The worst part of this sad story is that environmental groups/people on the left don’t seem to have learned anything from the experience. I had hoped that an unequivocal loss would at least force a reckoning.
Since approximately 2015, a lot of influential people seem to have a mental model of politics where most people share their values and prioritization and only disagree on politics and policy because of some combination of "misinformation" and lack of awareness. The environmental movement has been ground zero for this. With this mental model, responding to losses by saying the exact same stuff louder and angrier makes sense, but I think it's the wrong model. I also think a lot of the anger at the tech industry--with Mark Zuckerberg being the figurehead--is rooted in people truly believing that "misinformation" on platforms like Facebook is responsible for their electoral losses and that they can win voters with the exact same strategy if the "misinformation" goes away.
I've read several prominent people in the climate movement complain about articles in the NYT and Washington Post. Which is ridiculous because anyone who is also reading that article is just much more left wing than the average person in the electorate.
The obsession with media coverage is truly the most self defeating thing in politics. Only losers whine about the media. But partisans create a massive market for the most simplistic "media criticism".
Right on. They have this model because the mind is a machine for maintaining group identity. Environmentalists, and leftists generally, need to believe two propositions that cannot be reconciled:
- we are trailblazers
- we speak for the people
The emulsifier that holds this oil-and-water combination in suspension is the silly assertion that the people *really* want to follow down the leftist trail, but are silenced / misled / etc. by forces of darkness.
It’s interesting that this is such a bipartisan phenomenon. I’m presuming that it is example #851 of “social / media bubbles and filters screw up your brain.”
Just led me to learn about the low information rationality model.
“A supported alternative to the knowledge deficit model, the low-information rationality model states humans minimize costs associated with making decisions and forming attitudes, thereby avoiding developing in-depth understandings.”
I think that IS the case. I think that people really do not understand how little they would be inconvenienced by a rebated tax on net CO2 emissions and other at how little CO2 emissions/how high the cost would be reduced by putting obstacles to the LX pipeline. It is mistake to over particularize social media for spreading these misconceptions.
The tuned out citizens will just grumble at higher gas and electricity costs. The sharper citizens who just want to go about their jobs and lives will see this as a shell game that doesn't do anything substantial to their budget and get annoyed at the social engineering being attempted here.
Canadians would know better than I, but I believe their carbon tax has been very unpopular and was going to cost Liberals the election until Trump inadvertently saved them.
Shortly before the Australian election I had a short conversation with someone who truly believed that the only reason someone wouldn't vote for The Greens was because they had been brainwashed by the Murdoch Media and that 100% of people who actually read their platform would vote for them.
I was listening to an interview with Mark Lynas and he mentioned that when he's talking to a room of climate activists he'll often ask them if they could magically make climate change go away without any changes to society, would they do it. About half would. The other half don't, because in their minds climate change is just a symptom of a bigger problem. There are plenty of climate change activists who aren't like that, but the ones who are make it harder to enact effective climate change policies. People are going to be suspicious of the climate movement if their members often go on about it being a symptom of the "real problem", which is usually either capitalism or industrialization and technology. Because very few people want to get rid of those things, and claiming that those are the real causes of climate change doesn't pass the sniff test.
That is a great little mind experiment. And I can see that being true - there are a lot of people whose climate activism is part of a broader belief system that the current techno-rich world is bad and we should, in some way, return to nature.
Nothing wrong with living that way oneself but that is never going to be a majority viewpoint in the US so you can't successfully enact climate policy with that approach.
For some reason, I know several people who are very concerned about climate change and view it primarily as a result of the "sin" of capitalism or industrialization. I'm like you, I'm not going to tell anyone how to think and it's really not any of my business unless they corner me at parties and ramble on for half an hour.
It does become a problem when activists decide that solutions to climate change have to also get rid of the "sin" they think caused it and so solutions that don't stop the "sin" or enable it should be prohibited. Like you mentioned, the vast majority of people don't want to live in a society without a lot of modern technology or some sort of degrowth world. And trying to force people to live that way makes the general public understandably skeptical of climate change action. Most people want technological solutions not lower standards of living. I have lost count of the number of times a climate activist has insisted that climate action must include their preferred solutions or dismissed a technological solution that currently exists because it doesn't address the "sin". And if that's the face of hte climate movement, people will decide they don't want to take action on climate.
The people I know who are sin type environmentalists realize that their solutions will not win at the ballot box and so they tend to endorse policies that overrule the ballot box and are frankly often quite authoritarian. I've seen people advocating that the government reallocate housing space so that people don't have "too much space" based on some formula of what you need. In some ways, this arm of the environmental movement reminds me of the Christian Right when I was growing up in the '90's. The rhetoric comes off as wanting to control how other people live their lives.
Perhaps I’m being too judgmental but I find this absolutely revolting. People who feel that way ought to be marginalized as fast as practically possible, imo.
Degrowth is just a repackaging of the population bomb myth of the 1970s. Jason Hickel and his crew of idea launderers have very monstrous ideas. Ideas if they managed to enact would result in a state enforced famine worse than any committed by communist regimes of the 20th century.
It's in their job description not to learn the lesson. It's in the job description of Democratic officeholders (i.e., win elections, pass good laws) to ignore them.
Even David Roberts of Volts gets this. He just had a fantastic interview with Jesse Jenkins and Jane Fleagal where he let his angst about the self-sabotaging of the climate groups come through:
"So, it's like, it is true that the climate movement needs self-awareness and discipline and the ability to restrain itself sometimes and the ability to accept half a loaf. . . I feel bad saying that because that is like the core proposition for many people's lives whom I respect greatly, you know, and who spent their lives working on it and like, and I don't have a great alternative theory about what to do, but I have basically come around to thinking that the dream of a climate movement capable of moving national politics is probably forlorn and that you're probably going to get, insofar as you get popular support, rallying for things, it's going to be more targeted, focused on growth and opportunity and abundance. And electric cars are cooler and they work better. And you know, like, things are cooler, things are getting better, they're operating better, the air is getting cleaner.
"All of that stuff means more to public sentiment than climate. And maybe it's just like, maybe we should just internalize and accept the fact that climate is going to be kind of a background accelerator and not the main thing."
I’m an aspirational climate voter but I have been in the wilderness for the past… many years because I don’t thing the root problem is capitalism and therefore I think I the people leading the charge on this are mostly dumb and alienating. There are a lot of things in my issue bundle I would give up for techno/abundance climate policy.
Interesting, thanks for the link. Few people I know IRL seem to have subject themselves to this sort of self-examination. Most of them—and these are educated people—have either dug in more deeply or wandered into conspiracy theories and nihilism. Mostly the former, but it’s been kind of shocking to hear some of the latter.
I can't speak for the movement at large, but I absolutely have learned from the experience - stop wasting money on red states and subsidies. The IRA poured lots of money into red states, which they happily pocketed and provided effectively zero actual benefit to either the climate or the nation. Little infrastructure was built. No minds were changed.
I had the pleasure of driving across Nevada twice over the July 4th week in a non-Tesla EV. Because I did my homework, it wasn't a terrible experience. Still, I was shocked at how many EV charging stations which had been installed from 2017-2020 were now basically paperweights - either physically broken or no longer supported by their vendor (thanks for nothing, Shell). This work was largely paid for by federal highway money and state grants ('Nevada Electric Highway'). As far as I can tell, the vendors and installers took the money and ran. Did it translate into better infrastructure? Maybe marginally. Did it increase support for EVs and electrification in rural Nevada? I see no evidence of that either. The state is redder than its been in decades.
Apparently, some Republican minds *were* changed by the IRA investments and they worked behind the scenes to improve the OBBBA in this regard at least some. I learned this on a Volts podcast recently, and that modified my prior thinking some.
Well more Pre Failure and not anything actually 'learned'
The non building (and that means btw non-spending) was due to the Biden Adminstration ont cutting the red tape
One doesn't change minds by making Big Promises and then getting everything tied up in multilevel reviews approvals, everything-bagel "nudges" to include every nice Lefty agenda item in every project.
"Reds States" building more comes from faster processes.
This isn't all that surprising to me. A red state will happily take Green Projects money, throw that money at vendors to bolster support from the labor demographic, and then five years later the project is derelict because nobody actually gave a shit in the first place.
As someone in this space I don't think that true at all, like any social movement it can take a lot of time to turn the battleship as it were. See how formulating the new strategy after the failure of Cap and Trade didn't happen overnight, or the Sierra Club's evolution on housing issues.
Moreover a lot of the conflict and "reckoning" that people (especially this Stack's comment section) really, really want to see happen in public will happen behind closed doors for a variety of reasons. The big test will be what enviro groups decide to do in the run up to 2028, I think a number of outcomes are possible.
As someone also in this space, it was disappointing to see the "degrowth" and "keep it in the ground" movement take hold over the last decade. Plenty of mainstream enviro groups formerly took a more pragmatic approach - or maybe more accurately, took a multiprong strategy of pushing for more regulation while also encouraging development of clean tech like EVs (my particular experience is transportation-related so I'm more aware of the trajectory of clean tech in transport....).
So yes I take your point that these groups may be recalibrating as we speak, but I suspect this last decade or so will seem like time wasted tilting at windmills.
Sure, but I just don't think there's a lot of evidence that "nobody's learned anything" as claimed in the top comment, I could see a lot of different pathways between now and Nov of 2028. Likewise if some major funders decided to act different a lot of the "degrowthers" could be just not around in a few years.
Not all groups are the same of course and I’m sure some are more clued up than others. But my experience with these groups collectively, since I started my career in the 90s, makes me skeptical. And I have always considered myself to be an environmentalist.
I just think there's a lot of variance here, will institutional funders pull the plug on groups enmeshed in The Appliance Wars? Will we see major leadership changes at the ED/board level at lots of orgs? Will people decide to write off "red America" or increase efforts there? Will activists try to disrupt Josh Shapiro press conferences? Call AOC a monster after she refuses to call for banning gas stoves? Get depressed and do a "back to the land"/start smoking a lot of high stakes thing instead of being involved in politics?"
My new favorite kind of environmental group is rewilding projects. It's like abundance for the environment - making the world better by building stuff. There's no time to advocate for a toxic political agenda if you're too busy planting trees and moving dirt around.
The cultural left isn't just failing to meet the moment, they haven't even tried to make an appointment. My tolerance for their bullshit has been waning for the entire decade - ever since they started asserting things like "Elizabeth Warren is a right-winger" in 2019, really - and they haven't adjusted anything about their thinking since a loss that made the rest of us go back to the drawing board. At this point I think Democrats should make them active targets for scapegoat messaging.
Fuck them. They force us to adopt unpopular positions and then don't even support us with any enthusiasm, if they do at all. They pulled a LOT of us really far by putting everything in moralistic terms that we found hard to refute within our value system, and by exploiting the desperation of old-millennial Obama coalition members to be cool and down with the kids, and with progressivism, and by exploiting our fear of being labeled right-wingers, as we did to so many older Democrats in our youth.
I can't be the only one ready to Sista Soulja these fuckers out of a cannon into the sun. If some candidate comes out with that approach in '27 (and it isn't John Fetterman, because what the fuck is going on with that guy) they are going to get a lot of consideration for that, and if they get through a primary with that posture they would be an amazing position for a general election.
You are onto something here. The left seems to think everyone really agrees with them so they don’t believe they have to do much persuading. The right, on the other hand, knows that most people don’t agree with them on lots of issues. They feel perfectly justified in ramming stuff down people‘s throat, simply because it’s good for them in one way or another.
As someone on the left who sympathizes with larger goals and can see how critical progress in these next few years is extremely critical (due to the many tipping points we are approaching), I was still fighting for Kamala and Biden, but the left people, even the Sunrise Movement, were constantly anti-Democrat, often linking them as "the same," especially in light of the genocide in Gaza. I personally felt that the Republicans were clearly still worse on that and that the environmental gain was even so more important (not to mention the myriad other threats Trump posed and is enacting) especially due to the actual short-term-ness of the global warming problem. I do not think we should "demand" that Democrats enact the Green New Deal immediately or else we should tell everyone who cares to hold them accountable, I do think that work they are doing to elect people on a local level is paying off, and that this issue ought to be taken extremely seriously as (alongside nuclear war) the biggest threat humanity as well as all life on the planet faces and try to convince people of this sooner rather than later, because how much worse will it get for example in the Middle East with no oil money and severe drought in the future? Lives are still at stake. We should not simply rely on opinion data to determine the best moves. People can see through that anyway. Inspiring politicians have done a lot to change things in the past and still can. Humans can be and are caring, and (self-)obfuscation with facts and figures and focus group analyses actually incentivize status quo solutions that are simply invalid in light of the actually unprecedented urgency of the crises we face. If they had realized this back in the 60s and 70s things would be so much better, but short-term "economics" is always seen as the inevitably winning hand. Maybe more Gen Z-ers would have come out and tipped the scales for Kamala if she had been less bad on fracking, but really, all the pro-Palestine "Genocide Joe" stuff was a bad look for that enthusiasm, and of course, was just horrific in itself.
The fantasy of more voters solving your problems needs to be dropped - that ceased to be true a while back. Low propensity voters went Trump and all data show that the profiles that did not voter align to breaking Trump
Stuck in 1990s narratives and thinkig is going to continue to lead to dead ends.
What do you think the climate people actually believe? What is there real strategy here? It can’t be “win power and make meaningful change” so what is it?
"Republican trifecta has repealed the majority of the IRA energy spending."
I know I'm quibbling, but I don't think this is definitively true. Even if it does turn out to be true, it'll likely be a very close call.
The analysis I'm seeing seems to put the amount of subsidy spending retained at between 40-60%. So greater than 50% retained still seems very possible once all the loopholes are figured out. For example, OBBBA keeps subsidies for battery storage but ends the subsidies for solar and wind projects much earlier than IRA. As I understand it, developers were already building many solar and wind projects w/battery storage and under the new law, they can put many of the "balance of system" costs (inverters, grid interconnect, transmission lines) on the battery side of the ledger and still can get subsidies for them, even after the solar/wind credits expire. Given the low cost of solar panels especially, it may turn out that 70-80 percent of the cost of a typical solar + storage project still qualifies for subsidies.
That said, the biggest wildcards in all this seem to be how the foreign entity of concern stuff shakes out and also how Trump's recent E.O. defines project start date, which will impact solar and wind projects trying to get in under the wire on the tightened 2027-2028 subsidy end dates.
Still, given how bold and massive the IRA clean energy subsidies were, it's pretty amazing that the Republican Trifecta chose to keep somewhere in the ballpark of 50% of them.
If that's the wapo one, it's paywalled and I can't read it.
In the linked Alex Trembath X post, he frames this a lot more positively than Matt seems to with "@NatKeohane reminds us to that most of the IRA survived."
As I said before, I know I'm nitpicking, but the framing on much of the reporting on this seems more negative than is warranted by both expectations and by the what ended up in the bill (though I admit I am worried about how the FEOC and EO stuff play outs).
Yes, there a ton of variance here because the law itself is pretty vague, even lawyers who work in the solar industry remain puzzled about what gets phased on when and advise people to talk in "soon the better" terms not give people hard deadlines because, well, nobody really knows what those deadlines and various definitions will be.
Does anyone really know? Most of what got killed were subsidies for things Matt was saying we shouldn't be subsidizing anyway, like EVs, solar, and wind, which are well established and already economic technologies that don't really need limited taxpayer dollars anymore.
The subsidies on less developed technologies like advanced nuclear, geothermal, and battery storage were preserved in OBBBA and I think those are a good chunk of the 50%. US pollution and CO2 emissions will certainly be higher thanks to the cuts on EVs, solar, and wind, but the big opportunities Matt talks about for advancing breakthrough technologies through subsidies seem to mostly be preserved.
All that said, I don't agree with Matt on not subsidizing EVs, wind, and solar. IMO, these deserve ongoing subsidies just to correct the market distortions from the lack of pollution and carbon taxes on fossil emissions. It'd be better if we used taxes instead of subsidies, but taxes seem to be a non-starter so subsidies are as good as it gets.
Wind* and solar do not really need subsidies, in fact it's perverse as other things do need subsidy.
It is my literal job to invest in RE, industrial scale. That's hundreds of millions to move into RE. The constraint is not base economics, its Government and system.
1000% what is needed is
A. Permit speeding, streamling and reform to reduce timing risk that accelerates cost on multiple levels
B. Grid - distribution ("retail") and transmission upgrading with massive expansion of interconnect and energy exchange potential - of which modernisation not just new lines but the US grid is stuck in 1960s overall - higher capacity lines, line tech, modernisation in systems, etc. This is huge money and it is expensive. And if done fast (sans permiting) it will explode energy cost - and that will be toxic.
Enablement of the most rapid electrification of industrial processes, lower hanging fruit in transport without going "ban ICE" but enablement of EV competitiveness to not have market-train-wrecks. That is the key.
Mature or near mature tech does not need subsidy and most particularly if subsidy as it will boosts demand but the supply side bottlenecks are not solved
Grid connection.
Distribution, Transmission and inter-regional time-arbitrage
Upgrade in stability regulation and expansion of stabilty regatuion to avoid grid crash (see Texas., Iberia).
Advanced battery tech of which support to new battery chemistries for both fixed and mobile applications to go from pilot to SCale - Scale scale scale
China is crushing this as they do scale.
*: US offshore is another matter but US offshore is a deadletter and anyway since it seems impossible to kill off the binding constraints due to LEfties and Righties idiocies on the Jones act, not gonna happen at scale.
"... then pushed Democrats to use every regulatory means at their disposal to curtail fossil fuel use and fossil fuel production."
Biden presided over record domestic energy production including for oil and gas! We achieved a level of energy independence that in the mid 2000s would have been considered an unimaginable success. And all of this was in the context of a rip-roaring full employment job market and world-leading economic growth. Wasn't enough for voters because of the inflation burst but that's just the reality.
The Groups in the climate movement still deserve criticism here and genuinely were/are an anchor around the neck of our coalition with their stupid degrowth obsessions. It would be accurate to say "dumb coalitional management concerns around the Groups prevented Biden from getting credit for booming energy production." But the Biden years just substantively were not a degrowth experience!
Biden years were the fastest growth since Clinton’s second term! US real GDP growth from 2021-24 was 6.1%, 2.5%, 2.9%, and 2.8% (15%) over 4 years. Compare to about 10% in Bush’s first term, 9% in Bush’s second, 4% in Obama’s first term, 10% in Obama’s second, and 6% in Trump’s (even without the -2.2% in 2020 Trump would’ve only been at 8%). 2025 is again shaping up to be lower growth than Biden’s weakest year (2022). If anything the political failure of Bidenism is a strong argument for degrowth lol.
But it wasn't a given that there would be strong growth after COVID. I mean, a running theme of Slow Boring is that we underperformed for years after the Great Recession.
That's because of a lack of understanding of the difference between the root causes. The Covid recession was due to shutdowns. There were no inherent weaknesses in the economy. Rolling out the vaccines and telling people that it was ok to get out of the house would have sufficed.
The COVID slump didn’t make much of a difference and was mostly already over before Biden took office. Overall growth in 2020 was only -2.2%, less of a slump than 2009 (-2.6%). Biden’s policies should get credit for why we bounced back so quickly from 2020 (2021 being the best job market probably ever “great resignation”) versus 2009 (a long “jobless recovery” slog).
Nope, we were headed to recession in 2020 anyway. I remember Trump pushing the Fed hard to cut rates and the Fed started to cut rates in June 2019 before COVID was a thing.
I think Biden’s economic record gets unfairly criticized but it’s a stretch to argue that his presidency was some sort of golden age. Inflation hit HARD during his presidency. Apparently $100k in 2019 is the equivalent of $125k—that is a lot of inflation
I didn't know what the M1 money supply was and so I asked chatGPT. It tells me that the way the M1 money supply is calculated changed in May of 2020 to include savings deposits, and so the pre-2020 numbers are not comparable to the post-2020 numbers. This is borne out in the graph here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL which shows a jump from about 4T to about 16T in May 2020. From June 2020 to now the difference is about 16.5 -> 18.5T.
Economics is among the subjects I have the least familiarity with, but wouldn't you expect a >4x increase in the amount of money in circulation to correspond to much more inflation than we have actually seen?
Wages went up even faster than inflation though. 2021 was the first time in most people’s living memory when high-paying jobs were easy to get and workers had the upper hand over employers. That’s gone now, maybe forever due to AI. I feel pretty bad for the people who didn’t or couldn’t take advantage of the Biden job market.
"Wages went up even faster than inflation though."
Mine certainly didn't. I looked at CPI each year, and my wage increase was below it.
That's not uncommon.
And my cost of living went up more than CPI. Not uncommon either because they deliberately massage CPI to make it look like actual costs went up less than they really did.
For example, they pretend technology advancing is the same thing as costs decreasing. So new iPhone comes out for the same price, and they pretend the cost went down.
More seriously, Biden is of course flattered by base effects coming off of 2020, and Biden’s 2022-24 seems about comparable to Trump’s 2017-19. But yeah, it’s a strong 3-year record even if you put your finger on the scale like that.
Why didn’t we have similar base effects coming off of 2008? And how come we were able to skate right by the big banking failures beginning with SVB in 2023 with little damage to the broader economy even though the bank failures of 2023 were larger than 2008 by total impacted assets? Biden should get credit for that.
Coming out of a deep recession is a necessary condition for 6% real GDP growth but not a sufficient one? In 2008-9, policymakers did enough stimulus to stop a deflationary spiral but deliberately chose to leave slack in the labor market (which lasted for years and years) instead of risking inflation; in 2020-21 they ran the economy hot and got an extremely quick recovery but headline CPI that peaked at 9%.
The 2023 banking crisis is all kinds of fascinating as the kind of guy who reads Congressional and FDIC reports on the S&L crisis for fun. I generally think US regulators made the right decisions in that crisis (closing Signature Bank was probably premature, but also fuck the crypto industry lol), but it was not at 2008 levels basically because 2008 was not mostly or initially a crisis of insured depositary institutions but of investment banks, hedge funds and so on that financed risky assets by issuing short-term paper, and that short-term paper (a) was not insurable by the FDIC, and (b) made its way into every nook and cranny of the financial system.
Of the many things I appreciate about Paul Krugman, one of them was his ability to explain the concept of the "shadow banking system" and why this aspect of the financial system in 2008 made it more akin to 1929 than we realize. And thanks too decisive action from Treasury (taking over AIG for one, the forgotten centerpiece of the whole credit default swap edifice), presence of automatic stabilizers that didn't exist in 1929 (like unemployment insurance) and the fact that we're just much richer even adjusted for inflation, things didn't get as bad in 2009-2010 as they did in 1931-1932.
"Why didn't we have similar base effects coming off of 2008, when huge financial institutions went out of business or had to be restructured, when large changes were made to the financial system? Why wasn't a one-time global shock like a pandemic similar?"
I should note there is a pretty decent amount of economic literature that says recessions that are the result primarily from a banking crises take much longer to recover from than other types of recessions due to the long overhang of debt.
That's true but it is a self-inflicted choice. Policymakers refuse to spend the money/tolerate the inflation necessary to allow the labor market to recover quickly. It isn't because fast recoveries are impossible.
As a member of the Class of 09 who was forever harmed by that recession Biden's Economic Camp >>> Obama's economic camp. The obama economic team was just far to reluctant to risk inflation
I deliberately chose a post he did from 2021 because he did mea culpa a few years later regarding inflation and how there was more inflation in 2022 and 2023 than he expected. But I think looking at things in 2025, he was essentially right. He has since called this "Long transitory", but the story he provided in 2021 was largely correct even if it took a bit longer to play out and was a bit more painful than he anticipated.
If Trump was not a complete insane person or had a few more guardrails around him like he did in 2017, he would have likely gotten the rate cuts he wanted because there wouldn't be these insane tariffs because inflation was clearly heading downward to the Fed 2% target.
I never understand why it was so hard for Biden et al to simply explain that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon, and we were doing better than other people, in a way that was also compassionate. I mean, of course Biden was too old. This was the main problem I think.
Because Bourgeousie Inflationsplaining is not something that is either smart, workable or credible.
Talking about such things is the fine way that the professional class talks to itself
Talking to taking inflation seriously, attacking root causes etc. rather better than engaging in discourse about what may be happening in France or Germany as it will come off as mere excuse making (as it did)
Yes, the Biden administration, headed by a doddering senile vegetable, was so incompetent that instead of achieving its goals of crushing fossil fuel production and killing the economy the idiots actually inadvertently allowed the opposite to happen.
Inflation was the Fed's doing and probably most of it necessary to achieve the growth we saw. Biden's problem was to try to claim credit for the growth without seeing that woudl imply he was responsible for the inflation.
But I think the border more than inflation sank him.
The huge amounts of stimulus were certainly also a factor. I remember people like Larry Summers coming out warning against Biden's extra $2 trillion in stimulus, said it was too much.
US domestic oil production has been going up since the Obama presidency. The only time it stalled was during Covid. Either Democratic Presidents are not getting in the way of domestic oil production or they're doing a very poor job of sabotaging it.
Reading this article has prompted me a take that's been percolating in my head the last year or so; I think we underestimate how horribly damaging Bernie's insurgent run was in 2016 to the Democratic Party.
I say this in agreement with Matt's take that Bernie would actually have been a better President than we think given his track record of being more pragmatic in practice than he is in rhetoric. And I say this as someone who's probably more sympathetic to the concept of Medicare for All than a lot of SB commentators.
But I think since 2016, he's been absolutely central to pushing the idea that there is literally only one thing that's stopping all of the Left's dreams from coming true; Billionaires and corporate power. Why can't we have Medicare for all? It's only because of Insurance company lobbying and political donations. And why can't we have 100% green utopia? Big oil bribes politicians.
This all crystalized for me with Ezra Klein's interview with Zephyr Teachout. Her criticism to Ezra was just over and over again to say "corporate power". He tried pushing her gently to say don't you think there are other factors involved? And Ezra clearly agreed that Corporate power is at least part of the story (I agree too, any intellectually honest account as to why more progress hasn't been made addressing climate change has to include Big Oil's misinformation campaign regarding climate change and lobbying generally), but he tried over and over again to try to get her to at least concede there is at least a second reason why more progress hasn't made on say getting housing built in CA. He kept asking how do you account for the fact that housing is easier to build in Texas than CA. And she kept saying Corporate Power. And Ezra in a nice way basically said "if you know anything about the politics of Texas vs CA, it's absolutely insane to say that corporate power is less of an issue in Texas than CA".
I say all of this to note I'm probably more sympathetic to the environmental groups than Matt is. I mean for one I don't get the vitriol on twitter/BluSky that he does. But just in general I'm probably at least more sympathetic to their goals than Matt is (even if I disagree vehemently with the faction that advocates for a "degrowth" mindset). So it just frustrates me to no end that too many people on the environmental far left have bought into this Bernie inspired binary view of the world. Precisely because I think it's coming at the cost of achieving the goals I actually agree with.
I live in CA and am sympathetic to the YIMBY movement but I find the TX vs CA comparison to be in bad faith.
CA's actual built environment is already more dense than Texas. CA already went through a "sprawl" phase and has reached geographic limits on this front where as Texas has not and is still "sprawling" because it is basically a boring featureless flat-land.
CA's restrictive zoning laws are a reaction to trying to transition form a "sprawl" to "densification" phase of growth. The fact that Texas currently has no/less restrictive zoning is not because CA liberals are uniquely evil NIMBYs and Texas residents are "freedom loving" YIMBYs, it's because the two states are in different stages of growth.
Having said that I applaud the recent CEQA amendments which will lead to further densification where it most makes sense economically.
There was an Atlantic article just a few days ago about exactly this phenomenon, "The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California
Housing prices are rising fast in red and purple states known for being easy places to build. How can that be?"
“When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me.
Recently, however, many Sun Belt cities have begun hitting limits to their outward sprawl, either because they’ve run into natural obstacles (such as the Everglades in Miami and tribal lands near Phoenix) or because they’ve already expanded to the edge of reasonable commute distances (as appears to be the case in Atlanta and Dallas). To keep growing, these cities will have to find ways to increase the density of their existing urban cores and suburbs. That is a much more difficult proposition. “This is exactly what happened in many coastal cities in the 1980s and ’90s,” Armlovich told me. “Once you run out of room to sprawl, suddenly your zoning code starts becoming a real limitation.”
This. The simple answer to that Ezra Klein interview about why it's cheaper to build in Texas than California is simply there is a lot more land to build on and it has about half the population. Yes, we're more than a bit overregulated, but even if California mirrored Texas legally in terms of no regulation/zoning, it would still be more expensive because of the geographic limits and it can't sprawl any more, which means it can only grow vertically with infill housing which is more expensive than sprawl.
All the more reason why it was revealing to me that Zephyr couldn't give this answer. My old boss told me the abundance of land was underrated reason why environmental concerns don't have as much sway in places like Dallas (he was originally from there). Yes he acknowledged part of it is how central the oil industry is to the Texas economy. Forget environmental misinformation, there's just a lot of jobs at stake. But part of the reason was if you told someone something along the lines of "we need to do a better job of protecting the area where we live" the retort was some version of "look at all this land. It's just dirt, there's no animals, there's no parks, there's nothing to protect. We can just keep building outward".
But that's the point. It's a pretty easy answer Zephyr could have given to Ezra and yet seemed incapable of providing said answer because it didn't involve "corporate power" as an explanation.
I like Zephyr for her advocacy against public corruption as anti-corruption is my #1 issue. But she wants to be a power broker on the left and is not incentivized to win over people like Ezra Klein who the materialist left sees as being in bed with big money interests. I don't know if Zephyr is a particularly nimble debater but its obvious she went in with a siege mindset and felt she is better off continuing to hit corporate power no matter what. I guess in a closed meeting where only anti-corruption liberals/progressives gather, she would probably concede more than she was willing to in front of Klein.
Clearly she is not going to win over skeptics to her right with her nuance-free style but the left's theory of politics is that they don't need to win over skeptics on their materialist right because so many people have been left behind in our system that they can expand their coalition purely amongst the economically distressed masses and gain power without ever having to convince the Ezra Kleins of anything. This theory has failed to date because social leftism gets in the way constantly, but they keep trying.
I agree generally with your thesis, but while "Big Oil" has run a "disinformation" campaign, I really don't know that it has mattered? If there were restrictions on oil usage in the US/Europe starting in the 90s, I think that just makes it cheaper for other countries to use oil. Maybe that's good as it decreases coal usage, but I don't think it would be that much better.
Hard to know counterfactuals. I know MattY likes doing counterfactual history and I enjoy reading his posts, but I think even he would concede in reality it's hard to know what kind "butterfly effects" would occur if even one decision was different. In the 80s, climate change wasn't even on the radar of most environmentalists; stuff like acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer were much more front and center topics.
Having said all that, one of the reasons climate change wasn't on people's radar is that companies like ExxonMobil were helping suppress this information. So that then begs the question (at least to me) how much farther along are we with solar power and electric car advancements absent the suppression campaign. Are we now where we think we'll be in say 2032? I don't think it's crazy to me to think that if global warming as an existential issue was more wildly known the 80s there's more interest and research into developing "cleaner" energy options and developing an electric car.
I've noted before that I think it's pretty likely we're at or close to the "tipping point" for electric car and solar as technologies (a big part of why it's so damaging the new BBB is actively trying to harm this industry for dumb culture war reasons. Especially given America's geopolitical rival seems to be going full steam ahead. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/trump-bill-clean-energy-china.html). If I'm right and research into solar panels or electric cars starts even 3-4 years earlier, I don't think it's crazy to think that the percentage of electric grid coming from clean sources and percentage of cars on the road being electric are orders of magnitude higher today.
I just don't think it works that way. People say TODAY that global warming is a major issue but are unwilling to accept almost any economic cost to stop it. And environmental groups have despised oil companies long before global warming became a major thing (e.g. Exxon Valdez spill) so would have happily picked this up as well. But the science just wasn't there for a long time.
Yeah I don't know what the disinformation campaign would look like. "Driving a car is more convenient than walking places?" "You have more money when gas is cheap than when it's expensive?"
People happily buy a truck with a bed they use twice a year, or remodel their kitchen to include a second oven they only use on Thanksgiving, and I'm not sure that's due to disinformation. I think it's just a weakness of the human condition.
I don't think Bernie really inspired that view of the world so much as his unexpected success convinced a lot of people they could go mask-off with it.
I think it’s hard to overestimate how badly AOC’s Green New Deal damaged renewable energy efforts. It’s worth rereading the news coverage at the time to remember just what a total fiasco the rollout was, and how insane (and completely unrelated to climate change) some of the proposals were. As I recall AOC’s chief of staff admitted they didn’t particularly care about the “Green” stuff and were using it as branding for the “New Deal” aspect, which would have utterly transformed society. Yes, they never got close to getting any sort of law passed, but they did get a lot of media attention, and most of the Democrats running in 2020 endorsed it (although Biden) didn’t. The IRA ended up getting branded as a mini-Green New Deal, which turned out to be very unfortunate branding to have.
It was actually brilliant branding because it could simultaneously have a quite radical message (deal everyone a new hand) alongside a moderate one (renegotiate the social contract).
Yeah, the GND didn’t include nuclear power, presumably because environmental groups and DSA types didnt like nuclear power. But any serious climate change policy has to include it.
It also didn’t include any zoning reform - just some talk about running more public transit without allowing any more places where public transit can work.
I had forgotten about that. It was a pretty significant oversight -- you need people to be able to live near transit stops if you want them to take public transit.
To me this all goes back to Bill Clinton. He was able to tell the groups to go to hell. I didn't always like this-- his death penalty bill sucked eggs and I disliked welfare reform at the time. But he was able to do it.
They did not have such a stranglehold over the TV news media then. There were still old fashioned liberals around to whom truth mattered more than maintaining the narrative. They are mostly gone now.
I don’t think that’s it. It was far more that people would watch the evening news and subscribe to the daily paper as a matter of course. You didn’t need rage/clickbait to nearly the same degree.
Profoundly disagree that there is any longer any concern for truth over narrative in current TV media. There may well not have been much back then, but there is zero now. Narrative wins over truth on every news station.
A quick search shows: there are a total of 3 inmates on federal death row (37 sentences were commuted by President Biden so there were 40 in all by the end of 2024), and there have been 16 executions since 1994 (not all of which can be attributed to the Crime Bill).
The Democratic Party is 1994 simply was far less liberal. Far more people in 2025 who vote in Democratic primaries agree w/ The Groups than they did in 1994 and prefer The Groups over some moderate who tells them to shut up.
You can't take authoritarianism away from natural authoritarians. A reduction in fossil fuel use as a result of persuasion just does not produce the same high that *forcing* a reduction does. The power to force is more important than the result.
What happens is the nonprofits and groups staff the agencies and then these things bubble up.
The same way every Dem education department calls for stripping due process rights for college students accused of sexual assault. No voters are calling for this, but the appointees are chosen among people who want to sneak it in.
Not really. Agencies still make the regs amd courts will uphold the regs they want to and strike down the ones they don't. I don't agree with Matt's view that con law is fake, but regulatory review...sorta is? At least in the areas I know judges read 'arbitrary and capricious' as 'disagrees with my firm position pretty often.'
It ultimately depends on the statute. Every regulation is issued pursuant to authority granted by congress. Sometimes the statute says clearly that an agency may regulate the X output of Y. In that case, it’s simple: the agency can do so, so long as it’s not done in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Chevron won’t matter.
Sometimes the statute instead says that the agency may regulate Z and the agency has concluded that Z reasonably includes the X output of Y. Under Chevron, courts would let the agency make that call unless they did so unreasonably. Without Chevron, courts are no longer giving agencies deference about what Z includes. Instead, they’ll decide for themselves if Z includes regulating the X output of Y.
For dishwashers, the statute is kind of a mess and I can’t make the call without digging in to a degree that my employer probably wouldn’t be happy with.
I'm willing to be mildly annoyed if my monthly power bill goes up a dollar or two, but by and large, I simply don't care about "climate" as an issue, and you will not make me. I like the idea of electric vehicles and I'm an induction cooking evangelist, but I just don't get viscerally upset about the environment. And if enviros can't get me to care, they're not going to get normies.
Not even necessarily about all other human beings present and future equally, as some EAs at least aspire to, but even just other people in the normal way where you care a whole lot about your close family and somewhat less about friends and distant family and somewhat less about your neighbors/colleagues/countrymen and so on?
Because that is really all you need to justify caring about the climate from a moral perspective. Global warming will predictably cause a great deal of harm to a great many people, quite a few of whom are going to be the sort of people you hopefully already care about .
No, that attitude by itself does not imply advocating for climate change, because you're asking the people of today to sacrifice for the people of tomorrow, and thus both sides can argue that the other side doesn't care about people.
Firstly, that's not necessarily the case if you put the risk of technological extinction above zero.
Secondly, everyone applies *some* kind of discount factor to people distant to us in space and time, and if you have a sufficiently high discount factor, the people from sufficiently far in the future don't particularly matter when compared to the people of today. That was what I meant by my previous comment: empathy for people is by itself not enough to tell you whether to make sacrifices to mitigate future climate change, or to oppose those sacrifices; to disambiguate those positions, you need further assumptions.
This leaves our such a big aspect of the case for investment-focused climate policy that it almost seems misleading. A major part of the case was that investment would generate its own political support, in the form of industries that would lobby for it and constituents who would value the jobs and investments in their communities, and so it wouldn't be repealed by Republicans. That's why the IRA funding went so heavily to red states.
If that case had worked, then we would have seen repeal of all the non-investment things that Matt mentions, but kept the investments in place. But that isn't what happened and consideration of strategy going forward needs to reckon with that.
Is it clear that the strategy didn't work? The industrial policy parts of IRA mostly get continued with OBBBA don't they?
As I understand it, all the manufacturing subsidies for batteries are still in place and the ITC & PTC for grid scale battery storage are still in place.
The main things that got killed were things Matt himself was in favor of killing, like EV subsidies and support for tech like wind and solar that's well into its learning curve and fully economic even without subsidies.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't agree with Matt on ending those subsidies so fast because even if the tech is well developed, those products deserve a subsidy to compensate for the market distortion from the lack of carbon and pollution taxes on fossil fuel emissions.
Absolutely. 50% of spend preserved means 50% of spend got cut and that'll definitely mean layoffs, less clean energy build, and more CO2 and pollution.
A big part of the immediate issue is the overall business climate. EV uptake in the US wasn't going to plan even before the election. On top of that, tariffs and now OBBBA are creating a perfect storm of risk and uncertainty and that's making everyone skiddish on capital investment right now.
In the end, it's a question of glass half empty or glass half full. After the election I expected things to go much worse than they did in OBBBA, but everyone's mileage will vary. Imagine an alterative universe where IRA didn't pass and MAGA Republicans got a Trifecta. What would you have placed the odds of them creating a law that dedicates $500B of government subsidies to fund clean energy and fight climate change?
BTW - Tyler Norris is a great X follow for sensible information about powering the AI data center buildout.
Not sure if you follow him regularly, but he's been great for understanding the importance of encouraging data center operators to deploy some load flexibility to avoid huge costs to ratepayers from overbuilding gas generation, which is what many utilities are pushing for.
The problem with that theory was that the industries that people were focusing on reshoring were not climate focused industries. Making reindustrialization about climate change cut its appeal, because it was perceived as a subsidy to special interests. The same money to onshore making generic drugs would have been perceived differently by conservative voters.
I don't think this makes sense. The case is about "how do we build a political coalition to support addressing climate change". Generic drug manufacturing is just not relevant.
My point is that general support for manufacturing is not easily transferrable to solar. Solar at scale is rapidly getting less popular from a one two punch of most solar projects being placed on woodlands and farms, and the huge scale of land use needed with AI data center expansion exploding electricity demand.
Data center use is expected to double by 2050, to be the largest US commercial use of electricity. At some point soon you are going to need clean energy sources that use less land, because if you don’t get ahead of it, you will lose the public. That means getting ready for nuclear, geothermal, or smarter use of existing space for solar. Getting ready for that is key.
What I don't understand is why there isn't more attention on developing geothermal technology. No matter where on Earth you are, underneath you is a limitless source of heat, if you can figure out how to tap it without the equipment being destroyed by the heat and pressure. Not an easy problem, but it seems solvable, and could make it eventually possible to essentially drill for electricity as we do for oil now.
I'm definitely worried about this trend, but I think the industry will mostly defeat this once it gets its political footing better established. Local opposition and delay tactics will always be a source of friction and add some to cost. Jigar Shah has been complaining recently about how docile the wind and solar industry has been politically and how they need to get their act together and start dedicating more resources to these political fights.
BTW - Here's a good example of what you're talking about.
We went through this in New England with on-shore wind and although it was a tough battle, in the end the pro-wind side mostly got to build what it wanted (after plenty of fighting). The key was that they didn't make much progress until they got smart about how to manage the politics better.
The thing is, you are looking at a real problem that is starting to organically drive politics, and instead of fixing the real problem, you’re trying to work the politics. Long term, that doesn’t fly.
Solar takes up a lot of land. If energy demand had stayed stable, and rooftop solar had continued to grow, land use might have been below the pain point. People like rooftop solar and even small standalone arrays. They like the idea of energy independence. They don’t mind industrial solar out of sight.
What you have now is new solar farms primarily going up over farm fields (flat, cleared, cheap to build) and in woodlands (previously carbon absorbing.). They’re kind of ugly, they hurt property values, many are causing runoff, and a lot of them are being placed in the sort of pastoral exurban communities that many upper middle class people have been moving to and many others visit on weekends.
Data centers are power hogs, AI is not popular, and the people benefitting are not well loved. So, supporting “beloved weekend retreat turned into industrial solar farm to benefit tech billionaire’s AI data center” is not going to be a vote winning position, no matter how you spin it.
I would put my political energy into nuclear, fusion, and better solar placement. Solar on buildings, parking lots, industrial fields gets zero opposition. Figure out how to work with what people want and can live with.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but my understanding is that the "solar takes a lot of land" talking point is mostly false, especially compared with other industrial land uses, especially for energy.
The big one is growing corn for Ethanol. My understanding is that solar is around 30x more efficient land use versus corn ethanol and if we converted all corn fields used for ethanol to solar farms it'd produce 2x or 3x the total electricity demand of the US.
Absolutely yes. Energy demand was pretty stagnant for decades, the increase in demand has been a HUGE shock to the system. Now, I live in the biggest state for data centers so I'm a bit over focused on them, but they (and to a lesser extent, broader electrification efforts) have completely altered the playing field for electricity.
12% is nearly triple what it was in 2023. Which is nearly triple what it was in 2014. An industry tripling its energy use in nine years, and projected to triple again in five years, is explosive.
Adding about 8% overall energy demand in the US is, in fact, an explosion.
Just FYI: that's the UPPER estimate of data centers is 12%(The lower limit is 6.7% Which is 1.5x instead of 3x - that error bar makes a huge difference).
Matt’s analysis ignores as it often does the actual reality of the climate crisis which requires fossil fuels to stay in the ground.
Catastrophic largely irreversible existentially dangerous global tipping points are now anticipated to be activated at temperature increases above pre-industrial levels of less than 2°C
All the damn investments in renewables won’t mean a thing if fossil fuels are continued.
So the question Matt and everyone here should be asking is what is an appropriate strategy to end the use of fossil fuels in the next few decades.
So far the trillions of dollars that the world community has directed towards renewable energy has not appreciably slowed down the use of fossil fuels which is still 81 % of total energy use across the planet in 2023 compared to 87% in 2010.
If the only way to win elections is to agree to allow warming above 2°C, then what exactly is the point of climate people engaging in elections at all?
The only plausible conclusion to reach would be that the entire climate movement should commit itself to extra-democratic means.
To keep warming below 3°C? It's not a binary, I assume the climate movement's goal is to keep the number as small as possible (without doing unacceptable things like asking developing nations to make sacrifices).
So you’re saying that there is absolutely no ability to develop a policy strategy and advocacy campaign that can rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels given electoral politics?
If that is the case and perhaps it is then it is inevitable that life as we know it on this planet will be no longer by mid-century if not sooner
I disagree that climate is an ‘existential risk’ for most of humanity—in terms of geologic history the earth has gone through phases of higher temperatures for millions of years at a stretch. That said, I agree climate change is important, real, and solvable, and it does pose existential risks for people who live in vulnerable areas. If a zero carbon lifestyle were cheaper and more enjoyable than the status quo, people would adopt it en masse. So instead of preaching for a bonfire of the vanities, we should strive to invest in the right technologies and skip the pain. The alternative is losing elections and letting the planet warm even more. As I said, people who live in low-lying areas do face existential risks from climate change, but those risks are not all-or-nothing, rather they scale with the severity of the problem. Consequently, it makes sense to do the best we can rather than going for broke to meet arbitrary targets, thereby making the problem worse, again, by losing elections.
What you ignore is the increasing evidence that existential irreversible climate tipping points may take the control of the climate out of humanity’s control with disastrous consequences everywhere not just in low lying areas.
We are not at that point yet but we are perilously close
according to perhaps the world’s best known and influential climate scientist Johan Rockstrom. He made that point in an interview I recently conducted with him
See the paper I linked to in a previous comment that demonstrates just help existentially dangerous our situation is.
But you are ignoring that the changes you want are not politically feasible. The death knell was the rise in AI data centers. And the land use to offset data centers with solar is staggering. And those companies are generally not paying those costs.
So it’s going to require a mix of nuclear, fusion if they figure it out, possibly better point source carbon capture with the newer absorbent materials, and mitigation.
"There is 0.0000% likelihood of substantially reducing global fossil fuel consumption over the next 30 years."
IMO, this just isn't true. The expert consensus of what's likely to happen over the next 30 years weights heavily in favor of a large decline in fossil fuel consumption somewhere between 20-50%. This is supported by projections from IEA, IEA (US), BloombergNEF and many others.
Even BP and Shell have "best case" forecasts of flat to slightly down demand and both include projections for what they themselves say are realistic scenarios that involve very dramatic declines in demand. I think Exxon is the only major that's downplaying the likelihood of a major demand drop off over the next 30 years.
I think It's totally reasonable to expect global fossil fuel extraction to peak and gradually begin to decline at some point in the next three decades while becoming a smaller and smaller share of overall energy production, particularly in advanced economies. What's absolutely not going to happen is the kind of precipitous collapse in fossil fuel production that's necessary to substantially alter the trajectory of atmospheric CO2 over that time frame. A 20% reduction over 30 years isn't substantial in the existential climate doomer context. Hell a 50% reduction tomorrow is probably ten years too late for what those people are predicting.
Perhaps I am not a careful reader as I don’t see your assertion backed up by any evidence whatsoever.
As for my assertion that the world is at high risk for existentially damaging collapse here is a paper from three years ago that persuasively argues that multiple tipping points with catastrophic consequences are likely to be activated at temperatures around 1.5° C
In 2022 1.5° C seemed like quite a few years off but because of the acceleration of global temperature increase anticipated by almost no scientist we are at 1.5° or so right now
“Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points.” Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950.
Part of the problem is that many of the climate models the last few decades have been wrong (remember in 2000 predictions of 30 ft sea level rise by now?). I've been following this topic since the 70s so I've seen a fair amount of dramatic contentions fizzle out. So with the opposition it's a bit of the boy who cried wolf thing. The theory is legit---vaporizing millions of years of fossilized carbon in the span of a couple centuries and there indeed may be a magic buffer that gets broken (like the Gulf Stream shutting down) but until most people see devastating effects it's going to be tough convincing them. I think the best way is to avoid that by making renewables/EVs more desirable than ICEs and such. A free market approach.
Respectfully you actually have it exactly Backwards as the vast majority of projections made by climate scientists on virtually every impact of climate change has underestimated the speed scale and scope Of these impacts.
20 years ago the consensus climate science was that irreversible tipping points might not be activated until 5° above pre-industrial temperatures and now scientists are largely in agreement that these irreversible tipping points are being activated below 2° C
There was barely a prediction at all that the AMOC my collapse this century until very recently and I could give many more examples
The world should be working a little more aggressively on climate action but it is a genuinely hard problem technologically, economically and politically. No one nation really makes a difference acting on its own and it seems like we’ve squeezed as much collective action out of the Paris agreement as we can.
There have been multiple polls about this. They’re pretty consistent.
A majority of voters are unwilling to accept reductions in living standards or additional costs to phase out fossil fuels. There is a nice summary of how this polls including with key demographics over at https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-progressive-moment-is-over item 4.
When the polling on an approach is that bad, you really have to rethink.
If the facts of the issue are that either there is going to be a significant additional cost, or a reduction in living standards, or there is going to be a catastrophe within 25 years, then what? Obviously the situation is that the voters don't believe there will be a catastrophe, which is why they are not prepared to give anything up in exchange for preventing one, but what exactly do you propose?
It's a serious point: if the mass public is factually wrong on an important issue, then it's clearly a political advantage to say the thing that the mass public believes. But if that is factually incorrect, then the consequences are going to be harmful. Sometimes those consequences come fast (Liz Truss and her belief she could cut taxes, not cut spending and the bond market wouldn't care; the bond market did care), other times they take time and the politicians who caused the problem are long out of office by the time the consequences arrive.
Couple of questions. First, given that the US emits 10-11% of global carbon, how much additional short term difference do you think any given US policy change would make? Keep in mind, 89-90% of current emissions are non US and out of US voter control, as is existing carbon and ice loss. Going to zero today would not reset the atmosphere and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. How much difference do you think proposed changes would make in the next 25 years?
Pain vs gain is how the voters are calculating this, and what they seem to believe is, not much gain for the amount of pain. You cannot force this on people beyond the very short term. You have to make it in their own interest.
Second, which preventable catastrophes do you think the average voter cares about? If their own home floods or is swamped by sea level rise, yes. If some other person does, they may be sad, but will they be willing to pay more to prevent it?
I think relatively painless solutions like nuclear, mitigation, and eventually fusion are going to be the main sellable options. Work from home is another helpful policy. And mitigation needs to be focused as much as possible on things that are reversible and unlikely to have unpleasant side effects, which are big ifs.
If the consequence of 2.01°C is a catastrophic collapse in methane hydrates in Siberia which then triggers another 4°C of temperature rise, then everyone will care, because international trade will shut down and the last two times that happened we got the Bronze Age Collapse and the post-Roman Dark Ages.
If that threshold is 7°C, then we're probably OK.
I don't know what that threshold is. No climate scientist knows what that threshold is. It's probably in that range.
There are other scary positive feedbacks that have a threshold. These are the preventable catastrophes that I'm worried about.
I actually agree with you on the politics. I think we have to take the gamble on these catastrophes. I don't much like choosing to take a 5-10% shot that there will be a civilisational disaster, but I think the alternative is eco-fascism and that's worse.
People who said we needed to lower our standard of living were also WRONG.
Technological progress in generation and efficiency WOULD HAVE been enough! What we needed to do was not create massive new energy demands with pointless bullshit like crypto. If it weren't for that emissions would already be falling. (One could get a little tinfoily about this if so inclined.)
AI has just made the energy demand problem worse, but unlike crypto has at least been useful (and could be transformative). I mean, an AI could end up solving this problem for us. (Hopefully not with the most straightforward solution, mass ecofascist culling of the human population.)
Oh well if we’re only burning 0.5% (and rising) of our oil and LNG on A Complete Waste of Time I guess it’s fine.
(Crypto is probably worse than a waste of time, but that’s a philosophical argument about usury/gambling that goes back millennia so we’re not gonna fix that on SB comments)
I'll come back to something Matt has come back to a number of times. What is you're strategy for retaking the Senate?
I'm actually more in your camp than "the eleaticstranger" as far as the risks posed by climate change. But precisely for that reason, I am with Matt that you need a viable electoral strategy for taking the senate and that means a viable strategy to win senate seats that Trump won by double digits. Because right now, given the MAGA version of GOP that exists, the chances of any legislation passing that makes a meaningful difference to climate change is zero except due to unintended second and third order effects (i.e. some rich person who got their tax cut extended in the recent BBB, uses some of that saved money to invest in a solar panel company).
I don't have delusions that a moderate senator from Texas is going to become a "Green New Deal" advocate. In fact it's likely he'll vote strategically for tax credits or other bills that help the oil industry. But moderate Dem senator from Texas is way way way more likely to vote for bringing back the subsidies from IRA than John Cornyn and especially (god help us) Senator Ken Paxton.
This is why the 2°C threshold is such a bad position.
The IRA subsidies and the like might mean we can max out at 2.5°C. If your position is that it's 2°C or bust and the situation is that we are bust, then you don't really care if it's 2.5°C or 5°C. Now perhaps there are catastrophic feedback effects at 2.01°C that will result in 7.5°C regardless - if so, then I guess that position is correct, and if you're saying "we can't get to 2°C democratically", then the correct strategy is to abandon electoral politics entirely and do something extra-democratic (and probably violent and I don't think anyone wants to start debating the details of violent extra-democratic strategies, ie terrorism, least of all the mods).
But if there isn't a threshold, if every 0.1°C makes things worse, then you adopt the best strategy you can to get the least emissions (and therefore the least warming) you can. There is no way we don't get to net zero or close by 2100; the question is how much emissions we have on the way down, and therefore how much warming we store up. And the less the better.
Move the conversation forward by providing citations showing we’re all dead by mid-century under business-as-usual. Convince us, gain allies who’ll help you convince others.
Every time this has been tried the public simply doesn't believe it or says "good thing I'll be dead by then" and puts it off. People are lazy and total shit at managing long term risk.
Herb said “it is inevitable that life as we know it on this planet will be no longer by mid-century if not sooner”
I don’t think that’s true. I’m smart enough to read and follow a scientific paper. Show some cites, convince me, and other people like me, or how do you think you’ll have a chance with the public.
Oh, I thought this was more about the sentiment than literal meaning. Yeah, I don't think we'll all be dead but it will mean trillions of dollars in damages that will cause us to regret our decades of inaction.
If environmentalist leaders really believed the full doom-loop existential narrative equivalent to a planet killing meteor hurtling towards earth, I'd argue the IIJA would have looked much different - we'd spend a hundred billion a year *at least* to commercialize fusion technology and made small reactor nuclear a viable new energy source within 2-3 years. Instead we get gradual buildout of renewables and a hectoring, eat your peas regulatory approach on appliances and EVs. The claimed urgency doesn't match the actions taken. I think environmental groups are everything-bageling the issue and if you want someone to blame for our species' end if you're right about the stakes, then perversely they may share as much responsibility as Exxon.
Honestly we actually passed all the tipping points years ago, and green groups shoot their credibility by asserting new tipping points rather than admitting we're already locked in and need to find technological solutions.
A real problem with the "tipping point" model is the extent to which people are prepared to just go "well fuck it!" as soon as one of the tipping points becomes unattainable.
OK, we wanted to keep it to 1.5 - that's already gone. 1.5 is about where we are RIGHT NOW. That doesn't mean "we're all doomed and only extreme measures are cutting emissions to zero immediately are justified!" It means the situation remains "we should cut emissions as much as can be done without creating a massive political backlash that cancels out any gains."
There isn't a point where it goes from "okay" to "not okay" or from "not okay" to "skull and crossbones." 3 degrees is better than 3.2 degrees is better than 4 degrees... anything we can do to limit emissions will make our technological solutions work better towards mitigation.
The worst position of all is the "we hit the tipping point, that means even extreme measures aren't enough, so we might as well just burn all the fossil fuels and enjoy the 20 years or so we have left", which you see quite a bit of.
That's very bad. But what it really is, is "we hit all the tipping points, we're basically screwed, so we need to impose whatever conservation measures are practical while also spending a ton on technological solutions and hope we can mitigate it".
Your first paragraph is not actually true. For example, carbon sequestration or geo-engineering are two alternative solutions to the same problem. I'm not saying these don't have tradeoffs and downsides of their own, but it does everyone a disservice to pretend such alternative solutions don't exist.
Carbon sequestration is likely to require an infrastructure as large as the entire world fossil fuel infrastructure to remove sufficient quantities of CO2 to significantly minimize climate change.
I am very active in the Geo engineering space so I am more than familiar with it and almost no Geo engineering advocate argues that Geo engineering itself is sufficient. It needs to be part of a tri part approach including Accelerated emission reductions and large scale sequestrationI have labeled the Climate triad.
So I agree that in theory one could Geo engineer the planet and significantly reduce temperatures without addressing fossil fuels but the politics of that are extremely extremely difficult as not one government on the planet to date has indicated support for deployment of Geo engineering
I am one of a small group of folks who are doing everything we can to change that dynamic
It's not clear to me why the politics of geoengineering would be harder than that of fossil fuel reduction. For the latter, every nation needs to do it, which requires international agreement and cooperation. For the former, while it would be far preferable if there were international cooperation, it's in principle enough if one (rogue) nation does it.
Geo engineering politics should not be more challenging than the politics of fossil fuel reduction and we can only hope that as the climate continues to collapse that there will be some political leaders around the world who for whatever motivation will recognize that Geo engineering can rapidly reduce temperatures without requiring economic or behavioral sacrifices from the residents of the country.
And that should be easier and more straightforward.
Unfortunately almost every climate activist group around the world is strongly against Geo engineering for a variety of reasons none of which are in my view justified.
CCS: Why does everyone have to talk about every technology as all or nothing? We only need enough CCS to allow _some_ continued use of fossil fuel combustion in hard to substitute uses. We just give the same incentive for removing a molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere as for not emitting one. How much of which comes out the other end, who cares?
Agreed: we're not getting rid of fossil fuels for flying any time soon. But we can do CCS, or we can even do carbon capture without the storage and convert the stored carbon into jet fuel.
We've not found anything better than hydrocarbons for flying. Even space rockets, which can use any exotic chemical they like because the cost of the fuel is trivial compared to the cost of an entire rocket that is thrown away every launch, have converged on using methane, ie a hydrocarbon!
The lack of an alternative doesn't mean we can't run CCS for the limited residual emissions. Get rid of the carbon emissions from all the things where we don't have an alternative and then put in CCS for what's left.
He's talked about this at length before, but the short of it is this is not a problem that the US can go at it alone and it doesn't make sense to cripple the US democrats with unpopular policies if we can't get the rest of the world to play along as that will just lead to worse results.
GBU-57. But on coal mines rather than nuclear reactors obviously. THIS IS A JOKE. HAHA. But both China and India were signatories to the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accord.
"Catastrophic largely irreversible existentially dangerous global tipping points are now anticipated to be activated at temperature increases above pre-industrial levels of less than 2°C"
This is just factually incorrect. Latest modeling all shows that worst scenario's increasingly unlikely.
Not to mention the big changes that will need to happen will be in places like China or India.
The world will switch ONLY when renewables are the best option, not before.
that is not at all true. the glaciers are melting at a faster rate than expected. the ocean is warming at a faster rate. this is hugely impactful on weather phenomena globally and will have a spiraling effect, on such basic phenomena as the Gulf Stream itself. way more food shortages are coming, severe drought, in addition to flooding and massive habitat loss and deforestation that will cause more carbon to be released...it's a rolling snowball and every single amount of temperature rising makes things de facto way worse if you are seeing this even in terms of hundreds of thousands of lives lost--and it would be millions depending on the gradation--but then there is the economic outfall, and the world instability, and maybe middle class Americans living some places will be perfectly fine, but it will at least be worse, often hotter, which will of course require more energy expenditure. It is not a good time to buy into bullshit that disincentivizes immediate, large-scale change, this decade.
Can you elaborate on "catastrophic" and "existentially dangerous"? Like, what will a typical day on earth look like after we hit the 2 degree celsius increase?
> SSP3 is characterized by a world where nationalism, regional conflicts, and security concerns dominate, leading to a focus on domestic or regional issues rather than global cooperation.
> This scenario involves slow economic development, material-intensive consumption, and persistent or worsening inequalities.
> In terms of climate projections, the IPCC report indicates that under SSP3, global temperatures are expected to rise by 3.9–4.6°C by 2100
The result is still economic growth over the next 80 years, per capita.
The higher the cost of keeping them in the ground, the less will be kept in the ground. A tax on net emissions will keep the maximum amount in the ground. That the strategy.
It's been 20 years since "An Inconvenient Truth" and in all that time the environmental movement has failed to convince Americans that we need to keep it in the ground. If you're right, then how do we actually get the American public to agree with you?
Make the greener technology better than fossil fuel sources. Eg---solid state batteries, if they live up to the hype, will be a game changer: 900 mile range, longer battery life, charge time not much different than a gas fill-up, and made with cheaper/more abundant materials than just lithium. We need to start selling this stuff to the public instead of punishing them for not using it with climate predictions they can't see happening.
That is the exactly the question that I am challenging Matt and you all to focus on. Instead of avoiding the reality that we have to rapidly stop the use of fossil fuels if we want civilization as we know it to continue we need to focus on developing a strategy that answers the question you ask.
While I have my own thoughts if Matt and the rest of you put your heads together to answer the question you ask I am confident that you all could come up with a plausible strategy to advocate to Climate leaders and Democratic Party officials.
If you think we hit all the tipping points before we reach 2 degrees of warming, then we might as well use all the fossil fuels we want, since it hardly makes a difference once we’re past the tipping points.
The best way to keep it in the ground (including winning elections to keep your policies in place) is to invest in innovation so that people prefer the alternatives.
I am looking forward to when it’s time to retire one of our ICE cars and get an EV. (Well, I’m looking forward to the ‘having an EV’ part, not the ‘spending money on a car’ part)
I don’t get the irreversible tipping point idea. You can have both positive and negative feedback mechanisms, but obviously the negative feedback dominates overall within the relevant temperature range, as you can see by looking out your window, we don’t live on iceball or hothouse earth.
So then it is necessarily true that all tipping points are reversible, as a matter of physics.
As a matter of politics, green tech improves over time and the most easily accessible fossil fuels get mined out, temperatures get higher, we all get richer, put all that together and you see the politics of doing more about climate change get easier every year, not harder.
That is, unless you do actually convince people that we’ve already crossed all relevant “irreversible” tipping points.
One thing I always wondered about the Green New Deal was how we were going to balance the values of "community input"/"centering community voices" and replacing every hot water heater in America in 36 months.
As the teenage boy says in The Bling Ring, "You can't wear leopard print and zebra, you have to chose."
I’m sort of curious why electrification is struggling as much as it is as a consumer strategy.
I look at what’s available and think this or that electric category looks promising but in the us it seems like it’s only a luxury innovation market. I look overseas and see high quality at other price points but it’s very limited here.
One would have thought this would have been a huge opportunity by now but it mostly hasn’t been one.
Because the US blocks out those cool foreign products so a lot of Americans don’t even know about them and don’t demand them. Eventually we’re going to have a moment like Boris Yeltsin visiting a supermarket in reverse.
This is what it's like to watch reviews of Chinese electric cars. I understand and agree with the national security concerns against allowing the sale of Chinese EVs, but it's undeniable that they seem light years ahead of what American and Korean car companies are making. I still don't really understand why we can't make our cars that good? The Ford CEO admitted to driving and loving a Xiaomi, so shouldn't his engineers be able to recreate the magic.
Again worth noting that nothing is stopping BYD from competing in the US. They already do. They won the largest electric bus contract in US history and have already built a massive factory in California. They just delivered their 400th bus. They could do the same tomorrow and start selling the Dolphin Mini. The reason they don't is they'd be priced >$20k without the Chinese domestic market subsidies and also there's no US buyer demand for that car.
EDIT: Geez, I missed the best example. Volvo is owned by Geely (#2 Chinese OEM) and already owns two production facilities in the US. The Polestar's are produced in South Carolina. Sales are struggling.
Wow, Volvo is owned by a Chinese company now? That’s kinda fucked! So much for its reputation for safety, I guess, if folks find out. Glad they have factories in the US, though.
I think it is an open question whether Chinese EVs could be produced at a comparable price point if they had to comply with US passenger safety laws, US workplace safety laws, and US labor laws, while paying US wages, and without the local parts supply chain that Chinese car manufacturers enjoy.
But I think you’re saying that the Chinese EVs are genuinely superior enough that they should be available here at *some* price point. That I hear.
It's not an open question. They absolutely can't. BYD just launched a dealership in Mexico City. The Dolphin Mini is their cheapest car and is priced at ~ $20k. This is ~ the same car as the Seagull sold in China for ~ $10k. You can ladder up the gross margin requirements proportionally for their higher priced vehicles for what they'd need to sell them for outside their domestic Chinese market.
Great question. I think China set up a Hunger Games field of competition and threw a vast amount of money at it. They also have the population to support the kind of production that lowers costs through learning (and a huge amount of technological expertise).
It's the same thing with rooftop solar. It costs less than half as much to install in Australia as it does here. Which is insane since all the real technology is already being handled in China, and until recently the raw panels were cheaper here than in Australia!
I'm looking forward to the day that the Chinese finally figure out a way into the US market and we get access to an abundance of high-value EVs. Certainly after the last election, I'll never buy an American-made vehicle again.
I can really follow what we're "unable to produce"? The Tesla Model Y was the #1 selling BEV in **China** last year. The BYD Seagull was #2. The Model Y sold in China is a little different (e.g., LG vs. Panasonic batteries) and it's slightly lower priced but when you adjust for China's currency manipulation it's ~ the same price point. Which makes sense -- the production technology is identical; it's the same global gigafactory.
EDIT: The other big difference between the US and Chinese auto markets is how sophisticated / mature our used car market is. 75% of the vehicles we sell annually are used vs. in China it's still < 20%. So the reason we don't have a < $20k new BEV is a 5 year old Tesla Model 3 is already meeting the demand for that segment of the consumer market and it's still a better car than anything that could be produced at MSRP for that price point.
Like I have an accord hybrid that’s paid off and I like it a lot and if I wanted to replace it there’s quite a lot of options that are all pretty good but I chose the accord over the Camry I’m wholly subjective things. Mostly I like Honda’s seats more than Toyota’s.
Now I know a lot of Tesla owners who’ve convinced me that I do want an Ev. I’m not sure if I want a Tesla because i haven’t test driven it but like it’s mostly competitive with like a really tiny number of makes and models . There’s a lot less range than the market it’s supposed to be supplanting .
Characteristic American exceptionalism. They believe that because they have big houses and big cars, the rest of the world has nothing to offer. Actually, there are a bunch of posters on this board who subscribe to that view.
Even for infrastructure like internet access and cell service, the gap between the US and other industrialized countries is eye-opening, and not in a good way.
Our faithful old Prius finally died of old age (we took it in for routine maintenance and learned that it required repairs that cost more than the car was worth). So now we are leasing a shiny red Prius plug-in hybrid.
It's awesome! We get ~40 mile range on battery alone. We don't drive much (Husband and I both live within walking/cycling distance from work), so most days the car sits in our driveway during the day, when we can charge it off our rooftop solar panels. Most of our driving doesn't use gasoline at all. When we go for a longer drive, we get the first 40 miles off electricity, and then we just fill up with gasoline at a gas station like a regular ICEV, and we still get good mileage typical of a hybrid.
(The one annoyance is that once the battery is down to zero, it takes 9 hours to recharge it fully. We're not gonna sit around a charging station for 9 hours during a road trip! If we're staying at an AirBnB with a power outlet in the driveway, we can charge the car overnight.)
I'm curious what consumer level products you have in mind?
I think an induction stove is about the only thing I haven't bought fully into. And that is largely because I don't see much value in a kitchen renovation. Not to mention replacing most of my cookware. What category are we lagging overseas on?
Fully agreed on the induction stove. I'd be happy if it came in my house. I can't bring myself to want to tear up what I have to put one in. I could change my mind. I do already have a counter top oven that is quite nice.
At any rate, the desire is just for cars? I'm torn, as I am not opposed to electric vehicles. At all. It is hard for me to think people have really contended with the miles driven by many Americans, though? Google claims average yearly drive for China is 6400 miles. Same search says roughly half of what the average US driver hits.
That is to say, maybe the cheaper cars they have really are better. They tend to have vehicles that average half the age of a US driver, as well? We already have people gripe about how appliances don't last for as long as they ostensibly used to. Hard to swallow that with the idea that we should buy a car that is expected to be replaced sooner?
(Granted... I'm always blown away by the amount people are willing to pour into cars. Happily driving my luxury purchase of a Kia Soul. :D )
I mean, no? Resistive coils are frustrating to cook with. Induction, though, is quite nice. With a good stove, you can literally control the temperature of the cookware down to the degree. It is borderline magic.
Idk, my MIL has one and I just wasn’t impressed. Nothing beats actually cooking over a flame. There’s a reason you never see a cooking show where they’re using electric, induction or no.
Are you sure it was induction? A lot of people mistakenly call their glass panel resistive cooktops induction. And yeah, those still blow.
Induction is faster to heat than gas. Almost frighteningly so. The biggest downside seems to be that you are likely to need all new cookware to take advantage of it. The stainless steel sets that we have, at least are not compatible with it. (Cast iron works, of course.)
Almost every Matt Y piece these days descends into the following general pattern
1. Only "the groups (that don't control any actual votes)" have agency. Dem electeds are little flower petals who should not be "forced" into making bad decisions.
2. Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly? The only plausible reason for not doing symbolic things is because your communications suck. But that is not Matt Y's criticism.
3. Because delusional Biden let in millions upon millions of migrants and created chaos in low income communities and also had his brain fall out on live TV, thus losing the election, Democrats should basically abandon all their previous normative claims in every other sphere.
"Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly?"
Because optics matter. People can clearly see where Biden's priorities lie. And it wasn't bringing down the costs of gas, or increasing fossil fuel production.
If optics mattered, Trump wouldn't have won in 2024. His optics were downright shitty unless you were a teenage boy who thinks it's hilarious when the presidential candidate pretends to give a blow job to a mic at a campaign event.
I'll grant you one time when Trump's optics were genuinely impressive: when he stood up and raised his fist right after being shot. That was truly great optics and the one exception I can think of to what was otherwise a cesspool.
You and I both agree that Trump is bad (despite some other disagreements on optimal policy mix).
But I think voters took Biden's signals on stuff like oil and gas (and even more on immigration) as what his administration cared about, and they just really disagreed (I will note I did to).
I'm a right leaning person that does think climate change is real. But while I'm not against investment to boost green R&D, I'm also not one of the ones willing to pay a bunch extra to go green.
For example, I would be happy to put solar on my house if it actually saved me money.
But by far my bigger focus is getting down my $500k a month electric bill.
"Optics matter" is just another way of saying "My communication sucks".
On the one hand we are saying Trump can try to cut Obamacare, blow up the deficit, break all kinds of criminal statutes, get convicted of crimes, and nothing matters because the median voter is too uninformed to care because those things do not affect them tangibly on the ground.
On the other hand we are saying "Optics matter" for Biden because even if something does not cause any tangible change on the ground, the same uninformed median voter is able to anticipate the second and third order effects of Biden's "symbolic" moves far into the future and react negatively.
Democrats and Republicans are held to wildly different standards by voters, also water is wet, Trump's makeup is orange, the bear defecates in the woods, nothing to see here, move along.
Exactly! We should acknowledge this obvious asymmetry and try to figure out a way to concretely deal with it.
My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups.
We should work on lowering the cultural legitimacy deficit if we wish to deliver better material outcomes for the people we say we care about without just parroting what the GOP is already doing along all policy fronts.
"My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups."
definitely some truth to that.
But I submit policies do matter to. Voters don't want open borders, nor do they want to give up their gas stoves or cars. And they want that gas to be cheap.
Voters want many things: High paying jobs but also low costs. Low taxes and also good benefits (for themselves). Clean air/water where they live but also chemical plants spewing pollution. Beach front properties in Miami but also low insurance costs.
I remember back when the GOP was calling for "personal responsibility" that it used to be the "cool and serious" thing among the DNC pundit class but since Trump gutted the Obama+Hillary+Biden version of the Dem party now the "cool and serious" things seems to be to say "shut up and give the voters what they want now now now!".
Part of this is centrists who are supposedly Democrats loudly agree w/ Republican arguments that Democrats suck on issue x in a way that never happens with Republican's attacking other Republican's, at least ones that stay in good standing.
This is also true of the Left, see anytime somewhat positive news about Biden's economy was shown, but while it was annoying on Twitter, there weren't a lot of left-wingers on cable or network TV slamming Democrat's.
For 40 years, every single Republican basically says, "Democrat's are evil weirdos who hate America" and that message bleeds through to even non-political people and honestly, a lot of Democrat's who are in more conservative spaces, especially when a "hey, Democrats are actually good" message is basically nowhere, even on spaces supposedly friendly to Democrat's.
Obviously, another part is that while the media as a whole to be liberal-leaning, the Beltway Political Media is right-leaning on economics at a minimum and politics in general and has bent over backwards for the GOP on TV for as long as I've been alive.
Obviously this isn't true of the Democratic party as a whole. But just as obvious there are vocal segments of the Democratic coalition that have an anti-Western/anti-American world view. Particularly at elite institutions.
So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment.
The solution (for both parties) is to continually push back and say those values aren't are values.
Except the definition of 'evil weirdo who hates America' to the median Republican isn't the 1% of people who want to give it back to the Native American's, it's any person who has a more liberal social view than they do.
Sorry, this view from centrists that they just join in the hippie punching enough, you won't get called an evil leftist who hates America because you want a slightly higher tax rate on rich people and that 45% of the country won't believe the GOP when they say it has never been true.
Notice Republican's never say, "well, those open Gropyers who we put in actual charge of things are bad people." They just ignore they exist and attack, attack, attack all while every centrist Democratic pathetically is ready to genuflect and say, "yes, so many of people who vote for me are weirdos who I dislike. Please accept my apologies and the fact I don't like them either, just like you."
Also, reactionaries are the Republican base. 25-30% of America wants basically a pre-Civil Rights/Women's Lib/etc. America, with some exceptions for non-white people or women they personally think are OK. This isn't some fantasy, this is truth. Meanwhile, even the vast majority of Bernie votes just want a larger social welfare state and maybe some more liberal social policy than you may agree with.
"So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment."
The penalty (if any) that the GOP pays for the so called "a small segment of racists in their group" is next to nothing compared to the gigantic penalty Dems pay for hosting out-groups in their coalition.
The median voter may not be racist herself but she experiences much more cognitive discomfort when she sees an out-group member somewhere in an inner city shouting Anti-American slogans on FoX than when she sees her own uncle at Thanksgiving saying wildly racist things.
The situation is not symmetric at all. We see the same dynamic play out in many multi-ethnic democracies in the world.
It is wild to me to derogatorily call enviro groups focus on reducing fossil fuels use a "taboo or hangup". The whole point of "green energy" is to reduce fossil fuels use. What are we even talking about if reduction is off the table? Should we pat ourselves on the back for deploying solar while simultaneously increasing emissions? It sounds to me like we're just accepting that we'll melt the ice caps and put Bangladesh under the ocean because any other outcome would mean temporarily inconveniencing Americans. One 51-49 electoral loss should not lead you to reverse all of your beliefs about what is scientifically necessary to avoid extremely bad results!
The point here isn't that you need to philosophically need to want emissions to rise forever. The point being made us that forcing emissions reductions by targeting voters stove choices is bad politics and ineffective at reducing emissions to boot. Emissions reductions will be a natural consequence of developing green energy that is actually superior to fossil fuels and you won't need performative and hamfisted regulatory schemes to make it happen.
I completely agree that appliance regulation is bad politics. However, the other half of this essay is excoriating enviros for trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions at all as opposed to just doing investment and crossing your fingers. If emissions reductions was a natural consequence of green energy development then we wouldn't be talking about permitting current *expansion* of fossil fuel extraction and usage. The "superiority" of green energy on a cost per watt basis ignoring climate change is an engineering question whose answer is not predetermined.
I think Matt's general point is that trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions will not come if it entails forcing a reduction in standards of living. That is just a non starter.
The corollary to that is environmental groups incorrectly equating the stopping of fossil fuel production in the US with reducing fossil fuel emissions. Stopping a pipeline, or ending fracking, or blocking the Willow project doesn't reduce any fossil fuel emissions, it just shifts fossil fuel production to other parts of the world.
Anything that reduces fossil consumption relative to taking no action will "reduce the standard of living". If there was no tradeoff, we could just do nothing. Investment approach also reduces living standards by consuming funds that could be used for other projects or welfare. The idea that we could never do anything that negatively impacts standard of living is just false, we have a 4% GDP military budget that does nothing for standard of living as we're construing it here.
Of course lowered domestic production is offset by increases foreign production, but only partially, not completely. The policy change moves the supply curve resulting in a reduction in quantity supplies albeit at an amount less than the reduction in domestic supply.
But the bigger issue is credibility. The problem obviously requires international cooperation, but the US has no credibility asking other countries to reduce consumption or production in the case that it is not willing to reduce its own.
You either need to develop a cheaper/more effective technology or get off the hobby horse. This idea that you will ever get people to vote for mandating shittier energy sources that are more costly and unreliable is pure fantasy.
The idea that the government has no ability to regulate negative externalities of technology is just ideology. What is fantasy is imaging that the world where government takes no action is the best of all possible worlds.
First of all, right after I criticize Matt Y in these comments for not paying enough attention to climate, he goes and writes a piece on climate policy! Great, timing, Matt, thank you 😊
Second, how do I say this? None of this is Matt's fault, because he's just observing (accurately) what's going on in our politics. Don't shoot the messenger! But it's just so goddamn depressing. To sum up: the American people are, with rare exceptions, too selfish to pay even the smallest price or inconvenience for the sake of climate, so politicians who care about it must be super brilliant 4D chess masters and tightrope walkers to sneak any kind of climate reform past the electorate, and it must be 100% carrot, 0% stick.
Meanwhile, as someone says, "nature always bats last" and nature doesn't give a fruit fly's fart about our politics or human psychology.
No, I am not one of the extreme "we are ALL GONNA DIEEEEE" doomers, but climate change is going to hurt a lot of people very badly. To any of you who are like "IDGAF about climate change, I'm cool, I'll just turn up my AC!" consider:
1. Do you like eating food? A lot of our staple crops are adapted to fairly narrow temperature ranges (it's not that they'll die outside those temperature ranges, but yields will drop severely). Climate change = food shortages = higher grocery prices, and we know how much American consumers love those!
>By [Bloomberg's] calculations, climate change cost Americans nearly a trillion dollars last year, mainly in skyrocketing insurance premiums, power outages, and cleanup after two massive hurricanes and the LA fires.3 This is more than 3 percent of our GDP. As they put it, this amounts to “a stealth tariff on consumer spending.”
Furthermore,
"Without FEMA, the cost of insurance will soar. Commercial insurance premiums will have to price in the risk of extended disruptions to business and ever-more degraded infrastructure. The soaring premiums will degrade the value of assets like industrial and commercial buildings... Coupled with the rise in the cost of health insurance owing to heat- and smoke-related morbidity and mortality, this is really going to hurt us. This isn’t theoretical; it’s happening already."
3. Any of you concerned about illegal immigration? You're going to absolutely LOVE it when desperately poor people are driven out of their homes in the Global South by the millions due to climate change-related coastal flooding, droughts, heat waves, crop failures, etc., and try to seek shelter in North America and Europe.
Also, I'm one of those bleeding-heart liberals who feels sad about people suffering and dying needlessly, as many poor people in the Global South inevitably will.
The only trajectory we have left for ourselves now is some combination of
1. Mitigation/adaptation (assuming economic growth in the global south).
2. Some attempts at geo-engineering
3. Mass conflict and death in some parts of the world
Humans are known to react very emotionally to anecdotal tragedy stories affecting individuals but mass death in far away places does not cause the same reaction (maybe for better or worse)
Economic Growth in Developing Countries (stupid Lefty "global south" phrase is stupid, yet enother euphamism on galloping euphamism... for God's sake stop the damn mealy mouthed evasions - poor(er) developing countries) is entirely in scope.
While climate change is a serious serious problem - and a serious threat particularly for geographies with limited water resources (Middle East North Africa, parts of Indian Sub-Con, northern Saharan 'shore' of sub-Saharan Africa -Sahel), solar power makes a wide range of development quite feasible (one can add rising CO2 levels in fact are having impact promoting dryland greening: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change - pure simplistic doomerism is ... simplistic
Is "global south" supposed to be woke terminology now? I've seen it used in economics discussions that no one associates with "progressivism". I personally have no qualms against "developing countries" and am old enough to even use the retrograde "third-world countries" description but I fail to see why "global south" should evoke strong emotions like say "pregnant people". Whose' claim at specialness is being denied when one uses "global south"?
There's no "just" about any of it, you're talking about a massive undertaking and it wouldn't happen instantly. Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north" of where the crops currently are? What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."
“ Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north of where the crops currently are?”
Yes.
“What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."”
That will be a fraction of the cost of aggressive decarbonization.
It is not per se wrong as too simplistic - remains slightly too doomer as it were.
The underlying point I believe I would second is Doomerism expressed as Planet Saving is essentially wrong as The Planet has gone through much worse. Human civilisation enabling ecoystem stability... another matter. Focusing on the rather more real and immediate that climate change does in fact impact agriculture, and that is no longer abstract, the educated Tree-huggers already Very Concern About the Environment (tm) but concrete.
If one is going to sell adaptation rather than sell it as Save the Planet, focus on "Save agriculture"
Of course many of these things are addressable through technology.
Solar power feed water reclaim (brackish desal, retreatment), genmod seeds for greater tolerances.
And on the other side, higher CO2 concentrations, plants actually love it for growth and it actually boosts respiratory efficiency (i.e. reduces water needs). Of course the trade offs don't necessarily balance but the Enviro Left treating CO2 like a toxic pollutant (erroneously extrapolating from pollution agenda) -it's not it's fundamental to life systems.
The worst part of this sad story is that environmental groups/people on the left don’t seem to have learned anything from the experience. I had hoped that an unequivocal loss would at least force a reckoning.
Since approximately 2015, a lot of influential people seem to have a mental model of politics where most people share their values and prioritization and only disagree on politics and policy because of some combination of "misinformation" and lack of awareness. The environmental movement has been ground zero for this. With this mental model, responding to losses by saying the exact same stuff louder and angrier makes sense, but I think it's the wrong model. I also think a lot of the anger at the tech industry--with Mark Zuckerberg being the figurehead--is rooted in people truly believing that "misinformation" on platforms like Facebook is responsible for their electoral losses and that they can win voters with the exact same strategy if the "misinformation" goes away.
I've read several prominent people in the climate movement complain about articles in the NYT and Washington Post. Which is ridiculous because anyone who is also reading that article is just much more left wing than the average person in the electorate.
Yascha Mounk and Steven Teles discussed this very point on today’s Persuasion podcast!
Thanks - always love learning about a new podcast!
The obsession with media coverage is truly the most self defeating thing in politics. Only losers whine about the media. But partisans create a massive market for the most simplistic "media criticism".
Right on. They have this model because the mind is a machine for maintaining group identity. Environmentalists, and leftists generally, need to believe two propositions that cannot be reconciled:
- we are trailblazers
- we speak for the people
The emulsifier that holds this oil-and-water combination in suspension is the silly assertion that the people *really* want to follow down the leftist trail, but are silenced / misled / etc. by forces of darkness.
Well said.
It’s interesting that this is such a bipartisan phenomenon. I’m presuming that it is example #851 of “social / media bubbles and filters screw up your brain.”
Just led me to learn about the low information rationality model.
“A supported alternative to the knowledge deficit model, the low-information rationality model states humans minimize costs associated with making decisions and forming attitudes, thereby avoiding developing in-depth understandings.”
Sounds plausible!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
I think that IS the case. I think that people really do not understand how little they would be inconvenienced by a rebated tax on net CO2 emissions and other at how little CO2 emissions/how high the cost would be reduced by putting obstacles to the LX pipeline. It is mistake to over particularize social media for spreading these misconceptions.
That really depends on the consumer.
There are a lot of people with high CO2 use that would be very inconvenienced
It's definitely in their self interest to oppose some type of CO2 pricey
Of course the incidence of the rebated tax on net emissions would not be uniform. It only reduces the aggregate cost.
The tuned out citizens will just grumble at higher gas and electricity costs. The sharper citizens who just want to go about their jobs and lives will see this as a shell game that doesn't do anything substantial to their budget and get annoyed at the social engineering being attempted here.
It’s somebody else’s job to persuade people that any other policy that achieves the same reduction in CO2 is also not “social engineering.” :)
EV mandates and subsidies, rooftop solar, IRA are not “social engineering” just with higher costs?
Canadians would know better than I, but I believe their carbon tax has been very unpopular and was going to cost Liberals the election until Trump inadvertently saved them.
"With this mental model, responding to losses by saying the exact same stuff louder and angrier makes sense, but I think it's the wrong model."
I like to call this the Jo Galloway Strenuously Object Your Honor model (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYmI7J3NCsI for those who don't know the movie)
"Oh, you 'stenuously object'? Well then..."
Shortly before the Australian election I had a short conversation with someone who truly believed that the only reason someone wouldn't vote for The Greens was because they had been brainwashed by the Murdoch Media and that 100% of people who actually read their platform would vote for them.
(I read their platform and was not impressed.)
I was listening to an interview with Mark Lynas and he mentioned that when he's talking to a room of climate activists he'll often ask them if they could magically make climate change go away without any changes to society, would they do it. About half would. The other half don't, because in their minds climate change is just a symptom of a bigger problem. There are plenty of climate change activists who aren't like that, but the ones who are make it harder to enact effective climate change policies. People are going to be suspicious of the climate movement if their members often go on about it being a symptom of the "real problem", which is usually either capitalism or industrialization and technology. Because very few people want to get rid of those things, and claiming that those are the real causes of climate change doesn't pass the sniff test.
This comment deserves more likes!
That is a great little mind experiment. And I can see that being true - there are a lot of people whose climate activism is part of a broader belief system that the current techno-rich world is bad and we should, in some way, return to nature.
Nothing wrong with living that way oneself but that is never going to be a majority viewpoint in the US so you can't successfully enact climate policy with that approach.
For some reason, I know several people who are very concerned about climate change and view it primarily as a result of the "sin" of capitalism or industrialization. I'm like you, I'm not going to tell anyone how to think and it's really not any of my business unless they corner me at parties and ramble on for half an hour.
It does become a problem when activists decide that solutions to climate change have to also get rid of the "sin" they think caused it and so solutions that don't stop the "sin" or enable it should be prohibited. Like you mentioned, the vast majority of people don't want to live in a society without a lot of modern technology or some sort of degrowth world. And trying to force people to live that way makes the general public understandably skeptical of climate change action. Most people want technological solutions not lower standards of living. I have lost count of the number of times a climate activist has insisted that climate action must include their preferred solutions or dismissed a technological solution that currently exists because it doesn't address the "sin". And if that's the face of hte climate movement, people will decide they don't want to take action on climate.
The people I know who are sin type environmentalists realize that their solutions will not win at the ballot box and so they tend to endorse policies that overrule the ballot box and are frankly often quite authoritarian. I've seen people advocating that the government reallocate housing space so that people don't have "too much space" based on some formula of what you need. In some ways, this arm of the environmental movement reminds me of the Christian Right when I was growing up in the '90's. The rhetoric comes off as wanting to control how other people live their lives.
Perhaps I’m being too judgmental but I find this absolutely revolting. People who feel that way ought to be marginalized as fast as practically possible, imo.
It really bothers me that people like that are not only taken seriously by polite society, but they end up dictating climate policy.
Degrowth is just a repackaging of the population bomb myth of the 1970s. Jason Hickel and his crew of idea launderers have very monstrous ideas. Ideas if they managed to enact would result in a state enforced famine worse than any committed by communist regimes of the 20th century.
It's in their job description not to learn the lesson. It's in the job description of Democratic officeholders (i.e., win elections, pass good laws) to ignore them.
Even David Roberts of Volts gets this. He just had a fantastic interview with Jesse Jenkins and Jane Fleagal where he let his angst about the self-sabotaging of the climate groups come through:
"So, it's like, it is true that the climate movement needs self-awareness and discipline and the ability to restrain itself sometimes and the ability to accept half a loaf. . . I feel bad saying that because that is like the core proposition for many people's lives whom I respect greatly, you know, and who spent their lives working on it and like, and I don't have a great alternative theory about what to do, but I have basically come around to thinking that the dream of a climate movement capable of moving national politics is probably forlorn and that you're probably going to get, insofar as you get popular support, rallying for things, it's going to be more targeted, focused on growth and opportunity and abundance. And electric cars are cooler and they work better. And you know, like, things are cooler, things are getting better, they're operating better, the air is getting cleaner.
"All of that stuff means more to public sentiment than climate. And maybe it's just like, maybe we should just internalize and accept the fact that climate is going to be kind of a background accelerator and not the main thing."
https://www.volts.wtf/p/trumps-big-bill-how-bad-is-it-and
When you've lost David Roberts . . .
I’m an aspirational climate voter but I have been in the wilderness for the past… many years because I don’t thing the root problem is capitalism and therefore I think I the people leading the charge on this are mostly dumb and alienating. There are a lot of things in my issue bundle I would give up for techno/abundance climate policy.
Interesting, thanks for the link. Few people I know IRL seem to have subject themselves to this sort of self-examination. Most of them—and these are educated people—have either dug in more deeply or wandered into conspiracy theories and nihilism. Mostly the former, but it’s been kind of shocking to hear some of the latter.
Degrowth needs to be utterly crushed as any sort of political tactic, give it no voice on the platform whatsoever.
I can't speak for the movement at large, but I absolutely have learned from the experience - stop wasting money on red states and subsidies. The IRA poured lots of money into red states, which they happily pocketed and provided effectively zero actual benefit to either the climate or the nation. Little infrastructure was built. No minds were changed.
I had the pleasure of driving across Nevada twice over the July 4th week in a non-Tesla EV. Because I did my homework, it wasn't a terrible experience. Still, I was shocked at how many EV charging stations which had been installed from 2017-2020 were now basically paperweights - either physically broken or no longer supported by their vendor (thanks for nothing, Shell). This work was largely paid for by federal highway money and state grants ('Nevada Electric Highway'). As far as I can tell, the vendors and installers took the money and ran. Did it translate into better infrastructure? Maybe marginally. Did it increase support for EVs and electrification in rural Nevada? I see no evidence of that either. The state is redder than its been in decades.
Red states are usually the only ones where you can build things in.
They also have a lot of the desirable places to put renewable projects
Apparently, some Republican minds *were* changed by the IRA investments and they worked behind the scenes to improve the OBBBA in this regard at least some. I learned this on a Volts podcast recently, and that modified my prior thinking some.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/trumps-big-bill-how-bad-is-it-and
Well more Pre Failure and not anything actually 'learned'
The non building (and that means btw non-spending) was due to the Biden Adminstration ont cutting the red tape
One doesn't change minds by making Big Promises and then getting everything tied up in multilevel reviews approvals, everything-bagel "nudges" to include every nice Lefty agenda item in every project.
"Reds States" building more comes from faster processes.
This isn't all that surprising to me. A red state will happily take Green Projects money, throw that money at vendors to bolster support from the labor demographic, and then five years later the project is derelict because nobody actually gave a shit in the first place.
As someone in this space I don't think that true at all, like any social movement it can take a lot of time to turn the battleship as it were. See how formulating the new strategy after the failure of Cap and Trade didn't happen overnight, or the Sierra Club's evolution on housing issues.
Moreover a lot of the conflict and "reckoning" that people (especially this Stack's comment section) really, really want to see happen in public will happen behind closed doors for a variety of reasons. The big test will be what enviro groups decide to do in the run up to 2028, I think a number of outcomes are possible.
As someone also in this space, it was disappointing to see the "degrowth" and "keep it in the ground" movement take hold over the last decade. Plenty of mainstream enviro groups formerly took a more pragmatic approach - or maybe more accurately, took a multiprong strategy of pushing for more regulation while also encouraging development of clean tech like EVs (my particular experience is transportation-related so I'm more aware of the trajectory of clean tech in transport....).
So yes I take your point that these groups may be recalibrating as we speak, but I suspect this last decade or so will seem like time wasted tilting at windmills.
Sure, but I just don't think there's a lot of evidence that "nobody's learned anything" as claimed in the top comment, I could see a lot of different pathways between now and Nov of 2028. Likewise if some major funders decided to act different a lot of the "degrowthers" could be just not around in a few years.
Not all groups are the same of course and I’m sure some are more clued up than others. But my experience with these groups collectively, since I started my career in the 90s, makes me skeptical. And I have always considered myself to be an environmentalist.
I just think there's a lot of variance here, will institutional funders pull the plug on groups enmeshed in The Appliance Wars? Will we see major leadership changes at the ED/board level at lots of orgs? Will people decide to write off "red America" or increase efforts there? Will activists try to disrupt Josh Shapiro press conferences? Call AOC a monster after she refuses to call for banning gas stoves? Get depressed and do a "back to the land"/start smoking a lot of high stakes thing instead of being involved in politics?"
We'll just have to wait and see.
How long do you expect it it to take to turn this battleship?
Like they say about progress in scientific theory, one funeral at a time.
More than a few weeks?
"More than a few weeks?"
When do you think this should have started turning?
My new favorite kind of environmental group is rewilding projects. It's like abundance for the environment - making the world better by building stuff. There's no time to advocate for a toxic political agenda if you're too busy planting trees and moving dirt around.
https://youtube.com/@amillison
https://youtube.com/@mossyearth
The cultural left isn't just failing to meet the moment, they haven't even tried to make an appointment. My tolerance for their bullshit has been waning for the entire decade - ever since they started asserting things like "Elizabeth Warren is a right-winger" in 2019, really - and they haven't adjusted anything about their thinking since a loss that made the rest of us go back to the drawing board. At this point I think Democrats should make them active targets for scapegoat messaging.
Fuck them. They force us to adopt unpopular positions and then don't even support us with any enthusiasm, if they do at all. They pulled a LOT of us really far by putting everything in moralistic terms that we found hard to refute within our value system, and by exploiting the desperation of old-millennial Obama coalition members to be cool and down with the kids, and with progressivism, and by exploiting our fear of being labeled right-wingers, as we did to so many older Democrats in our youth.
I can't be the only one ready to Sista Soulja these fuckers out of a cannon into the sun. If some candidate comes out with that approach in '27 (and it isn't John Fetterman, because what the fuck is going on with that guy) they are going to get a lot of consideration for that, and if they get through a primary with that posture they would be an amazing position for a general election.
You are onto something here. The left seems to think everyone really agrees with them so they don’t believe they have to do much persuading. The right, on the other hand, knows that most people don’t agree with them on lots of issues. They feel perfectly justified in ramming stuff down people‘s throat, simply because it’s good for them in one way or another.
As someone on the left who sympathizes with larger goals and can see how critical progress in these next few years is extremely critical (due to the many tipping points we are approaching), I was still fighting for Kamala and Biden, but the left people, even the Sunrise Movement, were constantly anti-Democrat, often linking them as "the same," especially in light of the genocide in Gaza. I personally felt that the Republicans were clearly still worse on that and that the environmental gain was even so more important (not to mention the myriad other threats Trump posed and is enacting) especially due to the actual short-term-ness of the global warming problem. I do not think we should "demand" that Democrats enact the Green New Deal immediately or else we should tell everyone who cares to hold them accountable, I do think that work they are doing to elect people on a local level is paying off, and that this issue ought to be taken extremely seriously as (alongside nuclear war) the biggest threat humanity as well as all life on the planet faces and try to convince people of this sooner rather than later, because how much worse will it get for example in the Middle East with no oil money and severe drought in the future? Lives are still at stake. We should not simply rely on opinion data to determine the best moves. People can see through that anyway. Inspiring politicians have done a lot to change things in the past and still can. Humans can be and are caring, and (self-)obfuscation with facts and figures and focus group analyses actually incentivize status quo solutions that are simply invalid in light of the actually unprecedented urgency of the crises we face. If they had realized this back in the 60s and 70s things would be so much better, but short-term "economics" is always seen as the inevitably winning hand. Maybe more Gen Z-ers would have come out and tipped the scales for Kamala if she had been less bad on fracking, but really, all the pro-Palestine "Genocide Joe" stuff was a bad look for that enthusiasm, and of course, was just horrific in itself.
The fantasy of more voters solving your problems needs to be dropped - that ceased to be true a while back. Low propensity voters went Trump and all data show that the profiles that did not voter align to breaking Trump
Stuck in 1990s narratives and thinkig is going to continue to lead to dead ends.
If I wanted people not to vote on the ridiculous "Genocide Joe" stuff I would simply stop calling it "genocide" for Hamas to lose a war it started.
What do you think the climate people actually believe? What is there real strategy here? It can’t be “win power and make meaningful change” so what is it?
"Republican trifecta has repealed the majority of the IRA energy spending."
I know I'm quibbling, but I don't think this is definitively true. Even if it does turn out to be true, it'll likely be a very close call.
The analysis I'm seeing seems to put the amount of subsidy spending retained at between 40-60%. So greater than 50% retained still seems very possible once all the loopholes are figured out. For example, OBBBA keeps subsidies for battery storage but ends the subsidies for solar and wind projects much earlier than IRA. As I understand it, developers were already building many solar and wind projects w/battery storage and under the new law, they can put many of the "balance of system" costs (inverters, grid interconnect, transmission lines) on the battery side of the ledger and still can get subsidies for them, even after the solar/wind credits expire. Given the low cost of solar panels especially, it may turn out that 70-80 percent of the cost of a typical solar + storage project still qualifies for subsidies.
That said, the biggest wildcards in all this seem to be how the foreign entity of concern stuff shakes out and also how Trump's recent E.O. defines project start date, which will impact solar and wind projects trying to get in under the wire on the tightened 2027-2028 subsidy end dates.
Still, given how bold and massive the IRA clean energy subsidies were, it's pretty amazing that the Republican Trifecta chose to keep somewhere in the ballpark of 50% of them.
Thanks for this. I woke up to this article feeling pretty depressed, and now I'm between 40-60% depressed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl6s6DGapug
The piece links to an article that breaks down all the clean energy spending that survived.
If that's the wapo one, it's paywalled and I can't read it.
In the linked Alex Trembath X post, he frames this a lot more positively than Matt seems to with "@NatKeohane reminds us to that most of the IRA survived."
As I said before, I know I'm nitpicking, but the framing on much of the reporting on this seems more negative than is warranted by both expectations and by the what ended up in the bill (though I admit I am worried about how the FEOC and EO stuff play outs).
Yes, there a ton of variance here because the law itself is pretty vague, even lawyers who work in the solar industry remain puzzled about what gets phased on when and advise people to talk in "soon the better" terms not give people hard deadlines because, well, nobody really knows what those deadlines and various definitions will be.
But is it the right 50%, the lowest cost per ton of CO2 emissions avoided 50%?
Does anyone really know? Most of what got killed were subsidies for things Matt was saying we shouldn't be subsidizing anyway, like EVs, solar, and wind, which are well established and already economic technologies that don't really need limited taxpayer dollars anymore.
The subsidies on less developed technologies like advanced nuclear, geothermal, and battery storage were preserved in OBBBA and I think those are a good chunk of the 50%. US pollution and CO2 emissions will certainly be higher thanks to the cuts on EVs, solar, and wind, but the big opportunities Matt talks about for advancing breakthrough technologies through subsidies seem to mostly be preserved.
All that said, I don't agree with Matt on not subsidizing EVs, wind, and solar. IMO, these deserve ongoing subsidies just to correct the market distortions from the lack of pollution and carbon taxes on fossil emissions. It'd be better if we used taxes instead of subsidies, but taxes seem to be a non-starter so subsidies are as good as it gets.
There are limited dollars.
Wind* and solar do not really need subsidies, in fact it's perverse as other things do need subsidy.
It is my literal job to invest in RE, industrial scale. That's hundreds of millions to move into RE. The constraint is not base economics, its Government and system.
1000% what is needed is
A. Permit speeding, streamling and reform to reduce timing risk that accelerates cost on multiple levels
B. Grid - distribution ("retail") and transmission upgrading with massive expansion of interconnect and energy exchange potential - of which modernisation not just new lines but the US grid is stuck in 1960s overall - higher capacity lines, line tech, modernisation in systems, etc. This is huge money and it is expensive. And if done fast (sans permiting) it will explode energy cost - and that will be toxic.
Enablement of the most rapid electrification of industrial processes, lower hanging fruit in transport without going "ban ICE" but enablement of EV competitiveness to not have market-train-wrecks. That is the key.
Mature or near mature tech does not need subsidy and most particularly if subsidy as it will boosts demand but the supply side bottlenecks are not solved
Grid connection.
Distribution, Transmission and inter-regional time-arbitrage
Upgrade in stability regulation and expansion of stabilty regatuion to avoid grid crash (see Texas., Iberia).
Advanced battery tech of which support to new battery chemistries for both fixed and mobile applications to go from pilot to SCale - Scale scale scale
China is crushing this as they do scale.
*: US offshore is another matter but US offshore is a deadletter and anyway since it seems impossible to kill off the binding constraints due to LEfties and Righties idiocies on the Jones act, not gonna happen at scale.
Yes, the OBBBA cuts were bad but given that it was MAGA Republicans doing the cuts we should thank the heavens for small blessings.
"... then pushed Democrats to use every regulatory means at their disposal to curtail fossil fuel use and fossil fuel production."
Biden presided over record domestic energy production including for oil and gas! We achieved a level of energy independence that in the mid 2000s would have been considered an unimaginable success. And all of this was in the context of a rip-roaring full employment job market and world-leading economic growth. Wasn't enough for voters because of the inflation burst but that's just the reality.
The Groups in the climate movement still deserve criticism here and genuinely were/are an anchor around the neck of our coalition with their stupid degrowth obsessions. It would be accurate to say "dumb coalitional management concerns around the Groups prevented Biden from getting credit for booming energy production." But the Biden years just substantively were not a degrowth experience!
I think this piece basically agrees with what you just said. Aside from the amorphous use of "Democrats" in the line you cited.
Biden years were the fastest growth since Clinton’s second term! US real GDP growth from 2021-24 was 6.1%, 2.5%, 2.9%, and 2.8% (15%) over 4 years. Compare to about 10% in Bush’s first term, 9% in Bush’s second, 4% in Obama’s first term, 10% in Obama’s second, and 6% in Trump’s (even without the -2.2% in 2020 Trump would’ve only been at 8%). 2025 is again shaping up to be lower growth than Biden’s weakest year (2022). If anything the political failure of Bidenism is a strong argument for degrowth lol.
Coming off a historic COVID slump. Look, I'm not trying to be a Biden hater, but give some context, or you sound an awful lot like a propagandist.
But it wasn't a given that there would be strong growth after COVID. I mean, a running theme of Slow Boring is that we underperformed for years after the Great Recession.
That's because of a lack of understanding of the difference between the root causes. The Covid recession was due to shutdowns. There were no inherent weaknesses in the economy. Rolling out the vaccines and telling people that it was ok to get out of the house would have sufficed.
Millions of people dying of a plague tends to create an inherent weakness in the economy, actually.
And what did the ARP do to boost the population?
The COVID slump didn’t make much of a difference and was mostly already over before Biden took office. Overall growth in 2020 was only -2.2%, less of a slump than 2009 (-2.6%). Biden’s policies should get credit for why we bounced back so quickly from 2020 (2021 being the best job market probably ever “great resignation”) versus 2009 (a long “jobless recovery” slog).
If the 2020 -2% had been a more-normal +2%, "Trump's growth" would have been about the same as "Biden's growth".
Nope, we were headed to recession in 2020 anyway. I remember Trump pushing the Fed hard to cut rates and the Fed started to cut rates in June 2019 before COVID was a thing.
Okay but by that standard any recession we get in 2025 really will be the Biden recession, because the Fed started cutting in 2024.
"Nope, we were headed to recession in 2020 anyway."
Wait, what? Growth in 2019 was quite good including Q4. 2020 Q1 started the contraction, but that was because Covid started in the middle of it.
I think Biden’s economic record gets unfairly criticized but it’s a stretch to argue that his presidency was some sort of golden age. Inflation hit HARD during his presidency. Apparently $100k in 2019 is the equivalent of $125k—that is a lot of inflation
In 2019, the M1 money supply was $4 trillion. It is now about $18 trillion.
I didn't know what the M1 money supply was and so I asked chatGPT. It tells me that the way the M1 money supply is calculated changed in May of 2020 to include savings deposits, and so the pre-2020 numbers are not comparable to the post-2020 numbers. This is borne out in the graph here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL which shows a jump from about 4T to about 16T in May 2020. From June 2020 to now the difference is about 16.5 -> 18.5T.
Economics is among the subjects I have the least familiarity with, but wouldn't you expect a >4x increase in the amount of money in circulation to correspond to much more inflation than we have actually seen?
Wages went up even faster than inflation though. 2021 was the first time in most people’s living memory when high-paying jobs were easy to get and workers had the upper hand over employers. That’s gone now, maybe forever due to AI. I feel pretty bad for the people who didn’t or couldn’t take advantage of the Biden job market.
"Wages went up even faster than inflation though."
Mine certainly didn't. I looked at CPI each year, and my wage increase was below it.
That's not uncommon.
And my cost of living went up more than CPI. Not uncommon either because they deliberately massage CPI to make it look like actual costs went up less than they really did.
For example, they pretend technology advancing is the same thing as costs decreasing. So new iPhone comes out for the same price, and they pretend the cost went down.
More seriously, Biden is of course flattered by base effects coming off of 2020, and Biden’s 2022-24 seems about comparable to Trump’s 2017-19. But yeah, it’s a strong 3-year record even if you put your finger on the scale like that.
Why didn’t we have similar base effects coming off of 2008? And how come we were able to skate right by the big banking failures beginning with SVB in 2023 with little damage to the broader economy even though the bank failures of 2023 were larger than 2008 by total impacted assets? Biden should get credit for that.
Coming out of a deep recession is a necessary condition for 6% real GDP growth but not a sufficient one? In 2008-9, policymakers did enough stimulus to stop a deflationary spiral but deliberately chose to leave slack in the labor market (which lasted for years and years) instead of risking inflation; in 2020-21 they ran the economy hot and got an extremely quick recovery but headline CPI that peaked at 9%.
The 2023 banking crisis is all kinds of fascinating as the kind of guy who reads Congressional and FDIC reports on the S&L crisis for fun. I generally think US regulators made the right decisions in that crisis (closing Signature Bank was probably premature, but also fuck the crypto industry lol), but it was not at 2008 levels basically because 2008 was not mostly or initially a crisis of insured depositary institutions but of investment banks, hedge funds and so on that financed risky assets by issuing short-term paper, and that short-term paper (a) was not insurable by the FDIC, and (b) made its way into every nook and cranny of the financial system.
Of the many things I appreciate about Paul Krugman, one of them was his ability to explain the concept of the "shadow banking system" and why this aspect of the financial system in 2008 made it more akin to 1929 than we realize. And thanks too decisive action from Treasury (taking over AIG for one, the forgotten centerpiece of the whole credit default swap edifice), presence of automatic stabilizers that didn't exist in 1929 (like unemployment insurance) and the fact that we're just much richer even adjusted for inflation, things didn't get as bad in 2009-2010 as they did in 1931-1932.
"Why didn't we have similar base effects coming off of 2008, when huge financial institutions went out of business or had to be restructured, when large changes were made to the financial system? Why wasn't a one-time global shock like a pandemic similar?"
The question answers itself.
More financial institutions by assets went bust in 2023 than 2008, yet nothing happened in 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/business/bank-failures-svb-first-republic-signature.html. The fact that many people were predicting doom in 2023 that didn’t happen ought to make us revise the narrative about why 2008 was so bad.
I should note there is a pretty decent amount of economic literature that says recessions that are the result primarily from a banking crises take much longer to recover from than other types of recessions due to the long overhang of debt.
That's true but it is a self-inflicted choice. Policymakers refuse to spend the money/tolerate the inflation necessary to allow the labor market to recover quickly. It isn't because fast recoveries are impossible.
As a member of the Class of 09 who was forever harmed by that recession Biden's Economic Camp >>> Obama's economic camp. The obama economic team was just far to reluctant to risk inflation
What does the literature say about coming out of a shutdown of the economy due to a once in a century pandemic?
Funny you ask, there is a bearded fellow who used to write for the Times in the opinion section who try to address this.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-macro-equivalent-of-war
I deliberately chose a post he did from 2021 because he did mea culpa a few years later regarding inflation and how there was more inflation in 2022 and 2023 than he expected. But I think looking at things in 2025, he was essentially right. He has since called this "Long transitory", but the story he provided in 2021 was largely correct even if it took a bit longer to play out and was a bit more painful than he anticipated.
If Trump was not a complete insane person or had a few more guardrails around him like he did in 2017, he would have likely gotten the rate cuts he wanted because there wouldn't be these insane tariffs because inflation was clearly heading downward to the Fed 2% target.
The voters yearn for the living standards of the 1950s
Happy to give it to them as long as other countries will welcome the rest of us as economic refugees.
I feel like there should be some "control for fiscal policy" consideration here.
Growth is a little bit easier when you don't car about deficits at all.
I never understand why it was so hard for Biden et al to simply explain that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon, and we were doing better than other people, in a way that was also compassionate. I mean, of course Biden was too old. This was the main problem I think.
Because Bourgeousie Inflationsplaining is not something that is either smart, workable or credible.
Talking about such things is the fine way that the professional class talks to itself
Talking to taking inflation seriously, attacking root causes etc. rather better than engaging in discourse about what may be happening in France or Germany as it will come off as mere excuse making (as it did)
Yes, the Biden administration, headed by a doddering senile vegetable, was so incompetent that instead of achieving its goals of crushing fossil fuel production and killing the economy the idiots actually inadvertently allowed the opposite to happen.
Inflation was the Fed's doing and probably most of it necessary to achieve the growth we saw. Biden's problem was to try to claim credit for the growth without seeing that woudl imply he was responsible for the inflation.
But I think the border more than inflation sank him.
The huge amounts of stimulus were certainly also a factor. I remember people like Larry Summers coming out warning against Biden's extra $2 trillion in stimulus, said it was too much.
It was
I think that Summers may have been right in that some of the relief had NPV < 0.
But the inflation was 100% the Fed. The Fed decides how much of the deficit impacts aggregate demand.
"Biden presided over record domestic energy production including for oil and gas"
That was in spite of not because of biden
You do understand that *everything* that happens during a President's term gets tied to said President?
I'm sure some people do that.
US domestic oil production has been going up since the Obama presidency. The only time it stalled was during Covid. Either Democratic Presidents are not getting in the way of domestic oil production or they're doing a very poor job of sabotaging it.
Reading this article has prompted me a take that's been percolating in my head the last year or so; I think we underestimate how horribly damaging Bernie's insurgent run was in 2016 to the Democratic Party.
I say this in agreement with Matt's take that Bernie would actually have been a better President than we think given his track record of being more pragmatic in practice than he is in rhetoric. And I say this as someone who's probably more sympathetic to the concept of Medicare for All than a lot of SB commentators.
But I think since 2016, he's been absolutely central to pushing the idea that there is literally only one thing that's stopping all of the Left's dreams from coming true; Billionaires and corporate power. Why can't we have Medicare for all? It's only because of Insurance company lobbying and political donations. And why can't we have 100% green utopia? Big oil bribes politicians.
This all crystalized for me with Ezra Klein's interview with Zephyr Teachout. Her criticism to Ezra was just over and over again to say "corporate power". He tried pushing her gently to say don't you think there are other factors involved? And Ezra clearly agreed that Corporate power is at least part of the story (I agree too, any intellectually honest account as to why more progress hasn't been made addressing climate change has to include Big Oil's misinformation campaign regarding climate change and lobbying generally), but he tried over and over again to try to get her to at least concede there is at least a second reason why more progress hasn't made on say getting housing built in CA. He kept asking how do you account for the fact that housing is easier to build in Texas than CA. And she kept saying Corporate Power. And Ezra in a nice way basically said "if you know anything about the politics of Texas vs CA, it's absolutely insane to say that corporate power is less of an issue in Texas than CA".
I say all of this to note I'm probably more sympathetic to the environmental groups than Matt is. I mean for one I don't get the vitriol on twitter/BluSky that he does. But just in general I'm probably at least more sympathetic to their goals than Matt is (even if I disagree vehemently with the faction that advocates for a "degrowth" mindset). So it just frustrates me to no end that too many people on the environmental far left have bought into this Bernie inspired binary view of the world. Precisely because I think it's coming at the cost of achieving the goals I actually agree with.
I live in CA and am sympathetic to the YIMBY movement but I find the TX vs CA comparison to be in bad faith.
CA's actual built environment is already more dense than Texas. CA already went through a "sprawl" phase and has reached geographic limits on this front where as Texas has not and is still "sprawling" because it is basically a boring featureless flat-land.
CA's restrictive zoning laws are a reaction to trying to transition form a "sprawl" to "densification" phase of growth. The fact that Texas currently has no/less restrictive zoning is not because CA liberals are uniquely evil NIMBYs and Texas residents are "freedom loving" YIMBYs, it's because the two states are in different stages of growth.
Having said that I applaud the recent CEQA amendments which will lead to further densification where it most makes sense economically.
There was an Atlantic article just a few days ago about exactly this phenomenon, "The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California
Housing prices are rising fast in red and purple states known for being easy places to build. How can that be?"
“When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me.
Recently, however, many Sun Belt cities have begun hitting limits to their outward sprawl, either because they’ve run into natural obstacles (such as the Everglades in Miami and tribal lands near Phoenix) or because they’ve already expanded to the edge of reasonable commute distances (as appears to be the case in Atlanta and Dallas). To keep growing, these cities will have to find ways to increase the density of their existing urban cores and suburbs. That is a much more difficult proposition. “This is exactly what happened in many coastal cities in the 1980s and ’90s,” Armlovich told me. “Once you run out of room to sprawl, suddenly your zoning code starts becoming a real limitation.”
This. The simple answer to that Ezra Klein interview about why it's cheaper to build in Texas than California is simply there is a lot more land to build on and it has about half the population. Yes, we're more than a bit overregulated, but even if California mirrored Texas legally in terms of no regulation/zoning, it would still be more expensive because of the geographic limits and it can't sprawl any more, which means it can only grow vertically with infill housing which is more expensive than sprawl.
All the more reason why it was revealing to me that Zephyr couldn't give this answer. My old boss told me the abundance of land was underrated reason why environmental concerns don't have as much sway in places like Dallas (he was originally from there). Yes he acknowledged part of it is how central the oil industry is to the Texas economy. Forget environmental misinformation, there's just a lot of jobs at stake. But part of the reason was if you told someone something along the lines of "we need to do a better job of protecting the area where we live" the retort was some version of "look at all this land. It's just dirt, there's no animals, there's no parks, there's nothing to protect. We can just keep building outward".
But that's the point. It's a pretty easy answer Zephyr could have given to Ezra and yet seemed incapable of providing said answer because it didn't involve "corporate power" as an explanation.
By the way. To sort of back up your explanation. Interesting article in WSJ yesterday. Also backs up my contention that we really shouldn't think of YIMBY and NIMBY as partisan; too many of the issues at play cross partisan lines. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/after-a-mayors-mysterious-death-a-land-dispute-divides-republicans-in-tennessee-c40d5709?mod=hp_lead_pos7
I like Zephyr for her advocacy against public corruption as anti-corruption is my #1 issue. But she wants to be a power broker on the left and is not incentivized to win over people like Ezra Klein who the materialist left sees as being in bed with big money interests. I don't know if Zephyr is a particularly nimble debater but its obvious she went in with a siege mindset and felt she is better off continuing to hit corporate power no matter what. I guess in a closed meeting where only anti-corruption liberals/progressives gather, she would probably concede more than she was willing to in front of Klein.
Clearly she is not going to win over skeptics to her right with her nuance-free style but the left's theory of politics is that they don't need to win over skeptics on their materialist right because so many people have been left behind in our system that they can expand their coalition purely amongst the economically distressed masses and gain power without ever having to convince the Ezra Kleins of anything. This theory has failed to date because social leftism gets in the way constantly, but they keep trying.
I agree generally with your thesis, but while "Big Oil" has run a "disinformation" campaign, I really don't know that it has mattered? If there were restrictions on oil usage in the US/Europe starting in the 90s, I think that just makes it cheaper for other countries to use oil. Maybe that's good as it decreases coal usage, but I don't think it would be that much better.
Hard to know counterfactuals. I know MattY likes doing counterfactual history and I enjoy reading his posts, but I think even he would concede in reality it's hard to know what kind "butterfly effects" would occur if even one decision was different. In the 80s, climate change wasn't even on the radar of most environmentalists; stuff like acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer were much more front and center topics.
Having said all that, one of the reasons climate change wasn't on people's radar is that companies like ExxonMobil were helping suppress this information. So that then begs the question (at least to me) how much farther along are we with solar power and electric car advancements absent the suppression campaign. Are we now where we think we'll be in say 2032? I don't think it's crazy to me to think that if global warming as an existential issue was more wildly known the 80s there's more interest and research into developing "cleaner" energy options and developing an electric car.
I've noted before that I think it's pretty likely we're at or close to the "tipping point" for electric car and solar as technologies (a big part of why it's so damaging the new BBB is actively trying to harm this industry for dumb culture war reasons. Especially given America's geopolitical rival seems to be going full steam ahead. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/trump-bill-clean-energy-china.html). If I'm right and research into solar panels or electric cars starts even 3-4 years earlier, I don't think it's crazy to think that the percentage of electric grid coming from clean sources and percentage of cars on the road being electric are orders of magnitude higher today.
I just don't think it works that way. People say TODAY that global warming is a major issue but are unwilling to accept almost any economic cost to stop it. And environmental groups have despised oil companies long before global warming became a major thing (e.g. Exxon Valdez spill) so would have happily picked this up as well. But the science just wasn't there for a long time.
Yeah I don't know what the disinformation campaign would look like. "Driving a car is more convenient than walking places?" "You have more money when gas is cheap than when it's expensive?"
It’s more the disinformation about how inconvenient it is to have a 100 mile range limit.
People happily buy a truck with a bed they use twice a year, or remodel their kitchen to include a second oven they only use on Thanksgiving, and I'm not sure that's due to disinformation. I think it's just a weakness of the human condition.
Why is that disinformation?
I don't think Bernie really inspired that view of the world so much as his unexpected success convinced a lot of people they could go mask-off with it.
I think it’s hard to overestimate how badly AOC’s Green New Deal damaged renewable energy efforts. It’s worth rereading the news coverage at the time to remember just what a total fiasco the rollout was, and how insane (and completely unrelated to climate change) some of the proposals were. As I recall AOC’s chief of staff admitted they didn’t particularly care about the “Green” stuff and were using it as branding for the “New Deal” aspect, which would have utterly transformed society. Yes, they never got close to getting any sort of law passed, but they did get a lot of media attention, and most of the Democrats running in 2020 endorsed it (although Biden) didn’t. The IRA ended up getting branded as a mini-Green New Deal, which turned out to be very unfortunate branding to have.
The Green New Deal was a list of sentiments in a B level essay with a bunch of extraneous pop-socialist bullcrap tagged on.
Fun fact about New Deal branding: a lot of people meant it as in dealing a new hand of cards, not negotiating a new contract (https://www.posterazzi.com/cartoon-new-deal-1932-nwe-demand-a-new-deal-american-cartoon-defining-the-term-new-deal-first-used-by-franklin-d-roosevelt-in-his-speech-while-accepting-the-democratic-nomination-for-president-2-july-1932-cartoon-by-john-miller-baer-c193/)
It was actually brilliant branding because it could simultaneously have a quite radical message (deal everyone a new hand) alongside a moderate one (renegotiate the social contract).
Yeah, the GND didn’t include nuclear power, presumably because environmental groups and DSA types didnt like nuclear power. But any serious climate change policy has to include it.
It also didn’t include any zoning reform - just some talk about running more public transit without allowing any more places where public transit can work.
I had forgotten about that. It was a pretty significant oversight -- you need people to be able to live near transit stops if you want them to take public transit.
To me this all goes back to Bill Clinton. He was able to tell the groups to go to hell. I didn't always like this-- his death penalty bill sucked eggs and I disliked welfare reform at the time. But he was able to do it.
Whereas the guys we have now aren't.
They did not have such a stranglehold over the TV news media then. There were still old fashioned liberals around to whom truth mattered more than maintaining the narrative. They are mostly gone now.
I don’t think that’s it. It was far more that people would watch the evening news and subscribe to the daily paper as a matter of course. You didn’t need rage/clickbait to nearly the same degree.
Profoundly disagree that there is any longer any concern for truth over narrative in current TV media. There may well not have been much back then, but there is zero now. Narrative wins over truth on every news station.
Well, he did try to pass a BTU tax. I mean, not only was it a tax and not only was it climate-related but it was vaguely British on top of that!
> his death penalty bill sucked eggs
The 1994 Crime Bill? Could you elaborate!
A quick search shows: there are a total of 3 inmates on federal death row (37 sentences were commuted by President Biden so there were 40 in all by the end of 2024), and there have been 16 executions since 1994 (not all of which can be attributed to the Crime Bill).
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/federal-death-penalty/list-of-federal-death-row-prisoners
I was thinking of AEDPA instead.
Ah, thanks!
The Democratic Party is 1994 simply was far less liberal. Far more people in 2025 who vote in Democratic primaries agree w/ The Groups than they did in 1994 and prefer The Groups over some moderate who tells them to shut up.
You can't take authoritarianism away from natural authoritarians. A reduction in fossil fuel use as a result of persuasion just does not produce the same high that *forcing* a reduction does. The power to force is more important than the result.
Re the dishwasher wars, how do these rules come to be? Are they actual things people vote on or are they agency regulations or what?
What happens is the nonprofits and groups staff the agencies and then these things bubble up.
The same way every Dem education department calls for stripping due process rights for college students accused of sexual assault. No voters are calling for this, but the appointees are chosen among people who want to sneak it in.
You're a lawyer so you might be able to answer this -- does the recent Chevron decision change this?
Not really. Agencies still make the regs amd courts will uphold the regs they want to and strike down the ones they don't. I don't agree with Matt's view that con law is fake, but regulatory review...sorta is? At least in the areas I know judges read 'arbitrary and capricious' as 'disagrees with my firm position pretty often.'
It ultimately depends on the statute. Every regulation is issued pursuant to authority granted by congress. Sometimes the statute says clearly that an agency may regulate the X output of Y. In that case, it’s simple: the agency can do so, so long as it’s not done in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Chevron won’t matter.
Sometimes the statute instead says that the agency may regulate Z and the agency has concluded that Z reasonably includes the X output of Y. Under Chevron, courts would let the agency make that call unless they did so unreasonably. Without Chevron, courts are no longer giving agencies deference about what Z includes. Instead, they’ll decide for themselves if Z includes regulating the X output of Y.
For dishwashers, the statute is kind of a mess and I can’t make the call without digging in to a degree that my employer probably wouldn’t be happy with.
These guys do the dishwashers and similar:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/appliance-and-equipment-standards-program
It all goes back to Obama
I'm willing to be mildly annoyed if my monthly power bill goes up a dollar or two, but by and large, I simply don't care about "climate" as an issue, and you will not make me. I like the idea of electric vehicles and I'm an induction cooking evangelist, but I just don't get viscerally upset about the environment. And if enviros can't get me to care, they're not going to get normies.
Do you care about… other human beings in general?
Not even necessarily about all other human beings present and future equally, as some EAs at least aspire to, but even just other people in the normal way where you care a whole lot about your close family and somewhat less about friends and distant family and somewhat less about your neighbors/colleagues/countrymen and so on?
Because that is really all you need to justify caring about the climate from a moral perspective. Global warming will predictably cause a great deal of harm to a great many people, quite a few of whom are going to be the sort of people you hopefully already care about .
No, that attitude by itself does not imply advocating for climate change, because you're asking the people of today to sacrifice for the people of tomorrow, and thus both sides can argue that the other side doesn't care about people.
It's not about sacrificing for people of tomorrow. People *today* are *already* being hurt by climate change in multiple ways.
Well, the people of today are being hurt by the climate change caused by the people of yesterday.
Not really (unless you’re being pedantic about “yesterday”). If you’re 40, ~half of all human CO2 emissions have been in your lifetime.
How so? There are obviously more people of tomorrow than people of today.
Firstly, that's not necessarily the case if you put the risk of technological extinction above zero.
Secondly, everyone applies *some* kind of discount factor to people distant to us in space and time, and if you have a sufficiently high discount factor, the people from sufficiently far in the future don't particularly matter when compared to the people of today. That was what I meant by my previous comment: empathy for people is by itself not enough to tell you whether to make sacrifices to mitigate future climate change, or to oppose those sacrifices; to disambiguate those positions, you need further assumptions.
Agreed. Morals, empathy, and appreciation for the natural environment is so cringe.
This leaves our such a big aspect of the case for investment-focused climate policy that it almost seems misleading. A major part of the case was that investment would generate its own political support, in the form of industries that would lobby for it and constituents who would value the jobs and investments in their communities, and so it wouldn't be repealed by Republicans. That's why the IRA funding went so heavily to red states.
If that case had worked, then we would have seen repeal of all the non-investment things that Matt mentions, but kept the investments in place. But that isn't what happened and consideration of strategy going forward needs to reckon with that.
Is it clear that the strategy didn't work? The industrial policy parts of IRA mostly get continued with OBBBA don't they?
As I understand it, all the manufacturing subsidies for batteries are still in place and the ITC & PTC for grid scale battery storage are still in place.
The main things that got killed were things Matt himself was in favor of killing, like EV subsidies and support for tech like wind and solar that's well into its learning curve and fully economic even without subsidies.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't agree with Matt on ending those subsidies so fast because even if the tech is well developed, those products deserve a subsidy to compensate for the market distortion from the lack of carbon and pollution taxes on fossil fuel emissions.
I will confess that I don't totally understand which things were killed and which were kept in the end. But eg https://x.com/tylerhnorris/status/1945629957499064613?t=7TQMXO7XbjUiDmX79AMuLw&s=19 (layoffs in the renewable sector) suggests that OBBB is killing lots of manufacturing and construction investment.
Absolutely. 50% of spend preserved means 50% of spend got cut and that'll definitely mean layoffs, less clean energy build, and more CO2 and pollution.
A big part of the immediate issue is the overall business climate. EV uptake in the US wasn't going to plan even before the election. On top of that, tariffs and now OBBBA are creating a perfect storm of risk and uncertainty and that's making everyone skiddish on capital investment right now.
In the end, it's a question of glass half empty or glass half full. After the election I expected things to go much worse than they did in OBBBA, but everyone's mileage will vary. Imagine an alterative universe where IRA didn't pass and MAGA Republicans got a Trifecta. What would you have placed the odds of them creating a law that dedicates $500B of government subsidies to fund clean energy and fight climate change?
BTW - Tyler Norris is a great X follow for sensible information about powering the AI data center buildout.
Not sure if you follow him regularly, but he's been great for understanding the importance of encouraging data center operators to deploy some load flexibility to avoid huge costs to ratepayers from overbuilding gas generation, which is what many utilities are pushing for.
The problem with that theory was that the industries that people were focusing on reshoring were not climate focused industries. Making reindustrialization about climate change cut its appeal, because it was perceived as a subsidy to special interests. The same money to onshore making generic drugs would have been perceived differently by conservative voters.
I don't think this makes sense. The case is about "how do we build a political coalition to support addressing climate change". Generic drug manufacturing is just not relevant.
My point is that general support for manufacturing is not easily transferrable to solar. Solar at scale is rapidly getting less popular from a one two punch of most solar projects being placed on woodlands and farms, and the huge scale of land use needed with AI data center expansion exploding electricity demand.
Data center use is expected to double by 2050, to be the largest US commercial use of electricity. At some point soon you are going to need clean energy sources that use less land, because if you don’t get ahead of it, you will lose the public. That means getting ready for nuclear, geothermal, or smarter use of existing space for solar. Getting ready for that is key.
What I don't understand is why there isn't more attention on developing geothermal technology. No matter where on Earth you are, underneath you is a limitless source of heat, if you can figure out how to tap it without the equipment being destroyed by the heat and pressure. Not an easy problem, but it seems solvable, and could make it eventually possible to essentially drill for electricity as we do for oil now.
I'm definitely worried about this trend, but I think the industry will mostly defeat this once it gets its political footing better established. Local opposition and delay tactics will always be a source of friction and add some to cost. Jigar Shah has been complaining recently about how docile the wind and solar industry has been politically and how they need to get their act together and start dedicating more resources to these political fights.
BTW - Here's a good example of what you're talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKv7WOXwmw4
We went through this in New England with on-shore wind and although it was a tough battle, in the end the pro-wind side mostly got to build what it wanted (after plenty of fighting). The key was that they didn't make much progress until they got smart about how to manage the politics better.
The thing is, you are looking at a real problem that is starting to organically drive politics, and instead of fixing the real problem, you’re trying to work the politics. Long term, that doesn’t fly.
Solar takes up a lot of land. If energy demand had stayed stable, and rooftop solar had continued to grow, land use might have been below the pain point. People like rooftop solar and even small standalone arrays. They like the idea of energy independence. They don’t mind industrial solar out of sight.
What you have now is new solar farms primarily going up over farm fields (flat, cleared, cheap to build) and in woodlands (previously carbon absorbing.). They’re kind of ugly, they hurt property values, many are causing runoff, and a lot of them are being placed in the sort of pastoral exurban communities that many upper middle class people have been moving to and many others visit on weekends.
Data centers are power hogs, AI is not popular, and the people benefitting are not well loved. So, supporting “beloved weekend retreat turned into industrial solar farm to benefit tech billionaire’s AI data center” is not going to be a vote winning position, no matter how you spin it.
I would put my political energy into nuclear, fusion, and better solar placement. Solar on buildings, parking lots, industrial fields gets zero opposition. Figure out how to work with what people want and can live with.
Maybe I've got this wrong, but my understanding is that the "solar takes a lot of land" talking point is mostly false, especially compared with other industrial land uses, especially for energy.
The big one is growing corn for Ethanol. My understanding is that solar is around 30x more efficient land use versus corn ethanol and if we converted all corn fields used for ethanol to solar farms it'd produce 2x or 3x the total electricity demand of the US.
There is still plenty of land in the desert south west. But you need transmission lines.
Or even better build the data warehouses next to the solar. It's more efficient to move the bits than the electricty
"d the huge scale of land use needed with AI data center expansion exploding electricity demand."
Projections show at most 12% of U.S. energy being used by data centers by 2028. 12% is not nothing, but is that "exploding" energy demand?
Absolutely yes. Energy demand was pretty stagnant for decades, the increase in demand has been a HUGE shock to the system. Now, I live in the biggest state for data centers so I'm a bit over focused on them, but they (and to a lesser extent, broader electrification efforts) have completely altered the playing field for electricity.
12% is less than the 0% it should be. Data centers only cause harm and we shouldn’t have to suffer them.
12% is nearly triple what it was in 2023. Which is nearly triple what it was in 2014. An industry tripling its energy use in nine years, and projected to triple again in five years, is explosive.
Adding about 8% overall energy demand in the US is, in fact, an explosion.
Just FYI: that's the UPPER estimate of data centers is 12%(The lower limit is 6.7% Which is 1.5x instead of 3x - that error bar makes a huge difference).
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers
But how does this connect to political support for manufacturing of solar panels?
It connects in that you are going to have very limited crossover support for subsidizing solar panel manufacturing. Not quite none, but not much.
You would probably do better to put political capital to streamline development and deployment of nuclear, and research and prototypes for fusion.
I don’t think this is true. The IRA’s credits for EVs and solar included clauses that required or incentivized US-sourced parts and assembly.
A lot of that investment still hadn't happened though because there is so much red tape.
When red tape takes 5-10+ years for anything to happen, that makes it a lot easier to pull the plug
Matt’s analysis ignores as it often does the actual reality of the climate crisis which requires fossil fuels to stay in the ground.
Catastrophic largely irreversible existentially dangerous global tipping points are now anticipated to be activated at temperature increases above pre-industrial levels of less than 2°C
All the damn investments in renewables won’t mean a thing if fossil fuels are continued.
So the question Matt and everyone here should be asking is what is an appropriate strategy to end the use of fossil fuels in the next few decades.
So far the trillions of dollars that the world community has directed towards renewable energy has not appreciably slowed down the use of fossil fuels which is still 81 % of total energy use across the planet in 2023 compared to 87% in 2010.
How does losing elections keep warming to less than 2C?
If the only way to win elections is to agree to allow warming above 2°C, then what exactly is the point of climate people engaging in elections at all?
The only plausible conclusion to reach would be that the entire climate movement should commit itself to extra-democratic means.
Well yeah, that was Andreas Malm's whole manifesto on the climate issue.
To keep warming below 3°C? It's not a binary, I assume the climate movement's goal is to keep the number as small as possible (without doing unacceptable things like asking developing nations to make sacrifices).
So you’re saying that there is absolutely no ability to develop a policy strategy and advocacy campaign that can rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels given electoral politics?
If that is the case and perhaps it is then it is inevitable that life as we know it on this planet will be no longer by mid-century if not sooner
I disagree that climate is an ‘existential risk’ for most of humanity—in terms of geologic history the earth has gone through phases of higher temperatures for millions of years at a stretch. That said, I agree climate change is important, real, and solvable, and it does pose existential risks for people who live in vulnerable areas. If a zero carbon lifestyle were cheaper and more enjoyable than the status quo, people would adopt it en masse. So instead of preaching for a bonfire of the vanities, we should strive to invest in the right technologies and skip the pain. The alternative is losing elections and letting the planet warm even more. As I said, people who live in low-lying areas do face existential risks from climate change, but those risks are not all-or-nothing, rather they scale with the severity of the problem. Consequently, it makes sense to do the best we can rather than going for broke to meet arbitrary targets, thereby making the problem worse, again, by losing elections.
What you ignore is the increasing evidence that existential irreversible climate tipping points may take the control of the climate out of humanity’s control with disastrous consequences everywhere not just in low lying areas.
We are not at that point yet but we are perilously close
according to perhaps the world’s best known and influential climate scientist Johan Rockstrom. He made that point in an interview I recently conducted with him
See the paper I linked to in a previous comment that demonstrates just help existentially dangerous our situation is.
But you are ignoring that the changes you want are not politically feasible. The death knell was the rise in AI data centers. And the land use to offset data centers with solar is staggering. And those companies are generally not paying those costs.
So it’s going to require a mix of nuclear, fusion if they figure it out, possibly better point source carbon capture with the newer absorbent materials, and mitigation.
> What you ignore is the increasing evidence that existential irreversible climate tipping points may take the control
So if I look at the IPCC models, I'll see things getting worse? It won't be that the worst-case scenarios have been penciled out to not happening?
Since when is the climate already within humanity's control?
There is 0.0000% likelihood of substantially reducing global fossil fuel consumption over the next 30 years.
Happily the existential doomer stuff is nonsense, but if you disagree good luck building your doomsday bunker or whatever.
"There is 0.0000% likelihood of substantially reducing global fossil fuel consumption over the next 30 years."
IMO, this just isn't true. The expert consensus of what's likely to happen over the next 30 years weights heavily in favor of a large decline in fossil fuel consumption somewhere between 20-50%. This is supported by projections from IEA, IEA (US), BloombergNEF and many others.
Even BP and Shell have "best case" forecasts of flat to slightly down demand and both include projections for what they themselves say are realistic scenarios that involve very dramatic declines in demand. I think Exxon is the only major that's downplaying the likelihood of a major demand drop off over the next 30 years.
I think It's totally reasonable to expect global fossil fuel extraction to peak and gradually begin to decline at some point in the next three decades while becoming a smaller and smaller share of overall energy production, particularly in advanced economies. What's absolutely not going to happen is the kind of precipitous collapse in fossil fuel production that's necessary to substantially alter the trajectory of atmospheric CO2 over that time frame. A 20% reduction over 30 years isn't substantial in the existential climate doomer context. Hell a 50% reduction tomorrow is probably ten years too late for what those people are predicting.
Certainly oil (and hopefully coal!) is likely to drop over the next three decades. Gas may have a longer curve.
Damn straight. So let's not try.
(Hey kids and grandkids, sorry about the planet but whatchagonnado, amirite?)
Perhaps I am not a careful reader as I don’t see your assertion backed up by any evidence whatsoever.
As for my assertion that the world is at high risk for existentially damaging collapse here is a paper from three years ago that persuasively argues that multiple tipping points with catastrophic consequences are likely to be activated at temperatures around 1.5° C
In 2022 1.5° C seemed like quite a few years off but because of the acceleration of global temperature increase anticipated by almost no scientist we are at 1.5° or so right now
“Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points.” Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950.
Part of the problem is that many of the climate models the last few decades have been wrong (remember in 2000 predictions of 30 ft sea level rise by now?). I've been following this topic since the 70s so I've seen a fair amount of dramatic contentions fizzle out. So with the opposition it's a bit of the boy who cried wolf thing. The theory is legit---vaporizing millions of years of fossilized carbon in the span of a couple centuries and there indeed may be a magic buffer that gets broken (like the Gulf Stream shutting down) but until most people see devastating effects it's going to be tough convincing them. I think the best way is to avoid that by making renewables/EVs more desirable than ICEs and such. A free market approach.
Respectfully you actually have it exactly Backwards as the vast majority of projections made by climate scientists on virtually every impact of climate change has underestimated the speed scale and scope Of these impacts.
20 years ago the consensus climate science was that irreversible tipping points might not be activated until 5° above pre-industrial temperatures and now scientists are largely in agreement that these irreversible tipping points are being activated below 2° C
There was barely a prediction at all that the AMOC my collapse this century until very recently and I could give many more examples
The world should be working a little more aggressively on climate action but it is a genuinely hard problem technologically, economically and politically. No one nation really makes a difference acting on its own and it seems like we’ve squeezed as much collective action out of the Paris agreement as we can.
The paper doesn’t say that.
First, it never says existential. Second, the paper says risks are “non-negligible”. That is not the same as “high”.
There have been multiple polls about this. They’re pretty consistent.
A majority of voters are unwilling to accept reductions in living standards or additional costs to phase out fossil fuels. There is a nice summary of how this polls including with key demographics over at https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-progressive-moment-is-over item 4.
When the polling on an approach is that bad, you really have to rethink.
If the facts of the issue are that either there is going to be a significant additional cost, or a reduction in living standards, or there is going to be a catastrophe within 25 years, then what? Obviously the situation is that the voters don't believe there will be a catastrophe, which is why they are not prepared to give anything up in exchange for preventing one, but what exactly do you propose?
It's a serious point: if the mass public is factually wrong on an important issue, then it's clearly a political advantage to say the thing that the mass public believes. But if that is factually incorrect, then the consequences are going to be harmful. Sometimes those consequences come fast (Liz Truss and her belief she could cut taxes, not cut spending and the bond market wouldn't care; the bond market did care), other times they take time and the politicians who caused the problem are long out of office by the time the consequences arrive.
Couple of questions. First, given that the US emits 10-11% of global carbon, how much additional short term difference do you think any given US policy change would make? Keep in mind, 89-90% of current emissions are non US and out of US voter control, as is existing carbon and ice loss. Going to zero today would not reset the atmosphere and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. How much difference do you think proposed changes would make in the next 25 years?
Pain vs gain is how the voters are calculating this, and what they seem to believe is, not much gain for the amount of pain. You cannot force this on people beyond the very short term. You have to make it in their own interest.
Second, which preventable catastrophes do you think the average voter cares about? If their own home floods or is swamped by sea level rise, yes. If some other person does, they may be sad, but will they be willing to pay more to prevent it?
I think relatively painless solutions like nuclear, mitigation, and eventually fusion are going to be the main sellable options. Work from home is another helpful policy. And mitigation needs to be focused as much as possible on things that are reversible and unlikely to have unpleasant side effects, which are big ifs.
If the consequence of 2.01°C is a catastrophic collapse in methane hydrates in Siberia which then triggers another 4°C of temperature rise, then everyone will care, because international trade will shut down and the last two times that happened we got the Bronze Age Collapse and the post-Roman Dark Ages.
If that threshold is 7°C, then we're probably OK.
I don't know what that threshold is. No climate scientist knows what that threshold is. It's probably in that range.
There are other scary positive feedbacks that have a threshold. These are the preventable catastrophes that I'm worried about.
I actually agree with you on the politics. I think we have to take the gamble on these catastrophes. I don't much like choosing to take a 5-10% shot that there will be a civilisational disaster, but I think the alternative is eco-fascism and that's worse.
> or there is going to be a catastrophe within 25 years, then what?
Credibly signal that you think that there's going to be a disaster by giving up all your traditional wish list.
I think a lot of Green activists are coming close to dropping "democracy" from their traditional wishlist, yes.
People who said we needed to lower our standard of living were also WRONG.
Technological progress in generation and efficiency WOULD HAVE been enough! What we needed to do was not create massive new energy demands with pointless bullshit like crypto. If it weren't for that emissions would already be falling. (One could get a little tinfoily about this if so inclined.)
AI has just made the energy demand problem worse, but unlike crypto has at least been useful (and could be transformative). I mean, an AI could end up solving this problem for us. (Hopefully not with the most straightforward solution, mass ecofascist culling of the human population.)
The crypto that accounts for … at high estimates, 0.9% of global electricity use, and hence less than 0.5% of all fossil fuel consumption?
That’s an offensively high amount of fossil fuel consumption pissed away on something worse than useless by people worse than criminals
Oh well if we’re only burning 0.5% (and rising) of our oil and LNG on A Complete Waste of Time I guess it’s fine.
(Crypto is probably worse than a waste of time, but that’s a philosophical argument about usury/gambling that goes back millennia so we’re not gonna fix that on SB comments)
Not just electoral politics either. China is not on track for net zero in 2050.
I'll come back to something Matt has come back to a number of times. What is you're strategy for retaking the Senate?
I'm actually more in your camp than "the eleaticstranger" as far as the risks posed by climate change. But precisely for that reason, I am with Matt that you need a viable electoral strategy for taking the senate and that means a viable strategy to win senate seats that Trump won by double digits. Because right now, given the MAGA version of GOP that exists, the chances of any legislation passing that makes a meaningful difference to climate change is zero except due to unintended second and third order effects (i.e. some rich person who got their tax cut extended in the recent BBB, uses some of that saved money to invest in a solar panel company).
I don't have delusions that a moderate senator from Texas is going to become a "Green New Deal" advocate. In fact it's likely he'll vote strategically for tax credits or other bills that help the oil industry. But moderate Dem senator from Texas is way way way more likely to vote for bringing back the subsidies from IRA than John Cornyn and especially (god help us) Senator Ken Paxton.
This is why the 2°C threshold is such a bad position.
The IRA subsidies and the like might mean we can max out at 2.5°C. If your position is that it's 2°C or bust and the situation is that we are bust, then you don't really care if it's 2.5°C or 5°C. Now perhaps there are catastrophic feedback effects at 2.01°C that will result in 7.5°C regardless - if so, then I guess that position is correct, and if you're saying "we can't get to 2°C democratically", then the correct strategy is to abandon electoral politics entirely and do something extra-democratic (and probably violent and I don't think anyone wants to start debating the details of violent extra-democratic strategies, ie terrorism, least of all the mods).
But if there isn't a threshold, if every 0.1°C makes things worse, then you adopt the best strategy you can to get the least emissions (and therefore the least warming) you can. There is no way we don't get to net zero or close by 2100; the question is how much emissions we have on the way down, and therefore how much warming we store up. And the less the better.
Move the conversation forward by providing citations showing we’re all dead by mid-century under business-as-usual. Convince us, gain allies who’ll help you convince others.
Every time this has been tried the public simply doesn't believe it or says "good thing I'll be dead by then" and puts it off. People are lazy and total shit at managing long term risk.
I’m not talking about the public.
Herb said “it is inevitable that life as we know it on this planet will be no longer by mid-century if not sooner”
I don’t think that’s true. I’m smart enough to read and follow a scientific paper. Show some cites, convince me, and other people like me, or how do you think you’ll have a chance with the public.
Oh, I thought this was more about the sentiment than literal meaning. Yeah, I don't think we'll all be dead but it will mean trillions of dollars in damages that will cause us to regret our decades of inaction.
If environmentalist leaders really believed the full doom-loop existential narrative equivalent to a planet killing meteor hurtling towards earth, I'd argue the IIJA would have looked much different - we'd spend a hundred billion a year *at least* to commercialize fusion technology and made small reactor nuclear a viable new energy source within 2-3 years. Instead we get gradual buildout of renewables and a hectoring, eat your peas regulatory approach on appliances and EVs. The claimed urgency doesn't match the actions taken. I think environmental groups are everything-bageling the issue and if you want someone to blame for our species' end if you're right about the stakes, then perversely they may share as much responsibility as Exxon.
Honestly we actually passed all the tipping points years ago, and green groups shoot their credibility by asserting new tipping points rather than admitting we're already locked in and need to find technological solutions.
A real problem with the "tipping point" model is the extent to which people are prepared to just go "well fuck it!" as soon as one of the tipping points becomes unattainable.
OK, we wanted to keep it to 1.5 - that's already gone. 1.5 is about where we are RIGHT NOW. That doesn't mean "we're all doomed and only extreme measures are cutting emissions to zero immediately are justified!" It means the situation remains "we should cut emissions as much as can be done without creating a massive political backlash that cancels out any gains."
There isn't a point where it goes from "okay" to "not okay" or from "not okay" to "skull and crossbones." 3 degrees is better than 3.2 degrees is better than 4 degrees... anything we can do to limit emissions will make our technological solutions work better towards mitigation.
The worst position of all is the "we hit the tipping point, that means even extreme measures aren't enough, so we might as well just burn all the fossil fuels and enjoy the 20 years or so we have left", which you see quite a bit of.
That's very bad. But what it really is, is "we hit all the tipping points, we're basically screwed, so we need to impose whatever conservation measures are practical while also spending a ton on technological solutions and hope we can mitigate it".
Your first paragraph is not actually true. For example, carbon sequestration or geo-engineering are two alternative solutions to the same problem. I'm not saying these don't have tradeoffs and downsides of their own, but it does everyone a disservice to pretend such alternative solutions don't exist.
Carbon sequestration is likely to require an infrastructure as large as the entire world fossil fuel infrastructure to remove sufficient quantities of CO2 to significantly minimize climate change.
I am very active in the Geo engineering space so I am more than familiar with it and almost no Geo engineering advocate argues that Geo engineering itself is sufficient. It needs to be part of a tri part approach including Accelerated emission reductions and large scale sequestrationI have labeled the Climate triad.
So I agree that in theory one could Geo engineer the planet and significantly reduce temperatures without addressing fossil fuels but the politics of that are extremely extremely difficult as not one government on the planet to date has indicated support for deployment of Geo engineering
I am one of a small group of folks who are doing everything we can to change that dynamic
It's not clear to me why the politics of geoengineering would be harder than that of fossil fuel reduction. For the latter, every nation needs to do it, which requires international agreement and cooperation. For the former, while it would be far preferable if there were international cooperation, it's in principle enough if one (rogue) nation does it.
Geo engineering politics should not be more challenging than the politics of fossil fuel reduction and we can only hope that as the climate continues to collapse that there will be some political leaders around the world who for whatever motivation will recognize that Geo engineering can rapidly reduce temperatures without requiring economic or behavioral sacrifices from the residents of the country.
And that should be easier and more straightforward.
Unfortunately almost every climate activist group around the world is strongly against Geo engineering for a variety of reasons none of which are in my view justified.
CCS: Why does everyone have to talk about every technology as all or nothing? We only need enough CCS to allow _some_ continued use of fossil fuel combustion in hard to substitute uses. We just give the same incentive for removing a molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere as for not emitting one. How much of which comes out the other end, who cares?
Agreed: we're not getting rid of fossil fuels for flying any time soon. But we can do CCS, or we can even do carbon capture without the storage and convert the stored carbon into jet fuel.
We've not found anything better than hydrocarbons for flying. Even space rockets, which can use any exotic chemical they like because the cost of the fuel is trivial compared to the cost of an entire rocket that is thrown away every launch, have converged on using methane, ie a hydrocarbon!
The lack of an alternative doesn't mean we can't run CCS for the limited residual emissions. Get rid of the carbon emissions from all the things where we don't have an alternative and then put in CCS for what's left.
Gransted. I guess we should say CCa and non-emission. The tax on net emissions would encourage that, too.
He's talked about this at length before, but the short of it is this is not a problem that the US can go at it alone and it doesn't make sense to cripple the US democrats with unpopular policies if we can't get the rest of the world to play along as that will just lead to worse results.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/global-warming-local-benefits
What is the plan to force China and India to stop using fossil fuels?
I wish we were building as much solar capacity as China.
GBU-57. But on coal mines rather than nuclear reactors obviously. THIS IS A JOKE. HAHA. But both China and India were signatories to the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accord.
"Catastrophic largely irreversible existentially dangerous global tipping points are now anticipated to be activated at temperature increases above pre-industrial levels of less than 2°C"
This is just factually incorrect. Latest modeling all shows that worst scenario's increasingly unlikely.
Not to mention the big changes that will need to happen will be in places like China or India.
The world will switch ONLY when renewables are the best option, not before.
that is not at all true. the glaciers are melting at a faster rate than expected. the ocean is warming at a faster rate. this is hugely impactful on weather phenomena globally and will have a spiraling effect, on such basic phenomena as the Gulf Stream itself. way more food shortages are coming, severe drought, in addition to flooding and massive habitat loss and deforestation that will cause more carbon to be released...it's a rolling snowball and every single amount of temperature rising makes things de facto way worse if you are seeing this even in terms of hundreds of thousands of lives lost--and it would be millions depending on the gradation--but then there is the economic outfall, and the world instability, and maybe middle class Americans living some places will be perfectly fine, but it will at least be worse, often hotter, which will of course require more energy expenditure. It is not a good time to buy into bullshit that disincentivizes immediate, large-scale change, this decade.
Doesn’t heating use more energy than AC?
It doesn't matter what the truth is because it's now a partisan issue. The best hope is to find geoengineering solutions to this.
Can you elaborate on "catastrophic" and "existentially dangerous"? Like, what will a typical day on earth look like after we hit the 2 degree celsius increase?
You gotta see Richard Gadsden's replies on various threads, if you really want to feel a chill down your spine.
I prefer the IPCC.
SSP3 is the bad place:
> SSP3 is characterized by a world where nationalism, regional conflicts, and security concerns dominate, leading to a focus on domestic or regional issues rather than global cooperation.
> This scenario involves slow economic development, material-intensive consumption, and persistent or worsening inequalities.
> In terms of climate projections, the IPCC report indicates that under SSP3, global temperatures are expected to rise by 3.9–4.6°C by 2100
The result is still economic growth over the next 80 years, per capita.
The higher the cost of keeping them in the ground, the less will be kept in the ground. A tax on net emissions will keep the maximum amount in the ground. That the strategy.
It's been 20 years since "An Inconvenient Truth" and in all that time the environmental movement has failed to convince Americans that we need to keep it in the ground. If you're right, then how do we actually get the American public to agree with you?
Make the greener technology better than fossil fuel sources. Eg---solid state batteries, if they live up to the hype, will be a game changer: 900 mile range, longer battery life, charge time not much different than a gas fill-up, and made with cheaper/more abundant materials than just lithium. We need to start selling this stuff to the public instead of punishing them for not using it with climate predictions they can't see happening.
What if you're both right? That we do need to keep it in the ground, but there's no way to convince the American public of this fact.
Bhutan is a Buddhist theocracy / dictatorship that prioritizes nature and mindfulness above all else. We could try that out.
We already have one major political wing that is hostile to democracy. Let’s not have two?
Can I just have the mindfulness without the theocracy? Or is that a package deal
That is the exactly the question that I am challenging Matt and you all to focus on. Instead of avoiding the reality that we have to rapidly stop the use of fossil fuels if we want civilization as we know it to continue we need to focus on developing a strategy that answers the question you ask.
While I have my own thoughts if Matt and the rest of you put your heads together to answer the question you ask I am confident that you all could come up with a plausible strategy to advocate to Climate leaders and Democratic Party officials.
If you think we hit all the tipping points before we reach 2 degrees of warming, then we might as well use all the fossil fuels we want, since it hardly makes a difference once we’re past the tipping points.
My hope is that more money would involve R&D in large-scale carbon removal from our atmosphere. Slow, halt, even reverse, global warming.
No idea how many people are working on this though....
Throw the kitchen sink at every sort of viable cleaner energy construction, and at R&D for developing new viable technologies, and hope for the best.
As a laymen that's my philosophy. Within that R&D include large-scale desalinization of water and carbon-removal from our atmosphere.
The best way to keep it in the ground (including winning elections to keep your policies in place) is to invest in innovation so that people prefer the alternatives.
Exactly. I love my Ioniq 6 and my induction stove. They are *so* much better than what I had before.
I just wish the national EV charger network was a lot better.
I am looking forward to when it’s time to retire one of our ICE cars and get an EV. (Well, I’m looking forward to the ‘having an EV’ part, not the ‘spending money on a car’ part)
I don’t get the irreversible tipping point idea. You can have both positive and negative feedback mechanisms, but obviously the negative feedback dominates overall within the relevant temperature range, as you can see by looking out your window, we don’t live on iceball or hothouse earth.
So then it is necessarily true that all tipping points are reversible, as a matter of physics.
As a matter of politics, green tech improves over time and the most easily accessible fossil fuels get mined out, temperatures get higher, we all get richer, put all that together and you see the politics of doing more about climate change get easier every year, not harder.
That is, unless you do actually convince people that we’ve already crossed all relevant “irreversible” tipping points.
Doesn't seem like the enviro groups have a better answer
One thing I always wondered about the Green New Deal was how we were going to balance the values of "community input"/"centering community voices" and replacing every hot water heater in America in 36 months.
As the teenage boy says in The Bling Ring, "You can't wear leopard print and zebra, you have to chose."
I’m sort of curious why electrification is struggling as much as it is as a consumer strategy.
I look at what’s available and think this or that electric category looks promising but in the us it seems like it’s only a luxury innovation market. I look overseas and see high quality at other price points but it’s very limited here.
One would have thought this would have been a huge opportunity by now but it mostly hasn’t been one.
Because the US blocks out those cool foreign products so a lot of Americans don’t even know about them and don’t demand them. Eventually we’re going to have a moment like Boris Yeltsin visiting a supermarket in reverse.
This is what it's like to watch reviews of Chinese electric cars. I understand and agree with the national security concerns against allowing the sale of Chinese EVs, but it's undeniable that they seem light years ahead of what American and Korean car companies are making. I still don't really understand why we can't make our cars that good? The Ford CEO admitted to driving and loving a Xiaomi, so shouldn't his engineers be able to recreate the magic.
Again worth noting that nothing is stopping BYD from competing in the US. They already do. They won the largest electric bus contract in US history and have already built a massive factory in California. They just delivered their 400th bus. They could do the same tomorrow and start selling the Dolphin Mini. The reason they don't is they'd be priced >$20k without the Chinese domestic market subsidies and also there's no US buyer demand for that car.
https://en.byd.com/news/byd-produces-400th-bus-in-lancaster/
EDIT: Geez, I missed the best example. Volvo is owned by Geely (#2 Chinese OEM) and already owns two production facilities in the US. The Polestar's are produced in South Carolina. Sales are struggling.
Wow, Volvo is owned by a Chinese company now? That’s kinda fucked! So much for its reputation for safety, I guess, if folks find out. Glad they have factories in the US, though.
I think it is an open question whether Chinese EVs could be produced at a comparable price point if they had to comply with US passenger safety laws, US workplace safety laws, and US labor laws, while paying US wages, and without the local parts supply chain that Chinese car manufacturers enjoy.
But I think you’re saying that the Chinese EVs are genuinely superior enough that they should be available here at *some* price point. That I hear.
It's not an open question. They absolutely can't. BYD just launched a dealership in Mexico City. The Dolphin Mini is their cheapest car and is priced at ~ $20k. This is ~ the same car as the Seagull sold in China for ~ $10k. You can ladder up the gross margin requirements proportionally for their higher priced vehicles for what they'd need to sell them for outside their domestic Chinese market.
Yeah, agreed; I was trying to use a phrase that indicated skepticism but I should have used a stronger one
Roger. There's no big mystery why BYD hasn't entered the US market yet. They don't have a product they can sell profitably. It's just that simple.
Great question. I think China set up a Hunger Games field of competition and threw a vast amount of money at it. They also have the population to support the kind of production that lowers costs through learning (and a huge amount of technological expertise).
It's the same thing with rooftop solar. It costs less than half as much to install in Australia as it does here. Which is insane since all the real technology is already being handled in China, and until recently the raw panels were cheaper here than in Australia!
I'm looking forward to the day that the Chinese finally figure out a way into the US market and we get access to an abundance of high-value EVs. Certainly after the last election, I'll never buy an American-made vehicle again.
I guess I don’t understand what’s causing us to be unable to produce them in a huge market.
Like we can produce really good 50-150,000 dollar electric cars but we have no real electric answer to the mass market. And I don’t know why we can’t.
Like even if we’re not importing these things it’s not like we’re sitting here unaware that better things exist.
I can really follow what we're "unable to produce"? The Tesla Model Y was the #1 selling BEV in **China** last year. The BYD Seagull was #2. The Model Y sold in China is a little different (e.g., LG vs. Panasonic batteries) and it's slightly lower priced but when you adjust for China's currency manipulation it's ~ the same price point. Which makes sense -- the production technology is identical; it's the same global gigafactory.
EDIT: The other big difference between the US and Chinese auto markets is how sophisticated / mature our used car market is. 75% of the vehicles we sell annually are used vs. in China it's still < 20%. So the reason we don't have a < $20k new BEV is a 5 year old Tesla Model 3 is already meeting the demand for that segment of the consumer market and it's still a better car than anything that could be produced at MSRP for that price point.
A vibrant marketplace for evs generically.
Like I have an accord hybrid that’s paid off and I like it a lot and if I wanted to replace it there’s quite a lot of options that are all pretty good but I chose the accord over the Camry I’m wholly subjective things. Mostly I like Honda’s seats more than Toyota’s.
Now I know a lot of Tesla owners who’ve convinced me that I do want an Ev. I’m not sure if I want a Tesla because i haven’t test driven it but like it’s mostly competitive with like a really tiny number of makes and models . There’s a lot less range than the market it’s supposed to be supplanting .
Characteristic American exceptionalism. They believe that because they have big houses and big cars, the rest of the world has nothing to offer. Actually, there are a bunch of posters on this board who subscribe to that view.
Even for infrastructure like internet access and cell service, the gap between the US and other industrialized countries is eye-opening, and not in a good way.
"I’m sort of curious why electrification is struggling as much as it is as a consumer strategy."
The technology and cost isn't there yet.
EV's are great for in town commuter cars. They are less great if you go on a trip. Yeah, you can make it work, but it's still a hassle.
Plus the costs still need to come down.
That's why plug-in hybrids are so great!
Our faithful old Prius finally died of old age (we took it in for routine maintenance and learned that it required repairs that cost more than the car was worth). So now we are leasing a shiny red Prius plug-in hybrid.
It's awesome! We get ~40 mile range on battery alone. We don't drive much (Husband and I both live within walking/cycling distance from work), so most days the car sits in our driveway during the day, when we can charge it off our rooftop solar panels. Most of our driving doesn't use gasoline at all. When we go for a longer drive, we get the first 40 miles off electricity, and then we just fill up with gasoline at a gas station like a regular ICEV, and we still get good mileage typical of a hybrid.
(The one annoyance is that once the battery is down to zero, it takes 9 hours to recharge it fully. We're not gonna sit around a charging station for 9 hours during a road trip! If we're staying at an AirBnB with a power outlet in the driveway, we can charge the car overnight.)
I'm at 270k miles on my 2002 Prius.
Really hoping to get to 400k!
My daily commute is 70 or 80 miles. I would love a plug in that went that far.
Im just not able or willing to spend the money
Ouch that sounds like a brutal commute. Hope the scenery is nice
It's rural so it's about 30 to 35 mins each way (the 70 or 80 miles is round trip).
A bit longer than ideal but doable to have my 20 acre ranch.
Yes the scenery it gorgeous most of the way
I'm curious what consumer level products you have in mind?
I think an induction stove is about the only thing I haven't bought fully into. And that is largely because I don't see much value in a kitchen renovation. Not to mention replacing most of my cookware. What category are we lagging overseas on?
Transport of all kind and rooftop solar both seem like people on Reddit are always posting nicer versions of especially in lower price tiers.
I got an induction stove with my house totally by Happenstance and it’s amazing fwiw. I’m not sure I’d tear my house apart for one.
Fully agreed on the induction stove. I'd be happy if it came in my house. I can't bring myself to want to tear up what I have to put one in. I could change my mind. I do already have a counter top oven that is quite nice.
At any rate, the desire is just for cars? I'm torn, as I am not opposed to electric vehicles. At all. It is hard for me to think people have really contended with the miles driven by many Americans, though? Google claims average yearly drive for China is 6400 miles. Same search says roughly half of what the average US driver hits.
That is to say, maybe the cheaper cars they have really are better. They tend to have vehicles that average half the age of a US driver, as well? We already have people gripe about how appliances don't last for as long as they ostensibly used to. Hard to swallow that with the idea that we should buy a car that is expected to be replaced sooner?
(Granted... I'm always blown away by the amount people are willing to pour into cars. Happily driving my luxury purchase of a Kia Soul. :D )
Induction stoves are just another shitty electric stove, and there’s not much worse than cooking with electric
I mean, no? Resistive coils are frustrating to cook with. Induction, though, is quite nice. With a good stove, you can literally control the temperature of the cookware down to the degree. It is borderline magic.
Idk, my MIL has one and I just wasn’t impressed. Nothing beats actually cooking over a flame. There’s a reason you never see a cooking show where they’re using electric, induction or no.
Are you sure it was induction? A lot of people mistakenly call their glass panel resistive cooktops induction. And yeah, those still blow.
Induction is faster to heat than gas. Almost frighteningly so. The biggest downside seems to be that you are likely to need all new cookware to take advantage of it. The stainless steel sets that we have, at least are not compatible with it. (Cast iron works, of course.)
When I got my new Samsung induction stove they provided me a set of compatible cookware for free.
Yeah, no.
But, fire
Almost every Matt Y piece these days descends into the following general pattern
1. Only "the groups (that don't control any actual votes)" have agency. Dem electeds are little flower petals who should not be "forced" into making bad decisions.
2. Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly? The only plausible reason for not doing symbolic things is because your communications suck. But that is not Matt Y's criticism.
3. Because delusional Biden let in millions upon millions of migrants and created chaos in low income communities and also had his brain fall out on live TV, thus losing the election, Democrats should basically abandon all their previous normative claims in every other sphere.
"Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly?"
Because optics matter. People can clearly see where Biden's priorities lie. And it wasn't bringing down the costs of gas, or increasing fossil fuel production.
Voters disagree.
If optics mattered, Trump wouldn't have won in 2024. His optics were downright shitty unless you were a teenage boy who thinks it's hilarious when the presidential candidate pretends to give a blow job to a mic at a campaign event.
I'll grant you one time when Trump's optics were genuinely impressive: when he stood up and raised his fist right after being shot. That was truly great optics and the one exception I can think of to what was otherwise a cesspool.
You and I both agree that Trump is bad (despite some other disagreements on optimal policy mix).
But I think voters took Biden's signals on stuff like oil and gas (and even more on immigration) as what his administration cared about, and they just really disagreed (I will note I did to).
I'm a right leaning person that does think climate change is real. But while I'm not against investment to boost green R&D, I'm also not one of the ones willing to pay a bunch extra to go green.
For example, I would be happy to put solar on my house if it actually saved me money.
But by far my bigger focus is getting down my $500k a month electric bill.
>$500k a month electric bill
Got a data center under the ranch, there, hoss? Maybe a reverse osmosis plant?
Three meters, two shops, and 200 amp service to the house. I also put the AC at 56 at night. I like it cold when I sleep otherwise I sweat.
>AC at 56 at night
Now that's living like a king. Unfortunately I would be the victim of immediate regicide if I tried that in my house.
"Optics matter" is just another way of saying "My communication sucks".
On the one hand we are saying Trump can try to cut Obamacare, blow up the deficit, break all kinds of criminal statutes, get convicted of crimes, and nothing matters because the median voter is too uninformed to care because those things do not affect them tangibly on the ground.
On the other hand we are saying "Optics matter" for Biden because even if something does not cause any tangible change on the ground, the same uninformed median voter is able to anticipate the second and third order effects of Biden's "symbolic" moves far into the future and react negatively.
This is clearly some eight dimensional chess.
Democrats and Republicans are held to wildly different standards by voters, also water is wet, Trump's makeup is orange, the bear defecates in the woods, nothing to see here, move along.
Exactly! We should acknowledge this obvious asymmetry and try to figure out a way to concretely deal with it.
My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups.
We should work on lowering the cultural legitimacy deficit if we wish to deliver better material outcomes for the people we say we care about without just parroting what the GOP is already doing along all policy fronts.
"My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups."
definitely some truth to that.
But I submit policies do matter to. Voters don't want open borders, nor do they want to give up their gas stoves or cars. And they want that gas to be cheap.
Voters want many things: High paying jobs but also low costs. Low taxes and also good benefits (for themselves). Clean air/water where they live but also chemical plants spewing pollution. Beach front properties in Miami but also low insurance costs.
I remember back when the GOP was calling for "personal responsibility" that it used to be the "cool and serious" thing among the DNC pundit class but since Trump gutted the Obama+Hillary+Biden version of the Dem party now the "cool and serious" things seems to be to say "shut up and give the voters what they want now now now!".
Part of this is centrists who are supposedly Democrats loudly agree w/ Republican arguments that Democrats suck on issue x in a way that never happens with Republican's attacking other Republican's, at least ones that stay in good standing.
This is also true of the Left, see anytime somewhat positive news about Biden's economy was shown, but while it was annoying on Twitter, there weren't a lot of left-wingers on cable or network TV slamming Democrat's.
For 40 years, every single Republican basically says, "Democrat's are evil weirdos who hate America" and that message bleeds through to even non-political people and honestly, a lot of Democrat's who are in more conservative spaces, especially when a "hey, Democrats are actually good" message is basically nowhere, even on spaces supposedly friendly to Democrat's.
Obviously, another part is that while the media as a whole to be liberal-leaning, the Beltway Political Media is right-leaning on economics at a minimum and politics in general and has bent over backwards for the GOP on TV for as long as I've been alive.
""Democrat's are evil weirdos who hate America""
Obviously this isn't true of the Democratic party as a whole. But just as obvious there are vocal segments of the Democratic coalition that have an anti-Western/anti-American world view. Particularly at elite institutions.
So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment.
The solution (for both parties) is to continually push back and say those values aren't are values.
Except the definition of 'evil weirdo who hates America' to the median Republican isn't the 1% of people who want to give it back to the Native American's, it's any person who has a more liberal social view than they do.
Sorry, this view from centrists that they just join in the hippie punching enough, you won't get called an evil leftist who hates America because you want a slightly higher tax rate on rich people and that 45% of the country won't believe the GOP when they say it has never been true.
Notice Republican's never say, "well, those open Gropyers who we put in actual charge of things are bad people." They just ignore they exist and attack, attack, attack all while every centrist Democratic pathetically is ready to genuflect and say, "yes, so many of people who vote for me are weirdos who I dislike. Please accept my apologies and the fact I don't like them either, just like you."
Also, reactionaries are the Republican base. 25-30% of America wants basically a pre-Civil Rights/Women's Lib/etc. America, with some exceptions for non-white people or women they personally think are OK. This isn't some fantasy, this is truth. Meanwhile, even the vast majority of Bernie votes just want a larger social welfare state and maybe some more liberal social policy than you may agree with.
"So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment."
The penalty (if any) that the GOP pays for the so called "a small segment of racists in their group" is next to nothing compared to the gigantic penalty Dems pay for hosting out-groups in their coalition.
The median voter may not be racist herself but she experiences much more cognitive discomfort when she sees an out-group member somewhere in an inner city shouting Anti-American slogans on FoX than when she sees her own uncle at Thanksgiving saying wildly racist things.
The situation is not symmetric at all. We see the same dynamic play out in many multi-ethnic democracies in the world.
+100
It is wild to me to derogatorily call enviro groups focus on reducing fossil fuels use a "taboo or hangup". The whole point of "green energy" is to reduce fossil fuels use. What are we even talking about if reduction is off the table? Should we pat ourselves on the back for deploying solar while simultaneously increasing emissions? It sounds to me like we're just accepting that we'll melt the ice caps and put Bangladesh under the ocean because any other outcome would mean temporarily inconveniencing Americans. One 51-49 electoral loss should not lead you to reverse all of your beliefs about what is scientifically necessary to avoid extremely bad results!
The point here isn't that you need to philosophically need to want emissions to rise forever. The point being made us that forcing emissions reductions by targeting voters stove choices is bad politics and ineffective at reducing emissions to boot. Emissions reductions will be a natural consequence of developing green energy that is actually superior to fossil fuels and you won't need performative and hamfisted regulatory schemes to make it happen.
I completely agree that appliance regulation is bad politics. However, the other half of this essay is excoriating enviros for trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions at all as opposed to just doing investment and crossing your fingers. If emissions reductions was a natural consequence of green energy development then we wouldn't be talking about permitting current *expansion* of fossil fuel extraction and usage. The "superiority" of green energy on a cost per watt basis ignoring climate change is an engineering question whose answer is not predetermined.
I think Matt's general point is that trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions will not come if it entails forcing a reduction in standards of living. That is just a non starter.
The corollary to that is environmental groups incorrectly equating the stopping of fossil fuel production in the US with reducing fossil fuel emissions. Stopping a pipeline, or ending fracking, or blocking the Willow project doesn't reduce any fossil fuel emissions, it just shifts fossil fuel production to other parts of the world.
Anything that reduces fossil consumption relative to taking no action will "reduce the standard of living". If there was no tradeoff, we could just do nothing. Investment approach also reduces living standards by consuming funds that could be used for other projects or welfare. The idea that we could never do anything that negatively impacts standard of living is just false, we have a 4% GDP military budget that does nothing for standard of living as we're construing it here.
Of course lowered domestic production is offset by increases foreign production, but only partially, not completely. The policy change moves the supply curve resulting in a reduction in quantity supplies albeit at an amount less than the reduction in domestic supply.
But the bigger issue is credibility. The problem obviously requires international cooperation, but the US has no credibility asking other countries to reduce consumption or production in the case that it is not willing to reduce its own.
If green energy doesn't become superior on a cost basis, then it will not replace fossil fuels.
That's pretty much the end of the story.
If you're going to be a fatalist, why talk about policy at all? Nothing is inevitable, and I personally refuse to acquiesce.
You either need to develop a cheaper/more effective technology or get off the hobby horse. This idea that you will ever get people to vote for mandating shittier energy sources that are more costly and unreliable is pure fantasy.
The idea that the government has no ability to regulate negative externalities of technology is just ideology. What is fantasy is imaging that the world where government takes no action is the best of all possible worlds.
I have LOTS OF THOUGHTS on this!
First of all, right after I criticize Matt Y in these comments for not paying enough attention to climate, he goes and writes a piece on climate policy! Great, timing, Matt, thank you 😊
Second, how do I say this? None of this is Matt's fault, because he's just observing (accurately) what's going on in our politics. Don't shoot the messenger! But it's just so goddamn depressing. To sum up: the American people are, with rare exceptions, too selfish to pay even the smallest price or inconvenience for the sake of climate, so politicians who care about it must be super brilliant 4D chess masters and tightrope walkers to sneak any kind of climate reform past the electorate, and it must be 100% carrot, 0% stick.
Meanwhile, as someone says, "nature always bats last" and nature doesn't give a fruit fly's fart about our politics or human psychology.
No, I am not one of the extreme "we are ALL GONNA DIEEEEE" doomers, but climate change is going to hurt a lot of people very badly. To any of you who are like "IDGAF about climate change, I'm cool, I'll just turn up my AC!" consider:
1. Do you like eating food? A lot of our staple crops are adapted to fairly narrow temperature ranges (it's not that they'll die outside those temperature ranges, but yields will drop severely). Climate change = food shortages = higher grocery prices, and we know how much American consumers love those!
2. From Claire Berlinski's Substack, the combination of more climate disasters plus Trump effing over FEMA = badness: https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/in-heat
>By [Bloomberg's] calculations, climate change cost Americans nearly a trillion dollars last year, mainly in skyrocketing insurance premiums, power outages, and cleanup after two massive hurricanes and the LA fires.3 This is more than 3 percent of our GDP. As they put it, this amounts to “a stealth tariff on consumer spending.”
Furthermore,
"Without FEMA, the cost of insurance will soar. Commercial insurance premiums will have to price in the risk of extended disruptions to business and ever-more degraded infrastructure. The soaring premiums will degrade the value of assets like industrial and commercial buildings... Coupled with the rise in the cost of health insurance owing to heat- and smoke-related morbidity and mortality, this is really going to hurt us. This isn’t theoretical; it’s happening already."
3. Any of you concerned about illegal immigration? You're going to absolutely LOVE it when desperately poor people are driven out of their homes in the Global South by the millions due to climate change-related coastal flooding, droughts, heat waves, crop failures, etc., and try to seek shelter in North America and Europe.
Also, I'm one of those bleeding-heart liberals who feels sad about people suffering and dying needlessly, as many poor people in the Global South inevitably will.
The only trajectory we have left for ourselves now is some combination of
1. Mitigation/adaptation (assuming economic growth in the global south).
2. Some attempts at geo-engineering
3. Mass conflict and death in some parts of the world
Humans are known to react very emotionally to anecdotal tragedy stories affecting individuals but mass death in far away places does not cause the same reaction (maybe for better or worse)
Economic Growth in Developing Countries (stupid Lefty "global south" phrase is stupid, yet enother euphamism on galloping euphamism... for God's sake stop the damn mealy mouthed evasions - poor(er) developing countries) is entirely in scope.
While climate change is a serious serious problem - and a serious threat particularly for geographies with limited water resources (Middle East North Africa, parts of Indian Sub-Con, northern Saharan 'shore' of sub-Saharan Africa -Sahel), solar power makes a wide range of development quite feasible (one can add rising CO2 levels in fact are having impact promoting dryland greening: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change - pure simplistic doomerism is ... simplistic
Is "global south" supposed to be woke terminology now? I've seen it used in economics discussions that no one associates with "progressivism". I personally have no qualms against "developing countries" and am old enough to even use the retrograde "third-world countries" description but I fail to see why "global south" should evoke strong emotions like say "pregnant people". Whose' claim at specialness is being denied when one uses "global south"?
1. Is wrong - at least in the US, staple crops would just move a few degrees north.
There's no "just" about any of it, you're talking about a massive undertaking and it wouldn't happen instantly. Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north" of where the crops currently are? What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."
“ Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north of where the crops currently are?”
Yes.
“What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."”
That will be a fraction of the cost of aggressive decarbonization.
Equally speaking there are modes of adaptation for many systems in place - irrigation certainly can be improved, and solar powered.
Lefty Greeny dropping their ideological hostility to genetic modification of plants for higher tolerances.
etc.
It is not per se wrong as too simplistic - remains slightly too doomer as it were.
The underlying point I believe I would second is Doomerism expressed as Planet Saving is essentially wrong as The Planet has gone through much worse. Human civilisation enabling ecoystem stability... another matter. Focusing on the rather more real and immediate that climate change does in fact impact agriculture, and that is no longer abstract, the educated Tree-huggers already Very Concern About the Environment (tm) but concrete.
If one is going to sell adaptation rather than sell it as Save the Planet, focus on "Save agriculture"
Of course many of these things are addressable through technology.
Solar power feed water reclaim (brackish desal, retreatment), genmod seeds for greater tolerances.
And on the other side, higher CO2 concentrations, plants actually love it for growth and it actually boosts respiratory efficiency (i.e. reduces water needs). Of course the trade offs don't necessarily balance but the Enviro Left treating CO2 like a toxic pollutant (erroneously extrapolating from pollution agenda) -it's not it's fundamental to life systems.