doesn’t do a lot more on top of that. Particularly if the land in question is naturally a grassland.
I gotta admit, that Science article had my blood pressure up for a good bit, especially the old, white adjunct professor at a community college criticizing Crowther's team for being too white. In Europe.
When you can't attack the work, attack the person, I guess.
Nothing like a good wokeist nutjob story to get the ol' ticker pumpin'.
I definitely get the broader criticism of the initial study and I think Saatchi points out similar concerns with ~ this silver bullet idea of planting. But I read Saatchi's China point separate from that. I guess they either did or didn't create this 20% offset. If they did, seems encouraging.
Clearly what we need are GMO plants that produce harvestable carbon pods, kind of like how soybeans concentrate nitrogen in little nodules on their roots.
This is one of the things that people are hopeful for with cross-laminated timber construction - build more things out of wood, so that we can find fast-growing trees that suck carbon out of the air, and turn it into buildings that will be preserved against rot for many decades longer than the lifespan of dead trees in the wild.
I agree in that the rate of cover is sinful and should be ameliorated, but don't the trees all release their CO2 as they die? Am I missing part of the argument, aside from the other impacts (flooding, erosion, habitat destruction, etc.) denuding the planet causes?
This, pretty much, except that the technology to mostly fix the problem already exists and just needs some government subsidies to accelerate roll-out.
CCS is probably a must-have, but that might be enhanced weathering or regenerative agriculture, not big technological solutions.
If I said the solution to gang & ethnic violence globally was for all of involved parties to lay down their arms, stare deeply into each other eyes', and sing Kumbaya together- I mean, that's both technically true and actually useless advice. People are not realistically going to do this at scale. Billions of human beings are not going to voluntarily experience a reduction in their cost of living, or be even moderately inconvenienced, to do anything about climate change- and you can't scold or preach them into doing so either. Great idea, wrong species, etc.
Also, being a shrill, preachy ideologue is like the least effective messaging platform possible. (Doesn't she have some speech scolding the world's adults with 'how dare you'?) If you think climate change is a global disaster- don't you have a responsibility to use messaging that like actually works, versus messaging that's actually counterproductive?
"a literal child" Exactly, she's a literal child whose highest degree as far as I know is middle school. She shouldn't be a global superstar, her opinions are frankly irrelevant to adults. Seen and not heard etc. etc.
If you want to be treated like a child in the discourse, stay out of the discourse. If you want to make bold pronouncements, great, but except to get criticized. That's how it works.
Allowing critics of any action to discredit the entire environmental movement as a bunch of self-flagellating imbeciles in front of half the developed world electorate doesn't seem harmful to you?
Seriously, Greta is a child, somewhat stupid to boot.
Allowing her to serve as any sort of symbol was a truly damning failure on the part of the environmental movement, and her message is basically a return to a neo-religious extreme asceticism that has no appeal to anyone at all.
And it's completely unnecessary, to boot. We can give everyone on Earth a decent standard of living by modern, first-world standards without needing to burn another ounce of oil after 2050 or so if we actually put in the damned work.
So... I get that you're so firmly burrowed into the woke bubble that you don't realize how she (and the millions like her) comes off to everyone outside it.
Fine. Just admit that.
Her role is not productive and her messaging is actively harmful. She makes it harder to achieve the societal consensus needed to take actual action on the environment, not easier.
Frankly, the entire "woke left" bit of the environmental movement makes that job harder, not easier.
The techno-weenies are irredeemable optimists and often full of shit, but at least they know how to sell a vision of the future that doesn't consist of sackcloth, unsalted mush, and horseshit for fertilizer.
The big issue comes down to the difference between a Tesla Model 3 and a BMW i3.
Both are electric cars but the i3 is a small, ugly, slow, enviro-weenie shitbox. Because BMW execs thought that what people want was a penalty box in which to atone for their sins. With the Model 3 Tesla offered a super sophisticated explosively fast super-sedan. Why? Because only a small percentage of the population wants to atone for their sins. They want better.
Induction cooktops, electric cars, heat pumps, etc. are all better than the conventional alternative. They way to sell the public on them is that their lifestyle not only doesn't have to change, it will improve by a lot.
Unfortunately most rank and file environmental activists are folks who get off by doing without.
The hidden secret of capitalism is that, hard as it is to believe, people have different preferences. Like, some people would love a Tesla Model 3 and others would be delighted with a BMW i3. Amazingly, this esoteric rule also applies to things like breakfast cereal aisles in supermarkets. Check them out to see what I mean.
I think the Model 3 is cool. I've driven a lot in the i3 and it's just fine, and really great for city driving and for ease of parking in small spaces.
For a second I thought you were talking about the Series 3 and was very confused about it being ugly. Thankfully some of the newer electric BMWs aren't as bad-looking.
Of course. I own two, one of which is as fuel-efficient as ICE cars get, and I won't buy an EV until I can get something smaller than a Tesla 3.
But this entire concept is ugly as sin, and it's a pointless waste of resources and solar capacity to use thin-film solar cells in this role. Seriously, they've got them on the doors, completely perpendicular to the ground!
Sell people a package of EV car and roof-top cells, or make an "outdoor charging kit" that people can unfurl from a rooftop pod when camping, or something.
I suppose that could be the use case, but given the limited efficiency of thin-film cells and their positioning, I find it difficult to imagine it's worth much on the run. Whereas, the same cells optimally located would do a lot of good somewhere. It just seems gimmicky, like they've built the business around attracting outside investment and will fold up once they've paid themselves nice salaries and run down venture funding.
100 miles won't cut it, unfortunately.
Nissan Leaf is quite tempting, but the battery issues seem pretty bad still.
BMW's price points suck.
Ford's offerings are... large...
GM's Bolt, if it didn't keep blowing up, would be appealing.
I think we're holding out for Tesla's mooted city hatch. If they blow another deadline come 2023 then we'll find something else instead.
It looks like there's a company that is making a car that is basically completely covered with solar panels, and they are suggesting that under "ideal conditions" (I guess, parked outdoors in a dry climate directly under the sun - on the equator on the equinox, or on the tropics on the solstices?) it could get enough power over the course of a day to drive 41 miles.
I think solar panels on the doors are likely to generate only negligible power in midday, and only a bit of power in mornings and evenings (and only on one side of the car), so it doesn't seem likely to add that much range.
A good friend of mine who's looking to buy a Tesla Model 3 in Europe can't really do it, because his parking spot isn't that big. Cars designed for the EU market are very different from cars designed for the US market, and maybe that's the reason why i3 has that size. (It does look ugly to me too, though.)
The i3 isn't *that* horrible, it's just unredeemably boring, except the obnoxious paintjob. My neighbor owns one, I've been in it once or twice. Meanwhile, my college buddy owns a Tesla 3, which is an all-around pleasure now that they've mostly fixed the fit-and-finish issues.
"Unfortunately most rank and file environmental activists are folks who get off by doing without."
Nah, they're just stupid enough to think they can get OTHER people to do it for them.
Fortunately, the technologies and techniques involved in 75% of the globe's carbon footprint are already markedly, obviously inferior to their "green" counterparts. Now we get to ride the depreciation curve until the problem is fixed.
It would make economic and social sense to subsidize a bit so that curve gets steeper.
Perhaps, but I doubt that's "most" or even a large minority.
That sort of performative crap is usually centered on things which aren't actually a sacrifice. I don't know many people who make genuine sacrifices of luxuries and conveniences that are within their financial means.
Something that's going to come back to bite us all in the ass is the way that a lot of leftist policies are being promoted right now emphasize that it won't cause any extra burden for the "average" person, just the 10%/1%/0.1% (depending on the policy and who happens to be tweeting about it). And for some things that is probably right. A lot of social safety net items can be improved and funded without raising the tax burden for the type of person who is volunteering to phone bank for Bernie.
But that type of argument has wiggled its way into the climate change discussion, where it is just amazingly incorrect and actively unhelpful. Hardly a week goes by without seeing someone share some version of the "90% of emissions come from just 10 companies!" meme. But everyone forgets that those 10 companies are all fossil fuel companies. Putting the blame on all of them is like blaming the local gas station for all the carbon released by all of the cars driving on the gas they sell. But there are a lot of people are out there who see things like that and become legitimately convinced that we just need to tax/abolish/punish/whatever some small number of evil corporations and then everything will be fixed. That they, personally, will not have to endure any hardships in their daily life.
That dynamic is going to be ruinous when it comes time to try and pass any serious climate policy. A lot of people who claim to be very invested in curbing the effects of climate change are going to balk at some of the things that would need to be accomplished. (Matt mentioned the opposition to banning gas stoves, but can you imagine the riot if we forced gasoline to increase its price to match the externalities it causes?)
This! Absolutely this! There is such magical thinking going around - that if only we could ban this corporation or that corporation, everything would be better. There is no path to reducing emissions without either improving technology, or reducing consumption - and there’s only so much consumption the wealthy do before it inevitably cuts into everyone else.
There is a slightly more reasonable version of this argument where companies _could_ invest more in energy efficiency but choose to return a profit instead.
Investing in energy efficiency is like investing in R&D. It's cutting into immediate profit for longer-term gains. Companies that aren't doing any investment in increasing their energy efficiency should be looked at with the same skepticism as companies that don't do any investment in R&D.
Yes, and profits can occur because of an increase in revenue or a decrease in expenses. Becoming more energy-efficient and reducing your energy expenses (and blunting the impact of higher energy costs) can (and will) increase your company's profit.
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that companies are without fault. But when people say that they are entirely at fault, or that any changes/hardships an individual might have to endure are worthless ("because it is so minuscule when compared to what the big companies are doing"), it becomes a self-sabotaging position.
Sure - people are the same way though. They could invest in smaller cars, houses, electronics, etc. and have a smaller carbon footprint. But they don't. Why would we expect companies to do what individuals won't?
The fact that people are unwilling to pay $100/year for mitigation costs is good evidence of a lack of seriousness and a lack of appetite for any meaningful sacrifice.
The anecdote about stoves, however, is not.
"Nice upscale liberals who care a lot about climate change get very upset if you suggest banning gas stoves."
This is not evidence that people are unwilling to sacrifice: it's evidence that people are not willing to make *obviously meaningless* sacrifices. And that's a healthy thing.
Now, I don't give a toss about stoves (I'm using an electric one myself). But everyone knows that the scale of the problem is so huge that banning every Aga in the world won't matter. And most people also know that the nature of the problem is truly global: solutions are going to require coordinated action by many nations.
If I can sign a treaty with India and China whereby they will halve their use of coal-powered plants in exchange for my junking my gas stove, then of course I'll do it. But until they cut down on coal, my stove does not even register in the global crisis -- it's somewhere out in the 10-to-the-negative-17th range of effect.
Dick Cheney, may he burn in hell, once said the following:
"Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."
He was wrong if "conservation" means, "national and international treaties, policies, plans and regulations for conservation." That kind of conservation is an essential part of any comprehensive energy policy. But if "conservation" means "making trivial life-style changes on a voluntary individual basis," then unfortunately, the worst person in the world made a great point.
People who obsess over their personal energy usage are deluding themselves if they think they are fighting climate change. People who go vegan, one by one, are deluding themselves if they think they are fighting climate change. People who distort their life-styles in order to make trivial changes in their consumption are simply wasting their own lives, and not saving the planet. It's climate-change theater; it's meaningless.
The very start of sanity on climate is realizing that it has to start with treaties, laws, and regulations, from the top down. People who are unwilling to do stupid pointless stunts like individually giving up their gas stove are not the problem. Nor does their unwillingness to do stupid stunts mean that they might not be open to genuine sacrifice if it was meaningful (though, as I conceded, the $100 data does look bad on that front).
The stove anecdote just shows that these people have a sense of the scale of the problem. And that's good.
It’s not about individual progressive stunts - it’s about cities banning natural gas hookups in new construction. This would cut emissions by something like 5% long term, and is clearly essential eventually. Berkeley has done it and Brookline has done it. But Texas is trying to ban cities from banning gas, and there are other places they are fighting back. The biggest argument they have is about gas stoves. No one worries about replacing their gas heaters with heat pumps. But gas stoves are the wedge they use to get nice upscale liberals on their side.
"It’s not about individual progressive stunts - it’s about cities banning natural gas hookups in new construction."
In that case, I misunderstood this issue. I thought MY was merely reporting anecdotes about individuals, not describing a coordinated pushback against coordinated attempts at regulation.
So. These people are unwilling to give up their gas stoves, even when they would do this as part of a coordinated strategy that would lead to meaningful reductions at scale?
In that case, fuck 'em. They're selfish, unserious people. I have nothing but contempt for them, and their gas stoves.
(Though I would like to know the denominator of your 5% figure -- is that 5% of typical household usage, or of US national usage, or what? Given that household energy consumption is itself small compared to automotive + power generation + industrial heat for smelting etc., it may still be penny ante stuff.)
Here’s a more detailed study. It looks like something like 1.5% of all greenhouse emissions in the United States are from burning natural gas inside homes and businesses for cooking. Another 2% is for heating water, and about 7% is for space heating. The point of eliminating natural gas hookups is to eliminate that entire 10% of emissions. If you can replace gas heating with electric, then you can get the biggest chunk while still cooking with gas, but that gas hookup in the house will continue to be a Trojan horse the gas industry uses for decades to fight for gas heating. (If everyone would just move to California, we could eliminate that gas heating right away.)
I like your last sentence because it brings up another good example of people who purport to care about climate but really don't: California housing policy.
Lots of people want to live in California. California has lower emissions than other parts of the country. The easiest thing to do would be allow more housing development. Instead, *Californians* have organized militantly to stop that from happening via local zoning, tax policy and environmental review.
Californians preferred environmental policy is to force people to stay out of California or at least coastal California while adopting Californian emissions levels. That's a lot harder to do when you have a climate like most of the country.
But Californians don't care because they don't care much about climate.
I wonder: Did you ever try to heat a house with electricity?
NY State has consistently blocked adding pipeline capacity for natural gas, they’ve said in an effort to encourage renewable energy production. All they’ve done is encouraged people to use heating oil rather than gas.
I’m guessing on that 5%. This article says that 15% of all emissions in Massachusetts are from residential buildings, and I’m attributing 1/3 of that to gas. But the article also says 20% of all emissions are from power plants, so maybe I should attribute nearly all the residential emissions to gas, if electricity production is already taken out.
When we replace our stove (gas), we'll get induction. But I have to say that having a gas stove that I could use during the extended power outage in Texas last February allowed us to actually cook some food that we couldn't have otherwise cooked. (Oven doesn't work because it needs electricity to heat the heating element to allow gas to flow in the first place, but the stove does)
I mean, I'd rather the power were consistent(!!!) and I could switch to induction, but that is at least one advantage gas has over anything else, and while I don't know how much of a factor that is in Texas overall, that's in pretty recent memory...
I'm sure losing your stove during the power outage was painful, but if you lose that access for, say, four days in ten years, I'm not sure that's a powerful justification for keeping the gas stove.
There's also the cost of replacing a stove. What's the environmental cost of building a new stove vs. using the old one - especially with a grid that isn't 100% electrified yet (that is, replacing with an electric stove is a necessary precondition for zero carbon _eventually_ but how much does it matter right now)?
If the stove broke down I'd buy a non-gas stove for sure. But there's waste in getting rid of a perfectly good working stove to get a new one (and yes I can try to sell it used but it's 20 years old so it has low value that way but potentially high materials costs)
Ditto for me during the freeze, but you could also just keep a PowerGas-type camp stove handy. Safer to use that outside than running your gas stove inside without any circulation/ventilation.
That is really interesting. I had not realized how much of our emissions came from stuff like gs heaters and gas stoves until recently . Have they also been using the safety argument? Having a gas stove in a place like Berkeley that is in an earthquake zone seems like a significant risk for very little benefit.
I haven't heard that argument actually! It does seem like there should be some earthquake safety benefit from just having a double-sized electricity line for each building, rather than an electricity line and a gas line. But I don't really know how emergency shutoffs for gas and electricity work in earthquake zones.
I've heard things about early warning systems for earthquakes that would allow utility companies to have several seconds head start in shutting down the lines when an earthquake is detected several dozen miles away. I don't know if those are already in place.
We have a gas shutoff in our house in earthquake-prone LA. That makes me feel somewhat more secure. I'd feel a lot more secure, however, if my neighbors had the gas shutoff valve too, so when their houses explode into flames, mine doesn't.
"No one worries about replacing their gas heaters with heat pumps."
Did installing heat pumps in existing buildings suddenly become dramatically cheaper than just replacing existing natural gas furnaces with other natural gas furnaces?
I don't think we're at that point yet, and I shouldn't have used the word "replacing".
My point was just that when you talk about banning natural gas hookups in new construction, people don't mind hearing that the new construction will have heat pumps rather than gas heating. But they *do* mind hearing that the new construction won't be allowed to have gas cooktops.
On the "I won't speed $100" problem, is there any polling that ask Americans if they are willing to spend and extra $100 on anything else they think is an important issue? Does climate change fare any worse than those?
otoh, elite carbon gluttony discredits climate activism. When John Kerry flies around the world on a private jet and Al Gore has a 20,000 square foot house, they create a permission structure for normal people to resist change
How many people do you think would change their behaviour if John Kerry very publicly announced he would only talk to world leaders on Zoom calls from now on?
This 'permission structure' idea seems misguided to me. More like post-hoc rationalisations for stuff everyone was already going to do anyway.
My surmise is that the marginal effect is with the young. Middle aged and older people have habits and will cling to their consumption patterns. Many young people are idealistic, but these same people can become cynical when they understand authority figures don’t follow their own advice.
After the wide-ranging discussion (argument? bickering?) on nuclear power the other day, it prompted me to go wander and do some research, and enhanced geothermal may actually live up to the potential that all of the 4th generation nuclear technologies are supposed to have. (Note those technologies are, like the 3rd+ construction projects, decades behind schedule and vastly over budget, just on the research side!)
That would be a very good thing, not least because it takes advantage of existing infrastructure, capital plant, and workforce skills, and can be used damned near anywhere, with the same quick-ramping capabilities as a mixed-cycle gas plant today!
They purposely saved the comments so us west coasters from Idaho could post first.
Boise has the largest geothermal heating grid in the country (maybe the world). Given all the volcanic activity underneath the North West, geothermal energy could be a big deal.
Also, as someone who works on gas turbines. The new ones are amazingly efficient when paired as a combined cycle unit. Turbine exhaust is used to create steam for a steam turbine.
Gas Turbines will become even better as far as emissions go as they start using more and more syngas or natgas mixed with hydrogen.
Anyway, thanks for turning on the comments.
If there are any grammatical errors, feel free to point them out.
Ehh, the entire Mountain West is going to have serious water issues in this new climate we're creating for it. I'm not betting against renewed Eastern demographic dominance by 2050 or so as people leave.
I work in California water issues. I'm watching the situation, but pretty sure we'll move east of the continental divide by 2030 or so. Seems better to set my kids up long term in a less precarious place. Makes me really sad because I grew up farming in Nor Cal.
Lots of people say that climate change is an “existential threat” but, when pushed, blame every drought and hurricane on climate change or say that less pack ice will make it harder for polar bears to hunt. Very few mainstream sources even acknowledge the obvious benefits of a warmer climate— longer growing seasons between frosts, less privation and death for those who struggle to afford heat, more carbon dioxide for plants to turn into food, greater precipitation, etc. I am not saying the benefits outweigh the costs or that we should take a leap in the dark into a warmer future, but I really would like a careful accounting and I haven’t gotten one.
Here are some neglected data points. Winter mortality is significantly higher in Europe, the US, and China than summer mortality. Human beings are native to hot regions of Africa and have expanded across the globe as we have emerged from the ice age. The climate has warned by 0.85 degrees C in the last 140 years, during which time the human population has sextupled. I am somewhat confident that, today, cold causes more human misery than heat. Perhaps if the earth becomes two degrees warmer, heat will cause more misery than cold. It does not follow that aggregate misery would increase, especially when you adjust for the benefits of air conditioning, mechanized farming, and industrial prosperity generally. There’s certainly a point at which warmer temperatures would immiserate human kind. However, I don’t trust the estimates of those who fail to acknowledge any benefits of warmer temperatures and who care deeply about polar bears.
Look, we've had this out already, and you're wrong, but neither of us is going to shift the other on that front.
I'll just point out that "Winter mortality is significantly higher in Europe, the US, and China than summer mortality" is not a compelling argument, when you cherry-pick the three most populous regions of the temperate belt to say cold is more threatening there.
No one is saying that tens or hundreds of millions of people in the US or China are going to die directly or indirectly due to extended heat waves and droughts, we're saying that's highly likely to be the case in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Aggregate misery is going to increase *vastly* under even the most optimistic scenarios. Just not for you or I, not right away.
Even fairly warm places have significant excess winter mortality.
Even in Bangladesh, winter mortality is 20-25% higher than during the hot season right before the monsoon and 50% warmer than during the monsoon, when the weather is wet and temperate. One would expect similar patterns in India.
Maybe climate change will increase heat stroke deaths in the Congo, but far more people live in the temperate regions than the tropics. Sixty percent of the world’s population live in temperate zones versus 40% in the tropics, but many of the densest tropical places are in the highlands, eg Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, Kenya and Uganda.
Direct deaths due to extreme temperatures have always been, are today, and will continue to be a piddling number globally. I do not give a flying fuck whether making the globe warmer reduces that total by a few percent overall, because it is unimportant.
Indirect deaths due to famine from extreme precipitation variations have always been an immensely greater problem, and will always be.
No one expects millions to die when wet-bulb temperatures rise high enough to make the tropics "not habitable", they expect them to die when rainfall patterns make wide swathes of the tropics "not feedable".
Stop trying to slant analysis to look on the bright side. You're going up against the weight of a million-odd experts who broadly agree that things are going to be very, very unpleasant for most of the globe, with only very limited benefits to a few nations. The US isn't even really in the "benefits" column, not firmly, we're just rich enough not to notice some of the costs unless it gets quite out of hand.
The next century is going to bring a minimum of tens of millions of otherwise unnecessary deaths, more likely hundreds of millions, before century's end.
And if we don't arrest it, it's not like it's just going to *stop on its own*, it will keep getting worse, and human life in the tropics truly will become untenable over the course of the 22nd century.
There is immense inertia in these processes, and we've already set the ball rolling.
Do not attempt to say it will somehow be cheaper to accommodate and feed climate refugees here than to solve the underlying problem. Not only will it not be, because our agricultural and industrial base will be stretched to the limit changing the way they do things to adapt to changes in climate at home, but political considerations will mean that it isn't even on the menu of options.
No refugees will be admitted, and the vast, vast majority of the people who could be safely harbored in the developed temperate zones will instead starve to death in tropical refugee camps.
David R concedes that few people will die of heat stroke but claims tropical people will starve. So many unproven assumptions! First, air that is 90 degrees F can carry three times as much water vapor as air that is 60 degrees F. When the sun sets and temperatures cool, that water falls as range. There is a string, positive correlation between temperature and rainfall.
Second, the worlds bread baskets are in the temperate regions. Relatively few calories come from tropical lands. The places David R claims will turn into desserts aren’t producing much food today.
Finally, assuming (without conceding) that Canada and Russia don’t want climate refugees, it’s pretty easy to feed the (hypothetical) central African farmers whose crops fail because of climate-induced droughts. Rice costs 19 cents per pound. A person can be fed an adequate diet for a dollar a day. Maybe Canada and Europe don’t want climate refugees, but they aren’t monsters and would at least feed the people they keep out. A hundred million climate victims could be fed for $50 billion a year.
Surely I must treat the rambling pontification of the amateur climatologist with the same weight as the hundreds of thousands of experts who disagree with him on virtually all topics, even as he pronounces bald-faced lies about where the world's food is grown.
...
Oh, wait, no I don't, and for all that Substack lacks an "ignore" button, my brain carries a decent substitute.
While there may be something to this, the problem is that our planet has adapted (marvelously!) to one general set of climate parameters and now we are moving at unprecedented speed to another. While *some* good things may result, most likely the majority of them will be bad. It's like genetic mutations: every now and then, you may get a good one, but more likely they'll kill you.
I confess I get a bit tired of the doom-mongering over every adverse weather event, but that doesn't mean that directionally they're wrong.
"The steady-state climate from 2 to 3 degrees Celsius isn't really so bad. It's the transition."
I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. How onerous do you think the costs would need to be to stopping the transition before it becomes better to accept the costs of easing the transition?
The US currently accounts for about 10% of global emissions and that is dropping. If we zeroed out our emissions tomorrow we (the planet) still wouldn’t meet the 2.0 goal. the reality is that climate change is mostly a foreign policy problem.
It’s true that more total emissions reductions need to come elsewhere than the United States. But more per capita reductions need to come within the United States than anywhere but the Middle East.
Sure, but the planet doesn't care about per-capita emissions, it only cares about total emissions. We in the US certainly can and should do more to reduce our emissions, but the reality of global emissions is what it is.
If you care more about total emissions than per capita emissions, then the best thing to do is to indiscriminately kill Americans. That will reduce total emissions by more than any sort of targeted action in India or China. It's no longer a foreign policy issue - it's just a domestic policy issue of how we can kill Americans fastest.
The planet may only care about total emissions, but humans care about more than just the planet - we care about human well-being as well. And if the planet is one of the things we care about *as a part of* human well-being, then per capita emissions are a pretty good measure (and economic energy intensity, i.e., emissions per GDP, is likely an even better measure).
In general, when you're asking how much people should be doing to solve problem X, the best way to measure that is by looking at X per capita, not total X.
"If you care more about total emissions than per capita emissions, then the best thing to do is to indiscriminately kill Americans. "
Again, the US is still only about 10% of total emissions right now. So you'd actually want to kill China (~30% of emissions), plus India the EU as well as the US. And preferably with some nukes since that will give us some atmospheric cooling.
"n general, when you're asking how much people should be doing to solve problem X, the best way to measure that is by looking at X per capita, not total X."
Per capita emissions is only useful in relation to total emissions, such as identifying a global average.
China is currently at about half the per-capita emissions of the US and still growing. And again, the US could reduce per-capita emissions to zero and it won't come remotely close to solving the problem. If the entire globe was at China's current emissions level, it would still be about 3 times too high to meet projected targets. The average per capita emissions for every country would need to be close to where India is right now. That just highlights the scale of the problem.
True. And -- nonetheless -- there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't do everything we can do personally and as a nation.
(And BTW, China and India are moving out impressively on renewables and appear to be starting to turn against coal. Why not encourage those green shoots with our own actions?)
I agree that other countries aren't going to do what we want if we lack credibility on the issue, but I also understand from long experience that other countries do not blindly follow US "leadership" and that us taking whatever actions on climate change isn't going to compel other countries to act contrary to what they think are their best interests. Especially China.
And the "creating new technology" part assumes the new technology can be created, operationalized, and deployed at a relevant timescale for a reasonable cost at scale, and that it will come with few downsides. Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.
"But I think this business of setting targets and reasoning backward to policies has been a profoundly unproductive enterprise."
This is the same approach that the Democrats are taking in their current spending bills: $100B for this thing, $50B for that. They use suspiciously round numbers because there is no real underlying policy as such - just vague notions.
That is not a sound way to solve problems; these are not serious people.
Pretty big leap from "I don't agree with this round number approach" to "these are not serious people." I think we can disagree about the means (and even the ends) of policy without having to make ad hominem attacks, no?
I think you are mistaking journalistic simplification for reality. I haven't looked at every number in every bill but usually what is reported as "80 billion for ___" is some more complicated number when you look at it closer
You've clearly never dealt with Ken. There's no substance there, just one-liners, trolling, dismissal of research/data/analysis that disagrees with his preconceived notions, and misleading/decontextualized broad-brush statistics.
I shouldn't even have replied, and I'm going to delete my reply to him.
Ken in MIA does occasionally make good points and debate honestly. He is not a troll so much as sometimes inclined to trolling. When he trolls he is not inclined to engage in honest debate.
“…dismissal of research/data/analysis that disagrees with his preconceived notions…”
Here’s an example: I have a preconceived notion that the US has no need whatsoever for a 21st Century Climate Conservation Corps. I defy you to prove me wrong. Further, if you can explain why $50B is the right amount to spend on such a project please do share because no one else can explain it.
Here’s another example: Biden’s climate plans - this, remember, in response to a very serious, possibly existential, threat - include a claim that they “will create millions of good-paying, union jobs, ensure economic competitiveness, advance environmental justice, and improve the health and security of communities across America.”
As you will, Ken. I made a mistake getting goaded into a reply the first time.
The last time I put any substantial effort into a reply, you dismissed it with one (overly simplistic, intellectually dishonest, snarky) sentence, devoid of any actual content, just like everything else you post.
You know, I'll give it a shot, on this Climate Conservation Corps.
Philadelphia's flooding during Ida last month was not due to the failure of its drainage infrastructure, which held up well. It was because the Schuylkill River, in particular, burst its banks badly, to the tune of 17-19 feet.
Now, with the rainfall in Montgomery, Chester, Berks, and Schuylkill Counties, some of that was inevitable, and would have occurred in 1721 as well. But it was made much, much worse by the increasing population of the former two suburban counties especially. Their drainage infrastructure is also quite good, but geared towards dumping water straight into watersheds that flow towards Philly. The natural wetlands and retention features that would have significantly spread the peak of flooding in 1721 are now mostly paved over or flattened into plats in developments. Estimates are that this rainfall would have produced approximately half the rise in river water levels before those counties were developed.
To fix the problem requires restoring the ecosystems in question, but that's a long-term, rather expensive project that yields no benefits to the jurisdictions in question, even though it's also the cheapest way to fix the problem for Philadelphia.
That is *precisely* the use case at which the CCC is aimed; multi-jurisdictional restoration and rewilding projects that have environmental, social, and economic benefits. They are part and parcel of the "adaptation" and "mitigation" strategies you think are the best way to deal with climate change. Recreating natural retention and wetlands features is possible because the suburban counties have extensive open space programs, but most are mowed fields or second-growth forests. The space is there, the economic need is there, but the funding and programming cannot be accomplished at the purely local level.
This is not a problem unique to Philadelphia. One of the most economical ways to increase resiliency for Houston, New Orleans, or Pensacola will be to rewild coastal wetlands. Forest restoration and no-till agriculture programs in the Plains States will yield great benefits for agriculture, sequester carbon, and better protect human life against flood events.
Now, you can and will make the argument that the federal government shouldn't do this. Even though I don't entirely disagree, I simply *don't care*, because no one else is going to do it at scale. Not a coalition of forward-thinking insurance companies, not state governments, not local authorities, not non-profits. $50 billion is, if anything, an understatement of the need over the coming decade or two.
It's one of the single cheapest ways to buffer ourselves against not just climate change, but all disaster-related losses of life and property. That is *precisely* the sort of investment that a genuine fiscal conservative should want to see the government make.
This is a much better explanation than I have read elsewhere (even though I do have some scepticism about them ever implementing effectively even if they do get the money).
“Now, you can and will make the argument that the federal government shouldn't do this. Even though I don't entirely disagree, I simply *don't care*, because no one else is going to do it at scale.”
Correction: No one, including the federal government, is going to do this at scale.
At various times various people have touted this program as,
- Being necessary because unemployment is so high due to the pandemic. (That’s no longer true, obviously, but somehow that fact doesn’t dampen the spirit.)
- Providing valuable job training, generically. (Could be true, I suppose, but if climate damage mitigation is the goal, training is irrelevant except to the extent necessary to accomplish that goal. Unless you’re just spending money to buy votes, I suppose.)
- Training “the next generation of U.S. land managers, park rangers and other stewards of our natural resources.” (Good idea, maybe? Nothing to do with climate change.)
- $15 wage rates! Yes, that thing. (If climate change is such a threat we should be looking to get labor at market wages so as to enable us to do as much work per dollar spent as possible. It’s almost as if the people advocating for this either 1) don’t really think it’s needed to mitigate climate change, and/or, 2) don’t understand basic economics.)
- Will cost between $10B and $50B. (But who’s counting?)
- “Thousands” or “hundreds of thousands of jobs” created. (Tell me which of those you believe is feasible.)
- Turning the US into a place that “can compete in the global economy.” (Yes, someone actually said that. Who could be that stupid? How about a sitting US senator?)
- Could include, for example, “tutoring children, building affordable housing.” (Unclear how this is connected to climate.)
- Would “create demand for workers in an array of occupations, including engineering, construction, maintenance, and even marketing for climate-oriented programs.” (Demand for the first three is already very high. Demand for the fourth is very low for very good reasons.)
One of the most dumb things about Pastoral Liberal Boomers from the 70s is that they have held onto cold war era forged in late 70s three mile island fear mongering fear of nuclear.
We could solve this Right Now, tomorrow, by telling that wing of the party to politely F off and start building nuclear at scale. But that requires political leadership, which is in very very short supply.
Nuclear + geo + national bill banning localities from blocking rooftop solar (many states do this now) + electric cars would all do a ton. And none of them require massive movement from currently held positions for most folks.
That all said, one resource we really lack these days are politicians who have the gravitas to tell the body politic what they don't want to hear from the bully pulpit - and have people go along. Of course higher gas taxes and prices are needed. And carbon tax would be useful. Don't care if your average joe sixpack won't like it. You know what? He didn't like drunk driving laws, child support laws, seat belt laws, or COVID restrictions either. Don't care - we don't run society on the wants of idiots who would vote to legalize child slavery if it brought down their federal tax rate by 2%.
I banged my head against this door enough last week, so I'll be brief:
Average levelized cost of energy for PV cells in US last year: $37/MWh
Average levelized cost of energy for nuclear power in US last year: $163/MWh
Nuclear is more expensive by a factor of 4.4X, and that's just maintaining existing infrastructure. Best estimate is that that would go up to 8X or more if we built new plants in the quantity needed.
I found this (pretty long) piece useful for understanding why nuclear power has faced such a struggle in the US compared to peer countries - note that South Korea and India have built plants in the recent past for about 1/4 of what we last paid, and Japan for about 1/2.
The short answer is that we set up a safety standard that sets the amount required to be spent on safety such that the total plant costs is about equal to that of other forms of energy, which by definition prevents nuclear power frm ever being cheaper than other forms. Yes, nuclear safety's obviously important, but we take things way too far here.
Also, wouldn't building new nuclear plants give us the opportunity to use more efficient construction and plant design techniques learned in the last few decades? I don't see why scaling up the industry would obviously increase costs per MWh, nor why scaling up PV manufacturing wouldn't encounter the same issues.
I'm really not prepared to go back and do this again, so go find the last week's arguments if you want my position in detail.
TL;DR version is that this entire effect is a small contributing factor as to why nuclear is brutally expensive, and anyone who says otherwise is lying or stupid.
The single largest cost in a PWR plant is the containment system and shield, and no reduction in operating margins and radiation exposure standards is going to allow me to get around the construction cost of those items, because a plant needs to be able to withstand *anything* without physically exposing the pile.
I will note that, as a civil engineer "more efficient construction and plant design techniques learned in the last few decades" damned near made me spew coffee on my screen.
Every single plant constructed in the last decade has been between 2X (South Korea) and 5X (US, France, China) overbudget. All of them.
This is not, fundamentally, a regulatory issue. The technology sucks compared to its peer competitors and nothing is going to fix that.
If the costs are so out of whack, even in other countries, why are those other countries building nuclear? Is the South Korean government encouraging wasteful spending on nuclear over PV? Just because the plants are overbudget doesn't mean that the costs aren't still cheaper than they last were here... it's the final construction cost that's relevant here, not the budget.
Are you also saying that there have been no advances in nuclear plant construction and design since the late '70s?
When has a state ever subjected its own projects to rigorous cost-benefit analysis? (Yes, I know there are some, but generally speaking.)
In East Asia, China and South Korea in particular spent a decade or more developing 3rd Generation+ PWR designs as a prestige technology to show they'd arrived, expecting that they'd be somewhat economically competitive. As it turns out, they aren't, not really. They got built anyway.
"Are you also saying that there have been no advances in nuclear plant construction and design since the late '70s?"
Basically, yes!
Designs have improved in terms of implementing passive safety standards rather than active, but there are no substantial technological or economic enhancements there.
Construction, if anything, has gotten worse. Construction productivity is abysmal, lower per unit of labor than it was in 1965.
If anything, that trend is even worse with regards to complex projects like nuclear plant construction.
PV is always going to kick nuclear's ass in this regard because it's an off-the-shelf installation. Wind turbines really only require a foundation to be "constructed" as opposed to "installed." That will not change regardless of changes to the regulatory regime.
You are slowly changing my view, for what it's worth. Even if it's not good going forward, if we could repeat history, do you think more nuclear would have at least been a good intermediate step?
Even France has become very wobbly on their support for continued use of nuclear power. Their recent Flamanville reactor project is 5 times over budget and nearly a decade late so far.
Have been making this argument for decades and it’s only gotten more compelling. Nuclear power is monstrously expensive and presents very rare but very very serious risks of local devastation. There was never any chance that the US could or would build enough new plants to displace fossil fuels, and it has nothing to do with hippie protesters or the Cold War. The appeal is for those who want someone else to blame for refusing an “obvious” fix for “irrational” reasons, when really it’s no more realistic than expecting everyone to go back to subsistence farming in the dark.
You've mentioned before that the big issue for nuclear is the severe costs that modern large construction projects have. What do you see as driving those costs and is there something specific about the containment system and shield that would make those costs so much higher?
I can’t speak from a position of true expertise, but my understanding of the design of those containment buildings is that we’re talking about a very thick, heavily reinforced concrete-steel plate composite made of ultra-high strength concrete.
So first, I pour an incredibly heavily reinforced, very deep foundation structure, possibly with base isolation bearings.
Then I weld thick, heavy cylindrical steel segments together to form the interior steel layer of that structure on site, then spot-weld a million nail-like shear studs to the outside that will bond it to the concrete.
At the same time, I’m installing mechanical systems and the unfueled reactor assembly.
To pour concrete, I first install reinforcing steel; this isn’t the sort we see in a column in an office building, rather it’s a very dense arrangement of high grade stainless steel. We’re talking something like 20% of the volume of concrete being replaced by steel. Typical range in a beam is a few percent.
Then I set up forms and actually pour concrete. The problem with extremely high strength concrete is that it’s not nearly as liquid as ordinary concrete, even with excessive amounts of viscosity-reducing additives. Several reactors have been taken offline after discovering large voids in their containment buildings’ concrete.
All this adds up to a nightmare in construction terms:
Complex staging for extremely heavy prefabricated components, using the largest mobile crane systems ever built.
Extremely high welding standards with non-standard steels, on-site, for very large, very deep welds.
Huge issues with in-site ironwork, due to the density of reinforcing steel, snd frequent rework, even redesign, to avoid physical conflicts.
Access issues that make it damningly difficult to properly consolidate very viscous concrete mixes.
This is the bleeding edge of every single trait that makes a construction project a pain in the ass, all on a single project, with exacting standards.
And this is the one bit of the project where margins of safety simply cannot be reduced, because if it fails I’ve exposed a reactor pile to open air snd likely rendered a whole county uninhabitable for half a century.
There is not and never will be a way to do this cheaply, and the 4th generation technology proposals don’t change the need at all.
There is a bit more to be said. The costs of $37 count on efficient solar panel farms and not on residential rooftop which has much higher costs ($150-250). A key challenge with solar panel farms is how much area they take up - about 4-5 acres per MWh.
The US currently produces about 60% of its energy using fossil fues, about 40% gas and 20% coal. That equals to about 2500 terrawatts. Replacing that with solar panels will take up about 15-20 thousand square miles, or between the size of Maryland and W. Virgina.
Any source for rooftop cite? My back of the envelope calculation assuming $15k in purchase+installation costs and 5% in annual maintenance for a 7 kW rooftop system puts LCOE at around $50/MWh
Permit me to say it for you. PV cells suck because they only produce power for a few hours a day and to produce power dispbatchible to demand require massive investments in transmission and storage that dwarf the cost of the PVs themselves. Which the PV advocates always forget to tell anybody about.
First things first, LCOE metrics used above do already account for capacity factor, so the "a few hours a day" bit is already baked into the figures.
As for dispatchability... The *least* charitable estimates of the cost of grid resiliency and storage run around the same cost as the PV and wind installations themselves. Assuming some development of that field of technology over coming years as we roll it out widely, I think those estimates are likely to prove wildly conservative, just as *every* estimate related to renewables roll-out has been thus far.
I'll also note that these problems are simply *not new*. The grid we have today was designed around the notion that neither coal nor nuclear plants are easily or rapidly dispatchable, and downtime is often significant, and as such we have extensive experience managing these needs, albeit not quite at the same level.
There's simply nothing in your contention to suggest that nuclear is a viable way out. It's not. The LCOE metrics above are based only on the cost of trying to buy a few more years of safe life for decades-old plants with already long-sunken capital costs, and we're utterly unable to build anything resembling a cost-competitive 3rd or 3rd+ generation plant. LCOE for a new plant in the US right now might be as high as $300/MWh, from what I've heard.
Meanwhile, the 4th generation technologies are uniformly pie-in-the-sky or plans-on-paper, excepting a single PBR pilot reactor in Beijing, courtesy of my alma mater, and its sole gas-cooled high temperature offspring elsewhere in China.
We would need to be able to build and operate nuclear power plants for at most 30% their current cost in order for them to be cost-competitive with renewables, even after accounting for investments needed in redundant capacity, resilient and large grid, and storage capacity. And that's assuming a fairly charitable interpretation of modern construction cost data.
As discussed unto death (and well beyond) last week, there is no possible way, regardless of how you slash the operating or radiation safety regulations, that that is ever going to happen. The construction costs are too high and there is very little that can be done to lower them, as construction of pressure vessels and housing structures is the one bit of over-engineering which absolutely cannot be sacrificed.
I'm of the "try everything" school given the dire threat of climate change, and I've usually put nuclear in that group. But indeed nuclear may not be the way to go. Still, we need something! Especially to solve the intermittency problem, unless we get incredible breakthroughs in electricity storage technology and implementability.
Maybe a crash program in deep geothermal drilling? It's getting late in the game, but we really need to be very aggressive here. Technology breakthroughs, funded by aggressive R&D, are more important than behavioral changes, but we have to get them soon and then build on them quickly.
That's true but a little unfair. The current nuclear power plants in the US are built on decades old technology. The cost of PV cells built in 1995 are pretty damn high.
There are a bunch of new nuclear designs that are considerably cheaper and have other advantages. I'm not saying next-gen nuclear is the golden arrow, but we are going to have to create a lot of new technologies to drop carbon emissions world-wide.
This is a quote from a French nuclear consultant, the lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, FFS:
"Gen IV designs are PowerPoint reactors – they don’t exist. And the best example is Bill Gates, who started a company in 2006 to develop and promote a new design. Fifteen years later, he has nothing to show – no licensed design anywhere, no site, no prototype.”
The modular reactor projects in Russia and China are decades behind schedule and vastly overbudget, the thorium reactors are plans on paper or less... there's just nothing there, it's all vaporware and suckling at the research funding teat.
To be fair, that's not actually a long time to bring some kinds of new technology to market, no matter how much founders and inventors have to pretend otherwise (or believe otherwise) to make progress at all. There are good and bad reasons for budget and time overruns, but it's not especially helpful to assume the original plans made sense even on their own terms.
The first LED (made with silicon carbide!) was demonstrated in 1906, but the first commercial LEDs were developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the first commercial silicon carbide electronics were developed in the 1970s and 1980s.
The earliest carbon fiber dates from the 1870s, and it took until the 1950s to find a precursor and process conditions to make it good enough to use in composites. We're *just now* in the past handful of years starting (despite lots of effort from many quarters) to figure out how to make high quality composites from natural fibers or bio-derived carbon fibers.
Also, your quote is out of date. China's HTR-PM reactor became the first Gen IV reactor in the world to reach criticality, on September 12 2021. It isn't fully up and running, but it isn't like the people actually investing in the technology aren't making progress.
I'm not saying it is a long time, but it's *too long* in context.
Everyone who is claiming nuclear is a big part of the solution to our problems, within the timeframe we need to move to solve them, is either ill-informed or lying outright.
The 4th generation technologies may (MAY) one day be cheap enough to go toe-to-toe with renewables + storage.
I doubt it, frankly, given the safety concerns; I still need a very expensive pressure vessel and shield for my PBR lest the pebbles light on fire after the vessel's inert HE coolant leaks. Resiliency is also an issue; a single larger generator cannot be permitted to fail in an emergency, one of many dispersed smaller ones (wind farms, hi) can.
But even if it does, it's not going to get there anytime soon.
"But nuclear!" is almost always, when trotted out by those in the know, being used to discredit the "green left." Who are idiots in other ways, but not this particular one.
That's fair. I might lament the wasted decades since the 1980s when we could have been making progress on nuclear and didn't, but at this point we can move a whole lot faster with renewables and storage.
It's a fair point to say they are not ready for deployment, and many of the designs may not pan out. But I think we are better off allowing a lot more nuclear avenues to be explored even if most fail. I'd say the same thing about continued funding for the National Ignition Facility
I'm OK with tossing a few billion a year down the rathole of "cutting edge research" in case something pans out, but my guess is that none of these are going to be economically competitive, ever, and they'll arrive at scale far too late to do anything to solve this crisis. Maybe the next one.
If we're faced with the choice of "build a grid with 3rd+ generation PWR plants and existing nuclear+hydro" and "build a grid with today's renewables and existing nuclear+hydro," the latter is a vastly, vastly economically superior choice, even if better power storage doesn't come along in time to solve the biggest challenges.
Few are arguing against funding research on promising next-gen nuclear. Last year congress approved billions in funding for nuclear research and Biden's hard infrastructure bill will add billions more.
The issue is that all of these next-gen technologies are speculative investments that will likely take decades to pan out if they ever do. The industry doesn't have any cost/time competitive solutions that can be built starting right now.
IMO, over the next decade or two, the odds we'll get a revolutionary breakthrough in carbon capture or in green hydrogen technology that completely changes the energy game are as good or better than the odds that one of the next-gen nuclear technologies pans out.
I'm not saying we should be trying with nuclear. In fact, if I had to bet, I'd guess in 100 years nuclear power will play a huge role in satisfying our energy needs.
The big question is what has the best chance of providing ,mass deployable solutions that can have an impact in the next 10-20 years and the answer is unlikely to be nuclear.
"In fact, if I had to bet, I'd guess in 100 years nuclear power will play a huge role in satisfying our energy needs."
Until I started reading exactly what's entailed by enhanced geothermal, I would have assumed the same, but I suspect that the latter will end up being a bigger factor in the end.
One huge issue with much of the environmentalist movement is that it's an ideology of sacrifice, which tends to be a hard sell. It's all about giving up stuff people like. I am not saying that it's wrong that such sacrifices would help a lot, it's just that they are political non-starters. In contrast, there are lots of exciting things that can be done to help with emissions. Electric cars are now exciting, not just a poor substitution. I have found someone like Saul Griffith inspiring (not that I agree with everything he says).
Treating elite support for climate action as an exogenous factor seems like a bit of a mistake to me.
Somehow, by the late 2000s-early 2010s, Democratic elites had coalesced behind a position of doing more about climate than the politics alone would justify. Around that same time window, there was a bunch of student climate activism, Al Gore made a movie, Bill McKibben was making noise and intermittently getting arrested.
I agree that elite buy-in is the best thing we have going in terms of chances for combating climate change right now. If you're gonna be Mr. "these activists suck", though, you can't treat elite buy-in as a totally exogenous factor. Was elite buy-in a product in part of the actions people/groups who cared most about climate were taking? Are some forms of protest or communication that clearly don't work to create mass mobilization nonetheless succeeding at reaching the elites? It sure seems like someone did something that worked to create the current atmosphere among elites.
It's amazing people use "America generates 15% of global emissions" as an excuse against acting on climate.
America is 4% of global population, so 15% is almost 4 times its "fair share". Historically its share of emissions was much higher, and Americans still enjoy the wealth generated by those emissions. And even today, its share is above 15% if you count emissions generated for US imports.
But even ignoring that, America is by far the world's richest country, its largest economy, by strongest its strongest military. It's not the #1 emitter...but it's #2. If it's not going to act, who is?!
Another thing to consider is that American emissions have been trending down for basically 20 years.
Indian and Chinese emissions are not trending down. Neither are sub-saharan African emissions. This is very much a "Americans are not really the problem here and will not be the problem 20-30 years from now" situation.
Separately I think MattY and Noah Smith have tweeted a few times about how switching to including imports doesn't change the basic emissions math any.
Everyone is part of the problem. It’s a global problem.
American emissions per capita are the highest in the world of any large country. It’s also wealthy enough to subsidise the transition. It is an unusually large part of the problem.
The suggestion India or Africa are the problem because they’re becoming slightly less desperately poor is like a parody of the blinkered American
Everyone is "part of the problem" but I think the real "blinkered American" take is the one that refuses to acknowledge the basic math of the situation and the fact that other people and their emissions matter much more than ours.
Also slightly troubling that you ignored my "20-30 years from now" point, because when subsaharan Africa has 2.5 billion people in a bunch of middle income countries then the United States will essentially be irrelevant in terms of carbon emissions.
If one set of people is trending down and a (much larger) set of people is trending up then I think it's fairly clear what the forward-looking mindset has to focus on (helping them get not poor in a much cleaner way than we did).
Didn’t “loud” politics generate the elite consensus on climate in the first place? I’m thinking of student climate organizing in the late aughts, the climate march circa 2014, etc. Even if I find Matt’s argument persuasive and agree that loud politics aren’t helpful now, I think they have had a time and place in generating the type of political environment that gets climate stuff into every bill dems put forward.
I was a kid then, and I'm an adult now. Seems to me the politics of that vintage were extremely successful in elevating the climate issue to the top of dem agenda, if not public adoration. MY gives the example of loud bank reform folks getting stuff done. I don't actually see how climate activism of a decade ago is any different than that case, actually.
This post gets at the limits of popularism as a governing philosophy. On a lot of issues there is no objective right or wrong answer, so what's popular is by definition the right answer in a democracy. But for a lot of problems, there are better and worse solutions, better ways to raise living standards for everyone, better ways to structure incentives, etc., and what's popular or expedient in the short term isn't what's best. Sometimes sheep need a shepherd. Sometimes politicians need to be teachers and leaders, not just lemmings who jump in front of the parade and march whatever direction it's going.
Popularism might be a good incremental tactic in some of those problems, but it's no substitute for an actual vision and ability to communicate that to the public in a way that's compelling, honest and persuasive to many people.
Agree. But conversely message discipline and poll-tested positions will only take a movement so far with voters who don't feel a visceral connection to the movement's actual worldview. Some charismatic candidates might win who otherwise wouldn't have but that's about all.
Back when the Republican Party was the party of social progressives, the educated and well-to-do professionals and managers, it was at a disadvantage competing with Democrats for more downscale voters, too. Now the roles are reversing, it seems, and Democrats may be slower than Republicans to recognize it.
Good piece. One thing I'd say more broadly is that, like, degrowth & asceticism & depriving yourself of airplane flights & eating vegan meals and blah blah blah is just not a scaleable solution that billions of people are going to undertake. The US, as I never tire of noting, only emits about 15% of global carbon emissions. And no matter what country you live in, what your standard of living is there- people are just not realistically going to accept big cuts in their lifestyle, however that gets defined. People in India and China (who emit the large majority of carbon emissions) are not going to accept a reduced standard of living. I know that hysterical climate activists are going to freak out that this Will Lead To The End Of the World, but even if that's true.... much of humanity is not gonna accept an ascetic, carbon-neutral lifestyle. This is not scaleable behavior.
Basically, we have to either invent some brand-new carbon capture technology, or we're screwed. The endless shrill hectoring of Greta whatever her name is is a behavioral dead end- it's bizarre & useless. Let it go
Activists who push de-growth seem to not understand or not care that in places like China and India, that very growth they want to reverse allowed a lot of people to have much better lives and move away from subsistence farming. They can romanticize subsistence farming all they want but I’m pretty sure that after a couple of years trying their hands at it they would understand why so many people are so happy to leave it. People in low and middle income countries are not going to be willing to go back and nobody should expect them to.
"They can romanticize subsistence farming all they want but I’m pretty sure that after a couple of years trying their hands at it they would understand why so many people are so happy to leave it."
It wouldn't take a couple of years, I give it a week or two at most
Note there are a few activists out there - call them intersectional degrowthers, if you will - who take the position that the Indias and Chinas of the world should be allowed to emit, and the West should be extra, extra degrowthy to compensate for it. That would theoretically get around the problem you describe, at the cost of possibly being the most unpopular political position ever devised by man.
The plant a billion trees thing is new carbon capture technology, yet is getting very little attention.
Planting trees gets way too *much* attention. If a place can support trees, then letting trees grow naturally there will sink carbon just as quickly as planting saplings. If it can’t support trees, then planting trees causes more emissions than it sinks.
I don’t know much about this, but are they really aiming to plant trees in places trees can’t naturally thrive? I always figured part of the aim was to replace trees lost to logging and the like, and faster than nature would do it.
It depends on the project in question. Many of the big “tree planting” initiatives are greenwashing by using the very visible *act* of planting trees to claim they are doing something. There are surely some that are doing it in the right place, and supplementing the act with the long term protection needed. But even in those cases, there’s a question of how much that act actually speeds things up compared to natural growth. If your goal is to reach a stable climax forest, it’s not clear that planting a billion trees without the natural mix of underbrush and wildlife and so on actually speeds things up by a lot compared to letting it go through the succession of initial ecosystems that start in damaged areas and eventually get replaced by the climax forest cover.
Having taught the subject, I’m always glad to be reminded of how Important it is to think in terms of systems!
I want to take that class. It sounds interesting.
Thanks for your response. I understand what you mean about “greenwashing.” At the same time, I’m sometimes suspicious that certain activists use that and similar rhetoric to oppose helpful measures that are too incremental for their taste (not accusing you of this, to be clear).
But it sounds like, as in many areas of life, when it comes to planting a bunch of trees there’s no free lunch—in other words, man can’t necessarily create an ecosystem overnight by simply carpet bombing an area with saplings.
“…when it comes to planting a bunch of trees there’s no free lunch…”
That’s true, of course. But it is possible to figure out what it will cost to plant trees that wouldn’t otherwise grow and then estimate the resulting amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere over some number of years.
Well, China's vast "forests" (monoculture tree belts) aren't really sustainable at all.
But aside from that, no, not really.
Kenny -- What do you make of this statement from the below NASA link? I took it as proactive planting in these areas with marginal agricultural potential greatly expanded the forest coverage over just natural growth.
<Saatchi pointed to some recent examples that show what might be possible.
Over the past 15 years or so, China has planted millions of trees and created millions of hectares of new forest cover, much of it in areas with marginal agricultural potential. “China’s land use policy increased forest cover in southern China between 10 and 20 percent, turning these areas into intense managed forests,” he said. “As a result, they created close to a carbon sink (an area that stores carbon) in their forests, almost doubling their carbon uptake. The effort has offset 20 percent of China’s annual fossil fuel emissions, and since 2012 that percentage has increased to 33 percent. So that’s a success story.”>
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-of-planting-trees-to-help-mitigate-climate-change/
The particular study there attracted a lot of attention, but it has also been highly criticized:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/11/947/5903754?login=true
https://www.science.org/content/article/catchy-findings-have-propelled-young-ecologist-fame-and-enraged-his-critics
Overall, it seems that changing land use is the big thing, but the act of planting trees doesn’t do a lot more on top of that. Particularly if the land in question is naturally a grassland.
I gotta admit, that Science article had my blood pressure up for a good bit, especially the old, white adjunct professor at a community college criticizing Crowther's team for being too white. In Europe.
When you can't attack the work, attack the person, I guess.
Nothing like a good wokeist nutjob story to get the ol' ticker pumpin'.
I definitely get the broader criticism of the initial study and I think Saatchi points out similar concerns with ~ this silver bullet idea of planting. But I read Saatchi's China point separate from that. I guess they either did or didn't create this 20% offset. If they did, seems encouraging.
“…letting trees grow naturally there will sink carbon just as quickly as planting saplings.”
I find that hard to believe. I’ve seen fallow fields turn into stands of saplings and it’s not a rapid process.
Clearly what we need are GMO plants that produce harvestable carbon pods, kind of like how soybeans concentrate nitrogen in little nodules on their roots.
This is one of the things that people are hopeful for with cross-laminated timber construction - build more things out of wood, so that we can find fast-growing trees that suck carbon out of the air, and turn it into buildings that will be preserved against rot for many decades longer than the lifespan of dead trees in the wild.
Just implement regenerative farming practices, and store all that carbon in your new topsoil
Coal trees? Will they grow in West Virginia?
Who said coal can't grow on trees?
I agree in that the rate of cover is sinful and should be ameliorated, but don't the trees all release their CO2 as they die? Am I missing part of the argument, aside from the other impacts (flooding, erosion, habitat destruction, etc.) denuding the planet causes?
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22679378/tree-planting-forest-restoration-climate-solutions
Thanks a lot.
This, pretty much, except that the technology to mostly fix the problem already exists and just needs some government subsidies to accelerate roll-out.
CCS is probably a must-have, but that might be enhanced weathering or regenerative agriculture, not big technological solutions.
We don't need to invent a carbon capture technology, we just need to implement large scaled regenerative farming to soak up all that carbon.
If I said the solution to gang & ethnic violence globally was for all of involved parties to lay down their arms, stare deeply into each other eyes', and sing Kumbaya together- I mean, that's both technically true and actually useless advice. People are not realistically going to do this at scale. Billions of human beings are not going to voluntarily experience a reduction in their cost of living, or be even moderately inconvenienced, to do anything about climate change- and you can't scold or preach them into doing so either. Great idea, wrong species, etc.
Also, being a shrill, preachy ideologue is like the least effective messaging platform possible. (Doesn't she have some speech scolding the world's adults with 'how dare you'?) If you think climate change is a global disaster- don't you have a responsibility to use messaging that like actually works, versus messaging that's actually counterproductive?
"a literal child" Exactly, she's a literal child whose highest degree as far as I know is middle school. She shouldn't be a global superstar, her opinions are frankly irrelevant to adults. Seen and not heard etc. etc.
If you want to be treated like a child in the discourse, stay out of the discourse. If you want to make bold pronouncements, great, but except to get criticized. That's how it works.
it's such a great motte-and-bailey personification
"Listen to Greta and the children -- they're the ones with a stake in the future!"
"Don't you dare criticize Greta -- she's just a kid!"
If a 14 year old gave a speech to the RNC and said "drill baby drill" then could we criticize them?
Allowing critics of any action to discredit the entire environmental movement as a bunch of self-flagellating imbeciles in front of half the developed world electorate doesn't seem harmful to you?
You need to leave the bubble more.
Any climate-related policy action at all?
Seriously, Greta is a child, somewhat stupid to boot.
Allowing her to serve as any sort of symbol was a truly damning failure on the part of the environmental movement, and her message is basically a return to a neo-religious extreme asceticism that has no appeal to anyone at all.
And it's completely unnecessary, to boot. We can give everyone on Earth a decent standard of living by modern, first-world standards without needing to burn another ounce of oil after 2050 or so if we actually put in the damned work.
So... I get that you're so firmly burrowed into the woke bubble that you don't realize how she (and the millions like her) comes off to everyone outside it.
Fine. Just admit that.
Her role is not productive and her messaging is actively harmful. She makes it harder to achieve the societal consensus needed to take actual action on the environment, not easier.
Frankly, the entire "woke left" bit of the environmental movement makes that job harder, not easier.
The techno-weenies are irredeemable optimists and often full of shit, but at least they know how to sell a vision of the future that doesn't consist of sackcloth, unsalted mush, and horseshit for fertilizer.
The big issue comes down to the difference between a Tesla Model 3 and a BMW i3.
Both are electric cars but the i3 is a small, ugly, slow, enviro-weenie shitbox. Because BMW execs thought that what people want was a penalty box in which to atone for their sins. With the Model 3 Tesla offered a super sophisticated explosively fast super-sedan. Why? Because only a small percentage of the population wants to atone for their sins. They want better.
Induction cooktops, electric cars, heat pumps, etc. are all better than the conventional alternative. They way to sell the public on them is that their lifestyle not only doesn't have to change, it will improve by a lot.
Unfortunately most rank and file environmental activists are folks who get off by doing without.
Give yourself a pat on the back for "small, ugly, slow, enviro-weenie shitbox." That made me chuckle.
The hidden secret of capitalism is that, hard as it is to believe, people have different preferences. Like, some people would love a Tesla Model 3 and others would be delighted with a BMW i3. Amazingly, this esoteric rule also applies to things like breakfast cereal aisles in supermarkets. Check them out to see what I mean.
I think the Model 3 is cool. I've driven a lot in the i3 and it's just fine, and really great for city driving and for ease of parking in small spaces.
For a second I thought you were talking about the Series 3 and was very confused about it being ugly. Thankfully some of the newer electric BMWs aren't as bad-looking.
On a side note, let's talk about "small, ugly, enviro-weenie shitbox" cars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sono_Motors_Sion
WTF are these people thinking?
I mean that specific one seems likely to just be a scam on their investors?
Of course. I own two, one of which is as fuel-efficient as ICE cars get, and I won't buy an EV until I can get something smaller than a Tesla 3.
But this entire concept is ugly as sin, and it's a pointless waste of resources and solar capacity to use thin-film solar cells in this role. Seriously, they've got them on the doors, completely perpendicular to the ground!
Sell people a package of EV car and roof-top cells, or make an "outdoor charging kit" that people can unfurl from a rooftop pod when camping, or something.
I suppose that could be the use case, but given the limited efficiency of thin-film cells and their positioning, I find it difficult to imagine it's worth much on the run. Whereas, the same cells optimally located would do a lot of good somewhere. It just seems gimmicky, like they've built the business around attracting outside investment and will fold up once they've paid themselves nice salaries and run down venture funding.
100 miles won't cut it, unfortunately.
Nissan Leaf is quite tempting, but the battery issues seem pretty bad still.
BMW's price points suck.
Ford's offerings are... large...
GM's Bolt, if it didn't keep blowing up, would be appealing.
I think we're holding out for Tesla's mooted city hatch. If they blow another deadline come 2023 then we'll find something else instead.
It looks like there's a company that is making a car that is basically completely covered with solar panels, and they are suggesting that under "ideal conditions" (I guess, parked outdoors in a dry climate directly under the sun - on the equator on the equinox, or on the tropics on the solstices?) it could get enough power over the course of a day to drive 41 miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors
I think solar panels on the doors are likely to generate only negligible power in midday, and only a bit of power in mornings and evenings (and only on one side of the car), so it doesn't seem likely to add that much range.
A good friend of mine who's looking to buy a Tesla Model 3 in Europe can't really do it, because his parking spot isn't that big. Cars designed for the EU market are very different from cars designed for the US market, and maybe that's the reason why i3 has that size. (It does look ugly to me too, though.)
The i3 isn't *that* horrible, it's just unredeemably boring, except the obnoxious paintjob. My neighbor owns one, I've been in it once or twice. Meanwhile, my college buddy owns a Tesla 3, which is an all-around pleasure now that they've mostly fixed the fit-and-finish issues.
"Unfortunately most rank and file environmental activists are folks who get off by doing without."
Nah, they're just stupid enough to think they can get OTHER people to do it for them.
Fortunately, the technologies and techniques involved in 75% of the globe's carbon footprint are already markedly, obviously inferior to their "green" counterparts. Now we get to ride the depreciation curve until the problem is fixed.
It would make economic and social sense to subsidize a bit so that curve gets steeper.
"Nah, they're just stupid enough to think they can get OTHER people to do it for them."
That's certainly not the case. A lot of them like making a show of suffering and doing without.
Perhaps, but I doubt that's "most" or even a large minority.
That sort of performative crap is usually centered on things which aren't actually a sacrifice. I don't know many people who make genuine sacrifices of luxuries and conveniences that are within their financial means.
Teslas are ugly.
Something that's going to come back to bite us all in the ass is the way that a lot of leftist policies are being promoted right now emphasize that it won't cause any extra burden for the "average" person, just the 10%/1%/0.1% (depending on the policy and who happens to be tweeting about it). And for some things that is probably right. A lot of social safety net items can be improved and funded without raising the tax burden for the type of person who is volunteering to phone bank for Bernie.
But that type of argument has wiggled its way into the climate change discussion, where it is just amazingly incorrect and actively unhelpful. Hardly a week goes by without seeing someone share some version of the "90% of emissions come from just 10 companies!" meme. But everyone forgets that those 10 companies are all fossil fuel companies. Putting the blame on all of them is like blaming the local gas station for all the carbon released by all of the cars driving on the gas they sell. But there are a lot of people are out there who see things like that and become legitimately convinced that we just need to tax/abolish/punish/whatever some small number of evil corporations and then everything will be fixed. That they, personally, will not have to endure any hardships in their daily life.
That dynamic is going to be ruinous when it comes time to try and pass any serious climate policy. A lot of people who claim to be very invested in curbing the effects of climate change are going to balk at some of the things that would need to be accomplished. (Matt mentioned the opposition to banning gas stoves, but can you imagine the riot if we forced gasoline to increase its price to match the externalities it causes?)
This! Absolutely this! There is such magical thinking going around - that if only we could ban this corporation or that corporation, everything would be better. There is no path to reducing emissions without either improving technology, or reducing consumption - and there’s only so much consumption the wealthy do before it inevitably cuts into everyone else.
There is a slightly more reasonable version of this argument where companies _could_ invest more in energy efficiency but choose to return a profit instead.
In what sense is spending money with no expectation of return an “investment”?
Investing in energy efficiency is like investing in R&D. It's cutting into immediate profit for longer-term gains. Companies that aren't doing any investment in increasing their energy efficiency should be looked at with the same skepticism as companies that don't do any investment in R&D.
“…longer-term gains”
Gains are profit, no?
Yes, and profits can occur because of an increase in revenue or a decrease in expenses. Becoming more energy-efficient and reducing your energy expenses (and blunting the impact of higher energy costs) can (and will) increase your company's profit.
That's not necessarily the case and I'm unsure why you believe it is.
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that companies are without fault. But when people say that they are entirely at fault, or that any changes/hardships an individual might have to endure are worthless ("because it is so minuscule when compared to what the big companies are doing"), it becomes a self-sabotaging position.
Sure - people are the same way though. They could invest in smaller cars, houses, electronics, etc. and have a smaller carbon footprint. But they don't. Why would we expect companies to do what individuals won't?
The fact that people are unwilling to pay $100/year for mitigation costs is good evidence of a lack of seriousness and a lack of appetite for any meaningful sacrifice.
The anecdote about stoves, however, is not.
"Nice upscale liberals who care a lot about climate change get very upset if you suggest banning gas stoves."
This is not evidence that people are unwilling to sacrifice: it's evidence that people are not willing to make *obviously meaningless* sacrifices. And that's a healthy thing.
Now, I don't give a toss about stoves (I'm using an electric one myself). But everyone knows that the scale of the problem is so huge that banning every Aga in the world won't matter. And most people also know that the nature of the problem is truly global: solutions are going to require coordinated action by many nations.
If I can sign a treaty with India and China whereby they will halve their use of coal-powered plants in exchange for my junking my gas stove, then of course I'll do it. But until they cut down on coal, my stove does not even register in the global crisis -- it's somewhere out in the 10-to-the-negative-17th range of effect.
Dick Cheney, may he burn in hell, once said the following:
"Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."
He was wrong if "conservation" means, "national and international treaties, policies, plans and regulations for conservation." That kind of conservation is an essential part of any comprehensive energy policy. But if "conservation" means "making trivial life-style changes on a voluntary individual basis," then unfortunately, the worst person in the world made a great point.
People who obsess over their personal energy usage are deluding themselves if they think they are fighting climate change. People who go vegan, one by one, are deluding themselves if they think they are fighting climate change. People who distort their life-styles in order to make trivial changes in their consumption are simply wasting their own lives, and not saving the planet. It's climate-change theater; it's meaningless.
The very start of sanity on climate is realizing that it has to start with treaties, laws, and regulations, from the top down. People who are unwilling to do stupid pointless stunts like individually giving up their gas stove are not the problem. Nor does their unwillingness to do stupid stunts mean that they might not be open to genuine sacrifice if it was meaningful (though, as I conceded, the $100 data does look bad on that front).
The stove anecdote just shows that these people have a sense of the scale of the problem. And that's good.
It’s not about individual progressive stunts - it’s about cities banning natural gas hookups in new construction. This would cut emissions by something like 5% long term, and is clearly essential eventually. Berkeley has done it and Brookline has done it. But Texas is trying to ban cities from banning gas, and there are other places they are fighting back. The biggest argument they have is about gas stoves. No one worries about replacing their gas heaters with heat pumps. But gas stoves are the wedge they use to get nice upscale liberals on their side.
"It’s not about individual progressive stunts - it’s about cities banning natural gas hookups in new construction."
In that case, I misunderstood this issue. I thought MY was merely reporting anecdotes about individuals, not describing a coordinated pushback against coordinated attempts at regulation.
So. These people are unwilling to give up their gas stoves, even when they would do this as part of a coordinated strategy that would lead to meaningful reductions at scale?
In that case, fuck 'em. They're selfish, unserious people. I have nothing but contempt for them, and their gas stoves.
(Though I would like to know the denominator of your 5% figure -- is that 5% of typical household usage, or of US national usage, or what? Given that household energy consumption is itself small compared to automotive + power generation + industrial heat for smelting etc., it may still be penny ante stuff.)
Here’s a more detailed study. It looks like something like 1.5% of all greenhouse emissions in the United States are from burning natural gas inside homes and businesses for cooking. Another 2% is for heating water, and about 7% is for space heating. The point of eliminating natural gas hookups is to eliminate that entire 10% of emissions. If you can replace gas heating with electric, then you can get the biggest chunk while still cooking with gas, but that gas hookup in the house will continue to be a Trojan horse the gas industry uses for decades to fight for gas heating. (If everyone would just move to California, we could eliminate that gas heating right away.)
https://rmi.org/insight/the-economics-of-electrifying-buildings/
I like your last sentence because it brings up another good example of people who purport to care about climate but really don't: California housing policy.
Lots of people want to live in California. California has lower emissions than other parts of the country. The easiest thing to do would be allow more housing development. Instead, *Californians* have organized militantly to stop that from happening via local zoning, tax policy and environmental review.
Californians preferred environmental policy is to force people to stay out of California or at least coastal California while adopting Californian emissions levels. That's a lot harder to do when you have a climate like most of the country.
But Californians don't care because they don't care much about climate.
“…eliminate that entire 10% of emissions.”
Where does the electricity come from?
Right now nearly half comes from fossil fuels. But within the lifetime of any new houses that are built today, that fraction will fall below 10%.
I wonder: Did you ever try to heat a house with electricity?
NY State has consistently blocked adding pipeline capacity for natural gas, they’ve said in an effort to encourage renewable energy production. All they’ve done is encouraged people to use heating oil rather than gas.
I’m guessing on that 5%. This article says that 15% of all emissions in Massachusetts are from residential buildings, and I’m attributing 1/3 of that to gas. But the article also says 20% of all emissions are from power plants, so maybe I should attribute nearly all the residential emissions to gas, if electricity production is already taken out.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cities-look-to-natural-gas-bans-to-curb-carbon-emissions/
When we replace our stove (gas), we'll get induction. But I have to say that having a gas stove that I could use during the extended power outage in Texas last February allowed us to actually cook some food that we couldn't have otherwise cooked. (Oven doesn't work because it needs electricity to heat the heating element to allow gas to flow in the first place, but the stove does)
I mean, I'd rather the power were consistent(!!!) and I could switch to induction, but that is at least one advantage gas has over anything else, and while I don't know how much of a factor that is in Texas overall, that's in pretty recent memory...
I'm sure losing your stove during the power outage was painful, but if you lose that access for, say, four days in ten years, I'm not sure that's a powerful justification for keeping the gas stove.
There's also the cost of replacing a stove. What's the environmental cost of building a new stove vs. using the old one - especially with a grid that isn't 100% electrified yet (that is, replacing with an electric stove is a necessary precondition for zero carbon _eventually_ but how much does it matter right now)?
If the stove broke down I'd buy a non-gas stove for sure. But there's waste in getting rid of a perfectly good working stove to get a new one (and yes I can try to sell it used but it's 20 years old so it has low value that way but potentially high materials costs)
Ditto for me during the freeze, but you could also just keep a PowerGas-type camp stove handy. Safer to use that outside than running your gas stove inside without any circulation/ventilation.
That is really interesting. I had not realized how much of our emissions came from stuff like gs heaters and gas stoves until recently . Have they also been using the safety argument? Having a gas stove in a place like Berkeley that is in an earthquake zone seems like a significant risk for very little benefit.
Gasoline-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers are also much worse for the environment (and your own personal health) than one might think.
I think there’s also an pollution argument with particulates and such for residents of the house.
I haven't heard that argument actually! It does seem like there should be some earthquake safety benefit from just having a double-sized electricity line for each building, rather than an electricity line and a gas line. But I don't really know how emergency shutoffs for gas and electricity work in earthquake zones.
I've heard things about early warning systems for earthquakes that would allow utility companies to have several seconds head start in shutting down the lines when an earthquake is detected several dozen miles away. I don't know if those are already in place.
We have a gas shutoff in our house in earthquake-prone LA. That makes me feel somewhat more secure. I'd feel a lot more secure, however, if my neighbors had the gas shutoff valve too, so when their houses explode into flames, mine doesn't.
"No one worries about replacing their gas heaters with heat pumps."
Did installing heat pumps in existing buildings suddenly become dramatically cheaper than just replacing existing natural gas furnaces with other natural gas furnaces?
I don't think we're at that point yet, and I shouldn't have used the word "replacing".
My point was just that when you talk about banning natural gas hookups in new construction, people don't mind hearing that the new construction will have heat pumps rather than gas heating. But they *do* mind hearing that the new construction won't be allowed to have gas cooktops.
On the "I won't speed $100" problem, is there any polling that ask Americans if they are willing to spend and extra $100 on anything else they think is an important issue? Does climate change fare any worse than those?
I'd spend $100 to lower my taxes by $200
otoh, elite carbon gluttony discredits climate activism. When John Kerry flies around the world on a private jet and Al Gore has a 20,000 square foot house, they create a permission structure for normal people to resist change
How many people do you think would change their behaviour if John Kerry very publicly announced he would only talk to world leaders on Zoom calls from now on?
This 'permission structure' idea seems misguided to me. More like post-hoc rationalisations for stuff everyone was already going to do anyway.
My surmise is that the marginal effect is with the young. Middle aged and older people have habits and will cling to their consumption patterns. Many young people are idealistic, but these same people can become cynical when they understand authority figures don’t follow their own advice.
After the wide-ranging discussion (argument? bickering?) on nuclear power the other day, it prompted me to go wander and do some research, and enhanced geothermal may actually live up to the potential that all of the 4th generation nuclear technologies are supposed to have. (Note those technologies are, like the 3rd+ construction projects, decades behind schedule and vastly over budget, just on the research side!)
That would be a very good thing, not least because it takes advantage of existing infrastructure, capital plant, and workforce skills, and can be used damned near anywhere, with the same quick-ramping capabilities as a mixed-cycle gas plant today!
first
They purposely saved the comments so us west coasters from Idaho could post first.
Boise has the largest geothermal heating grid in the country (maybe the world). Given all the volcanic activity underneath the North West, geothermal energy could be a big deal.
Also, as someone who works on gas turbines. The new ones are amazingly efficient when paired as a combined cycle unit. Turbine exhaust is used to create steam for a steam turbine.
Gas Turbines will become even better as far as emissions go as they start using more and more syngas or natgas mixed with hydrogen.
Anyway, thanks for turning on the comments.
If there are any grammatical errors, feel free to point them out.
Idaho would also probably be a good place to flee to once the sea-levels rise and the coasters are looking to move
Nahhh. They will just move inland 1/2 half a mile.
Ehh, the entire Mountain West is going to have serious water issues in this new climate we're creating for it. I'm not betting against renewed Eastern demographic dominance by 2050 or so as people leave.
I work in California water issues. I'm watching the situation, but pretty sure we'll move east of the continental divide by 2030 or so. Seems better to set my kids up long term in a less precarious place. Makes me really sad because I grew up farming in Nor Cal.
Or in the case of FL, 1/2 a state
Lots of people say that climate change is an “existential threat” but, when pushed, blame every drought and hurricane on climate change or say that less pack ice will make it harder for polar bears to hunt. Very few mainstream sources even acknowledge the obvious benefits of a warmer climate— longer growing seasons between frosts, less privation and death for those who struggle to afford heat, more carbon dioxide for plants to turn into food, greater precipitation, etc. I am not saying the benefits outweigh the costs or that we should take a leap in the dark into a warmer future, but I really would like a careful accounting and I haven’t gotten one.
Here are some neglected data points. Winter mortality is significantly higher in Europe, the US, and China than summer mortality. Human beings are native to hot regions of Africa and have expanded across the globe as we have emerged from the ice age. The climate has warned by 0.85 degrees C in the last 140 years, during which time the human population has sextupled. I am somewhat confident that, today, cold causes more human misery than heat. Perhaps if the earth becomes two degrees warmer, heat will cause more misery than cold. It does not follow that aggregate misery would increase, especially when you adjust for the benefits of air conditioning, mechanized farming, and industrial prosperity generally. There’s certainly a point at which warmer temperatures would immiserate human kind. However, I don’t trust the estimates of those who fail to acknowledge any benefits of warmer temperatures and who care deeply about polar bears.
Look, we've had this out already, and you're wrong, but neither of us is going to shift the other on that front.
I'll just point out that "Winter mortality is significantly higher in Europe, the US, and China than summer mortality" is not a compelling argument, when you cherry-pick the three most populous regions of the temperate belt to say cold is more threatening there.
No one is saying that tens or hundreds of millions of people in the US or China are going to die directly or indirectly due to extended heat waves and droughts, we're saying that's highly likely to be the case in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Aggregate misery is going to increase *vastly* under even the most optimistic scenarios. Just not for you or I, not right away.
Even fairly warm places have significant excess winter mortality.
Even in Bangladesh, winter mortality is 20-25% higher than during the hot season right before the monsoon and 50% warmer than during the monsoon, when the weather is wet and temperate. One would expect similar patterns in India.
Maybe climate change will increase heat stroke deaths in the Congo, but far more people live in the temperate regions than the tropics. Sixty percent of the world’s population live in temperate zones versus 40% in the tropics, but many of the densest tropical places are in the highlands, eg Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, Kenya and Uganda.
https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-9276-10-32
I wasn't sufficiently clear.
Direct deaths due to extreme temperatures have always been, are today, and will continue to be a piddling number globally. I do not give a flying fuck whether making the globe warmer reduces that total by a few percent overall, because it is unimportant.
Indirect deaths due to famine from extreme precipitation variations have always been an immensely greater problem, and will always be.
No one expects millions to die when wet-bulb temperatures rise high enough to make the tropics "not habitable", they expect them to die when rainfall patterns make wide swathes of the tropics "not feedable".
Stop trying to slant analysis to look on the bright side. You're going up against the weight of a million-odd experts who broadly agree that things are going to be very, very unpleasant for most of the globe, with only very limited benefits to a few nations. The US isn't even really in the "benefits" column, not firmly, we're just rich enough not to notice some of the costs unless it gets quite out of hand.
The next century is going to bring a minimum of tens of millions of otherwise unnecessary deaths, more likely hundreds of millions, before century's end.
And if we don't arrest it, it's not like it's just going to *stop on its own*, it will keep getting worse, and human life in the tropics truly will become untenable over the course of the 22nd century.
There is immense inertia in these processes, and we've already set the ball rolling.
Do not attempt to say it will somehow be cheaper to accommodate and feed climate refugees here than to solve the underlying problem. Not only will it not be, because our agricultural and industrial base will be stretched to the limit changing the way they do things to adapt to changes in climate at home, but political considerations will mean that it isn't even on the menu of options.
No refugees will be admitted, and the vast, vast majority of the people who could be safely harbored in the developed temperate zones will instead starve to death in tropical refugee camps.
David R concedes that few people will die of heat stroke but claims tropical people will starve. So many unproven assumptions! First, air that is 90 degrees F can carry three times as much water vapor as air that is 60 degrees F. When the sun sets and temperatures cool, that water falls as range. There is a string, positive correlation between temperature and rainfall.
Second, the worlds bread baskets are in the temperate regions. Relatively few calories come from tropical lands. The places David R claims will turn into desserts aren’t producing much food today.
Finally, assuming (without conceding) that Canada and Russia don’t want climate refugees, it’s pretty easy to feed the (hypothetical) central African farmers whose crops fail because of climate-induced droughts. Rice costs 19 cents per pound. A person can be fed an adequate diet for a dollar a day. Maybe Canada and Europe don’t want climate refugees, but they aren’t monsters and would at least feed the people they keep out. A hundred million climate victims could be fed for $50 billion a year.
Surely I must treat the rambling pontification of the amateur climatologist with the same weight as the hundreds of thousands of experts who disagree with him on virtually all topics, even as he pronounces bald-faced lies about where the world's food is grown.
...
Oh, wait, no I don't, and for all that Substack lacks an "ignore" button, my brain carries a decent substitute.
that’s rude
Did Exxon write this analysis?
*50% higher than during the monsoon.
that’s just an proven assertion
*unproven
what exactly do they test those models against?
While there may be something to this, the problem is that our planet has adapted (marvelously!) to one general set of climate parameters and now we are moving at unprecedented speed to another. While *some* good things may result, most likely the majority of them will be bad. It's like genetic mutations: every now and then, you may get a good one, but more likely they'll kill you.
I confess I get a bit tired of the doom-mongering over every adverse weather event, but that doesn't mean that directionally they're wrong.
"The steady-state climate from 2 to 3 degrees Celsius isn't really so bad. It's the transition."
I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. How onerous do you think the costs would need to be to stopping the transition before it becomes better to accept the costs of easing the transition?
Maybe time to renew the Homestead Act and open Alaska to settlement by those displaced in Africa, Haiti and the like.
Canada could rival US population in 75 years
The US currently accounts for about 10% of global emissions and that is dropping. If we zeroed out our emissions tomorrow we (the planet) still wouldn’t meet the 2.0 goal. the reality is that climate change is mostly a foreign policy problem.
It’s true that more total emissions reductions need to come elsewhere than the United States. But more per capita reductions need to come within the United States than anywhere but the Middle East.
Sure, but the planet doesn't care about per-capita emissions, it only cares about total emissions. We in the US certainly can and should do more to reduce our emissions, but the reality of global emissions is what it is.
If you care more about total emissions than per capita emissions, then the best thing to do is to indiscriminately kill Americans. That will reduce total emissions by more than any sort of targeted action in India or China. It's no longer a foreign policy issue - it's just a domestic policy issue of how we can kill Americans fastest.
The planet may only care about total emissions, but humans care about more than just the planet - we care about human well-being as well. And if the planet is one of the things we care about *as a part of* human well-being, then per capita emissions are a pretty good measure (and economic energy intensity, i.e., emissions per GDP, is likely an even better measure).
In general, when you're asking how much people should be doing to solve problem X, the best way to measure that is by looking at X per capita, not total X.
"If you care more about total emissions than per capita emissions, then the best thing to do is to indiscriminately kill Americans. "
Again, the US is still only about 10% of total emissions right now. So you'd actually want to kill China (~30% of emissions), plus India the EU as well as the US. And preferably with some nukes since that will give us some atmospheric cooling.
"n general, when you're asking how much people should be doing to solve problem X, the best way to measure that is by looking at X per capita, not total X."
Per capita emissions is only useful in relation to total emissions, such as identifying a global average.
China is currently at about half the per-capita emissions of the US and still growing. And again, the US could reduce per-capita emissions to zero and it won't come remotely close to solving the problem. If the entire globe was at China's current emissions level, it would still be about 3 times too high to meet projected targets. The average per capita emissions for every country would need to be close to where India is right now. That just highlights the scale of the problem.
Sure, but even assuming zero emissions is possible in any kind of reasonable or relevant timeframe, the details matter in how you get to zero.
True. And -- nonetheless -- there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't do everything we can do personally and as a nation.
(And BTW, China and India are moving out impressively on renewables and appear to be starting to turn against coal. Why not encourage those green shoots with our own actions?)
“…there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't do everything we can do personally and as a nation.”
Of course there is: Cost.
Everything? If nothing else, there will always be political limitations.
I agree we can do more, but also everything ought to be on the table.
I agree that other countries aren't going to do what we want if we lack credibility on the issue, but I also understand from long experience that other countries do not blindly follow US "leadership" and that us taking whatever actions on climate change isn't going to compel other countries to act contrary to what they think are their best interests. Especially China.
And the "creating new technology" part assumes the new technology can be created, operationalized, and deployed at a relevant timescale for a reasonable cost at scale, and that it will come with few downsides. Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.
"But I think this business of setting targets and reasoning backward to policies has been a profoundly unproductive enterprise."
This is the same approach that the Democrats are taking in their current spending bills: $100B for this thing, $50B for that. They use suspiciously round numbers because there is no real underlying policy as such - just vague notions.
That is not a sound way to solve problems; these are not serious people.
Pretty big leap from "I don't agree with this round number approach" to "these are not serious people." I think we can disagree about the means (and even the ends) of policy without having to make ad hominem attacks, no?
Ad hominem targeted at politicians upsets you?
“Don't waste your time arguing with Ken.”
For *you* it is a waste of time.
Go away troll
The end of your sentence was cut off.
?
Enjoy your bubble!
I think you are mistaking journalistic simplification for reality. I haven't looked at every number in every bill but usually what is reported as "80 billion for ___" is some more complicated number when you look at it closer
Nope: The complicated stuff is left to the bureaucracy to manage.
If you're going to trivialize people's expressed views because they're just an "online poster", what are any of us doing here?
You've clearly never dealt with Ken. There's no substance there, just one-liners, trolling, dismissal of research/data/analysis that disagrees with his preconceived notions, and misleading/decontextualized broad-brush statistics.
I shouldn't even have replied, and I'm going to delete my reply to him.
Ken in MIA does occasionally make good points and debate honestly. He is not a troll so much as sometimes inclined to trolling. When he trolls he is not inclined to engage in honest debate.
You're mistaken.
“…dismissal of research/data/analysis that disagrees with his preconceived notions…”
Here’s an example: I have a preconceived notion that the US has no need whatsoever for a 21st Century Climate Conservation Corps. I defy you to prove me wrong. Further, if you can explain why $50B is the right amount to spend on such a project please do share because no one else can explain it.
Here’s another example: Biden’s climate plans - this, remember, in response to a very serious, possibly existential, threat - include a claim that they “will create millions of good-paying, union jobs, ensure economic competitiveness, advance environmental justice, and improve the health and security of communities across America.”
I’ll say it again: These are not serious people.
As you will, Ken. I made a mistake getting goaded into a reply the first time.
The last time I put any substantial effort into a reply, you dismissed it with one (overly simplistic, intellectually dishonest, snarky) sentence, devoid of any actual content, just like everything else you post.
So this time... whatever you say.
You know, I'll give it a shot, on this Climate Conservation Corps.
Philadelphia's flooding during Ida last month was not due to the failure of its drainage infrastructure, which held up well. It was because the Schuylkill River, in particular, burst its banks badly, to the tune of 17-19 feet.
Now, with the rainfall in Montgomery, Chester, Berks, and Schuylkill Counties, some of that was inevitable, and would have occurred in 1721 as well. But it was made much, much worse by the increasing population of the former two suburban counties especially. Their drainage infrastructure is also quite good, but geared towards dumping water straight into watersheds that flow towards Philly. The natural wetlands and retention features that would have significantly spread the peak of flooding in 1721 are now mostly paved over or flattened into plats in developments. Estimates are that this rainfall would have produced approximately half the rise in river water levels before those counties were developed.
To fix the problem requires restoring the ecosystems in question, but that's a long-term, rather expensive project that yields no benefits to the jurisdictions in question, even though it's also the cheapest way to fix the problem for Philadelphia.
That is *precisely* the use case at which the CCC is aimed; multi-jurisdictional restoration and rewilding projects that have environmental, social, and economic benefits. They are part and parcel of the "adaptation" and "mitigation" strategies you think are the best way to deal with climate change. Recreating natural retention and wetlands features is possible because the suburban counties have extensive open space programs, but most are mowed fields or second-growth forests. The space is there, the economic need is there, but the funding and programming cannot be accomplished at the purely local level.
This is not a problem unique to Philadelphia. One of the most economical ways to increase resiliency for Houston, New Orleans, or Pensacola will be to rewild coastal wetlands. Forest restoration and no-till agriculture programs in the Plains States will yield great benefits for agriculture, sequester carbon, and better protect human life against flood events.
Now, you can and will make the argument that the federal government shouldn't do this. Even though I don't entirely disagree, I simply *don't care*, because no one else is going to do it at scale. Not a coalition of forward-thinking insurance companies, not state governments, not local authorities, not non-profits. $50 billion is, if anything, an understatement of the need over the coming decade or two.
It's one of the single cheapest ways to buffer ourselves against not just climate change, but all disaster-related losses of life and property. That is *precisely* the sort of investment that a genuine fiscal conservative should want to see the government make.
Are you not a fiscal conservative?
This is a much better explanation than I have read elsewhere (even though I do have some scepticism about them ever implementing effectively even if they do get the money).
“Now, you can and will make the argument that the federal government shouldn't do this. Even though I don't entirely disagree, I simply *don't care*, because no one else is going to do it at scale.”
Correction: No one, including the federal government, is going to do this at scale.
At various times various people have touted this program as,
- Being necessary because unemployment is so high due to the pandemic. (That’s no longer true, obviously, but somehow that fact doesn’t dampen the spirit.)
- Providing valuable job training, generically. (Could be true, I suppose, but if climate damage mitigation is the goal, training is irrelevant except to the extent necessary to accomplish that goal. Unless you’re just spending money to buy votes, I suppose.)
- Training “the next generation of U.S. land managers, park rangers and other stewards of our natural resources.” (Good idea, maybe? Nothing to do with climate change.)
- $15 wage rates! Yes, that thing. (If climate change is such a threat we should be looking to get labor at market wages so as to enable us to do as much work per dollar spent as possible. It’s almost as if the people advocating for this either 1) don’t really think it’s needed to mitigate climate change, and/or, 2) don’t understand basic economics.)
- Will cost between $10B and $50B. (But who’s counting?)
- “Thousands” or “hundreds of thousands of jobs” created. (Tell me which of those you believe is feasible.)
- Turning the US into a place that “can compete in the global economy.” (Yes, someone actually said that. Who could be that stupid? How about a sitting US senator?)
- Could include, for example, “tutoring children, building affordable housing.” (Unclear how this is connected to climate.)
- Would “create demand for workers in an array of occupations, including engineering, construction, maintenance, and even marketing for climate-oriented programs.” (Demand for the first three is already very high. Demand for the fourth is very low for very good reasons.)
It would undoubtedly be a boondoggle.
Hmm. Nothing from the peanut gallery in response to a good faith explanation of the need and use case for that program?
Why is that not surprising?
Ah well, hopefully the thought I put into it proves useful to someone who isn't criminally stupid.
“…hopefully the thought I put into it proves useful to someone who isn't criminally stupid.”
It won’t.
One of the most dumb things about Pastoral Liberal Boomers from the 70s is that they have held onto cold war era forged in late 70s three mile island fear mongering fear of nuclear.
We could solve this Right Now, tomorrow, by telling that wing of the party to politely F off and start building nuclear at scale. But that requires political leadership, which is in very very short supply.
Nuclear + geo + national bill banning localities from blocking rooftop solar (many states do this now) + electric cars would all do a ton. And none of them require massive movement from currently held positions for most folks.
That all said, one resource we really lack these days are politicians who have the gravitas to tell the body politic what they don't want to hear from the bully pulpit - and have people go along. Of course higher gas taxes and prices are needed. And carbon tax would be useful. Don't care if your average joe sixpack won't like it. You know what? He didn't like drunk driving laws, child support laws, seat belt laws, or COVID restrictions either. Don't care - we don't run society on the wants of idiots who would vote to legalize child slavery if it brought down their federal tax rate by 2%.
I banged my head against this door enough last week, so I'll be brief:
Average levelized cost of energy for PV cells in US last year: $37/MWh
Average levelized cost of energy for nuclear power in US last year: $163/MWh
Nuclear is more expensive by a factor of 4.4X, and that's just maintaining existing infrastructure. Best estimate is that that would go up to 8X or more if we built new plants in the quantity needed.
Nothing more needs to be said.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
I found this (pretty long) piece useful for understanding why nuclear power has faced such a struggle in the US compared to peer countries - note that South Korea and India have built plants in the recent past for about 1/4 of what we last paid, and Japan for about 1/2.
The short answer is that we set up a safety standard that sets the amount required to be spent on safety such that the total plant costs is about equal to that of other forms of energy, which by definition prevents nuclear power frm ever being cheaper than other forms. Yes, nuclear safety's obviously important, but we take things way too far here.
Also, wouldn't building new nuclear plants give us the opportunity to use more efficient construction and plant design techniques learned in the last few decades? I don't see why scaling up the industry would obviously increase costs per MWh, nor why scaling up PV manufacturing wouldn't encounter the same issues.
I'm really not prepared to go back and do this again, so go find the last week's arguments if you want my position in detail.
TL;DR version is that this entire effect is a small contributing factor as to why nuclear is brutally expensive, and anyone who says otherwise is lying or stupid.
The single largest cost in a PWR plant is the containment system and shield, and no reduction in operating margins and radiation exposure standards is going to allow me to get around the construction cost of those items, because a plant needs to be able to withstand *anything* without physically exposing the pile.
I will note that, as a civil engineer "more efficient construction and plant design techniques learned in the last few decades" damned near made me spew coffee on my screen.
Every single plant constructed in the last decade has been between 2X (South Korea) and 5X (US, France, China) overbudget. All of them.
This is not, fundamentally, a regulatory issue. The technology sucks compared to its peer competitors and nothing is going to fix that.
If the costs are so out of whack, even in other countries, why are those other countries building nuclear? Is the South Korean government encouraging wasteful spending on nuclear over PV? Just because the plants are overbudget doesn't mean that the costs aren't still cheaper than they last were here... it's the final construction cost that's relevant here, not the budget.
Are you also saying that there have been no advances in nuclear plant construction and design since the late '70s?
When has a state ever subjected its own projects to rigorous cost-benefit analysis? (Yes, I know there are some, but generally speaking.)
In East Asia, China and South Korea in particular spent a decade or more developing 3rd Generation+ PWR designs as a prestige technology to show they'd arrived, expecting that they'd be somewhat economically competitive. As it turns out, they aren't, not really. They got built anyway.
"Are you also saying that there have been no advances in nuclear plant construction and design since the late '70s?"
Basically, yes!
Designs have improved in terms of implementing passive safety standards rather than active, but there are no substantial technological or economic enhancements there.
Construction, if anything, has gotten worse. Construction productivity is abysmal, lower per unit of labor than it was in 1965.
If anything, that trend is even worse with regards to complex projects like nuclear plant construction.
PV is always going to kick nuclear's ass in this regard because it's an off-the-shelf installation. Wind turbines really only require a foundation to be "constructed" as opposed to "installed." That will not change regardless of changes to the regulatory regime.
You are slowly changing my view, for what it's worth. Even if it's not good going forward, if we could repeat history, do you think more nuclear would have at least been a good intermediate step?
South Korea announced they're phasing out nuclear power following the Fukushima accident and scandals involving forged safety certifications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#South_Korea
Even France has become very wobbly on their support for continued use of nuclear power. Their recent Flamanville reactor project is 5 times over budget and nearly a decade late so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I mean, most other countries aren't building nuclear.
Have been making this argument for decades and it’s only gotten more compelling. Nuclear power is monstrously expensive and presents very rare but very very serious risks of local devastation. There was never any chance that the US could or would build enough new plants to displace fossil fuels, and it has nothing to do with hippie protesters or the Cold War. The appeal is for those who want someone else to blame for refusing an “obvious” fix for “irrational” reasons, when really it’s no more realistic than expecting everyone to go back to subsistence farming in the dark.
It is expensive solely because we make it so. Get rid of the paranoid regulation, nuclear becomes cheap.
No, it doesn't.
You've mentioned before that the big issue for nuclear is the severe costs that modern large construction projects have. What do you see as driving those costs and is there something specific about the containment system and shield that would make those costs so much higher?
I can’t speak from a position of true expertise, but my understanding of the design of those containment buildings is that we’re talking about a very thick, heavily reinforced concrete-steel plate composite made of ultra-high strength concrete.
So first, I pour an incredibly heavily reinforced, very deep foundation structure, possibly with base isolation bearings.
Then I weld thick, heavy cylindrical steel segments together to form the interior steel layer of that structure on site, then spot-weld a million nail-like shear studs to the outside that will bond it to the concrete.
At the same time, I’m installing mechanical systems and the unfueled reactor assembly.
To pour concrete, I first install reinforcing steel; this isn’t the sort we see in a column in an office building, rather it’s a very dense arrangement of high grade stainless steel. We’re talking something like 20% of the volume of concrete being replaced by steel. Typical range in a beam is a few percent.
Then I set up forms and actually pour concrete. The problem with extremely high strength concrete is that it’s not nearly as liquid as ordinary concrete, even with excessive amounts of viscosity-reducing additives. Several reactors have been taken offline after discovering large voids in their containment buildings’ concrete.
All this adds up to a nightmare in construction terms:
Complex staging for extremely heavy prefabricated components, using the largest mobile crane systems ever built.
Extremely high welding standards with non-standard steels, on-site, for very large, very deep welds.
Huge issues with in-site ironwork, due to the density of reinforcing steel, snd frequent rework, even redesign, to avoid physical conflicts.
Access issues that make it damningly difficult to properly consolidate very viscous concrete mixes.
This is the bleeding edge of every single trait that makes a construction project a pain in the ass, all on a single project, with exacting standards.
And this is the one bit of the project where margins of safety simply cannot be reduced, because if it fails I’ve exposed a reactor pile to open air snd likely rendered a whole county uninhabitable for half a century.
There is not and never will be a way to do this cheaply, and the 4th generation technology proposals don’t change the need at all.
There is a bit more to be said. The costs of $37 count on efficient solar panel farms and not on residential rooftop which has much higher costs ($150-250). A key challenge with solar panel farms is how much area they take up - about 4-5 acres per MWh.
The US currently produces about 60% of its energy using fossil fues, about 40% gas and 20% coal. That equals to about 2500 terrawatts. Replacing that with solar panels will take up about 15-20 thousand square miles, or between the size of Maryland and W. Virgina.
Any source for rooftop cite? My back of the envelope calculation assuming $15k in purchase+installation costs and 5% in annual maintenance for a 7 kW rooftop system puts LCOE at around $50/MWh
Looks like they've done an update since the last one I saw, but here is the latest from Lazards which shows $150-$227.
https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf
Using their inputs, I’m still coming up with a very different result. I’ll look at it in the morning.
Permit me to say it for you. PV cells suck because they only produce power for a few hours a day and to produce power dispbatchible to demand require massive investments in transmission and storage that dwarf the cost of the PVs themselves. Which the PV advocates always forget to tell anybody about.
Ahh, hello again.
First things first, LCOE metrics used above do already account for capacity factor, so the "a few hours a day" bit is already baked into the figures.
As for dispatchability... The *least* charitable estimates of the cost of grid resiliency and storage run around the same cost as the PV and wind installations themselves. Assuming some development of that field of technology over coming years as we roll it out widely, I think those estimates are likely to prove wildly conservative, just as *every* estimate related to renewables roll-out has been thus far.
I'll also note that these problems are simply *not new*. The grid we have today was designed around the notion that neither coal nor nuclear plants are easily or rapidly dispatchable, and downtime is often significant, and as such we have extensive experience managing these needs, albeit not quite at the same level.
There's simply nothing in your contention to suggest that nuclear is a viable way out. It's not. The LCOE metrics above are based only on the cost of trying to buy a few more years of safe life for decades-old plants with already long-sunken capital costs, and we're utterly unable to build anything resembling a cost-competitive 3rd or 3rd+ generation plant. LCOE for a new plant in the US right now might be as high as $300/MWh, from what I've heard.
Meanwhile, the 4th generation technologies are uniformly pie-in-the-sky or plans-on-paper, excepting a single PBR pilot reactor in Beijing, courtesy of my alma mater, and its sole gas-cooled high temperature offspring elsewhere in China.
We would need to be able to build and operate nuclear power plants for at most 30% their current cost in order for them to be cost-competitive with renewables, even after accounting for investments needed in redundant capacity, resilient and large grid, and storage capacity. And that's assuming a fairly charitable interpretation of modern construction cost data.
As discussed unto death (and well beyond) last week, there is no possible way, regardless of how you slash the operating or radiation safety regulations, that that is ever going to happen. The construction costs are too high and there is very little that can be done to lower them, as construction of pressure vessels and housing structures is the one bit of over-engineering which absolutely cannot be sacrificed.
I'm of the "try everything" school given the dire threat of climate change, and I've usually put nuclear in that group. But indeed nuclear may not be the way to go. Still, we need something! Especially to solve the intermittency problem, unless we get incredible breakthroughs in electricity storage technology and implementability.
Maybe a crash program in deep geothermal drilling? It's getting late in the game, but we really need to be very aggressive here. Technology breakthroughs, funded by aggressive R&D, are more important than behavioral changes, but we have to get them soon and then build on them quickly.
That's true but a little unfair. The current nuclear power plants in the US are built on decades old technology. The cost of PV cells built in 1995 are pretty damn high.
There are a bunch of new nuclear designs that are considerably cheaper and have other advantages. I'm not saying next-gen nuclear is the golden arrow, but we are going to have to create a lot of new technologies to drop carbon emissions world-wide.
What next generation nuclear technology?
This is a quote from a French nuclear consultant, the lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, FFS:
"Gen IV designs are PowerPoint reactors – they don’t exist. And the best example is Bill Gates, who started a company in 2006 to develop and promote a new design. Fifteen years later, he has nothing to show – no licensed design anywhere, no site, no prototype.”
The modular reactor projects in Russia and China are decades behind schedule and vastly overbudget, the thorium reactors are plans on paper or less... there's just nothing there, it's all vaporware and suckling at the research funding teat.
To be fair, that's not actually a long time to bring some kinds of new technology to market, no matter how much founders and inventors have to pretend otherwise (or believe otherwise) to make progress at all. There are good and bad reasons for budget and time overruns, but it's not especially helpful to assume the original plans made sense even on their own terms.
The first LED (made with silicon carbide!) was demonstrated in 1906, but the first commercial LEDs were developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the first commercial silicon carbide electronics were developed in the 1970s and 1980s.
The earliest carbon fiber dates from the 1870s, and it took until the 1950s to find a precursor and process conditions to make it good enough to use in composites. We're *just now* in the past handful of years starting (despite lots of effort from many quarters) to figure out how to make high quality composites from natural fibers or bio-derived carbon fibers.
Also, your quote is out of date. China's HTR-PM reactor became the first Gen IV reactor in the world to reach criticality, on September 12 2021. It isn't fully up and running, but it isn't like the people actually investing in the technology aren't making progress.
I'm not saying it is a long time, but it's *too long* in context.
Everyone who is claiming nuclear is a big part of the solution to our problems, within the timeframe we need to move to solve them, is either ill-informed or lying outright.
The 4th generation technologies may (MAY) one day be cheap enough to go toe-to-toe with renewables + storage.
I doubt it, frankly, given the safety concerns; I still need a very expensive pressure vessel and shield for my PBR lest the pebbles light on fire after the vessel's inert HE coolant leaks. Resiliency is also an issue; a single larger generator cannot be permitted to fail in an emergency, one of many dispersed smaller ones (wind farms, hi) can.
But even if it does, it's not going to get there anytime soon.
"But nuclear!" is almost always, when trotted out by those in the know, being used to discredit the "green left." Who are idiots in other ways, but not this particular one.
That's fair. I might lament the wasted decades since the 1980s when we could have been making progress on nuclear and didn't, but at this point we can move a whole lot faster with renewables and storage.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/bill-gates-terrapower-will-build-first-next-gen-nuclear-reactor-wyoming/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-micro-reactors-that-run-off-nuclear-waste.html
It's a fair point to say they are not ready for deployment, and many of the designs may not pan out. But I think we are better off allowing a lot more nuclear avenues to be explored even if most fail. I'd say the same thing about continued funding for the National Ignition Facility
I'm OK with tossing a few billion a year down the rathole of "cutting edge research" in case something pans out, but my guess is that none of these are going to be economically competitive, ever, and they'll arrive at scale far too late to do anything to solve this crisis. Maybe the next one.
If we're faced with the choice of "build a grid with 3rd+ generation PWR plants and existing nuclear+hydro" and "build a grid with today's renewables and existing nuclear+hydro," the latter is a vastly, vastly economically superior choice, even if better power storage doesn't come along in time to solve the biggest challenges.
Few are arguing against funding research on promising next-gen nuclear. Last year congress approved billions in funding for nuclear research and Biden's hard infrastructure bill will add billions more.
The issue is that all of these next-gen technologies are speculative investments that will likely take decades to pan out if they ever do. The industry doesn't have any cost/time competitive solutions that can be built starting right now.
IMO, over the next decade or two, the odds we'll get a revolutionary breakthrough in carbon capture or in green hydrogen technology that completely changes the energy game are as good or better than the odds that one of the next-gen nuclear technologies pans out.
I'm not saying we should be trying with nuclear. In fact, if I had to bet, I'd guess in 100 years nuclear power will play a huge role in satisfying our energy needs.
The big question is what has the best chance of providing ,mass deployable solutions that can have an impact in the next 10-20 years and the answer is unlikely to be nuclear.
"In fact, if I had to bet, I'd guess in 100 years nuclear power will play a huge role in satisfying our energy needs."
Until I started reading exactly what's entailed by enhanced geothermal, I would have assumed the same, but I suspect that the latter will end up being a bigger factor in the end.
One huge issue with much of the environmentalist movement is that it's an ideology of sacrifice, which tends to be a hard sell. It's all about giving up stuff people like. I am not saying that it's wrong that such sacrifices would help a lot, it's just that they are political non-starters. In contrast, there are lots of exciting things that can be done to help with emissions. Electric cars are now exciting, not just a poor substitution. I have found someone like Saul Griffith inspiring (not that I agree with everything he says).
Treating elite support for climate action as an exogenous factor seems like a bit of a mistake to me.
Somehow, by the late 2000s-early 2010s, Democratic elites had coalesced behind a position of doing more about climate than the politics alone would justify. Around that same time window, there was a bunch of student climate activism, Al Gore made a movie, Bill McKibben was making noise and intermittently getting arrested.
I agree that elite buy-in is the best thing we have going in terms of chances for combating climate change right now. If you're gonna be Mr. "these activists suck", though, you can't treat elite buy-in as a totally exogenous factor. Was elite buy-in a product in part of the actions people/groups who cared most about climate were taking? Are some forms of protest or communication that clearly don't work to create mass mobilization nonetheless succeeding at reaching the elites? It sure seems like someone did something that worked to create the current atmosphere among elites.
Bono. The elites are big U2 fans.
It's amazing people use "America generates 15% of global emissions" as an excuse against acting on climate.
America is 4% of global population, so 15% is almost 4 times its "fair share". Historically its share of emissions was much higher, and Americans still enjoy the wealth generated by those emissions. And even today, its share is above 15% if you count emissions generated for US imports.
But even ignoring that, America is by far the world's richest country, its largest economy, by strongest its strongest military. It's not the #1 emitter...but it's #2. If it's not going to act, who is?!
Another thing to consider is that American emissions have been trending down for basically 20 years.
Indian and Chinese emissions are not trending down. Neither are sub-saharan African emissions. This is very much a "Americans are not really the problem here and will not be the problem 20-30 years from now" situation.
Separately I think MattY and Noah Smith have tweeted a few times about how switching to including imports doesn't change the basic emissions math any.
Everyone is part of the problem. It’s a global problem.
American emissions per capita are the highest in the world of any large country. It’s also wealthy enough to subsidise the transition. It is an unusually large part of the problem.
The suggestion India or Africa are the problem because they’re becoming slightly less desperately poor is like a parody of the blinkered American
Everyone is "part of the problem" but I think the real "blinkered American" take is the one that refuses to acknowledge the basic math of the situation and the fact that other people and their emissions matter much more than ours.
Also slightly troubling that you ignored my "20-30 years from now" point, because when subsaharan Africa has 2.5 billion people in a bunch of middle income countries then the United States will essentially be irrelevant in terms of carbon emissions.
If one set of people is trending down and a (much larger) set of people is trending up then I think it's fairly clear what the forward-looking mindset has to focus on (helping them get not poor in a much cleaner way than we did).
“I think it's fairly clear what the forward-looking mindset has to focus on (helping them get not poor in a much cleaner way than we did).”
Agree with this 100%. (Actually makes me a bit confused what you were disagreeing with me about).
Didn’t “loud” politics generate the elite consensus on climate in the first place? I’m thinking of student climate organizing in the late aughts, the climate march circa 2014, etc. Even if I find Matt’s argument persuasive and agree that loud politics aren’t helpful now, I think they have had a time and place in generating the type of political environment that gets climate stuff into every bill dems put forward.
I was a kid then, and I'm an adult now. Seems to me the politics of that vintage were extremely successful in elevating the climate issue to the top of dem agenda, if not public adoration. MY gives the example of loud bank reform folks getting stuff done. I don't actually see how climate activism of a decade ago is any different than that case, actually.
This post gets at the limits of popularism as a governing philosophy. On a lot of issues there is no objective right or wrong answer, so what's popular is by definition the right answer in a democracy. But for a lot of problems, there are better and worse solutions, better ways to raise living standards for everyone, better ways to structure incentives, etc., and what's popular or expedient in the short term isn't what's best. Sometimes sheep need a shepherd. Sometimes politicians need to be teachers and leaders, not just lemmings who jump in front of the parade and march whatever direction it's going.
Popularism might be a good incremental tactic in some of those problems, but it's no substitute for an actual vision and ability to communicate that to the public in a way that's compelling, honest and persuasive to many people.
This is a fair point, but if a movement can build credibility and trust via popularism, it will be in a better position to lead.
Agree. But conversely message discipline and poll-tested positions will only take a movement so far with voters who don't feel a visceral connection to the movement's actual worldview. Some charismatic candidates might win who otherwise wouldn't have but that's about all.
Back when the Republican Party was the party of social progressives, the educated and well-to-do professionals and managers, it was at a disadvantage competing with Democrats for more downscale voters, too. Now the roles are reversing, it seems, and Democrats may be slower than Republicans to recognize it.