On the substance, MY points on electricity pricing impediment.: "Obviously to solve climate change, you need that expanded electricity generation to be as clean as possible. But what I’m saying here is that blocking pipelines does not summon clean electricity into existence. A permitting deal, by contrast, actually does increase the amount of clean electricity."
People outside of my sector often really do not know how much electrification is a fundamental climate win and both the MAGA-Trumpies and the Green Activists fall substantially prey to the Primary Energy Fallacy (for different reasons but often for oddly similar results).
And there remains a huge popular blind spot where everyone focuses on GENERATION (power plants etc) and not on applied useful energy getting to usage (so issues of connections, of congestion, of the two combined)
First, thermodynamically, electrification of processes is fundamentally more efficient than combustion - depending on usages (one has to exclude e.g. some high-temperature use cases) the conversioin of Energy to Work - or shall we say energy to useful output and not waste heat / waste is 40-60% more efficient. Combusution is structually inefficient in conversion to Work (it's however really useful in energy density for energy dense fuels so...)
So electrification of all possible processes can get global economy somewhere on the order of 40-50% to decarbonisation goals WITHOUT CHANGING GENERATION AT ALL on final useful energy applied, this from fundamental thermodynamic efficiency. [see e.g.
However we can not achieve economical electrification e.g. in cases like a New England where electricity pricing is really economically catastrophically high and strangling even at current usage. This chokes off electrification which structurally then impedes uptake (and generates backlash against electrification pushing).
Getting to real economy wide decarbonisation the pathway technologically is clear - it is the Elec Tech Stack and grabbing right now up-front the lower-hanging fruit of electrifiation of a wide range of processes (of which discourse is way too focused on consumers, but industry and commerce for God's sake is where huge usage is to address [of course this is my world, industrial / ulity scale]
Enabling conversion of broad swaths of energy usage to electrification gets one enormous efficiency gains that are both climate gains and well.... efficiency gains, Efficiency is productivity, productivity is growth!
There is not any good justification for the hair shirt strangling games of the Greeny Left - they are for me in my real work barriers.
More build. More grid at both Transmission and Distribution (of which both expansion plus modernisation).
The more elec demand there is so long as Supply can respond the more money pours into advancing the tech and more stuff is becoming feasible. More is better. More is growth. More is getting us to real achievement rather than silly administrative targets and declarations and yearly cycles of hand-wringing and doomerism.
Is there? All life forms we know of are carbon based. You see, carbon has some key chemical properties like being able to form four stable bonds, including double and triple bonds and chains of any length. Nothing else can be used to build complex molecules.
"Underpants gnome?" Isn't a more descriptive name for the strategy of reducing global CO2 emissions by impeding US supply of fossil fuels, "McKibbenism?"
As this is my world - they are utterly wrong-headed, the climate activists.
There is one thing in RenEnergy I need now: faster physical infra build times which are nearly 100% constrained directly or indirectly by permitting.
Grid Grid Grid.
The ideological approach to priviledge administratively strangling hydrocarbons gets you to one place: no needed progress on reforms and higher energy pricing that actually causes direct backlash against the agenda.
Strangle hydrocarbons administratively is 100% the wrong answer, making the build economics positive on RenEnergy which means both generation build but also a comprehensive from distribution to transmission level upgrading of the grid is the priority (this is infra spend that regardless is needed as the US grid is really in a pathetic sad-sack state)
On the merits, I think Matt's abundance/permitting argument is mostly right. But I don’t trust courts to enforce BF's written protections against discriminatory treatment strongly/quickly enough, and of course Trump will abuse his (considerable) powers 200%. So fossil-fuel projects will take full advantage of the new rules immediately, while wind and other renewables are delayed, obstructed, and litigated for 2 years. The statutory protections help, but they can't solve that asymmetry.
More broadly, I think this connects to why Dem politics has become more “expressive.” Representative democracy should mediate between voters’ values and objective constraints: politicians can tell their voters, “I share your goals, but this compromise is the best achievable outcome," but that only works if voters trust them, and now many rightly do not. The shutdown last year was a perfect example: instead of Dems openly voting to fold and then defending that to their constituents, politically safe members took the necessary votes while vulnerable ones postured against the outcome (aka lied). It might be tactically clever, but also makes voters reasonably wonder whether they can trust "the Dem establishment”, and I know many people (including some not on the left) who wanted to “burn it all down”, especially with moderate Senate Dems, in the aftermath.
Similarly on Israel, voters (at least Dems) are upset when they get a chance to see the abuses being perpetrated every day with their resources, but politicians have lied for 50+ years, talking about "shared values" and compromising with "difficult realities" that ignore the massive leverage available to the US.
So some of the demand to “fight” may be expressive politics a lot of it is also a rational response to a principal-agent problem: voters don't trust courts and norms, so they’re going to demand much more visible and inflexible forms of accountability.
Trust is part of it, but there's a different angle here where Matthew Yglesias fundamentally disagrees with you. He doesn't think the Democratic party domestically and the US abroad have massive leverage. He's not convinced that the green groups or the Democratic party establishment have a temporarily embarrassed durable governing majority. Similarly, he's not convinced that internationally the US has as much leverage as you think it does. Your position is one that rejects compromise. I'm not sure where I come down on that question, but it isn't just about trust. It is also about capability. What capability does the Democratic party (or some replacement center left party) have to govern and defeat the Republicans, because if you want improvement on climate, that is what has to happen.
I saw someone say Republicans and Establishment Dems are just bad cop/good cop and can’t unsee that now. What really seemed to confirm their use of “rotating villains” was when Jared Golden voted against an anti-war resolution that he himself had sponsored when it looked like a couple Republicans would vote for and it failed by one vote. There’s a lot I don’t like about Twitter but one good thing is that people can point this stuff out to rather large followings, who can then point it out to their IRL friends—the Dem Establishment seems to think we still live under media gatekeepers where these easily-caught tricks would’ve never been reported.
Narrrowly, it woud be OK if the permitting bill ONLY resulted in more finacially profitable fossil fuels project being built. Not as good as both, but better than the status quo.
And as another aside completely away from energy policy, Genevieve Guenther demonstrates two of the most insufferable social media traits in her handle: the Josb Barro observation of calling herself Dr. without being an MD (Wikipedia tells me her Ph.D. is in English Renaissance Literature(?)!) , and then including pronouns to be referred to that don't even make sense unless one is really deep into the weeds of that practice. And then the Hamsa emoji at the end is the cherry on top.
The appeal to authority of credential titles is annoying (I am a PhD, only rarely do people call me Dr.) I do have professional and subject expertise on climate change stuff.
The pronouns just feel dated and a signal of in group status.
I feel pretty uncomfortable when people call me by any title or even last name lol. Some of the other kids in my kids’ preschool call me by first name and I think—those kids are going somewhere. Reject hierarchy, embrace Quakerism.
I have anecdotes about English Renaissance literature people from my time in academia. One voted for Trump because her rich dad told her to. The other complained about being an adjunct.
Yes, you worked hard and achieved something difficult: you're entitled to insist. But doing so is more likely to reduce people's respect for PhDs than improve your rhetorical position.
As an aside, I absolutely hate the term "renewable" in energy discourse and wish it would go away. It is too many syllables and letters, and is misleading as to what the goal is here. For example, wood is a renewable resource, but it's not particularly *clean*. That's the word that we should be using--clean is one syllable, five letters, and gets to the point that we want energy sources that are not going to produce greenhouse gases or other air pollution into the common space of the atmosphere as a matter of the source itself.
I could see resistance to the term clean energy being on the grounds that it can include nuclear and hydropower, of which some environmentalists don't like for reasons unrelated to GHG emissions, even if both play a huge role in reducing such emissions. But in practice, "renewables" ends up getting used as a substitute for "solar & wind", which is the same number of syllables but more accurately describes the lion's share of energy being discussed here. Geothermal might be the only other source that's not a total edge case yet, but is also discussed significantly less than solar & wind.
And while I'm at it, I also don't like referring only to carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming mitigation, as there are other greenhouse gases that are of concern as well. Or even worse, shortening it to carbon--elemental carbon is not the problem at hand here.
Geothermal is functionally an edge case as the best version is very geographically restricted and the version you can build anywhere has an induced seismicity problems which functionally makes it very geographically restricted as you can't build it close to anything that would complain about that. Sure solar and wind have geographic restrictions but their restrictions are far, far, far less restrictive.
In the UK we replaved our main coal power station with American wood and after a spell in prison the Energy Secretary who ordered the conversion ended up the director of the company supplying the wood.
Yup, several pilot projects were shut down after the induced seismicity caused damage. Seems to have produced some worse earthquakes than fracking has. You could build around it but you need local buy in and the risk of a reasonably strong earthquake (peak recorded was 5.5) strangles it in the crib. It feels like a technology that might be very useful for places like Australia where they can put it somewhere mostly populated by people working in resource extraction or few enough people that can just be paid off, but then that messes with the economy of scales that would make a building program economical.
I suppose the more authoritarian states could also just build it and use repression to ignore the public complaints but those states don't have a problem with building coal (which is bad) or nuclear (which is good) which are likely more economically efficient.
1. Stonewall all fossil fuels forever (aside: it's so weird to name an LGBT inn after a reactionary President)
2. Continuously ratchet up standards for energy efficiency as backdoor coercive conservation
3. Eventually only renewables will be left to power our meagre electricity appetites
4. Net zero or even negative
...with the anticipatory retort that you'd rather be austere than dead, because global warming is literally existential risk, unlike fake regulatory capture marketing stunts like AI that destroy water by disrupting Van der Waals forces?
Britain has basically done this (Net Zero laws are incredibly restrictive) and the end result has mostly been extremely expensive energy (and associated political unrest) and us just importing more things made with cheap and extremely dirty coal energy. "Rather be austere than dead" only works if you can force it on the entire planet at once.
In re the "Stonewall Inn," Google AI claims that when it opened it was originally named "Bonnie's Stone Wall" (later "Bonnie's Stonewall Inn") and likely took its name from Mary Casal's 1930 lesbian memoir, "The Stone Wall."
They hold the public in contempt because misanthropy is at the core of their ideology. They care at least as much about the Swamy Swans and Trufula Trees as they care about people.
I feel like Matt takes out the trash with these dumb ideas from Guenther and Mckibben on a regular basis (probably because they’re putting dumb ideas out on a regular basis.) Do they ever respond substantively? I know that hoping for that moment of catharsis where your political opponent sees the error of their ways and repents is like expecting *this* to be the trap that that rascal Donald can’t slip his way out of. Still, how do they not feel shame for their nonsense?
I think Matt is misreading the five best states for electric vehicle savings, and should be reading it the same as he is for the five worst, which is as a regional phenomenon. What we have here are the three Northwest states that are buoyed by cheap abundant hydropower (along with plenty of good solar and wind potential) and two sunny Southwest states that, unlike Texas, don't also have a huge abundance of petroleum.
It's also that the west coast made their gasoline more expensive than the rest of the country with environmental regulations. The PNW offsets that somewhat with cheap hydro power. California just gets screwed on both gas and electricity. The pumping of crude in a given state doesn't have that much to do with the price of gas in that state.
I'm not sure if the green thought is entirely underpants gnomes logic. I think their Phase 2 is that American citizens are to be demanded to accept degrowth as part of blocking fossil fuels from being extracted. I think they're terribly wrong on that thinking, and the politics will continue to prove that, but I do feel that that's what they genuinely want as a tangible plan. Matt highlighted this in a recent tweet referencing how it's more important for someone like McKibben to reduce fossil fuel consumption than it is to increase clean energy production. Hence why permitting reform is not acceptable if it gives even an inch to any fossil fuel extraction.
I'd submit that's still a form of Underpants Gnome logic because, although you've labeled step 2, there doesn't appear to be any polling data or other political evidence showing it's true.
It's obviously not true, but they don't care, they think it's just something we have to accept for an immediate halt of any GHG emissions that they see as unacceptable and hold that everyone else should as well.
They pretend that people will rationally and democratically accept degrowth as a solution, but then try to enact degrowth through opaque channels and via bait-and-switch actions.
They refuse to acknowledge and address their positions on the merits!
Because "you will get poorer" is incredibly unpopular in a democratic system. Slipping it through the backdoor might at least achieve boiling frog status if you can keep a lid on inflation. The reality though seems to be that you can't hide the inflation from the electorate and they vote against you regardless.
I do hate that degrowth is the desired solution of progressives though, we have the solution for reasonably priced low/zero emissions base load energy, we don't have to suffer for the climate or suffer from the climate!
I wish this more directly took on the logic that is driving opposition to the permitting bill:
- if we get 2 degrees of warming, there will be disastrous impacts
- these disasters must be avoided
- therefore, we can only emit so much more carbon
- if we build and use this new infrastructure, that by itself will emit too much carbon
Unfortunately the premise that's wrong here is that we can avoid the disasters. The world is not going to hit the targets, and we have to keep working to not make it even worse.
Both advocates and opponents of the bill don't want to say this out loud (no one like pessimism in politics) but it's the truth.
I’d really like someone to explain to me (in a way that would pass an ideological Turing test) why pro-climate people don’t seem to think in cost/benefit terms.
There's a couple proposals that I know of that can possibly help with global warming: stratospheric particulates (sulfates are injected into the stratosphere for solar shielding) and olivine seeding in tropical waters (olivine promotes microorganism/plankton growth in nutrient poor tropical oceans--organisms grow/absorb carbon then die and take that carbon to the seafloor). If I were a climate activist I would jumping up and down to get low cost ideas to a broader experimental stage but they seem stuck on expensive solutions like carbon scrubbing and massive lithium storage banks.
Insofar as cost/benefit goes, getting EV batteries (solid state) to their theorized fruition would allow free market forces to produce the desired outcome: people will buy them because they are better than internal combustion engines.
Because colonization of activist movements by progressives (and pop neoMarxists) has pushed many voices out the conversation. Economists are treated as morally suspect and thus ideas like benefit-costs get thrown aside. (Because economists are apparently neoliberal shills or the priests of capitalism or other nonsense.)
I respectfully submit that the one-sentence explanation would be: The long-term effects of failing to reach net zero on CO2 emissions are so catastrophic (literal human extinction) that no short-term tradeoff can ever be worth it.
Well, yes, but the request was for presentation of the argument that would pass the ideological Turing test. It's a little blunt because I was trying to write fast, but I think it's accurate.
They do think in very eschatological terms, which is just factually wrong even the worst results of Global Warming wouldn't come close to human extinction. There does seem to be a clear Tom Holland style Christian element to their though processes.
100%. Most people simply do not believe there should be trade-offs in life. But, you know, people are busy and it’s hard to make the distinction between what “should be” and what “is”. Maybe they only have enough time to identify the ways in which they are dissatisfied, but not which cost-benefit trade-offs would be necessary to address their dissatisfaction (if it’s even possible).
I have the sense that a lot of environmental activists are motivated in part by an aesthetic objection to mass consumer society. That is, if we suddenly had unlimited zero carbon power that worked on jets and big SUVs, they would not love the result because they just don't like the idea of people jetting off to the Riviera or whatever at the dropping of a hat, or big ole Cajuns driving around in huge trucks.
How much of the opposition to cheap natural gas (which is definitely better than coal and oil) stems from a sort of hair shirt attitude that ultimate believes we should all live simpler lives because of some obscure moral imperative to live smaller, rather than because of the actual environmental implications?
there is indeed a vast amount of hair-shirtism amongst such activists.
NatGas and industrial electrification e.g. is net carbon positive versus not. Get there by steps that actually can be swallowed. (of course industrial electrifiction plus RE is even better but grid grid grid grid grid: everyone fucking focuses on installed generation but that quickly becomes competely wrong unless both Transmission (long-distance) and Distribuiton are upgraded)
Still fits, the stereotype is closer to "rich want us all to have and travel less while they jet around" which is fundamentally about mass consumer society.
That’s correct. They are a misanthropic movement. Pretending to care about the human costs wrought by climate change is just cover for their hatred of people.
Depends how you're defining misanthropic. If you're of the more abundance stripe then degrowth "solarpunk" society is anti-human flourishing. If you're more aligned with them then its a utopian vision of society where humans flourish alongside nature. I think the intellectuals of the movement are genuinely not misanthropic but I think the vulgar version espoused by *some* of the activists is functionally indistinguishable from just wanting people to suffer. As always the problem is that in online discourse you see your opposition as the worst of the movement.
On the substance, MY points on electricity pricing impediment.: "Obviously to solve climate change, you need that expanded electricity generation to be as clean as possible. But what I’m saying here is that blocking pipelines does not summon clean electricity into existence. A permitting deal, by contrast, actually does increase the amount of clean electricity."
People outside of my sector often really do not know how much electrification is a fundamental climate win and both the MAGA-Trumpies and the Green Activists fall substantially prey to the Primary Energy Fallacy (for different reasons but often for oddly similar results).
And there remains a huge popular blind spot where everyone focuses on GENERATION (power plants etc) and not on applied useful energy getting to usage (so issues of connections, of congestion, of the two combined)
First, thermodynamically, electrification of processes is fundamentally more efficient than combustion - depending on usages (one has to exclude e.g. some high-temperature use cases) the conversioin of Energy to Work - or shall we say energy to useful output and not waste heat / waste is 40-60% more efficient. Combusution is structually inefficient in conversion to Work (it's however really useful in energy density for energy dense fuels so...)
So electrification of all possible processes can get global economy somewhere on the order of 40-50% to decarbonisation goals WITHOUT CHANGING GENERATION AT ALL on final useful energy applied, this from fundamental thermodynamic efficiency. [see e.g.
Liebritch:
* More: https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/more-and-more-and-more-or-less;
* EU elec; https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/eu-proposes-unachievable-electrification;
** Make Electricity Cheap Again: https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/make-electricity-cheap-again;
* Staircase: https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/the-electrification-staircase-is
However we can not achieve economical electrification e.g. in cases like a New England where electricity pricing is really economically catastrophically high and strangling even at current usage. This chokes off electrification which structurally then impedes uptake (and generates backlash against electrification pushing).
Getting to real economy wide decarbonisation the pathway technologically is clear - it is the Elec Tech Stack and grabbing right now up-front the lower-hanging fruit of electrifiation of a wide range of processes (of which discourse is way too focused on consumers, but industry and commerce for God's sake is where huge usage is to address [of course this is my world, industrial / ulity scale]
Enabling conversion of broad swaths of energy usage to electrification gets one enormous efficiency gains that are both climate gains and well.... efficiency gains, Efficiency is productivity, productivity is growth!
There is not any good justification for the hair shirt strangling games of the Greeny Left - they are for me in my real work barriers.
More build. More grid at both Transmission and Distribution (of which both expansion plus modernisation).
The more elec demand there is so long as Supply can respond the more money pours into advancing the tech and more stuff is becoming feasible. More is better. More is growth. More is getting us to real achievement rather than silly administrative targets and declarations and yearly cycles of hand-wringing and doomerism.
> More to life than carbon
Is there? All life forms we know of are carbon based. You see, carbon has some key chemical properties like being able to form four stable bonds, including double and triple bonds and chains of any length. Nothing else can be used to build complex molecules.
Beryllium never had a chance.
Points for the amusing angle (however not entirely clear nothing else biologically can work, but certainly on earth nothing else beats carbon basis)
Matt drops silicon-based shadow biosphere hot take when???
"Underpants gnome?" Isn't a more descriptive name for the strategy of reducing global CO2 emissions by impeding US supply of fossil fuels, "McKibbenism?"
The term describes a broader logical fallacy than just McKibben's takes.
As this is my world - they are utterly wrong-headed, the climate activists.
There is one thing in RenEnergy I need now: faster physical infra build times which are nearly 100% constrained directly or indirectly by permitting.
Grid Grid Grid.
The ideological approach to priviledge administratively strangling hydrocarbons gets you to one place: no needed progress on reforms and higher energy pricing that actually causes direct backlash against the agenda.
Strangle hydrocarbons administratively is 100% the wrong answer, making the build economics positive on RenEnergy which means both generation build but also a comprehensive from distribution to transmission level upgrading of the grid is the priority (this is infra spend that regardless is needed as the US grid is really in a pathetic sad-sack state)
I think the missing variable here is trust.
On the merits, I think Matt's abundance/permitting argument is mostly right. But I don’t trust courts to enforce BF's written protections against discriminatory treatment strongly/quickly enough, and of course Trump will abuse his (considerable) powers 200%. So fossil-fuel projects will take full advantage of the new rules immediately, while wind and other renewables are delayed, obstructed, and litigated for 2 years. The statutory protections help, but they can't solve that asymmetry.
More broadly, I think this connects to why Dem politics has become more “expressive.” Representative democracy should mediate between voters’ values and objective constraints: politicians can tell their voters, “I share your goals, but this compromise is the best achievable outcome," but that only works if voters trust them, and now many rightly do not. The shutdown last year was a perfect example: instead of Dems openly voting to fold and then defending that to their constituents, politically safe members took the necessary votes while vulnerable ones postured against the outcome (aka lied). It might be tactically clever, but also makes voters reasonably wonder whether they can trust "the Dem establishment”, and I know many people (including some not on the left) who wanted to “burn it all down”, especially with moderate Senate Dems, in the aftermath.
Similarly on Israel, voters (at least Dems) are upset when they get a chance to see the abuses being perpetrated every day with their resources, but politicians have lied for 50+ years, talking about "shared values" and compromising with "difficult realities" that ignore the massive leverage available to the US.
So some of the demand to “fight” may be expressive politics a lot of it is also a rational response to a principal-agent problem: voters don't trust courts and norms, so they’re going to demand much more visible and inflexible forms of accountability.
Trust is part of it, but there's a different angle here where Matthew Yglesias fundamentally disagrees with you. He doesn't think the Democratic party domestically and the US abroad have massive leverage. He's not convinced that the green groups or the Democratic party establishment have a temporarily embarrassed durable governing majority. Similarly, he's not convinced that internationally the US has as much leverage as you think it does. Your position is one that rejects compromise. I'm not sure where I come down on that question, but it isn't just about trust. It is also about capability. What capability does the Democratic party (or some replacement center left party) have to govern and defeat the Republicans, because if you want improvement on climate, that is what has to happen.
I saw someone say Republicans and Establishment Dems are just bad cop/good cop and can’t unsee that now. What really seemed to confirm their use of “rotating villains” was when Jared Golden voted against an anti-war resolution that he himself had sponsored when it looked like a couple Republicans would vote for and it failed by one vote. There’s a lot I don’t like about Twitter but one good thing is that people can point this stuff out to rather large followings, who can then point it out to their IRL friends—the Dem Establishment seems to think we still live under media gatekeepers where these easily-caught tricks would’ve never been reported.
"Rotating villains"
That encapsulates the last 15 years of maligned populism well.
Narrrowly, it woud be OK if the permitting bill ONLY resulted in more finacially profitable fossil fuels project being built. Not as good as both, but better than the status quo.
Completely agree. I work in the solar industry and the "green" opposition to these type of bills from some in our industry truly aggravates me.
And as another aside completely away from energy policy, Genevieve Guenther demonstrates two of the most insufferable social media traits in her handle: the Josb Barro observation of calling herself Dr. without being an MD (Wikipedia tells me her Ph.D. is in English Renaissance Literature(?)!) , and then including pronouns to be referred to that don't even make sense unless one is really deep into the weeds of that practice. And then the Hamsa emoji at the end is the cherry on top.
The appeal to authority of credential titles is annoying (I am a PhD, only rarely do people call me Dr.) I do have professional and subject expertise on climate change stuff.
The pronouns just feel dated and a signal of in group status.
I feel pretty uncomfortable when people call me by any title or even last name lol. Some of the other kids in my kids’ preschool call me by first name and I think—those kids are going somewhere. Reject hierarchy, embrace Quakerism.
Are you able to sling takes on English Renaissance literature while you're putting your subject matter Ph.D to work?
I have anecdotes about English Renaissance literature people from my time in academia. One voted for Trump because her rich dad told her to. The other complained about being an adjunct.
The "Dr" thing really drives me nuts.
Yes, you worked hard and achieved something difficult: you're entitled to insist. But doing so is more likely to reduce people's respect for PhDs than improve your rhetorical position.
If you must put it in your twitter name, you can put phd at the end, which is way less pretentious than calling yourself Dr
If her statements stood on the merits, then she wouldn’t need to appeal to the authority using credentials.
As an aside, I absolutely hate the term "renewable" in energy discourse and wish it would go away. It is too many syllables and letters, and is misleading as to what the goal is here. For example, wood is a renewable resource, but it's not particularly *clean*. That's the word that we should be using--clean is one syllable, five letters, and gets to the point that we want energy sources that are not going to produce greenhouse gases or other air pollution into the common space of the atmosphere as a matter of the source itself.
I could see resistance to the term clean energy being on the grounds that it can include nuclear and hydropower, of which some environmentalists don't like for reasons unrelated to GHG emissions, even if both play a huge role in reducing such emissions. But in practice, "renewables" ends up getting used as a substitute for "solar & wind", which is the same number of syllables but more accurately describes the lion's share of energy being discussed here. Geothermal might be the only other source that's not a total edge case yet, but is also discussed significantly less than solar & wind.
Absolutely. Nothing is renewable.
I just want us to promote the research and development of geothermal via our fracking industry.
Instead of "renewables" the word should be, "zero net CO2 (and other GHG) emissions technology."
That's even more of a mouthful.
And while I'm at it, I also don't like referring only to carbon dioxide when it comes to global warming mitigation, as there are other greenhouse gases that are of concern as well. Or even worse, shortening it to carbon--elemental carbon is not the problem at hand here.
Swindar energy. There.
Geothermal is functionally an edge case as the best version is very geographically restricted and the version you can build anywhere has an induced seismicity problems which functionally makes it very geographically restricted as you can't build it close to anything that would complain about that. Sure solar and wind have geographic restrictions but their restrictions are far, far, far less restrictive.
In the UK we replaved our main coal power station with American wood and after a spell in prison the Energy Secretary who ordered the conversion ended up the director of the company supplying the wood.
Is the seismic shaking why we haven’t seen a boom in new geothermal using knowledge from fracking innovations?
Yup, several pilot projects were shut down after the induced seismicity caused damage. Seems to have produced some worse earthquakes than fracking has. You could build around it but you need local buy in and the risk of a reasonably strong earthquake (peak recorded was 5.5) strangles it in the crib. It feels like a technology that might be very useful for places like Australia where they can put it somewhere mostly populated by people working in resource extraction or few enough people that can just be paid off, but then that messes with the economy of scales that would make a building program economical.
I suppose the more authoritarian states could also just build it and use repression to ignore the public complaints but those states don't have a problem with building coal (which is bad) or nuclear (which is good) which are likely more economically efficient.
Thanks for sharpening my point, then.
... well me I just say RE (although then in wrong circles people think real estatem... sad face).
All I want for Xmas is more goddamn grid. Grid grid grid grid grid grid.
We need to get Ja'Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson to do the Griddy for the grid.
Isn't the theory of change something like:
1. Stonewall all fossil fuels forever (aside: it's so weird to name an LGBT inn after a reactionary President)
2. Continuously ratchet up standards for energy efficiency as backdoor coercive conservation
3. Eventually only renewables will be left to power our meagre electricity appetites
4. Net zero or even negative
...with the anticipatory retort that you'd rather be austere than dead, because global warming is literally existential risk, unlike fake regulatory capture marketing stunts like AI that destroy water by disrupting Van der Waals forces?
Britain has basically done this (Net Zero laws are incredibly restrictive) and the end result has mostly been extremely expensive energy (and associated political unrest) and us just importing more things made with cheap and extremely dirty coal energy. "Rather be austere than dead" only works if you can force it on the entire planet at once.
In re the "Stonewall Inn," Google AI claims that when it opened it was originally named "Bonnie's Stone Wall" (later "Bonnie's Stonewall Inn") and likely took its name from Mary Casal's 1930 lesbian memoir, "The Stone Wall."
Thanks, didn't see the connection to the Confederate general.
Nitpick. Stonewall Jackson was never a president. He was a confederate general (read: slaving bastard)
Edit: Yeah, I think avalanche Genesis thinking "Old Hickory".
?
Sorry, still getting lost navigating nested responses.
No worries.
"You'd rather be austere than dead" is what I was getting at in my top level comment with "demanding that degrowth be accepted".
They hold the public in contempt because misanthropy is at the core of their ideology. They care at least as much about the Swamy Swans and Trufula Trees as they care about people.
I feel like Matt takes out the trash with these dumb ideas from Guenther and Mckibben on a regular basis (probably because they’re putting dumb ideas out on a regular basis.) Do they ever respond substantively? I know that hoping for that moment of catharsis where your political opponent sees the error of their ways and repents is like expecting *this* to be the trap that that rascal Donald can’t slip his way out of. Still, how do they not feel shame for their nonsense?
I think Matt is misreading the five best states for electric vehicle savings, and should be reading it the same as he is for the five worst, which is as a regional phenomenon. What we have here are the three Northwest states that are buoyed by cheap abundant hydropower (along with plenty of good solar and wind potential) and two sunny Southwest states that, unlike Texas, don't also have a huge abundance of petroleum.
It's also that the west coast made their gasoline more expensive than the rest of the country with environmental regulations. The PNW offsets that somewhat with cheap hydro power. California just gets screwed on both gas and electricity. The pumping of crude in a given state doesn't have that much to do with the price of gas in that state.
I'm not sure if the green thought is entirely underpants gnomes logic. I think their Phase 2 is that American citizens are to be demanded to accept degrowth as part of blocking fossil fuels from being extracted. I think they're terribly wrong on that thinking, and the politics will continue to prove that, but I do feel that that's what they genuinely want as a tangible plan. Matt highlighted this in a recent tweet referencing how it's more important for someone like McKibben to reduce fossil fuel consumption than it is to increase clean energy production. Hence why permitting reform is not acceptable if it gives even an inch to any fossil fuel extraction.
I'd submit that's still a form of Underpants Gnome logic because, although you've labeled step 2, there doesn't appear to be any polling data or other political evidence showing it's true.
It's obviously not true, but they don't care, they think it's just something we have to accept for an immediate halt of any GHG emissions that they see as unacceptable and hold that everyone else should as well.
In any case, I just made an edit to clarify this.
They pretend that people will rationally and democratically accept degrowth as a solution, but then try to enact degrowth through opaque channels and via bait-and-switch actions.
They refuse to acknowledge and address their positions on the merits!
Because "you will get poorer" is incredibly unpopular in a democratic system. Slipping it through the backdoor might at least achieve boiling frog status if you can keep a lid on inflation. The reality though seems to be that you can't hide the inflation from the electorate and they vote against you regardless.
I do hate that degrowth is the desired solution of progressives though, we have the solution for reasonably priced low/zero emissions base load energy, we don't have to suffer for the climate or suffer from the climate!
I wish this more directly took on the logic that is driving opposition to the permitting bill:
- if we get 2 degrees of warming, there will be disastrous impacts
- these disasters must be avoided
- therefore, we can only emit so much more carbon
- if we build and use this new infrastructure, that by itself will emit too much carbon
Unfortunately the premise that's wrong here is that we can avoid the disasters. The world is not going to hit the targets, and we have to keep working to not make it even worse.
Both advocates and opponents of the bill don't want to say this out loud (no one like pessimism in politics) but it's the truth.
I’d really like someone to explain to me (in a way that would pass an ideological Turing test) why pro-climate people don’t seem to think in cost/benefit terms.
There's a couple proposals that I know of that can possibly help with global warming: stratospheric particulates (sulfates are injected into the stratosphere for solar shielding) and olivine seeding in tropical waters (olivine promotes microorganism/plankton growth in nutrient poor tropical oceans--organisms grow/absorb carbon then die and take that carbon to the seafloor). If I were a climate activist I would jumping up and down to get low cost ideas to a broader experimental stage but they seem stuck on expensive solutions like carbon scrubbing and massive lithium storage banks.
Insofar as cost/benefit goes, getting EV batteries (solid state) to their theorized fruition would allow free market forces to produce the desired outcome: people will buy them because they are better than internal combustion engines.
Because colonization of activist movements by progressives (and pop neoMarxists) has pushed many voices out the conversation. Economists are treated as morally suspect and thus ideas like benefit-costs get thrown aside. (Because economists are apparently neoliberal shills or the priests of capitalism or other nonsense.)
I respectfully submit that the one-sentence explanation would be: The long-term effects of failing to reach net zero on CO2 emissions are so catastrophic (literal human extinction) that no short-term tradeoff can ever be worth it.
They could still favor the most cost effective way to get to whatever goal they set.
The basis of that is fundamentally wrong
Well, yes, but the request was for presentation of the argument that would pass the ideological Turing test. It's a little blunt because I was trying to write fast, but I think it's accurate.
Liked but I don’t think this requires literal human extinction. Instead, various levels of biosphere desruction below that are still failure states.
They do think in very eschatological terms, which is just factually wrong even the worst results of Global Warming wouldn't come close to human extinction. There does seem to be a clear Tom Holland style Christian element to their though processes.
All the integrated assessment models show that future people will be vastly wealthier than people now. Climate change will just be a drag on growth.
Do most people believe in it?
People get angry when it is applied to health or education decisions.
100%. Most people simply do not believe there should be trade-offs in life. But, you know, people are busy and it’s hard to make the distinction between what “should be” and what “is”. Maybe they only have enough time to identify the ways in which they are dissatisfied, but not which cost-benefit trade-offs would be necessary to address their dissatisfaction (if it’s even possible).
I have the sense that a lot of environmental activists are motivated in part by an aesthetic objection to mass consumer society. That is, if we suddenly had unlimited zero carbon power that worked on jets and big SUVs, they would not love the result because they just don't like the idea of people jetting off to the Riviera or whatever at the dropping of a hat, or big ole Cajuns driving around in huge trucks.
How much of the opposition to cheap natural gas (which is definitely better than coal and oil) stems from a sort of hair shirt attitude that ultimate believes we should all live simpler lives because of some obscure moral imperative to live smaller, rather than because of the actual environmental implications?
there is indeed a vast amount of hair-shirtism amongst such activists.
NatGas and industrial electrification e.g. is net carbon positive versus not. Get there by steps that actually can be swallowed. (of course industrial electrifiction plus RE is even better but grid grid grid grid grid: everyone fucking focuses on installed generation but that quickly becomes competely wrong unless both Transmission (long-distance) and Distribuiton are upgraded)
Isn’t the stereotype that a lot of them do like to fly around the world a lot?
Still fits, the stereotype is closer to "rich want us all to have and travel less while they jet around" which is fundamentally about mass consumer society.
That’s correct. They are a misanthropic movement. Pretending to care about the human costs wrought by climate change is just cover for their hatred of people.
That's a straightforward insane take; their vision is utopian and intended to avert a catastrophe that would in fact be good for humans.
The problem is they don't game it out further than averting catastrophe and this is common amongst utopians of all stripes.
Depends how you're defining misanthropic. If you're of the more abundance stripe then degrowth "solarpunk" society is anti-human flourishing. If you're more aligned with them then its a utopian vision of society where humans flourish alongside nature. I think the intellectuals of the movement are genuinely not misanthropic but I think the vulgar version espoused by *some* of the activists is functionally indistinguishable from just wanting people to suffer. As always the problem is that in online discourse you see your opposition as the worst of the movement.
That's my sense too. Indeed, run from utopians of all sorts.