I especially agree with the part about this issue being an underrated aspect of class dealignment in politics.
For the more committed environmentalists, they seem to *need* something both publicly noticeable and slightly inconvenient to experience the positive feeling of "doing something". Witness low-flow shower heads, paper straws, banning plastic bags, banning gas stoves. Each is a little annoying while providing miniscule tangible benefit. It is akin to going to confession and doing penance to cleanse one's soul of sin.
I just finished reading We Have Never Been Woke and a theme in that book is the tendency for, what the author calls symbolic capitalists, to use coercive displays of values to burnish their commitment to a cause (usually linked to an oppressed group of people) in place of taking obvious actions. The result is often harmful to the cause. An example is universities giving land acknowledgements and then not taking the obvious step of offering free tuition to the decedents of the people whose land they built the university on.
I think you hit on the same dynamic. Railing against plastic straws is a great way to signal your alignment with a cause without having to explain why you still choose to fly instead of taking trains or drive instead of taking the bus. And it is ultimately harmful to the cause because of the backlash this kind of finger-wagging hypocrisy.
Not to get on a tangent, but what I find so useful about the book is that it made me realize how far my own head has become lodged up my ass, e.g., in pointing out the finger-wagging hypocrisy of land acknowledgements and plastic straw bans I am engaging in the same dynamic that I am criticizing. And, you know, admitting that you have a problem is the first step to overcoming it, right?
I kinda feel like you (<- generic slow boring reader, not you personally, though probably also you personally) actually do advocate for policies that tangibly redress wrongs you are also symbolically finger wagging against? Ex: YIMBY, higher taxes to fund CTC, carbon tax, congestion pricing, etc. It's one thing to rail about gas ovens at a meeting you pulled up to in your gas guzzler, it's another to scold people for something that you yourself are not meaningfully being hypocritical about.
But more generally, yeah, nobody likes a scold. Being publicly annoying is the worst thing someone can do on behalf of their cause.
I'll just pint out that the plastic bag ban* provided significant tangible benefits. The Potomac in particular saw a significant decrease in waste in the river after DC enacted their law, and other places seem to observe noticeable local effects. There's a reason the first plastic bag ban was in Bangladesh, which isn't a hotbed for environmentalism.
The mania over plastic straws was ridiculous though.
The thing about plastic bag bans is now stores use thicker plastic bags (which are even worse for the environment) bc they call them reusable yet no one really reuses them except for kitty litter or bathroom trash like they do with the thinner bags as well. I’m for plastic bag bans - I’ve seen how much nicer the Anacostia in DC is now. But it should apply to those thick bags too.
Well said, it needs to be pointed out with extreme clarity how this stuff pisses off normal people. And I say this as someone who doesn't like using straws, finds plastic bags to be unwanted clutter, and does not think that gas stoves are the answer! (But the showerheads....ugh, from my cold dead hands on that one!)
You really hate Obama's regulations on shower heads don't you. (We just need proper pricing of water which is something that MattY's article points to, changing regulations to enhance efficiency. But that is hard.)
Plastic bag bans do lower litter, the same with bottle deposits and Styrofoam bans. Gas stoves... just need an education campaign about the dangers of indoor air pollution and we need better electric ranges.
Paper straws suck.
Nevertheless your point about environmentalists treating these as moral crusades still stands. We should implement policies based on benefit cost, not emotional reasoning.
They're more significant when it comes to energy consumption (assuming hot showers), about 2¢ per gallon-minute. A daily 15-minute shower with an old 5.5 gpm showerhead would cost close to $50 per person per month (11¢/kWh equivalent), versus a 10-minute shower with a 1.5 gpm showerhead that would be under $10 month for one person.
Fair enough, but also, we’re rich. $40 a month? I can spend that on one DoorDash order.
If Americans want to spend some of their money on luxurious long hot showers with great water pressure, I think it’s a real political vulnerability if our party is the one telling them that they are forbidden.
Of course, water distribution doesn’t work this way. Droughts tend to span broad areas which include numerous isolated reservoirs that are unused for agriculture and merely supply residences.
This seems unlikely to be important in practice. Do you have examples of drought vulnerable urban areas that don't share their water supply with agriculture?
(Also, national requirements for low-flow shower heads seem like a really poorly targeted way to deal with some isolated localities having water supply issues.)
I feel like we are in medieval times when the glories of the Roman Empire -- aqueducts, public sanitation, widespread literacy, high-flow shower heads -- have been lost and the public is living in squalor and misery.
"Gas stoves... just need an education campaign about the dangers of indoor air pollution and we need better electric ranges."
First we need good-faith studies looking at how much indoor air pollution there is from gas stoves. Sealing up a room and cranking up the burners until you measure a high level pollution does not tell us anything useful. Ignoring the amount of the pollution that comes from the cooked food itself also means you aren't doing a fair comparison. I suspect that a good faith evaluation would show the added effects of using a gas stove to cook compared to electric is pretty minimal.
The main problem is that people don't ventilate when they cook. Gas stoves are worse than electric due to the the simple fact there is combustion. The amount of particulate matter in an enclosed space it just going to be a function on the amount of gas used.
This is why there are non-profits trying to push people away from charcoal stoves to electric ones in the developing world.
We are talking about the marginal difference between gas and electric. Searing steaks, in your example, would be differenced out. You don't need experiments to mechanically back out what comes out of combustion when we have pretty accurate values for the amount of PM2.5 released from burning a cubic meter of natural gas.
"We are talking about the marginal difference between gas and electric."
I disagree. We're talking about the effects of cooking on indoor air quality (and really, we're talking about the downstream health effects of that, which is also questionable). If the dominant effect is *the cooking*, then why bother tinkering around the edges?
Maybe the gas effects are more than cooking in general. But the studies I've seen take extreme steps like literally sealing off the room with gas burners on but don't factor in the effect of actual food being cooked. So I don't take them seriously in the slightest. In fact, it moves my priors to thinking that cooking with gas is totally fine, if they have to rig the game to that extent to get the answer they're looking for.
But if the marginal effect of replacing gas with electric over a full year is less than the marginal effect of one fewer steak per year (I have no idea if that number is right) then it would tell us a more productive target for our concerns.
One thing that makes answering this question particularly hard is that the actual amount of indoor pollution as a result of using a gas stove vs. electric stove depends a great deal on one's individual cooking habits? How often do you eat at home vs. eat out? Do your favorite foods take 10 minutes or 60 minutes to cook? Do you cook with a higher flame level than needed? And, of course, the size of the kitchen matters, as does whether you leave your windows open while cooking.
Of course, one can conduct surveys of a bunch of homes and calculate averages, but the fact is, as an individual, you don't really care about averages, you care about your home and your health, and your numbers are going to very wildly from the average, depending on your individual habits.
Isn't the solution then to not ban gas lines to the kitchen, but require ventilation to an outdoor space be included if there's a gas line there? Seems like that would shift the argument away from "banning stove choice" to "being lax on safety standards".
After spending a lifetime in domestic construction and reading this discussion I wonder if anybody has heard of exhaust hoods and long standing makeup air requirements for any properly installed gas appliance. This is fabricated static hampering real policy. This is simply dumb public policy that fixes nothing, pisses off the general public, makes for more energy consumption and sales for appliance manufacturers, adds to land fills, the uniformed feel better about themselves and instills resistance within the general public when legitimate energy policy is attempted.
to achieve the benefit of the vent hood you need to run the fan on high the whole time the burner is on and perhaps a few minutes afterward, do you think most people will use the fan that way? They are pretty damn loud.
Are you saying exhaust hoods are already required for new construction with a gas range? I couldn't find a satisfactory answer when looking around briefly online, so if yes, then the whole "controversy" about gas ranges is really silly, because anyone worried about indoor air pollution from them can solve the problem with the flick of a switch.
I’m not in construction and I am aware there are rules on exhaust hoods and ventilation for gas appliances. There’s ventilation rules even without gas appliances.
I don't get what the hang up is with even the current electric ranges. We didn't want the air pollution and were on a tight budget for our kitchen reno so we converted to all electric and not even the higher end induction - just the basic electric - and they're perfect for everything we throw out them. Our last condo had a higher end Wolf stove / range and I can't think of a cooking style we'd rather have gas for.
You may have a much better electric stove than I do, or you are smarter than I am, but I genuinely find it a huge PITA to cook on mine. It's really hard to regulate the temperature. It's not the end of the world, but there is a very noticeable negative difference from a gas stove.
It was just from Home Depot. We do cook with nice stainless steel pans and let them heat up before cooking - so maybe that's a difference or it's more that the pan helps neutralize the negatives. But we both swear the temp. / sear control we have for eggs and fish is better than we had with the gas range.
I think the real answer is, with electric stoves, you have to get in the habit of physically taking the pan off the burner if it gets too hot. If you just leave the too-hot pan on the burner, yeah, it's not gonna cool down fast enough and your stuff will burn.
I haven’t had an electric stove since the olden days of coil burners (in the house I grew up in) but induction is *magical*. So fast and responsive. You can actually simmer! Maybe you could swap out for one at some point?
I have the impression that induction cooktops are priced bizarrely high in the US, in a way I don't understand. It seems to me like they're way, *way* cheaper here in Germany despite our 19% VAT etc. Like, we recently bought a good 60 cm induction cooktop for <~500€, and even great ones cost <1500€. Of course arbitrarily expensive ones *exist* here, too, but I nonetheless find the contrast baffling. For instance, in a current Wirecutter article, the cheapest recommended cooktop is $850, and two recommendations cost $2800...
#NoSpoilers since we haven't watched season final but -- totally agree. Great season. It's one of my favorite shows. We still go back and to re-watch the best Kim-Joy episodes.
You can buy one for a hundred dollars. We have one for that purpose. We had hoped it would be more useful for other things, but the cheap one doesn’t have great controls.
I think this is good policy solely for not having to build in gas lines to new construction. All-electric new construction is just better for the long term, since you don't have to maintain gas lines as well as electric ones.
“Easiest steps possible” sounds good, as long as you’re assessing it in terms of, “How much climate benefit for how little political pain?”
My understanding is that gas stove bans specifically poll poorly and the gains are miniscule. 150kg of CO2 per year of emissions for the average family with a gas stove. Even with zero switching cost (new buildings only) and zero emissions from electricity (assumed future zero carbon grid), that’s just too tiny to be worth spending any amount of political capital on.
Instead of a gas stove ban, just mandate new construction without gas lines. Call it “preventing underground explosions in residential neighborhoods.” Save money on insurance and construction costs—and on stoves, the electric ones are cheaper. Leave the gas stoves to us folks in old (and ironically, mostly Democratic) cities that have had gas lines for a hundred years.
We don’t get to dictate how our proffered policies will be discussed. The policy you are proposing, when it has been proposed in the past, has been discussed as a ban on gas stoves. When the public is polled on it, they are not supportive.
But that’s just because it was framed as constricting consumer choice in the service of preventing global warming. What I remember reading at the time was that most of the people who objected—like people in red states, suburban/exurban areas, lived in places where gas stoves were not an option anyway, because there were no gas lines. I think if you polled people about would they like to have new housing that cost less to buy and to insure, that would poll pretty well.
I think we could win the battle for mandating electric stoves for new construction.
Other than builders (who would adjust) who is really going to the mat to fight this? I mean, it's significant that the Republicans try to turn this into "they'll make you replace the gas stove in your home." And the Democrats say, "Nope, usual Republican lies."
In deep blue jurisdictions, sure. But doing so will damage the Democratic brand nationally, which has real climate change costs.
More than that, I just don't see how this policy makes sense on the merits. If you taxed gas at a reasonable social cost of carbon, running a gas stove would be about $2 more expensive per month than it is now. Of all the ways we can trade utilons for lowered carbon emissions, how is this the one that makes sense?
I think it would be dumb for a Democratic administration to seek to ban gas stoves in new construction. I'm not sure what the basis would be for a nationwide ban. And the Biden administration is attempting no such thing, nor did the 2024 Democratic platform breathe a word about it.
"Requiring" stuff like electric stoves, or prohibiting stuff like gas lines, is usually a bad idea, that's just more regulations which will make housing more expensive. How about alternatives like "encouraging" X, "incentivizing" X, "removing regulatory barriers to" X, "removing subsidies for" not-X, etc.?
Would requiring electric stoves make housing more expensive? We already require houses to have electrical wiring. Why wouldn't eliminating a gas pipeline (especially if the house is otherwise electrified) make housing cheaper?
Are gas lines currently required? If eliminating them would save money without meaningful disadvantages (or even with disadvantages to consumers eventually, as long as they don't affect the developer or reduce initial demand), and it's already legal, why isn't new construction already like that?
Some is, and old construction too. In my current residence (not a new building), I have an electric stove, and even with those annoying coil burners, I wouldn't prefer gas, so it's intuitive to me that not having gas lines is good. But the market doesn't need to be forced to do things that are clearly beneficial to the seller and the buyer -- regulation is more for protecting third parties, limiting easily-missed damages, enforcing honesty etc. As a buyer, if option A was better than option B on all relevant dimensions (safety, air quality, cost etc), I would simply always buy A, and sellers wouldn't need a law to tell them that.
One very general argument is that by introducing any extra regulation, you're making some housing projects on the margins no longer profitable, which reduces housing supply, which increases housing prices.
If you don't find this argument compelling, how about this one: if developers thought it would be more profitable not to include gas lines in their housing planning, they could do that already. Since they do include them, they must naturally think it would be more profitable to do so.
Magic 8 ball says, "You bet!" Renewables/batteries are increasingly a cheaper option for electricity generation and over time an electric stove will result in less fossil fuel consumption than a gas stove, as more and more electricity from the grid will come from renewables.
You know, that's been my knee-jerk reaction when I see someone in a mask - but then I try to remind myself "it's flu season, does this person seem on the older side, are they maybe immuno-compromised?" One thing Covid did is make it a little less weird for people to wear masks and as long as there's not this social pressure to do it unnecessarily, seems fine to me.
Yeah I wear it at the doctor’s office and on planes, bc of the recirculated air. But am not a Nazi about it. Bc I will take it off to eat my biscoff and drink my ginger ale. I just hate being sick.
I don't have a problem with random individuals masking, I just have a holdover reaction from like early 2022 when people were still performing Covid-induced masking and it was kind of like "we're still doing this...?" I was replying to a comment saying something similar, and saying that I was trying to get past that initial "ugh, come on" reaction and recognize that the average individual masking probably doesn't care about what I'm doing in the same way they may have 2-3 years ago.
Except, as mentioned above, there are plenty of people for whom wearing a mask while doing routine things like shopping, is actually a wise thing. Your assumption that they're all or even mostly secular penance is likely wrong.
It seems different to me than secular penance. It seems to be born of fear. In some (many) cases that can be justified fear! But having talked to a bunch of mostly older folks still wearing them, their concern seems to something like: "the pandemic isn't over dammit, mpox is spreading, rcv is rampant, and everyone is crazy for not treating the situation with more concern."
I now put on a mask when I've been exposed (but don't think I'm sick) but must go out. It's a low-cost intervention to reduce my chance of infecting someone else(but again, only when I have reason to believe I'm way more likely than baseline to be infectious)
I've had the same thought, but during the pandemic many people found that wearing masks helped with seasonal allergy problems. Fall is one of the most difficult times for many of them.
Texan Democrat of the oil and gas industry here pointing out that antagonizing the oil and gas industry is a not-small reason that losses in south Texas have been worse than in other Latino regions (including other Latino border regions like Arizona).
Canadian and Norwegian center-left parties can talk about climate change in a way that’s still proud of their domestic oil and gas production. The US is new to the “oil and gas production is so big as to be macroeconomically significant” group of countries, and Democrats are seriously tripping over themselves in not updating their positioning accordingly.
Especially when their actual policy is boosting domestic production to an all time high! Biden should have been giving speeches outside Texas oil rigs.
Yes, it doesn't seem tremendously hard to say "OK, we should use less fossil fuels, but that change won't happen overnight, and in the meantime it would be great for oil and gas users to buy American instead of Russian or Saudi."
The shock of the 70s and continued concerns until about 10 years was enough for pretty much our entire relevant population (baby-boomers on) to internalize the net-importer mentality.
Like it or not, yes. Voters want their egos stroked! Or at least not to be thought of as the bad guys, which I do think is a fair characterization of the mainstream Democratic politician/media view (not Bernie but like Brian Schatz, Chris Murphy, Chris Hayes, etc.). Don’t think the oil and gas industry is unique in this way.
Norway's oil companies are partially state-owned, and significant shares of their income are diverted to the national pension / sovereign wealth funds that now hold and invest something like $350,000 per Norwegian citizen. I would also be proud of THAT arrangement.
>> "But it does mean saying a firm “no” to degrowth and embracing real cost-benefit analysis and maybe even (in the right macroeconomic environment) returning to carbon pricing. "
The combination of doomerism and a degrowth mindset underpins much of the democratic rhetoric on climate action, even while dems get most of the big stuff right in the actual policy space. This messaging fail, made worse by an insistence that climate messaging always has to include social justice and identity politics messaging, has seriously eroded public support for Biden's otherwise sensible policies on climate. While this stuff mostly results in bad optics and reduction of public support, it also makes the climate action dems pass much more convoluted than it ought to be for no good reason.
It's similar to democrats echoing talking points from "the groups" on defunding the police and opening the borders to everyone.
Yeah, the thesis is that environmental groups were built to deal with local pollution and then ham-fistedly apply those solutions to global issues. Lead drinking water for poor black kids in Flint, MI does count as environmental racism or whatever you want to call it. But climate change is global and therefore doesn't care about American concepts of racial identity, so the concept doesn't make much sense in terms of climate.
"Climate justice" as it is often referred to, is not just if it decarbonizes the economy on the backs of the poor. These are people who will be disproportionately harmed by increased energy prices, and any climate policy needs to keep their needs top of mind.
Climate justice just seems like more red tape and mandated administrative hurdles to check boxes off. In practice it is not focused on efficiency, effectiveness, or really outcomes.
How do we do that? Calculating disproportionate impact isn't trivial. It seems to me that our focus should be on not increasing energy costs at all if this is a big concern.
Assuming we're only talking about U.S. policy and people, could subsidize lower-income people to help pay for their energy usage. (Have to be careful or that starts driving up usage again - better to make it a flat cash grant that offsets expected energy cost increases)
Nah, the mainstream view on climate justice is about the "global south" and the legacy of colonialism. The steel-manned case is something like, the rich west already was able to industrialize and reap the benefits of CO2 based externalities. Further the developed world tends to be located at higher latitudes that might even benefit from a warmer climate, or at least be less adversely affected. Thus justice would indicate that the developed west should "compensate" the "global south" for this disparity. And then of course, that ends up justifying the same old socialist and degrowth prescriptions that have been being pushed for 50 years or so.
To my mind though, the real answer is exactly what Matt argues for: abundance. The answer isn't to payoff underdeveloped countries to remain that way, with their citizens remaining in relative poverty, it is to increase innovation, trade, strengthen the global order such that it can maintain peace, and having a world with a richer global south that both can better mitigate climate impacts but also can afford to address their own local environmental issues is going to be better for everyone.
I’ll start by saying I think Matt understates the concrete benefits to regular Americans of fighting climate change. Not sure you can talk about cost-benefit analysis without talking about the actual costs of increased number and intensity of natural disasters as well as increasing number of heat waves.
Second, I’m a bit worried Matt is going down the Andrew Sullivan path; making your personal beefs the basis of your political analysis. For Andrew it’s thinking that the people who he thinks got him fired from New York Magazine are the actual masters of the Democratic Party. Matt is nowhere this deluded (yet) but I worry that because Matt very clearly gets more (mostly unfair) grief from extreme lefty environmentalists he’s starting to overestimate how powerful they really are.
Having said all that I thought Matt’s most astute point is that a huge problem environmental groups have is too many of them were born in an entirely different era. I actually think there is parallels to colleges in that these institutions were created for an entirely different world than exists today.
In other words institutions and institutional status quo bias really matters. Because as I noted above I think Matt is underplaying the climate crisis. And yet his prescription is mostly right to me which makes it truly disappointing when climate activists decide he’s the enemy because the frame of reference for these organizations world view hasn’t been properly updated for the current era.
I think the political problem lefty environmentalist orgs pose to the Democratic Party is very real. While people in the US will certainly be harmed by increased natural disasters, many voters Dems lost don’t think about cost like that.
For these voters, it seemed like Biden was focused on controlling their lives (gas stoves) or capitulating to environmentalist demands on oil production (even though it was at an all time high!) when cost of living was clearly the number one issue on their mind. The Democratic Party brand got completely intertwined with caring about climate change more than caring about the economy, and they’re paying a political price for that.
The passive construction "The Democratic Party brand got completely intertwined with <insert politically toxic position>" is, I think, outdated. The right-wing media ecosystem will assimilate a proposed regulation (regardless of when or from which administration it originates) like the one about indoor air pollution and then bounce it around the echo chamber until it becomes "Democrats want to ban gas stoves", which dovetails nicely with other fictions about banning hamburgers and forcing everyone to drive EVs and use heat pumps. It all feeds into a master narrative that has roots in the old right-wing media's complaints about the nanny state and big government. A decade ago, these narratives were contained in the Fox News Cinematic Universe, but they now seep through podcasts and social media and become conventional wisdom.
Trump ran on "drill baby drill" despite the huge increases in fossil fuel production under Biden and the fact that oil companies themselves say that they don't want to drill new wells. The details of reality don't matter because the narrative has flipped from "Republicans want to poison the air and water" to "Democrats want to take away the things you like". I think sometimes we focus too much on the crazy stuff the climate doomers and degrowthers say and fail to recognize the importance of these big, non-specific narratives that have taken root.
In this comment section today we have people saying we should ban gas lines in new construction, and CARB did in fact effectively ban tailpipe emissions starting 2035.
These are not fictions, Democrats and liberals do in fact hold these opinions and are in fact trying to advance them politically.
And the leader of the Republican Party said shoplifters should be executed without trial. Yet conventional wisdom is Republicans are tough on crime and Democrats want to ban hamburgers. Policy and rhetoric seem to be metabolized into mainstream narratives that are asymmetrically harmful to liberal causes.
Using CARB as an example, California is basically following the same policy as Norway, where *new car sales* eventually become 100% EV. Norway has been subsidizing EV sales since the 90's and "completed the EV transition" this year. But most cars on the road still burn gas. Characterizing California's EV policy as "effectively banning tailpipe emissions" is exactly the kind of metabolite the media ecosystem produces and it plays into the narrative that Democrats are totalitarians who want to take away all your favorite things.
“Policy and rhetoric seem to be metabolized into mainstream narratives that are asymmetrically harmful to liberal causes..”
The mainstream narrative was that Trump held a literal Nazi rally in NYC. I don't think it's helpful to have liberals act like they're asymmetrically victimized by media narratives because the counterexamples are so readily available.
The point of CARBs action was to force people into EVs. True or not?
Yah, but what I'm saying is that "Trump held a literal Nazi rally in NYC" is the *mainstream media* narrative, which "we" take to be synonymous with the mainstream cultural narrative. But I don't think that is actually true anymore.
The "national conversation" still takes place in national newspapers, network news and the Sunday shows. But I think it has become divorced from the mainstream media diet. Like, if you just grabbed a random person off the street and asked if Trump had a Nazi rally in NYC, more of then not you'd get a blank stare. But if you ask them what the median Democratic politician thinks about any issue, more of then than not you'd get a tossed salad of half-truths with plenty of right-wing croutons.
This obviously all anecdotal, but the outcome of the election shows that a majority of voters, in a country where Trump constantly espoused fascist dicta, called for immigrant interment camps and proposed a hugely inflationary tariff policy, decided that whatever Democrats were proposing was worse. And, like, my Trump-hating hippie mom asked me if chemtrails were real.
The position was ‘these are things liberals get blamed for, but don't actually want’, and I'm demonstrating that yes, in fact, they do want these things.
I don't entirely disagree with this take, but I'm not sure what it implies as far as how Democrats can respond or overcome the right-wing "take something minor and benign and make it the second coming of Stalin" effect. Is it that they just can't and we're screwed?
I don't think that dynamic has changed much, and both sides do it. What has changed is that the "mainstream media" no longer sets the narrative. I think the "we" lost control of the cultural narrative and live in a bubble that can't reckon with the fact that we've never watched the top ten shows on Netflix or heard of whatever YouTube bro just interviewed Trump.
In the wake of the election, I've come to the realization that I am basically in a conversation with a small group of people who write articles at places like The Atlantic, Slate, NY Times, Washing Post, etc. and talk to each other on podcasts about the articles that they write. I'm used to the idea that the people in my life who listen to right-wing talk radio and watch Fox News are engaged in a different conversation.
What I didn't expect is that, upon hearing me recount some of the stupid MAGA conspiracies, my kids look up from their cereal bowls and casually inform me that these things are common knowledge in adolescent world. It is infused into the discourse, in YouTube, in-game chats, etc. They know all about raw milk and crypto and various Trump-related mysticism.
We don’t know how people get their information. I’m 80. To me, the whole world is the Times, the Post, the nets, cable TV. It dawned on me we don’t do anything. So what I’m trying to do, Greg, is to get people interested and get the right people to do an exhaustive, detailed, well-fielded, well-constructed survey on media consumption—I cannot tell you, I just talked to a pretty active political consultant that did focus groups with black voters in Milwaukee. They’re on TikTok, I don’t even know what TikTok is.
It strikes me that the Biden climate policy was excellent. Maybe it would help electorally to pick public fights with the groups, but substantively I have no problem with the Biden administration and where the Democratic party stands.
True! But there's a reason why the Biden admin is thought to be so intertwined with left environmentalist groups.
Public fights with the groups and not pushing for low-impact high political cost things like combustion engine EOs, played a big role in creating that perception.
I'm not sure which EO you're referring to, but the EPA regulations (i.e., not an EO) will help drive adoption of EVs over the coming decade, and that's a very good thing and worth one thousand battles with The Groups in terms of actually helping fight climate change and moving the nation to the far superior EVs.
The hostility to fossil fuel producing and transportation project in the US has a ridiculously high cost per ton of global CO emissions reduced.
IRA should not give subsidies to _investment in_ CO2 reduction but to _the reduction_ on sheer efficiency grounds. In addition, giving the subsidy for reduction woud make the cost per ton reduced more transparent and presumably would weed out projects that would not be chosen if we had the tax on net emissions that we should have.
The administration did nothing to reform the COP approach of seeking arbitrary % reductions in CO2. This does not mimic the effects of taxation of net CO2 reductions at all!
The fact that taxing net emissions is not yet feasible does not mean that we cannot seek to make policy mimic the effects.
Investing results in long-term gains, well after the investments have gone away. If we transition to an EV-based transportation system CO2 reductions will stretch out indefinitely. Focusing on immediate reduction (not sure how to do that anyway) doesn't buy you very much.
Now one can argue that the same thing can be accomplished via a carbon tax and I might agree. But that's the same thing as the economist on the desert island saying, assume we have a can opener. It isn't that it's "not yet feasible"; it's that it's not going to happen.
Umm, Biden really did try to stop the federal government from issuing new gas and oil leases and really did try to appoint a banking regulator who wanted to kneecap oil companies. Republicans saved him from himself.
I think Matt is mostly on target here, especially about the degrowthers and the attempts to do a backdoor carbon tax by stopping local production is nonsensical.
But it does feel like he is also basing is cost benefit analysis solely on the central tendency of likely outcomes, not the outlier outcomes, which become much more likely as the normal distribution plot gets moved a couple of degrees higher (assuming that's what we're dealing with)
The principles remain the same. If you can show convincingly that risk-adjusted costs are skewing higher that changes the portfolio of actions that provide a net benefit.
The RCP8.5 thing showed that activists and activist scientists are willing to exaggerate costs so some skepticism and wide-ranging debate is warranted.
There’s also the matter of adaptation vs mitigation spending. The taboo on the former makes little sense. There are definitely cases where the marginal benefit is provided by spending on adaptation.
Anyone citing RCP8.5 (cough cough Biden White House memos.....) is deliberately lying. It is so dishonest to act like this is "business as usually" when it hasn't been a plausible pathway for over ten years erodes trust in and the authority of those who want to take action on climate change.
It makes me so angry. If one's stance has merit, then one does not need to lie!
That’s the problem with any sort of tactical science. You’d better be sure about your results because your opponents will be looking hard for any mistakes.
The burden of proof here is backwards, as it always has been. The folks who want to pursue current emissions pathways should absolutely prove that it's safe. You're playing Russian roulette with my kids' lives, and asking *me* to prove that the current chamber doesn't have a bullet in it.
Yes, bearing in mind that the benefits of mitigation are diffuse across time and space whereas money well spent on adaptation can bring more immediate benefits to those doing the spending. There’s a balance to be struck, yes?
Natural disasters and heat waves don’t actually cost that much. The average for the last 5 years is around $120B in total damage, about like losing a single midsize bank. You could triple that and it still wouldn’t be that big a deal.
I think this mostly shows the perils of this sort of accounting. Do you really think the loss of a midsize bank would cause the same amount of human suffering as the destruction of western North Carolina, or the fire that burned down Paradise, CA, let alone all of them together?
The conflation of natural disasters and climate change here isn’t particularly scientific though. There is an increased chance of more severe events, but the words “increased” and “more” are simply not known with any degree of certainty. You are overstating how much we know.
In a policy sense though it just sounds like catastrophising, which isn’t helpful. If there is an expected benefit from some policy it is good to be able to enumerate that benefit in some measurable way.
But that's been largely the issue. It's incredibly difficult to measure, and climate scientists have actually been fairly conservative in their projections. The assumption many have made is that the damage function grows in a linear function and that's likely wrong. You can call it catastrophizing if you want, while life is not going to end, it's likely a Major American city is going cease to be sometime over the next 50 years, and it's hard to predict the downstream effects of that.
I don't think I conflated anything, or claimed anything about how much we know. I agree that the impact of climate change on natural disasters is probabilistic, but that doesn't mean it's not significant.
Do you think the science is sufficiently settled about the relationship between climate change and natural disasters that it would allow us to make well grounded claims about the harm reduction resulting from any specific climate policy?
I think the connection between increased temperature and wildfire is quite well established. The connection between hurricanes and ocean temperatures is less clear, which means that it justifies less mitigation effort (but definitely more than 0).
The fire that wiped out 1000 homes on a December day was because of unseasonably high and dry temperatures that have doubled the length of the average fire season
This. My outdoor wedding in the Pacific Northwest was half ruined by wildfire smoke. No need to cry me a river, but it's especially hard to put a dollar value on the impact of the whole West Coast not being able to enjoy the outdoors 5 days a year.
If a bunch of kids are absent from schools for ~18 days, that's considered chronically absent and we consider it a crisis in that school system. Schools in some parts of North Carolina are still closed (for totally justifiable reasons!). The dollar amount of the cost of repairing the roads, repairing schools, fixing kids and teachers homes, etc. are one thing. The long term impact on the region's youth is unlikely to be a component of that calculation but we all know that delays and disruptions in education have negative long term impacts on those kids.
I'm a schools guy so that's where my head goes when I think about what you've written but we can probably apply that same line of thinking to many aspects of climate change induced disruption. It's not just lost property but lost time and opportunity that could have otherwise been spent normally.
If the bank failed and took lots of peoples savings with it? It would definitely cause much more human suffering. If it was like Silicon Valley Bank and nobody lost a penny, it would cause much less.
So what if they don't cost "that much"? If we can avoid them with low-cost policies like taxing net emissions of CO2, and investments in adaption -- levies, asset hardening, seawalls, relocation, forest management, etc., why not do it?
> I’m a bit worried Matt is going down the Andrew Sullivan path; making your personal beefs the basis of your political analysis
Uh, we can always attribute some of these beefs to "strategic trolling". Ie, getting your ideological opponents to negatively engage and thereby raise the salience and distribution of the debate. And, as noted in the article, Yglesias has a history of trolling in general so even if this is just him indulging those impulses, we can be confident he'll manage that well enough.
shifting fossil fuel consumption from here to not-here has huge benefits to domestic air pollution, an issue that Matt has expressed both support for and support for running on in the past. So I do think there are some unexamined tensions
I don’t take his position to be “solving climate change wouldn’t have large benefits to Americans”.
His position is that reducing emissions through high local energy prices has large local costs and contributes only a little to solving climate change, and the amount contributed is also enjoyed by free riders, so there is an obvious collective action problem.
If we could waive a wand and solve climate change I am confident he would enthusiastically do so.
If the US zeroed out its own emissions for 26 years, that would curb aggregate warming by about 0.1 degree celsius. The marginal effect of any sort of realistic austerity is trivial.
And yet, the innovation point stands. The side-effect of us trying to curb our emissions is inventing technology, processes and policies that enable it, which can be adopted abroad. That doesn't mean the ROI exists across the board, but it does make the calculus more complext.
What if we just ignore these braindead groups and just concentrate on the awesome things going on in transitioning to the new renewables economy? More like David Roberts, Noah Smith, Jesse Jenkins etc. Arguing about the groups here is entering into a useless cul de sac. Meanwhile, the incoming administration will try its best to do devastating things. Focus on *that.*
Andrew Sullivan’s path is better than putting solar panels on your roof.
There are certainly more efficient ways of curbing climate change than putting solar panels on the roof of a townhouse in a high cost, regulation-loving city. However, said actions would not signal one’s commitment to curbing climate change. Matt seems to do a great deal to deflect criticisms from Democrats to his left.
I've been an Yglesias reader since the 00s, always admired him for thoughtful takes. It's only since the Substack switch that I've seen him spiral towards the "extremely online" anti-establishment and personal resentment takes. I think Matt of 2000-something would be horrified to see people comparing him to Sullivan; I hope today's Matt manages to avoid that fate.
To be clear. I don’t think he’s going full Sullivan. His personality being what is compared to Sully (who by is own admission is very emotional) i seriously doubt he gets there.
Nonetheless, just number of times he’s writing about his disagreements with lefty environmentalists tells me it’s affecting his work at least a bit. And again, I maybe wasn’t clear but I agreed more than disagreed with his take.
I think this is one of the worst Yglesias takes I've seen. I can give several reasons:
1. The casual link to a piece that presents an argument over whether climate change is "existential" (as in civilization-destroying) or merely "catastrophic" (as in, hundreds of millions of people will die and human progress will be set back by most of a century.) The Yglesias I read in the 2000s would have correctly seen both of these outcomes as unacceptable, and he would have called out insanity of balancing policy on distinctions like that. It very much reminds me of the kind of muddled thinking that got us into the Iraq war.
2. The unknown unknowns associated with climate change are enormous. Current models are spitting out enormous temperature rises due to changes in cloud formation. Are they right? Nobody knows. The arctic is melting decades ahead of when this was predicted. Oceans are currently much hotter than anyone can really explain (and yes I'm aware of the particulates theory), despite El Nino being over. We are currently off the map and in uncharted territory. Any piece on climate change should at least try to perform a real cost/benefit assessment based on the huge risks and tipping points, but instead we get a link to an extremely low-quality Vox article.
3. The implication that actual Democratic policies are actually somehow different than the policies he would implement. In practice, he wants "common sense" climate policies that center on short-term economic growth. But if you look at Biden's policies around short-term fossil fuel production and emissions reductions through economic development AKA the IRA (basically a basket of tax incentives to produce new technology, essentially no direct emissions caps), what are we even arguing about? These are the policies we implemented. Matt is offering essentially no new policy ideas here. At best he is offering us a political surrender around the *idea that climate policy is important*, which isn't accurate or in any way the courageous political move.
Finally, there is a point that Matt used to make that I've taken to heart. Which is that the purpose of winning elections is not simply to win elections, but to *govern*. If climate change is best-case "catastrophic" (according to Matt's own citation) then we should care about this. We should not treat it as a political means-to-an-end, but actually the end itself.
I feel like the old Yglesias from a decade ago would have been the one writing this comment, and he would have said it all more eloquently than I have. I've been defending Matt against many of my friends who criticize him, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm defending a version of Matt that no longer really exists. Maybe we all have a well-defined intellectual expiration date and Matt has simply passed his.
Qualitatively, policy does NOT depend on the difference between "existential" and "catastrophic." What these exaggerations do is persuade people that the are being stampeded into extreme, anti-growth policies. This tragic because I do not think that is the motivation of most environmentalists; they simple do not understand the costs of the policies that come out of listening to these exaggerations o that there exist policies that reconcile CO2 emissions reduction and vigorous growth.
Could you link to some of the extreme anti-growth policies that were passed or ordered into law in the United States over the past four years? I'm trying to understand what policies we're arguing to replace.
What I meant was policies that are so costly per unit of CO2 emission avoided that in effect they are anti growth.
The clearest example IO think is is the pause of the LNG exports. This will just mean that slightly more expensive LNG will be supplied from somewhere else an that the slightly higher cost will lead to a super slightly lower CO2 emission at a non-slight cost to project sponsors. But anything beyond taxing net emissions is a bit anti-growth.
Given that most Americans are meh on climate change and even if America were to zero out its emissions for the next 26 years it would only decrease global warming by ~.1%, I think Matt’s absolutely right to focus on the economic benefits and an “all of the above” energy strategy.
I can’t tell if it’s because of American exceptionalism, but Americans deeply believe they are the end all be all. The reality is, the countries that will determine the climate trajectory in the next 50 years will be India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria and a host of other developing nations
Some recent studies are giving strong signals that we are now entering a climate feedback loop that involves reduced cloud formation [1,2]. Warmer temperatures means fewer sunlight-reflecting clouds, and that means more warming, and so on. If this is happening, then we're in very deep shit. None of this is certain yet, but the signals are getting more robust. At very least, recent warming is well outside of the predicted range.
Assuming we come to the conclusion this (or some other tipping point) is underway, then to avoid catastrophe we're going to need to take some kind of action. The most likely options include solar radiation management techniques -- spraying reflective materials into the upper atmosphere, or marine cloud brightening. This is going to require coordinated action between multiple nations, since it will affect global weather.
The problem with this idea is twofold. First, the US does not seem interested in coordinated action involving climate change. Worse, the current administration seems to be actively opposed even to researching these techniques. (Some GOP-led states in the US are passing laws to ban even small-scale research studies.) Second, whatever you might think about the US, we still have the largest military in the world. This means that if the US decides to stop the rest of the world from taking action, we have a relatively high probability of being able to do so.
So yes: I think climate change matters a lot. I think Matt should pay more attention to it. I don't think it's about US emissions, so much as the need for global leadership on an issue that might get suddenly much worse. Matt does not seem to be aware of any of these tipping points, and he's posting analysis that looks like it was written in 1998.
I think something that climate people struggle with is political reality. I believe in climate change. None of what you said changes the fact that the trajectory of climate change is going to be determined by countries not named the US and Americans are largely ambivalent to it.
Unless you can figure out a way to change the political reality that Americans don’t really care about climate change and more importantly don’t want to spend money on it, the climate science is moot
I think Matt’s point is that the US has very little control over those tipping points, Americans don’t seem to care about it, it’s unclear what the effects will be and our policy of climate change should mostly focus on energy abundance that is popular with voters.
America was never really a leader on climate change and it’ll unlikely be one in the future.
Your response to the above points that “America might use military force” is … odd. Like sure, hypothetically. But the idea that there is a global consensus to spray chemicals in the atmosphere in mass, funding is secured for it and it is deployed, will probably be decades from now. Hell we barely even implemented the Kyoto protocol. Who knows what the administration will be like!
All the "concrete benefits to regular Americans of fighting climate change" go into the estimate of the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions or the value of CO2 emission avoided in any mitigation policy.
The line about heat pump subsidies is wrong -- it is working through the innovation channel as well, just like all the technologies in the previous sentence. Subsidies for heat pumps are a big reason why we now have high performance cold temperature heat pumps, and they are likely cost effective without subsidy in the near future. Similar subsidies are why cool new electric products like the Impulse stove have become real. Innovation is real and important beyond the big power generation questions.
Yeah subsidies are a bit economically inefficient, but that's vs a carbon tax which is practically impossible.
And subsidies at least are pro-growth/investment, rather than degrowth, and they don't directly make energy more expensive(yes, they contribute to tax burden/deficit)
Now that we're no longer in a zero interest rate situation, large government subsidies also contribute to inflation, which makes everything more expensive; and they crowd out private investment.
Agreed, but there's often a step function - a hump, if you will - that new technologies need to overcome before private investments become viable. It's not that they won't get there, but they'll get there faster if subsidies give them a push. Getting the "push" correct - in timing, targets, and magnitude - is tricky, but that's where dispassionate cost-benefit analysis (particularly as opposed to industry lobbying) is most critical.
I agree that such targeted subsidies can be occasionally helpful. But firstly, are 21st century democracies competent enough to do this kind of thing well? And secondly, one problem with such subsidies is that they create a group of constituents that then perpetually lobbies against repealing them.
> are 21st century democracies competent enough[...]?
is the big-picture question for our generation to answer, and the reason why I am a subscriber to Matt Yglesias Thought. I desperately want the answer to be Yes, because I don't see any other hopeful alternative.
My more libertarian impulses are based on only wanting to take that bet (on government competence) when government has something genuinely unique to offer, or when there are no private alternatives. In case of things like subsidies, if those are only worthwhile if they're well-implemented, then I'd rather not take that bet in the first place.
Essentially, restrict government to doing few things, but doing those very well.
A recent example is preparedness against various catastrophes, like pandemics: here private actors can help, but the main responsibility lies with government. Nevertheless, even this attitude can result in highly suboptimal policy outcomes, like in the case of climate policy, where market- and technology-based solutions would work much better than what we get.
One of the advantages of taxing net emissions is that it does NOT create an interest group and does not require targeting, though it does require monitoring of the CO2 removed to get the "net" getting subsidy.
<sigh> No, subsidies not paid for with additional revenues do not cause inflation.* They cause _deficits_ which poses a choice to the Fed whether to inflator or raise interest rates. If it is pursuing Flexible Average Inflation Targeting, it has to chose higher interest rates.
* I'm assuming that the subsidies are not large enough and not so concentrated as to "require" additional inflation to facilitate adjustment o relative prices.
Subsidies for X are often a wasteful solution for what would be much better solved via deregulation, permitting reform, *removal* of subsidies for not-X, etc. Rather than subsidize geothermal energy, say, it's much better to remove regulatory barriers to allow it to be built out.
It would probably be helpful to also consider making discussion of carbon capture more publicly acceptable. It doesn’t eliminate the need to reduce emissions, but it can help, and recent breakthroughs make it more feasible as a tool. See for example https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/10/23/capturing-carbon-from-the-air-just-got-easier/
I wonder if countries who would benefit (in purely selfish nationalist terms) from some moderate measure of global warming, e.g. Scandinavia, would protest if we reversed the climate back to 1990 temperatures through carbon capture.
Good piece, though I would have mentioned the pausing of LNG export permits as well. Biden in his boundless wisdom decided to make a bunch of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania mad by going after their line of work in an election year.
I still remember my sense of despair when the LNG export permit pause was announced. Even though there was no immediate impact, the combination of brain dead political malpractice and geostrategic malpractice was stunning. Remember that substituting American LNG for Russian pipelined natural gas for Europe was both part of what got Europe through the winter, and a significant increase in American global influence. To step on that American success in order to get cheers from fringe climate groups was utter madness.
Welp…Greta Thunberg won’t be sending Matt a Christmas Card this year…
Definite parallels between climate thought policing and other recent issues that have animated the Left. Ending up on some group’s “black list” as a “denier” for daring to say something as innocuous as ‘We overlap on 90% of our views, but I’d like to reserve judgment on the final 10%’ is or was a noxious feature of: 1) Covid …2) race/policing issues starting in the late 2010’s 3) MeToo 4) Trans issues, and maybe 5) Israel/Palestine 6) and even Trump’s re-election.
Perhaps there is something to the idea that the decline of religion has left a psychological hole in our lives…which has led to the adoption of religious-like fervor on other issues.
The bad news is the Left continues to create these reactionary purity tests. The GOOD news though - I think - is that the zeitgeist usually peaks, passions naturally cool, and the idea space re-opens after a few years...(I have many friends that angrily wagged their finger at me over not wearing a mask outside eg…or for not accepting “Believe All Women” as a literal command…who NOW pretend they were always middle grounders and were never part of the litmus test crowd.)
I don’t trust “expert” estimates of the cost of carbon because very few people think seriously about mitigation.
Coastal defenses can protect against rising sea levels.
Air conditioning can protect directly against heat.
Moving to higher latitudes and higher altitudes can protect against flooding and heat.
Even today, most migration within the US is towards the sun belt. Europeans are far likelier to vacation in the Mediterranean than in Norway. There are vast empty spaces between 45 and 60 degrees north that could easily become more habitable as the world warms. Many of these are in the US and Canada could plausibly become a superpower.
Climate reparations might be as simple as subsidizing cheap solar panels for places like Nigeria and India and letting people in the hardest hit places immigrate to rich, northern countries.
In addition, those who do think seriously about mitigation can come to different conclusions about how it should be valued and traded off in comparison to the energy benefits gained.
The whole point is that everyone has their own specifications here. They may not be as detailed and exhaustive as yours often are, but they may still differ in opinions on how to best trade off.
If I had to make a steel-man case for being an angry climate litmus tester - it might be that the mitigation costs and costs associated with half a billion people relocating within 1 or 2 generations (as countries like Bangladesh get swallowed up) is much greater than the cost of acting now…and scarier that that is the not-completely-crazy tipping point feature of some climate models. (ie ice cap and permafrost loss is an accelerating process - so by 2100 we have a 1 foot sea-level rise and +2 C, but by 2200 we have a 50 foot rise and +10 C…then the Tuesday after *that* happens Earth turns into Venus…or maybe Seti Alpha 6.)
(But too many people who earnestly believe the above also tell me that nuclear power isn’t an option😐 due to safety concerns)
But adaptation and mitigation are not alternatives, they are simultaneously determined. Avoiding some of the costs of adaption is part of the benefit of mitigation. We optimize both mitigation and adaption.
I'm not sure there are non-human sentient organisms in the sense that they have hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
And jeez trying to calculate animal utility for those non-hoping, non-dreaming, non-aspiring critters boggles my mind. Consider the ongoing humanitarian crisis of predator-driven antelope carnage. But there is *human* utility to be gained by preserving biodiversity, for many reasons.
I also oppose my wife’s efforts to euthanize pets when they become inconvenient to us but still seem to enjoy life. Our 17 year old car cat has lived through two years of loud, nocturnal meowing because of my grace.
However, if I started explicitly weighing the subjective experiences of all animals, I’d become a cuck. I’d also become a cuck if I valued the utility of other humans as much as my own. I’m happy giving human happiness much more weight than animal happiness just like I give my son’s happiness more weight than that of strangers. Keeping the cat alive is about grace and finishing what we starred honorably more than net utility
I do, but thing the practical effect is just to marginally raise the estimated optimal tax on net emission of CO2. (Cutting down the tree the orangutan lives in releases CO2).
Look, I don't want to sound too condescending here because I really think that you don't come from a place of malice. That being said, it's clear that you don't know a single thing about this topic. It's not the experts who "haven't thought very seriously about mitigation", it's you. Which honestly makes it hard for me to figure out where to begin.
For starters, look at satellite visualisations of India during a typical heat wave from the last few years. I'm not sure if my post gets hidden if I post a link here, but they are not too hard to find on Google. What you're gonna see there is that there are very few specks of lands in India that aren't affected by heat waves and droughts. So the idea that the people from those affected areas can just move to the "highlands" if those heat waves manifest themselves thanks to climate change is a fantasy. (Also, who houses those migrants? Who provides the infrastructure? Who moderates the societal strifes that are sure to come out of this?)
It's also pretty interesting that you immediately jump to "India" when I mention the 2.5 billion people at risk of displacement by climate change. The problem is a lot bigger than India. Floods in Bangladesh, droughts in the MENA region, forest fires and heat waves in South America, floods in Southeast Asia and basically the entire Pacific region... 2.5 billion might even be a conservative estimate. The UN IPCC estimates the number of people living in areas particularly vulnerable to climate change as high as 3.3 billion.
As an aside: We actually don't know how much mitigation we'll need to do, because one thing that scientists have learned over the last few years is that the planet already acts crazier than predicted. Heat waves are more brutal, floods are more frequent, droughts are more prolonged than estimated. There are very weird things happening with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that scientists can't really explain. So the idea that Bangladesh can just build dams or whatever, EVEN IF THE FINANCING IS SOMEHOW SECURED, sounds more sensible than it is.
But back to our numbers from before. Let's conservatively estimate that the number of people living in regions particularly vulnerable to climate change is more like 1.5 billion. Let's say that twenty percent of those actually need to leave their region at some point, that makes it 300 million people. According to the UN, 58 percent of refugees are displaced internally, whereas 42 percent try to find their luck abroad. Applying those numbers to our 300 million people, that makes it 126 million people who flee to other countries of the world. That's 2.5 times the total number of refugees living abroad right now, which is 50 million.
Granted, those 126 million probably leave over the span of several decades, but more than tripling the total number of refugees SOLELY because of climate change... that seems pretty bad to me. Look how quickly western democracies lost their minds with refugee numbers way smaller than that. I'm not saying that we are nearing the apocalypse or anything; that's obviously dumb. But the idea that "people in the hardest-hit countries can just emigrate"... yeah, that's pretty ignorant, I'm sorry.
I agree with your pointing out the cost without or WITH adaption. That's exactly what goes into the models that estimate the rate of taxation of net emissions [or other policies even if they have higher costs] that we need to minimize those costs.
I’m less ignorant than you suppose. The migration necessitated by climate change will be difficult and expensive. However, it will be less difficult and less expensive than any realistic alternative.
You talk about 300 million refugees. That number can be greatly reduced through deploying air conditioning to hot places. Deaths from heat stroke are regrettable, but so is extreme poverty. Current increases in global emissions are driven by newly industrializing countries. It is more important that these countries continue winning the war against extreme poverty than it is to keep the planet a degree cooler.
I don’t. I do note that hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese (and quite a few Indonesians and Brazilians) have, in the past two decades, escaped privation through joining industrial, high energy civilization.
This is a good point in principle, but in practice I believe that adaption costs avoided (seawalls ain't cheap :)) are folded into the benefits of mitigation and therefor into the estimate of the optimal tax on net emissions.
A very underused frame for Democratic energy policy is something like: Freedom from the tyranny of gas prices.
Turns EV adoption from a culture war issue into an energy independence and pocketbook one. And resounds in national security in a way that highlights the urgency of the clean energy infrastructure buildout.
"And if your policymaking is responsive to the demands of interest groups whose ideas don’t make sense, you end up making bad policies." - a one-sentence summation of the failures of the Biden administration
I pumped my fist in the air strongly when I read this. This needs to be the first thing on the minds of every single person who wants to advocate on behalf of the environment. People will not stand for a lower quality of living, those who do advocate for it vastly underestimate how much more miserable their own lives would be, and anyone who advocates for degrowth policies needs to be strongly attacked as such.
After that, the next step needs to be a full embrace of nuclear energy, and deploying as much of it as possible. This would pretty much solve tackling the electricity wedge of fossil fuel usage. It also disarms getting into fights with preservationists over mass solar and wind farms. Matt is correct that permitting reform needs to be at the heart of this effort, and that also covers expanded geothermal drilling. Hydroelectric energy production also must be maintained.
Once you have the electricity wedge tackled, then the transportation wedge is not that far away--keep grinding on battery development and making electric cars reliable, and building out networks of charging stations to make it viable everywhere. After that, we're just down to the industrial and agricultural wedges that are tougher, but much more manageable.
Finally, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We are going to need to do plenty of mining to get the resources we need to build cleaner energy--let's do it more responsibly and within our own domestic power. And yes, that does mean in the interim we also need cleaner forms of fossil fuels to prevent degrowth. Thus, we should here to call out those who call out stances in favor of fracking--Ooo, YES!
I endorse almost all of this. My only quibble is with the idea of deploying as much nuclear as possible to solve "tackling the electricity wedge of fossil fuel usage." I'd say we should continue with Biden's very strong support of nuclear power and give the industry everything it needs to stop "blowing it" with ridiculously expensive reactors and overpromising and under-delivering.
IMO, many nuclear advocates are a tad delusional about how to cost effective it would be to build out a clean grid with "as much nuclear as possible." Using Vogtle as an example, The cost of its output averaged over its lifetime is about 15 cents per kWh (wholesale). Transmission and distribution and other misc costs would mean that the total cost of getting its output to retail users is around 25-30 cents per kwh. The average retail electricity price in the US is around 16 cents. It's likely if we built 10 more Vogtles (and we should), the cost of the output from the last one would be more like 10 cents per kwh. That still yields a retail cost of 20-25 cents or more. Also, this ignores the fact that nuclear power can't economically follow load, so on a grid, it needs to be paired with either flexible generation or batteries.
Currently, nuclear power plant construction is too risky for the private sector to finance it. The only way nuclear gets built is with the government somehow underwriting its cost overrun risk or pushing it onto ratepayers. There have been a few examples of tech companies financing SMRs, but those are just demo/pilot designs that won't be ready for mass deployment for at least a decade and likely more. The reality is that due to private market financing constraints, nuclear power is unlikely to even maintain its current contribution to electric power generation for the next 10-20 years.
Yes. Me too. But the public isn't at all. Not because they're anti-nuclear, but because they don't want higher electricity costs or higher taxes. Every poll I've seen shows almost no willingness by the public to pay much of anything extra for clean electricity. Meanwhile, the bankruptcies and cost overruns at Vogtle and Summer killed any change for a fast nuclear renaissance that's private sector lead. SMRs funded by tech companies may eventually get us there, but not before 2040 or so.
I don't understand the way federal budgeting works well enough to know the exact answer to this.
Vogtle units 3 and 4 cost about $35 billion total. Ten of those would cost $350 billion, but that's not reality-based. The total cost of 10 Vogtle-like plants with 2 reactors each would probably cost between 100-200 billion.
The trick is figuring out how to structure the government guarantees for possible cost overruns. The Vogtle debacle bankrupted or caused severe financial distress to almost everyone involved, so the private sector wants almost nothing to do with nuclear power in general. The goal would be some sort of cost overrun guarantee that assuages the fears of private industry without creating wildly perverse incentives for them to pad out their profits or be reckless with costs.
Fair--I'm more skeptical on the efficacy of this but I could be wrong. We also probably shouldn't discount sucking GHGs out of the atmosphere either--although that too is going require abundant clean energy.
I very much WANT to think abut CCS. We have to make it cheaper to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than some alternative way of displacing the higher marginal value use of fossil fuels. Something like a dedicated nuclear plant reducing CO2 back to C and O2 and then rebury the artificial coal we just created. :)
I agree with the vast majority of what you say here, Matt, but I'm pessimistic that the next Trump administration is going to simultaneously kneepcap green energy for the sake of "owning the libs" and even more strongly negatively polarize Democrats against anything having to do with fossil fuels.
Maybe Musk can convince Trump of the merits of green energy, EVs, etc., but I suspect that there are going to be a lot more people around Trump on a day-to-day basis in the White House who think converting the entire US government vehicle fleet to "rolling coal" would be a swell idea.
Unfortunately, Trump will _keep_ all the subsidies to high-cost green energy schemes instead of "repeal and replace" with lower cost direct subsidies to CO2 removal with equal effect.
When I talk to my fellow progressives about how climate change is real but not existential, I draw the analogy to Covid
I agree that it is unimaginably terrible. Apocalyptic scenes, wildfire, drought, storms. The average person who spends almost zero time thinking about it, now has their life undeniably altered. (If you secretly hope for a crisis so you can take a run at capitalism, you'll get it.)
It follows that with the benefit of foresight, the average person would care about this issue a lot more. It also follows that there are many prudent things society should be doing right now to prepare before the political consensus moves into sharp concurrence.
But, like COVID it's not literally existential. Millions of people died who didn't have to, but societies kept going. Afterwards the schools reopened and you could not even tell which city or region was hit harder than another. For all the economic cost, economies are already stronger just from the passage of time. Climate change would be the same only on slow motion - a slowly unfolding calamity washed out by continual societal adaption.
Lastly if you think of the average person in a developing country, they already live in conditions you and I would characterize as apocalyptic. They are rightly much more concerned with the building of the society than the rebuilding of society. If I ask what progressives should prioritize, I find an inversion of the climate justice framework - If you are chiefly concerned with the global poor than you should emphasize anti-poverty development over decarbonization.
Antipoverty development need not be in contrast to "decarbonization" (or better said net zero by 20xx; CCS may make total decarbonization unnecessary). Even the poorest country can have an excise tax on first sale of carbon-containing fuels at very low deadweight loss. If they are fossil fuel importers, they may even see their import bill go down as the world reduces its demand for fossil fuels.
Right now, energy consumption is pretty strongly correlated with GDP, and so it follows that economic development will coincide with those developing countries consuming much more energy.
Similarly the cheapest forms of energy are carbon intensive. Until green technology advanced to the point that it literally makes fossil fuels obsolete, the most cost effective way to develop will be carbon intensive as well. So anti-poverty development will lead directly to carbon emissions - Yglesias gave the example of China in the past few decades.
For advanced economies it's true that if we proceed towards net zero faster it will mean cheaper energy prices (of all types) in developing countries. It would also allow those developing countries a great carbon budget (before whatever global climate consequences kick in).
That's all fine if we are pursuing green policies for our own sake, to know that it has positive knock-on effects for other countries. But if the primary purpose of our green policies is regard for the impact on other countries, there are many better ways to proceed with anti-poverty development than installing solar panels in Western countries.
To put it one way, if the West paid massive climate reparations to developing countries, letting them choose how to spend the money in development, the proximal impact would be to increase rather than decrease global emissions.
What I am trying to say is that we should be promoting both anti-poverty growth AND making that growth less net CO2 emission intensive, not slow growth in order to slow net CO2 emissions.
What is the genuine end-goal American (and world) climate policy. For the environmental Groups, the goal seems to be hanging oil company execs or some other thing that harms oil companies and brings the Groups catharsis. But those aren't serious goals. But the "serious" people don't seem to have a climate end-goal. They know that CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere, and that burning hydrocarbons since Industrialization means there is more CO2 in the atmosphere now than in 1850. Therefore, the atmosphere is warmer now than in 1850. But what is so sacred about the climate of 1850? And if it is sacred, do we have to return to it? Or if it is not, what is the goal instead? Matt is right that atmospheric warming won't cause human exinction. Maybe it will cause more natural distasters, but those happened in 1850 also, so responding to them is just a matter of spending priorities, not some test of moral worth. What atmospheric warming will likely do is cause glaciers to retreat further and coral reefs to shrink. Those really are just asthetic concerns. But even if humanity stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow the atmosphere would still be warmer than it was in 1850. Getting the atmosphere and the asthetics of 1850 back requires geoengineering, which none of the "serious" climate people want to do.
If you believe that non-human life has moral value, then coral reefs shrinking is not just an aesthetic concern. Or maybe the other way to put it is that I see aesthetic concerns as the actual purpose of life at the top of Maslow's hierarchy. I personally see a thriving city like Tokyo and a thriving coral reef as very similar. The highest form of life is complex, dynamic, and interdependent.
Ok, but what does that moral intuition say about what humanity should do in response? Curtailing current CO2 emissions will only limit future warming, which means that we are accepting that coral reefs will shrink in the future. To actually prevent reef shrinkage or even get reef growth means we have to make ocean water less acidic and create new areas for reef growth, which requires geoengineering.
It says that we should build a 200 year Noah's Ark of intensively managed wildlife sanctuaries to preserve biodiversity until we can get the natural environment back to a place where it can be self-sustaining.
Ok, maybe we should do that (Im not against it). But that is completely different from limiting current CO2 emissions, which is the only thing the "serious" climate people want to do.
Do you think there's some risk that your description of "serious climate people" has become something of a straw man? If we pointed out people who do want to preserve biodiversity, or do want to suck carbon from the air, would that adjust your sense of the movement, or would you just say "no, I'm not talking about those guys"?
I'm talking about all the dignitaries and wealthy people who attend things like the UN COP conventions and the World Economic Forum. The people with the power and the money to "do something." They come up with these great plans to limit future CO2 emissions and act like thats the only thing humanity should do solve the problem of climate change, even though that won't solve climate change according to every definition of climate change I know of. I'm actually more sympathetic to the biodiversity and asthetic concerns that result from atmospheric warming than I am about vague platitudes about future warming. I want an Operation Warp Speed for direct-air capture of CO2! If there is a chance we can reverse atmospheric warming then why aren't we trying?
Just limiting ourselves to direct effects on humans, a number of ways humans have adapted to the environment—the crops we grow, the lands we settle—rely on assumptions about climate that become non-viable if the climate changes significantly. For many temperate areas (or for extreme climates in rich countries, like Arizona or Florida), significant climate change will mean lower quality of life and shorter lifespans, as well as increased costs for insurance and infrastructure. For poor countries with extreme climates, the result of significant warming would be mass displacement for the lucky ones, and for the unlucky, death from heat, drowning, or famine. So to the extent we can mitigate climate change and its effects, we save people from those fates.
I don’t see why “natural disasters happened in 1850 too” is any more serious than the people you complain about. Crime also happened in 1850. Poverty and stagnation happened in 1850. Wars happened in 1850. All of these could also be described as matters of spending priorities, but money isn’t the only resource that gets spent—effort is spent, lives are spent. If policy *ever* has a moral aspect I think stopping the upending of the lives of the planet’s least fortunate people surely qualifies.
You are just restating what is pretty nearly universally agreed. The continued emission of CO2 into the atmosphere has costs. Given that reducing emissions has a cost how much reduction should we do to so that the marginal cost of reducing. equal the marginal cost of CO2 accumulation.
Ok, but atmospheric warming is already baked-in even if humanity stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow. So limiting current emissions only limits future warming. It doesn't do anything to get the atmosphere back to its pre-industrialization state. That's a fine outcome, but we shouldn't pretend that limiting current emissions is a panacea.
Sure, but I don't see why that disagrees with anything I wrote. The key sentence in what I wrote is "So to the extent we can mitigate climate change and its effects, we save people from those fates [of displacement and death]." That is in line with the "fine outcome" that you describe!
I alluded to this in another comment but maybe I would understand your argument better with a sense of who you're writing against. Who is it that is *not* a "lynch the Exxon execs" fanatic but also believes that limiting current emissions is a panacea, and is treated as "serious" (and treated that way by whom)? The way you framed your original comment it sounded like you were skeptical about climate policy full stop, since you named two groups and said that neither of them had worthwhile goals. But every time someone here has pointed out a benefit of limiting emissions you've said "Sure, that's a good idea." So it feels like maybe there's more seriousness on offer than you thought?
The 1850 climate isn’t sacred, but ecosystems take a long time to adapt to a new normal, and there’s usually lots of suffering in the process, so it’s better at the margin if the new normal they are adapting to is closer to what they are already adapted to.
That is a valid response, but that does mean accepting living a in a world that is fundamentally warmer than in 1850. The "serious people" should be straightforward about that instead of catastrophizing everything.
I can't speak for other "serious people," but for me it is enact a set of least cost policies that according to the best geophysical-economic model we cna build leads to a least cost (literally highest benefit net of the dead weight losses of the policies) trajectory of the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. An approximation of that is a trajectory rates of taxation of net CO2 emissions applied by all countries that get us net zero by 20xx. The higher the tax rates the smaller is 20xx.
This is brilliant.
I especially agree with the part about this issue being an underrated aspect of class dealignment in politics.
For the more committed environmentalists, they seem to *need* something both publicly noticeable and slightly inconvenient to experience the positive feeling of "doing something". Witness low-flow shower heads, paper straws, banning plastic bags, banning gas stoves. Each is a little annoying while providing miniscule tangible benefit. It is akin to going to confession and doing penance to cleanse one's soul of sin.
I just finished reading We Have Never Been Woke and a theme in that book is the tendency for, what the author calls symbolic capitalists, to use coercive displays of values to burnish their commitment to a cause (usually linked to an oppressed group of people) in place of taking obvious actions. The result is often harmful to the cause. An example is universities giving land acknowledgements and then not taking the obvious step of offering free tuition to the decedents of the people whose land they built the university on.
I think you hit on the same dynamic. Railing against plastic straws is a great way to signal your alignment with a cause without having to explain why you still choose to fly instead of taking trains or drive instead of taking the bus. And it is ultimately harmful to the cause because of the backlash this kind of finger-wagging hypocrisy.
As an aside, We Have Never Been Woke is a fantastic book, and everyone who considers themselves to be center or left of center should read it.
Not to get on a tangent, but what I find so useful about the book is that it made me realize how far my own head has become lodged up my ass, e.g., in pointing out the finger-wagging hypocrisy of land acknowledgements and plastic straw bans I am engaging in the same dynamic that I am criticizing. And, you know, admitting that you have a problem is the first step to overcoming it, right?
I kinda feel like you (<- generic slow boring reader, not you personally, though probably also you personally) actually do advocate for policies that tangibly redress wrongs you are also symbolically finger wagging against? Ex: YIMBY, higher taxes to fund CTC, carbon tax, congestion pricing, etc. It's one thing to rail about gas ovens at a meeting you pulled up to in your gas guzzler, it's another to scold people for something that you yourself are not meaningfully being hypocritical about.
But more generally, yeah, nobody likes a scold. Being publicly annoying is the worst thing someone can do on behalf of their cause.
Yet plastic waste in our seas is extremely harmful. Like using a paper straw in a plastic one time cup.
If you properly recycle/trash that straw, what reason is there to think it'll end up in the ocean?
I'll just pint out that the plastic bag ban* provided significant tangible benefits. The Potomac in particular saw a significant decrease in waste in the river after DC enacted their law, and other places seem to observe noticeable local effects. There's a reason the first plastic bag ban was in Bangladesh, which isn't a hotbed for environmentalism.
The mania over plastic straws was ridiculous though.
The anti-litter part of the plastic bag ban always seemed like a way stronger argument than the carbon footprint stuff.
Incineration is good for reducing plastic waste going to land or water. Unfortunately it's not popopular with environmentalists.
The thing about plastic bag bans is now stores use thicker plastic bags (which are even worse for the environment) bc they call them reusable yet no one really reuses them except for kitty litter or bathroom trash like they do with the thinner bags as well. I’m for plastic bag bans - I’ve seen how much nicer the Anacostia in DC is now. But it should apply to those thick bags too.
Well said, it needs to be pointed out with extreme clarity how this stuff pisses off normal people. And I say this as someone who doesn't like using straws, finds plastic bags to be unwanted clutter, and does not think that gas stoves are the answer! (But the showerheads....ugh, from my cold dead hands on that one!)
I had to work really hard to remove the flow restrictor from my last one.
You really hate Obama's regulations on shower heads don't you. (We just need proper pricing of water which is something that MattY's article points to, changing regulations to enhance efficiency. But that is hard.)
Plastic bag bans do lower litter, the same with bottle deposits and Styrofoam bans. Gas stoves... just need an education campaign about the dangers of indoor air pollution and we need better electric ranges.
Paper straws suck.
Nevertheless your point about environmentalists treating these as moral crusades still stands. We should implement policies based on benefit cost, not emotional reasoning.
We also need to acknowledge that showers are peanuts when it comes to overall water consumption (hello, agriculture....).
Damn you flood irrigation for alfalfa! The appetite of guinea pig's will destroy us all!
They're more significant when it comes to energy consumption (assuming hot showers), about 2¢ per gallon-minute. A daily 15-minute shower with an old 5.5 gpm showerhead would cost close to $50 per person per month (11¢/kWh equivalent), versus a 10-minute shower with a 1.5 gpm showerhead that would be under $10 month for one person.
Why do you assume the low-flow showerhead also reduces shower time?
If the opposite is true, low-flow shower heads might actually increase water and energy usage, as was the case in this study:
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/hxaey
I didn’t mean to imply that. I meant to compare the cost of an extravagant shower habit with a thrifty one.
Fair enough, but also, we’re rich. $40 a month? I can spend that on one DoorDash order.
If Americans want to spend some of their money on luxurious long hot showers with great water pressure, I think it’s a real political vulnerability if our party is the one telling them that they are forbidden.
Of course, water distribution doesn’t work this way. Droughts tend to span broad areas which include numerous isolated reservoirs that are unused for agriculture and merely supply residences.
This seems unlikely to be important in practice. Do you have examples of drought vulnerable urban areas that don't share their water supply with agriculture?
(Also, national requirements for low-flow shower heads seem like a really poorly targeted way to deal with some isolated localities having water supply issues.)
I feel like we are in medieval times when the glories of the Roman Empire -- aqueducts, public sanitation, widespread literacy, high-flow shower heads -- have been lost and the public is living in squalor and misery.
Normal Rockwell.jpeg “I think Americans have higher living standards than the Romans”
Barbarians are at the gates and they have Grubhub.
A joke?
We've never been richer or healthier.
whoosh.
"Gas stoves... just need an education campaign about the dangers of indoor air pollution and we need better electric ranges."
First we need good-faith studies looking at how much indoor air pollution there is from gas stoves. Sealing up a room and cranking up the burners until you measure a high level pollution does not tell us anything useful. Ignoring the amount of the pollution that comes from the cooked food itself also means you aren't doing a fair comparison. I suspect that a good faith evaluation would show the added effects of using a gas stove to cook compared to electric is pretty minimal.
The main problem is that people don't ventilate when they cook. Gas stoves are worse than electric due to the the simple fact there is combustion. The amount of particulate matter in an enclosed space it just going to be a function on the amount of gas used.
This is why there are non-profits trying to push people away from charcoal stoves to electric ones in the developing world.
"Gas stoves are worse than electric due to the the simple fact there is combustion."
Yes, but by how much? The amount matters!
"The amount of particulate matter in an enclosed space it just going to be a function on the amount of gas used."
That's not true. It also depends on what your cooking. I suspect searing a steak is going to cause far more particulate matter than using gas.
"This is why there are non-profits trying to push people away from charcoal stoves to electric ones in the developing world."
Charcoal is very different from natural gas.
We are talking about the marginal difference between gas and electric. Searing steaks, in your example, would be differenced out. You don't need experiments to mechanically back out what comes out of combustion when we have pretty accurate values for the amount of PM2.5 released from burning a cubic meter of natural gas.
"We are talking about the marginal difference between gas and electric."
I disagree. We're talking about the effects of cooking on indoor air quality (and really, we're talking about the downstream health effects of that, which is also questionable). If the dominant effect is *the cooking*, then why bother tinkering around the edges?
Maybe the gas effects are more than cooking in general. But the studies I've seen take extreme steps like literally sealing off the room with gas burners on but don't factor in the effect of actual food being cooked. So I don't take them seriously in the slightest. In fact, it moves my priors to thinking that cooking with gas is totally fine, if they have to rig the game to that extent to get the answer they're looking for.
But if the marginal effect of replacing gas with electric over a full year is less than the marginal effect of one fewer steak per year (I have no idea if that number is right) then it would tell us a more productive target for our concerns.
One thing that makes answering this question particularly hard is that the actual amount of indoor pollution as a result of using a gas stove vs. electric stove depends a great deal on one's individual cooking habits? How often do you eat at home vs. eat out? Do your favorite foods take 10 minutes or 60 minutes to cook? Do you cook with a higher flame level than needed? And, of course, the size of the kitchen matters, as does whether you leave your windows open while cooking.
Of course, one can conduct surveys of a bunch of homes and calculate averages, but the fact is, as an individual, you don't really care about averages, you care about your home and your health, and your numbers are going to very wildly from the average, depending on your individual habits.
Yup. We cook a lot, but we smoke in the house. That’s much worse than anything from a gas stove!
Isn't the solution then to not ban gas lines to the kitchen, but require ventilation to an outdoor space be included if there's a gas line there? Seems like that would shift the argument away from "banning stove choice" to "being lax on safety standards".
After spending a lifetime in domestic construction and reading this discussion I wonder if anybody has heard of exhaust hoods and long standing makeup air requirements for any properly installed gas appliance. This is fabricated static hampering real policy. This is simply dumb public policy that fixes nothing, pisses off the general public, makes for more energy consumption and sales for appliance manufacturers, adds to land fills, the uniformed feel better about themselves and instills resistance within the general public when legitimate energy policy is attempted.
to achieve the benefit of the vent hood you need to run the fan on high the whole time the burner is on and perhaps a few minutes afterward, do you think most people will use the fan that way? They are pretty damn loud.
Are you saying exhaust hoods are already required for new construction with a gas range? I couldn't find a satisfactory answer when looking around briefly online, so if yes, then the whole "controversy" about gas ranges is really silly, because anyone worried about indoor air pollution from them can solve the problem with the flick of a switch.
I’m not in construction and I am aware there are rules on exhaust hoods and ventilation for gas appliances. There’s ventilation rules even without gas appliances.
For new builds it makes sense to ban gas hookups, given that there’s a good chance gas is phased out during the lifetime of the building.
The casual authoritarianism is why many Americans hate people like you.
I don't care about indoor pollution.
I replaced my gas stove with an induction stove and I really love it. It's just better (except for the wok thing).
These links are meant to be informative, not dispositive, but they definitely updated my take on both of those things by a little.
Technology Connections: "Induction cooking - but what about woks?" - http://youtube.com/watch?v=CzJKxUCKOBg
Dynomight: "Better air quality is the easiest way not to die" - https://dynomight.net/air/
Gathering that data seems like a bad idea.
I don't get what the hang up is with even the current electric ranges. We didn't want the air pollution and were on a tight budget for our kitchen reno so we converted to all electric and not even the higher end induction - just the basic electric - and they're perfect for everything we throw out them. Our last condo had a higher end Wolf stove / range and I can't think of a cooking style we'd rather have gas for.
You may have a much better electric stove than I do, or you are smarter than I am, but I genuinely find it a huge PITA to cook on mine. It's really hard to regulate the temperature. It's not the end of the world, but there is a very noticeable negative difference from a gas stove.
Interesting. Here's ours: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bosch-Benchmark-Series-30-in-Radiant-Electric-Cooktop-in-Black-with-5-Burner-Elements-NETP069SUC/320483529
It was just from Home Depot. We do cook with nice stainless steel pans and let them heat up before cooking - so maybe that's a difference or it's more that the pan helps neutralize the negatives. But we both swear the temp. / sear control we have for eggs and fish is better than we had with the gas range.
I think the real answer is, with electric stoves, you have to get in the habit of physically taking the pan off the burner if it gets too hot. If you just leave the too-hot pan on the burner, yeah, it's not gonna cool down fast enough and your stuff will burn.
I haven’t had an electric stove since the olden days of coil burners (in the house I grew up in) but induction is *magical*. So fast and responsive. You can actually simmer! Maybe you could swap out for one at some point?
Yeah I should look into it again . They’ve always seemed pricy. But good to know they work well!
I have the impression that induction cooktops are priced bizarrely high in the US, in a way I don't understand. It seems to me like they're way, *way* cheaper here in Germany despite our 19% VAT etc. Like, we recently bought a good 60 cm induction cooktop for <~500€, and even great ones cost <1500€. Of course arbitrarily expensive ones *exist* here, too, but I nonetheless find the contrast baffling. For instance, in a current Wirecutter article, the cheapest recommended cooktop is $850, and two recommendations cost $2800...
I got a basic induction stove from Home Depot and it's awesome.
I know induction is supposed to solve the problem with temperature but they’re expensive so I’m curious what a basic one costs- will check it out!
I want a single induction plate for fast boiling water. That is all. I will pay a few thousand dollars for it.
What about these things? https://www.webstaurantstore.com/avantco-ic1800-countertop-induction-range-cooker-120v-1800w/177IC1800.html
I've seen them on like the Great British Bakeoff and wanted to get one for just that - quick boiling water.
Now I discovered something.
Also the most recent season has been pretty good.
#NoSpoilers since we haven't watched season final but -- totally agree. Great season. It's one of my favorite shows. We still go back and to re-watch the best Kim-Joy episodes.
You can buy one for a hundred dollars. We have one for that purpose. We had hoped it would be more useful for other things, but the cheap one doesn’t have great controls.
What? Cooking on electric sucks even with a fancy induction range (plus they are usually pretty crappy products).
Why do you never see a cooking show where they use electric?
Grocery stores that sell paper bags but everything else is wrapped in plastic.
"Can I have a big plastic bag to put my groceries in?" Absolutely not, scum.
"Can I have a million small plastic bags to individually wrap my vegetables?" Be our guest! Take as many as you need (:
Would requiring electric stoves in *new* construction be a bad thing? Shouldn't we take the easiest steps possible to reduce the use of fossil fuels?
I think this is good policy solely for not having to build in gas lines to new construction. All-electric new construction is just better for the long term, since you don't have to maintain gas lines as well as electric ones.
“Easiest steps possible” sounds good, as long as you’re assessing it in terms of, “How much climate benefit for how little political pain?”
My understanding is that gas stove bans specifically poll poorly and the gains are miniscule. 150kg of CO2 per year of emissions for the average family with a gas stove. Even with zero switching cost (new buildings only) and zero emissions from electricity (assumed future zero carbon grid), that’s just too tiny to be worth spending any amount of political capital on.
Instead of a gas stove ban, just mandate new construction without gas lines. Call it “preventing underground explosions in residential neighborhoods.” Save money on insurance and construction costs—and on stoves, the electric ones are cheaper. Leave the gas stoves to us folks in old (and ironically, mostly Democratic) cities that have had gas lines for a hundred years.
We don’t get to dictate how our proffered policies will be discussed. The policy you are proposing, when it has been proposed in the past, has been discussed as a ban on gas stoves. When the public is polled on it, they are not supportive.
But that’s just because it was framed as constricting consumer choice in the service of preventing global warming. What I remember reading at the time was that most of the people who objected—like people in red states, suburban/exurban areas, lived in places where gas stoves were not an option anyway, because there were no gas lines. I think if you polled people about would they like to have new housing that cost less to buy and to insure, that would poll pretty well.
I think we could win the battle for mandating electric stoves for new construction.
Other than builders (who would adjust) who is really going to the mat to fight this? I mean, it's significant that the Republicans try to turn this into "they'll make you replace the gas stove in your home." And the Democrats say, "Nope, usual Republican lies."
In deep blue jurisdictions, sure. But doing so will damage the Democratic brand nationally, which has real climate change costs.
More than that, I just don't see how this policy makes sense on the merits. If you taxed gas at a reasonable social cost of carbon, running a gas stove would be about $2 more expensive per month than it is now. Of all the ways we can trade utilons for lowered carbon emissions, how is this the one that makes sense?
I think it would be dumb for a Democratic administration to seek to ban gas stoves in new construction. I'm not sure what the basis would be for a nationwide ban. And the Biden administration is attempting no such thing, nor did the 2024 Democratic platform breathe a word about it.
Why on earth would we choose to pick this battle? It’s bad on the merits!
"Requiring" stuff like electric stoves, or prohibiting stuff like gas lines, is usually a bad idea, that's just more regulations which will make housing more expensive. How about alternatives like "encouraging" X, "incentivizing" X, "removing regulatory barriers to" X, "removing subsidies for" not-X, etc.?
Would requiring electric stoves make housing more expensive? We already require houses to have electrical wiring. Why wouldn't eliminating a gas pipeline (especially if the house is otherwise electrified) make housing cheaper?
Are gas lines currently required? If eliminating them would save money without meaningful disadvantages (or even with disadvantages to consumers eventually, as long as they don't affect the developer or reduce initial demand), and it's already legal, why isn't new construction already like that?
Some is, and old construction too. In my current residence (not a new building), I have an electric stove, and even with those annoying coil burners, I wouldn't prefer gas, so it's intuitive to me that not having gas lines is good. But the market doesn't need to be forced to do things that are clearly beneficial to the seller and the buyer -- regulation is more for protecting third parties, limiting easily-missed damages, enforcing honesty etc. As a buyer, if option A was better than option B on all relevant dimensions (safety, air quality, cost etc), I would simply always buy A, and sellers wouldn't need a law to tell them that.
One very general argument is that by introducing any extra regulation, you're making some housing projects on the margins no longer profitable, which reduces housing supply, which increases housing prices.
Well, there's theory, I guess.
Not buying it in this case.
If you don't find this argument compelling, how about this one: if developers thought it would be more profitable not to include gas lines in their housing planning, they could do that already. Since they do include them, they must naturally think it would be more profitable to do so.
How do you know it would reduce the use of fossil fuels?
Electricity can come from sources other than fossil fuels, but natural gas cannot.
Magic 8 ball says, "You bet!" Renewables/batteries are increasingly a cheaper option for electricity generation and over time an electric stove will result in less fossil fuel consumption than a gas stove, as more and more electricity from the grid will come from renewables.
It won't happen tomorrow, but it's coming.
“…as more and more electricity from the grid will come from renewables”
Ok, so you assume it will lead to less use of fossil fuels at some point in the future.
It’s happening in California right now. Fossil fuels are quickly disappearing from our grid. Not gone yet, but the trendline is unmistakable.
It looks like Texas is heading there as well.
Oh, I think we’re headed there at some point, but it won’t be predictable or on the same timeline everywhere.
Good for them! The extent to which they can be counted on to do this, reduces the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions.
I, for one, had high hopes for paper straws.
But that’s because I just really like paper in general.
I find that if you wrap a plastic bag around your paper straw, the straw holds its shape better.
You know, I really love the plastic bag bans. All that garbage just completely disappeared from the roadside.
The whole paper straws and banning gas stoves things are ridiculous!
You know, that's been my knee-jerk reaction when I see someone in a mask - but then I try to remind myself "it's flu season, does this person seem on the older side, are they maybe immuno-compromised?" One thing Covid did is make it a little less weird for people to wear masks and as long as there's not this social pressure to do it unnecessarily, seems fine to me.
I wear masks to the doctor's office and don't begrudge people doing it in germy places. But if you mask up and go to the bar? I am like "bruh."
Yeah I wear it at the doctor’s office and on planes, bc of the recirculated air. But am not a Nazi about it. Bc I will take it off to eat my biscoff and drink my ginger ale. I just hate being sick.
Some of them probably are doing it for flu seasons, some of them aren't, I don't know who's who and I don't ask.
Also you might just be being respectful. If I'm sick I wear a mask on the train
Not sure why you would have a problem with random individuals masking. Asia has been doing it consistently for decades.
I don't have a problem with random individuals masking, I just have a holdover reaction from like early 2022 when people were still performing Covid-induced masking and it was kind of like "we're still doing this...?" I was replying to a comment saying something similar, and saying that I was trying to get past that initial "ugh, come on" reaction and recognize that the average individual masking probably doesn't care about what I'm doing in the same way they may have 2-3 years ago.
Griping about random people wearing masks says a lot more about you than it does about them.
They're free to do it, I'm not trying to stop them, I'm just noting it's the same "secular penance" impulse.
Except, as mentioned above, there are plenty of people for whom wearing a mask while doing routine things like shopping, is actually a wise thing. Your assumption that they're all or even mostly secular penance is likely wrong.
It seems different to me than secular penance. It seems to be born of fear. In some (many) cases that can be justified fear! But having talked to a bunch of mostly older folks still wearing them, their concern seems to something like: "the pandemic isn't over dammit, mpox is spreading, rcv is rampant, and everyone is crazy for not treating the situation with more concern."
RSV sucks! My niblings just got over it. My niece had to go to the hospital with a fever of 105! I’m glad there’s a vaccine for seniors now.
I now put on a mask when I've been exposed (but don't think I'm sick) but must go out. It's a low-cost intervention to reduce my chance of infecting someone else(but again, only when I have reason to believe I'm way more likely than baseline to be infectious)
I’m surprised that the conspiracy theorist don’t wear masks to block out the government from following them via camera.
Like people wore them to brazenly shoplift
I've had the same thought, but during the pandemic many people found that wearing masks helped with seasonal allergy problems. Fall is one of the most difficult times for many of them.
Texan Democrat of the oil and gas industry here pointing out that antagonizing the oil and gas industry is a not-small reason that losses in south Texas have been worse than in other Latino regions (including other Latino border regions like Arizona).
Canadian and Norwegian center-left parties can talk about climate change in a way that’s still proud of their domestic oil and gas production. The US is new to the “oil and gas production is so big as to be macroeconomically significant” group of countries, and Democrats are seriously tripping over themselves in not updating their positioning accordingly.
Especially when their actual policy is boosting domestic production to an all time high! Biden should have been giving speeches outside Texas oil rigs.
Was that because of admin policy or coincidental?
Sometimes you gotta say... who cares? Play the hand you're dealt.
Yes, it doesn't seem tremendously hard to say "OK, we should use less fossil fuels, but that change won't happen overnight, and in the meantime it would be great for oil and gas users to buy American instead of Russian or Saudi."
Norway is electrifying all their own vehicles while also not slowing their oil and gas exports.
"The US is new to the 'oil and gas production is so big as to be macroeconomically significant' group of countries"
I guess, kind of? The US was a major oil exporter in the early to mid-20th Century.
The shock of the 70s and continued concerns until about 10 years was enough for pretty much our entire relevant population (baby-boomers on) to internalize the net-importer mentality.
So their feelings are hurt when meanwhile we have record-breaking oil production?
Got it.
Like it or not, yes. Voters want their egos stroked! Or at least not to be thought of as the bad guys, which I do think is a fair characterization of the mainstream Democratic politician/media view (not Bernie but like Brian Schatz, Chris Murphy, Chris Hayes, etc.). Don’t think the oil and gas industry is unique in this way.
I mean politics boils down to “which candidate makes me feel the best”. This is politics 101
Right, “renewed” better way to put it than “new”, but yes, meant “new in political memory”
Norway's oil companies are partially state-owned, and significant shares of their income are diverted to the national pension / sovereign wealth funds that now hold and invest something like $350,000 per Norwegian citizen. I would also be proud of THAT arrangement.
>> "But it does mean saying a firm “no” to degrowth and embracing real cost-benefit analysis and maybe even (in the right macroeconomic environment) returning to carbon pricing. "
The combination of doomerism and a degrowth mindset underpins much of the democratic rhetoric on climate action, even while dems get most of the big stuff right in the actual policy space. This messaging fail, made worse by an insistence that climate messaging always has to include social justice and identity politics messaging, has seriously eroded public support for Biden's otherwise sensible policies on climate. While this stuff mostly results in bad optics and reduction of public support, it also makes the climate action dems pass much more convoluted than it ought to be for no good reason.
It's similar to democrats echoing talking points from "the groups" on defunding the police and opening the borders to everyone.
Yeah, the thesis is that environmental groups were built to deal with local pollution and then ham-fistedly apply those solutions to global issues. Lead drinking water for poor black kids in Flint, MI does count as environmental racism or whatever you want to call it. But climate change is global and therefore doesn't care about American concepts of racial identity, so the concept doesn't make much sense in terms of climate.
"Climate justice" as it is often referred to, is not just if it decarbonizes the economy on the backs of the poor. These are people who will be disproportionately harmed by increased energy prices, and any climate policy needs to keep their needs top of mind.
Climate justice just seems like more red tape and mandated administrative hurdles to check boxes off. In practice it is not focused on efficiency, effectiveness, or really outcomes.
But then again I am a bit jaded.
What does "keep their needs top of mind" mean in practice?
Ensure that your climate policy doesn't disprotionately increase energy costs for lower income people.
How do we do that? Calculating disproportionate impact isn't trivial. It seems to me that our focus should be on not increasing energy costs at all if this is a big concern.
Assuming we're only talking about U.S. policy and people, could subsidize lower-income people to help pay for their energy usage. (Have to be careful or that starts driving up usage again - better to make it a flat cash grant that offsets expected energy cost increases)
Nah, the mainstream view on climate justice is about the "global south" and the legacy of colonialism. The steel-manned case is something like, the rich west already was able to industrialize and reap the benefits of CO2 based externalities. Further the developed world tends to be located at higher latitudes that might even benefit from a warmer climate, or at least be less adversely affected. Thus justice would indicate that the developed west should "compensate" the "global south" for this disparity. And then of course, that ends up justifying the same old socialist and degrowth prescriptions that have been being pushed for 50 years or so.
To my mind though, the real answer is exactly what Matt argues for: abundance. The answer isn't to payoff underdeveloped countries to remain that way, with their citizens remaining in relative poverty, it is to increase innovation, trade, strengthen the global order such that it can maintain peace, and having a world with a richer global south that both can better mitigate climate impacts but also can afford to address their own local environmental issues is going to be better for everyone.
I’ll start by saying I think Matt understates the concrete benefits to regular Americans of fighting climate change. Not sure you can talk about cost-benefit analysis without talking about the actual costs of increased number and intensity of natural disasters as well as increasing number of heat waves.
Second, I’m a bit worried Matt is going down the Andrew Sullivan path; making your personal beefs the basis of your political analysis. For Andrew it’s thinking that the people who he thinks got him fired from New York Magazine are the actual masters of the Democratic Party. Matt is nowhere this deluded (yet) but I worry that because Matt very clearly gets more (mostly unfair) grief from extreme lefty environmentalists he’s starting to overestimate how powerful they really are.
Having said all that I thought Matt’s most astute point is that a huge problem environmental groups have is too many of them were born in an entirely different era. I actually think there is parallels to colleges in that these institutions were created for an entirely different world than exists today.
In other words institutions and institutional status quo bias really matters. Because as I noted above I think Matt is underplaying the climate crisis. And yet his prescription is mostly right to me which makes it truly disappointing when climate activists decide he’s the enemy because the frame of reference for these organizations world view hasn’t been properly updated for the current era.
I think the political problem lefty environmentalist orgs pose to the Democratic Party is very real. While people in the US will certainly be harmed by increased natural disasters, many voters Dems lost don’t think about cost like that.
For these voters, it seemed like Biden was focused on controlling their lives (gas stoves) or capitulating to environmentalist demands on oil production (even though it was at an all time high!) when cost of living was clearly the number one issue on their mind. The Democratic Party brand got completely intertwined with caring about climate change more than caring about the economy, and they’re paying a political price for that.
The passive construction "The Democratic Party brand got completely intertwined with <insert politically toxic position>" is, I think, outdated. The right-wing media ecosystem will assimilate a proposed regulation (regardless of when or from which administration it originates) like the one about indoor air pollution and then bounce it around the echo chamber until it becomes "Democrats want to ban gas stoves", which dovetails nicely with other fictions about banning hamburgers and forcing everyone to drive EVs and use heat pumps. It all feeds into a master narrative that has roots in the old right-wing media's complaints about the nanny state and big government. A decade ago, these narratives were contained in the Fox News Cinematic Universe, but they now seep through podcasts and social media and become conventional wisdom.
Trump ran on "drill baby drill" despite the huge increases in fossil fuel production under Biden and the fact that oil companies themselves say that they don't want to drill new wells. The details of reality don't matter because the narrative has flipped from "Republicans want to poison the air and water" to "Democrats want to take away the things you like". I think sometimes we focus too much on the crazy stuff the climate doomers and degrowthers say and fail to recognize the importance of these big, non-specific narratives that have taken root.
In this comment section today we have people saying we should ban gas lines in new construction, and CARB did in fact effectively ban tailpipe emissions starting 2035.
These are not fictions, Democrats and liberals do in fact hold these opinions and are in fact trying to advance them politically.
And the leader of the Republican Party said shoplifters should be executed without trial. Yet conventional wisdom is Republicans are tough on crime and Democrats want to ban hamburgers. Policy and rhetoric seem to be metabolized into mainstream narratives that are asymmetrically harmful to liberal causes.
Using CARB as an example, California is basically following the same policy as Norway, where *new car sales* eventually become 100% EV. Norway has been subsidizing EV sales since the 90's and "completed the EV transition" this year. But most cars on the road still burn gas. Characterizing California's EV policy as "effectively banning tailpipe emissions" is exactly the kind of metabolite the media ecosystem produces and it plays into the narrative that Democrats are totalitarians who want to take away all your favorite things.
“Policy and rhetoric seem to be metabolized into mainstream narratives that are asymmetrically harmful to liberal causes..”
The mainstream narrative was that Trump held a literal Nazi rally in NYC. I don't think it's helpful to have liberals act like they're asymmetrically victimized by media narratives because the counterexamples are so readily available.
The point of CARBs action was to force people into EVs. True or not?
Yah, but what I'm saying is that "Trump held a literal Nazi rally in NYC" is the *mainstream media* narrative, which "we" take to be synonymous with the mainstream cultural narrative. But I don't think that is actually true anymore.
The "national conversation" still takes place in national newspapers, network news and the Sunday shows. But I think it has become divorced from the mainstream media diet. Like, if you just grabbed a random person off the street and asked if Trump had a Nazi rally in NYC, more of then not you'd get a blank stare. But if you ask them what the median Democratic politician thinks about any issue, more of then than not you'd get a tossed salad of half-truths with plenty of right-wing croutons.
This obviously all anecdotal, but the outcome of the election shows that a majority of voters, in a country where Trump constantly espoused fascist dicta, called for immigrant interment camps and proposed a hugely inflationary tariff policy, decided that whatever Democrats were proposing was worse. And, like, my Trump-hating hippie mom asked me if chemtrails were real.
Is having gas lines new construction a hill anyone should die on?
As for CARB, that's a California decision as far as I can tell, the people of California are fine with it.
The position was ‘these are things liberals get blamed for, but don't actually want’, and I'm demonstrating that yes, in fact, they do want these things.
I don't entirely disagree with this take, but I'm not sure what it implies as far as how Democrats can respond or overcome the right-wing "take something minor and benign and make it the second coming of Stalin" effect. Is it that they just can't and we're screwed?
I don't think that dynamic has changed much, and both sides do it. What has changed is that the "mainstream media" no longer sets the narrative. I think the "we" lost control of the cultural narrative and live in a bubble that can't reckon with the fact that we've never watched the top ten shows on Netflix or heard of whatever YouTube bro just interviewed Trump.
In the wake of the election, I've come to the realization that I am basically in a conversation with a small group of people who write articles at places like The Atlantic, Slate, NY Times, Washing Post, etc. and talk to each other on podcasts about the articles that they write. I'm used to the idea that the people in my life who listen to right-wing talk radio and watch Fox News are engaged in a different conversation.
What I didn't expect is that, upon hearing me recount some of the stupid MAGA conspiracies, my kids look up from their cereal bowls and casually inform me that these things are common knowledge in adolescent world. It is infused into the discourse, in YouTube, in-game chats, etc. They know all about raw milk and crypto and various Trump-related mysticism.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188822/transcript-james-carville-trump-wonand-dems-must-now
He's come to the same conclusion:
We don’t know how people get their information. I’m 80. To me, the whole world is the Times, the Post, the nets, cable TV. It dawned on me we don’t do anything. So what I’m trying to do, Greg, is to get people interested and get the right people to do an exhaustive, detailed, well-fielded, well-constructed survey on media consumption—I cannot tell you, I just talked to a pretty active political consultant that did focus groups with black voters in Milwaukee. They’re on TikTok, I don’t even know what TikTok is.
Basically Chinese Pravda
It strikes me that the Biden climate policy was excellent. Maybe it would help electorally to pick public fights with the groups, but substantively I have no problem with the Biden administration and where the Democratic party stands.
True! But there's a reason why the Biden admin is thought to be so intertwined with left environmentalist groups.
Public fights with the groups and not pushing for low-impact high political cost things like combustion engine EOs, played a big role in creating that perception.
I'm not sure which EO you're referring to, but the EPA regulations (i.e., not an EO) will help drive adoption of EVs over the coming decade, and that's a very good thing and worth one thousand battles with The Groups in terms of actually helping fight climate change and moving the nation to the far superior EVs.
https://walberg.house.gov/media/in-the-news/fox-news-biden-finalizes-crackdown-gas-cars-forcing-more-half-new-car-sales-be
(A two part comment because Substack won't let me write a longer comment. Apparently, many posters don't have that problem.)
The policy was NOT excellent.
The hostility to fossil fuel producing and transportation project in the US has a ridiculously high cost per ton of global CO emissions reduced.
IRA should not give subsidies to _investment in_ CO2 reduction but to _the reduction_ on sheer efficiency grounds. In addition, giving the subsidy for reduction woud make the cost per ton reduced more transparent and presumably would weed out projects that would not be chosen if we had the tax on net emissions that we should have.
The administration did nothing to reform the COP approach of seeking arbitrary % reductions in CO2. This does not mimic the effects of taxation of net CO2 reductions at all!
The fact that taxing net emissions is not yet feasible does not mean that we cannot seek to make policy mimic the effects.
Investing results in long-term gains, well after the investments have gone away. If we transition to an EV-based transportation system CO2 reductions will stretch out indefinitely. Focusing on immediate reduction (not sure how to do that anyway) doesn't buy you very much.
Now one can argue that the same thing can be accomplished via a carbon tax and I might agree. But that's the same thing as the economist on the desert island saying, assume we have a can opener. It isn't that it's "not yet feasible"; it's that it's not going to happen.
Umm, Biden really did try to stop the federal government from issuing new gas and oil leases and really did try to appoint a banking regulator who wanted to kneecap oil companies. Republicans saved him from himself.
I think Matt is mostly on target here, especially about the degrowthers and the attempts to do a backdoor carbon tax by stopping local production is nonsensical.
But it does feel like he is also basing is cost benefit analysis solely on the central tendency of likely outcomes, not the outlier outcomes, which become much more likely as the normal distribution plot gets moved a couple of degrees higher (assuming that's what we're dealing with)
The principles remain the same. If you can show convincingly that risk-adjusted costs are skewing higher that changes the portfolio of actions that provide a net benefit.
The RCP8.5 thing showed that activists and activist scientists are willing to exaggerate costs so some skepticism and wide-ranging debate is warranted.
There’s also the matter of adaptation vs mitigation spending. The taboo on the former makes little sense. There are definitely cases where the marginal benefit is provided by spending on adaptation.
Anyone citing RCP8.5 (cough cough Biden White House memos.....) is deliberately lying. It is so dishonest to act like this is "business as usually" when it hasn't been a plausible pathway for over ten years erodes trust in and the authority of those who want to take action on climate change.
It makes me so angry. If one's stance has merit, then one does not need to lie!
That’s the problem with any sort of tactical science. You’d better be sure about your results because your opponents will be looking hard for any mistakes.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/we-found-an-excel-file-online?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
The burden of proof here is backwards, as it always has been. The folks who want to pursue current emissions pathways should absolutely prove that it's safe. You're playing Russian roulette with my kids' lives, and asking *me* to prove that the current chamber doesn't have a bullet in it.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950
Part of the benefit of mitigation is to avoid costs of adaptation.
Yes, bearing in mind that the benefits of mitigation are diffuse across time and space whereas money well spent on adaptation can bring more immediate benefits to those doing the spending. There’s a balance to be struck, yes?
Yes that is exactly the problem
Although ..
My sense is not so much that people WANT to free ride as that they overestimate the deadweight losses.
Natural disasters and heat waves don’t actually cost that much. The average for the last 5 years is around $120B in total damage, about like losing a single midsize bank. You could triple that and it still wouldn’t be that big a deal.
I think this mostly shows the perils of this sort of accounting. Do you really think the loss of a midsize bank would cause the same amount of human suffering as the destruction of western North Carolina, or the fire that burned down Paradise, CA, let alone all of them together?
The conflation of natural disasters and climate change here isn’t particularly scientific though. There is an increased chance of more severe events, but the words “increased” and “more” are simply not known with any degree of certainty. You are overstating how much we know.
You should talk to people in the insurance industry. The complete lack of certainly is exactly what worries them.
In a policy sense though it just sounds like catastrophising, which isn’t helpful. If there is an expected benefit from some policy it is good to be able to enumerate that benefit in some measurable way.
But that's been largely the issue. It's incredibly difficult to measure, and climate scientists have actually been fairly conservative in their projections. The assumption many have made is that the damage function grows in a linear function and that's likely wrong. You can call it catastrophizing if you want, while life is not going to end, it's likely a Major American city is going cease to be sometime over the next 50 years, and it's hard to predict the downstream effects of that.
I don't think I conflated anything, or claimed anything about how much we know. I agree that the impact of climate change on natural disasters is probabilistic, but that doesn't mean it's not significant.
Do you think the science is sufficiently settled about the relationship between climate change and natural disasters that it would allow us to make well grounded claims about the harm reduction resulting from any specific climate policy?
There is a whole field of research about that. It's called event attribution. In other words: Yes.
I think the connection between increased temperature and wildfire is quite well established. The connection between hurricanes and ocean temperatures is less clear, which means that it justifies less mitigation effort (but definitely more than 0).
The fire that destroyed Paradise, CA had more to do with California's refusal to clear out underbrush or allow controlled burns.
And PG&E's failure to do any maintenance for 50 years.
That too
The fire that wiped out 1000 homes on a December day was because of unseasonably high and dry temperatures that have doubled the length of the average fire season
In Louisville Colorado*
Climate change absolutely plays a role, but it's not the only factor.
Ok, but so what?
Natural disasters have a thousand fathers while the lack of them is an orphan.
This. My outdoor wedding in the Pacific Northwest was half ruined by wildfire smoke. No need to cry me a river, but it's especially hard to put a dollar value on the impact of the whole West Coast not being able to enjoy the outdoors 5 days a year.
If a bunch of kids are absent from schools for ~18 days, that's considered chronically absent and we consider it a crisis in that school system. Schools in some parts of North Carolina are still closed (for totally justifiable reasons!). The dollar amount of the cost of repairing the roads, repairing schools, fixing kids and teachers homes, etc. are one thing. The long term impact on the region's youth is unlikely to be a component of that calculation but we all know that delays and disruptions in education have negative long term impacts on those kids.
I'm a schools guy so that's where my head goes when I think about what you've written but we can probably apply that same line of thinking to many aspects of climate change induced disruption. It's not just lost property but lost time and opportunity that could have otherwise been spent normally.
If you have a way of making comparisons in raw human suffering, I and the Nobel Committee are all ears.
If the bank failed and took lots of peoples savings with it? It would definitely cause much more human suffering. If it was like Silicon Valley Bank and nobody lost a penny, it would cause much less.
Is this hypothetical bank not FDIC insured?
However much it is, it makes sense to make cost effective investments in adaption and mitigation.
So what if they don't cost "that much"? If we can avoid them with low-cost policies like taxing net emissions of CO2, and investments in adaption -- levies, asset hardening, seawalls, relocation, forest management, etc., why not do it?
> I’m a bit worried Matt is going down the Andrew Sullivan path; making your personal beefs the basis of your political analysis
Uh, we can always attribute some of these beefs to "strategic trolling". Ie, getting your ideological opponents to negatively engage and thereby raise the salience and distribution of the debate. And, as noted in the article, Yglesias has a history of trolling in general so even if this is just him indulging those impulses, we can be confident he'll manage that well enough.
*edit to deal w/ substack messing up long comments by making a short comment and editing in the rest of the original comment. background, https://www.slowboring.com/p/wednesday-thread-f0f/comment/79168766
shifting fossil fuel consumption from here to not-here has huge benefits to domestic air pollution, an issue that Matt has expressed both support for and support for running on in the past. So I do think there are some unexamined tensions
I don’t take his position to be “solving climate change wouldn’t have large benefits to Americans”.
His position is that reducing emissions through high local energy prices has large local costs and contributes only a little to solving climate change, and the amount contributed is also enjoyed by free riders, so there is an obvious collective action problem.
If we could waive a wand and solve climate change I am confident he would enthusiastically do so.
If the US zeroed out its own emissions for 26 years, that would curb aggregate warming by about 0.1 degree celsius. The marginal effect of any sort of realistic austerity is trivial.
And yet, the innovation point stands. The side-effect of us trying to curb our emissions is inventing technology, processes and policies that enable it, which can be adopted abroad. That doesn't mean the ROI exists across the board, but it does make the calculus more complext.
You are leaving out the effects of the border adjustment on CO2 heavy imports from countries that do not have a tax on net emissions.
We can: tax net emissions and have a border adjustment on imports from placed that do not.
I'm waiting for someone to enthusiastically wave it. :)
What if we just ignore these braindead groups and just concentrate on the awesome things going on in transitioning to the new renewables economy? More like David Roberts, Noah Smith, Jesse Jenkins etc. Arguing about the groups here is entering into a useless cul de sac. Meanwhile, the incoming administration will try its best to do devastating things. Focus on *that.*
I think it’s useful because democrats need affirmatively disavow them
Andrew Sullivan’s path is better than putting solar panels on your roof.
There are certainly more efficient ways of curbing climate change than putting solar panels on the roof of a townhouse in a high cost, regulation-loving city. However, said actions would not signal one’s commitment to curbing climate change. Matt seems to do a great deal to deflect criticisms from Democrats to his left.
Andrew Sullivan has balls.
I think Matt genuinely want to _persuade_ some on his Left.
I've been an Yglesias reader since the 00s, always admired him for thoughtful takes. It's only since the Substack switch that I've seen him spiral towards the "extremely online" anti-establishment and personal resentment takes. I think Matt of 2000-something would be horrified to see people comparing him to Sullivan; I hope today's Matt manages to avoid that fate.
If a Substacker is serious, they cannot afford to be "horrified" by being compared to anyone.
Do you have a substantive policy disagreement?
See my reply to Colin Chaudhuri, which I posted an hour before you posted this.
To be clear. I don’t think he’s going full Sullivan. His personality being what is compared to Sully (who by is own admission is very emotional) i seriously doubt he gets there.
Nonetheless, just number of times he’s writing about his disagreements with lefty environmentalists tells me it’s affecting his work at least a bit. And again, I maybe wasn’t clear but I agreed more than disagreed with his take.
I think this is one of the worst Yglesias takes I've seen. I can give several reasons:
1. The casual link to a piece that presents an argument over whether climate change is "existential" (as in civilization-destroying) or merely "catastrophic" (as in, hundreds of millions of people will die and human progress will be set back by most of a century.) The Yglesias I read in the 2000s would have correctly seen both of these outcomes as unacceptable, and he would have called out insanity of balancing policy on distinctions like that. It very much reminds me of the kind of muddled thinking that got us into the Iraq war.
2. The unknown unknowns associated with climate change are enormous. Current models are spitting out enormous temperature rises due to changes in cloud formation. Are they right? Nobody knows. The arctic is melting decades ahead of when this was predicted. Oceans are currently much hotter than anyone can really explain (and yes I'm aware of the particulates theory), despite El Nino being over. We are currently off the map and in uncharted territory. Any piece on climate change should at least try to perform a real cost/benefit assessment based on the huge risks and tipping points, but instead we get a link to an extremely low-quality Vox article.
3. The implication that actual Democratic policies are actually somehow different than the policies he would implement. In practice, he wants "common sense" climate policies that center on short-term economic growth. But if you look at Biden's policies around short-term fossil fuel production and emissions reductions through economic development AKA the IRA (basically a basket of tax incentives to produce new technology, essentially no direct emissions caps), what are we even arguing about? These are the policies we implemented. Matt is offering essentially no new policy ideas here. At best he is offering us a political surrender around the *idea that climate policy is important*, which isn't accurate or in any way the courageous political move.
Finally, there is a point that Matt used to make that I've taken to heart. Which is that the purpose of winning elections is not simply to win elections, but to *govern*. If climate change is best-case "catastrophic" (according to Matt's own citation) then we should care about this. We should not treat it as a political means-to-an-end, but actually the end itself.
I feel like the old Yglesias from a decade ago would have been the one writing this comment, and he would have said it all more eloquently than I have. I've been defending Matt against many of my friends who criticize him, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm defending a version of Matt that no longer really exists. Maybe we all have a well-defined intellectual expiration date and Matt has simply passed his.
Qualitatively, policy does NOT depend on the difference between "existential" and "catastrophic." What these exaggerations do is persuade people that the are being stampeded into extreme, anti-growth policies. This tragic because I do not think that is the motivation of most environmentalists; they simple do not understand the costs of the policies that come out of listening to these exaggerations o that there exist policies that reconcile CO2 emissions reduction and vigorous growth.
Could you link to some of the extreme anti-growth policies that were passed or ordered into law in the United States over the past four years? I'm trying to understand what policies we're arguing to replace.
What I meant was policies that are so costly per unit of CO2 emission avoided that in effect they are anti growth.
The clearest example IO think is is the pause of the LNG exports. This will just mean that slightly more expensive LNG will be supplied from somewhere else an that the slightly higher cost will lead to a super slightly lower CO2 emission at a non-slight cost to project sponsors. But anything beyond taxing net emissions is a bit anti-growth.
Given that most Americans are meh on climate change and even if America were to zero out its emissions for the next 26 years it would only decrease global warming by ~.1%, I think Matt’s absolutely right to focus on the economic benefits and an “all of the above” energy strategy.
I can’t tell if it’s because of American exceptionalism, but Americans deeply believe they are the end all be all. The reality is, the countries that will determine the climate trajectory in the next 50 years will be India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria and a host of other developing nations
Some recent studies are giving strong signals that we are now entering a climate feedback loop that involves reduced cloud formation [1,2]. Warmer temperatures means fewer sunlight-reflecting clouds, and that means more warming, and so on. If this is happening, then we're in very deep shit. None of this is certain yet, but the signals are getting more robust. At very least, recent warming is well outside of the predicted range.
Assuming we come to the conclusion this (or some other tipping point) is underway, then to avoid catastrophe we're going to need to take some kind of action. The most likely options include solar radiation management techniques -- spraying reflective materials into the upper atmosphere, or marine cloud brightening. This is going to require coordinated action between multiple nations, since it will affect global weather.
The problem with this idea is twofold. First, the US does not seem interested in coordinated action involving climate change. Worse, the current administration seems to be actively opposed even to researching these techniques. (Some GOP-led states in the US are passing laws to ban even small-scale research studies.) Second, whatever you might think about the US, we still have the largest military in the world. This means that if the US decides to stop the rest of the world from taking action, we have a relatively high probability of being able to do so.
So yes: I think climate change matters a lot. I think Matt should pay more attention to it. I don't think it's about US emissions, so much as the need for global leadership on an issue that might get suddenly much worse. Matt does not seem to be aware of any of these tipping points, and he's posting analysis that looks like it was written in 1998.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/why-hot-high-temperatures-cloud-cover-decreased-rcna182937
[2] https://www.envirotech-online.com/news/weather-monitoring/159/international-environmental-technology/cloud-feedback-a-crucial-driver-of-recent-global-warming/64091
I think something that climate people struggle with is political reality. I believe in climate change. None of what you said changes the fact that the trajectory of climate change is going to be determined by countries not named the US and Americans are largely ambivalent to it.
Unless you can figure out a way to change the political reality that Americans don’t really care about climate change and more importantly don’t want to spend money on it, the climate science is moot
I think Matt’s point is that the US has very little control over those tipping points, Americans don’t seem to care about it, it’s unclear what the effects will be and our policy of climate change should mostly focus on energy abundance that is popular with voters.
America was never really a leader on climate change and it’ll unlikely be one in the future.
Your response to the above points that “America might use military force” is … odd. Like sure, hypothetically. But the idea that there is a global consensus to spray chemicals in the atmosphere in mass, funding is secured for it and it is deployed, will probably be decades from now. Hell we barely even implemented the Kyoto protocol. Who knows what the administration will be like!
Yes the enemy is not these hapless environmental groups, it’s Republican media ecosphere nutpicking and messaging.
All the "concrete benefits to regular Americans of fighting climate change" go into the estimate of the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions or the value of CO2 emission avoided in any mitigation policy.
The line about heat pump subsidies is wrong -- it is working through the innovation channel as well, just like all the technologies in the previous sentence. Subsidies for heat pumps are a big reason why we now have high performance cold temperature heat pumps, and they are likely cost effective without subsidy in the near future. Similar subsidies are why cool new electric products like the Impulse stove have become real. Innovation is real and important beyond the big power generation questions.
Yeah subsidies are a bit economically inefficient, but that's vs a carbon tax which is practically impossible.
And subsidies at least are pro-growth/investment, rather than degrowth, and they don't directly make energy more expensive(yes, they contribute to tax burden/deficit)
Now that we're no longer in a zero interest rate situation, large government subsidies also contribute to inflation, which makes everything more expensive; and they crowd out private investment.
Agreed, but there's often a step function - a hump, if you will - that new technologies need to overcome before private investments become viable. It's not that they won't get there, but they'll get there faster if subsidies give them a push. Getting the "push" correct - in timing, targets, and magnitude - is tricky, but that's where dispassionate cost-benefit analysis (particularly as opposed to industry lobbying) is most critical.
I agree that such targeted subsidies can be occasionally helpful. But firstly, are 21st century democracies competent enough to do this kind of thing well? And secondly, one problem with such subsidies is that they create a group of constituents that then perpetually lobbies against repealing them.
Fair points.
> are 21st century democracies competent enough[...]?
is the big-picture question for our generation to answer, and the reason why I am a subscriber to Matt Yglesias Thought. I desperately want the answer to be Yes, because I don't see any other hopeful alternative.
My more libertarian impulses are based on only wanting to take that bet (on government competence) when government has something genuinely unique to offer, or when there are no private alternatives. In case of things like subsidies, if those are only worthwhile if they're well-implemented, then I'd rather not take that bet in the first place.
Essentially, restrict government to doing few things, but doing those very well.
A recent example is preparedness against various catastrophes, like pandemics: here private actors can help, but the main responsibility lies with government. Nevertheless, even this attitude can result in highly suboptimal policy outcomes, like in the case of climate policy, where market- and technology-based solutions would work much better than what we get.
One of the advantages of taxing net emissions is that it does NOT create an interest group and does not require targeting, though it does require monitoring of the CO2 removed to get the "net" getting subsidy.
<sigh> No, subsidies not paid for with additional revenues do not cause inflation.* They cause _deficits_ which poses a choice to the Fed whether to inflator or raise interest rates. If it is pursuing Flexible Average Inflation Targeting, it has to chose higher interest rates.
* I'm assuming that the subsidies are not large enough and not so concentrated as to "require" additional inflation to facilitate adjustment o relative prices.
They go great with a carbon tax!
Subsidies for X are often a wasteful solution for what would be much better solved via deregulation, permitting reform, *removal* of subsidies for not-X, etc. Rather than subsidize geothermal energy, say, it's much better to remove regulatory barriers to allow it to be built out.
It would probably be helpful to also consider making discussion of carbon capture more publicly acceptable. It doesn’t eliminate the need to reduce emissions, but it can help, and recent breakthroughs make it more feasible as a tool. See for example https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/10/23/capturing-carbon-from-the-air-just-got-easier/
Yep, we need new technologies to reduce carbon emissions.
It's already as acceptable as taxation of net emissions. [Does this comment require a :) or a:(?]
I wonder if countries who would benefit (in purely selfish nationalist terms) from some moderate measure of global warming, e.g. Scandinavia, would protest if we reversed the climate back to 1990 temperatures through carbon capture.
Yet another advantage of taxation of net emissions. The incentive for creation of new technologies it there.
Good piece, though I would have mentioned the pausing of LNG export permits as well. Biden in his boundless wisdom decided to make a bunch of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania mad by going after their line of work in an election year.
I still remember my sense of despair when the LNG export permit pause was announced. Even though there was no immediate impact, the combination of brain dead political malpractice and geostrategic malpractice was stunning. Remember that substituting American LNG for Russian pipelined natural gas for Europe was both part of what got Europe through the winter, and a significant increase in American global influence. To step on that American success in order to get cheers from fringe climate groups was utter madness.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports
Which swing voters were targeted with this absurdity?
And, according to this: https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/power-decarbonization-and-lng-exports
the effect of the "pause" global CO2 emissions is MORE emissions
There is good odds that the pause will save them from themselves from overshooting on capacity too much.
The approved pipeline of projects was already probably more than needed to satisfy longer term demand…
Welp…Greta Thunberg won’t be sending Matt a Christmas Card this year…
Definite parallels between climate thought policing and other recent issues that have animated the Left. Ending up on some group’s “black list” as a “denier” for daring to say something as innocuous as ‘We overlap on 90% of our views, but I’d like to reserve judgment on the final 10%’ is or was a noxious feature of: 1) Covid …2) race/policing issues starting in the late 2010’s 3) MeToo 4) Trans issues, and maybe 5) Israel/Palestine 6) and even Trump’s re-election.
Perhaps there is something to the idea that the decline of religion has left a psychological hole in our lives…which has led to the adoption of religious-like fervor on other issues.
The bad news is the Left continues to create these reactionary purity tests. The GOOD news though - I think - is that the zeitgeist usually peaks, passions naturally cool, and the idea space re-opens after a few years...(I have many friends that angrily wagged their finger at me over not wearing a mask outside eg…or for not accepting “Believe All Women” as a literal command…who NOW pretend they were always middle grounders and were never part of the litmus test crowd.)
I try to be "spiritual but not religious" in my left-wing beliefs
To be fair, the block list claims to be “deniers and trolls”, and it’s very accurate to say that Matt does some unnecessary trolling in his tweets.
This is a link to a literature review on degrowth. It will not surprise you that degrowth is a load of nonsense.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924002210
I note that someone actually thought that the Cuban economic situation in the 1990s was actually good and worth emulating.
When I was young the standard talking point on the left was Cuba had the best health care system in the world. Lefties loved Castro.
In some respects that was defensible - they had / have a more "market-based" approach to doctor training than the US.
Jason Hickel and his cabal of people trying to resell the "
Population Bomb's" neo-Malthusian assertions are a bunch of idea laundering frauds.
I don’t trust “expert” estimates of the cost of carbon because very few people think seriously about mitigation.
Coastal defenses can protect against rising sea levels.
Air conditioning can protect directly against heat.
Moving to higher latitudes and higher altitudes can protect against flooding and heat.
Even today, most migration within the US is towards the sun belt. Europeans are far likelier to vacation in the Mediterranean than in Norway. There are vast empty spaces between 45 and 60 degrees north that could easily become more habitable as the world warms. Many of these are in the US and Canada could plausibly become a superpower.
Climate reparations might be as simple as subsidizing cheap solar panels for places like Nigeria and India and letting people in the hardest hit places immigrate to rich, northern countries.
In addition, those who do think seriously about mitigation can come to different conclusions about how it should be valued and traded off in comparison to the energy benefits gained.
Sounds true, but specifics?
The whole point is that everyone has their own specifications here. They may not be as detailed and exhaustive as yours often are, but they may still differ in opinions on how to best trade off.
Agree overall.
If I had to make a steel-man case for being an angry climate litmus tester - it might be that the mitigation costs and costs associated with half a billion people relocating within 1 or 2 generations (as countries like Bangladesh get swallowed up) is much greater than the cost of acting now…and scarier that that is the not-completely-crazy tipping point feature of some climate models. (ie ice cap and permafrost loss is an accelerating process - so by 2100 we have a 1 foot sea-level rise and +2 C, but by 2200 we have a 50 foot rise and +10 C…then the Tuesday after *that* happens Earth turns into Venus…or maybe Seti Alpha 6.)
(But too many people who earnestly believe the above also tell me that nuclear power isn’t an option😐 due to safety concerns)
I really think Bangladesh can build coastal defenses. If the Dutch could pull it off in 1675…
But adaptation and mitigation are not alternatives, they are simultaneously determined. Avoiding some of the costs of adaption is part of the benefit of mitigation. We optimize both mitigation and adaption.
Do you place any value on the subjective utility of non-human sentient organisms?
I'm not sure there are non-human sentient organisms in the sense that they have hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
And jeez trying to calculate animal utility for those non-hoping, non-dreaming, non-aspiring critters boggles my mind. Consider the ongoing humanitarian crisis of predator-driven antelope carnage. But there is *human* utility to be gained by preserving biodiversity, for many reasons.
Yes, more so than the body politic, but mainly by not eating meat.
I also oppose my wife’s efforts to euthanize pets when they become inconvenient to us but still seem to enjoy life. Our 17 year old car cat has lived through two years of loud, nocturnal meowing because of my grace.
However, if I started explicitly weighing the subjective experiences of all animals, I’d become a cuck. I’d also become a cuck if I valued the utility of other humans as much as my own. I’m happy giving human happiness much more weight than animal happiness just like I give my son’s happiness more weight than that of strangers. Keeping the cat alive is about grace and finishing what we starred honorably more than net utility
I do, but thing the practical effect is just to marginally raise the estimated optimal tax on net emission of CO2. (Cutting down the tree the orangutan lives in releases CO2).
You do realize that "people in the hardest hit places" is like 2.5 billion people, right
Have fun with those caravans!
No, it’s not. India will not be “hardest hit” because it has highlands for internal migrants.
Low lying, tropical islands with no highlands within their borders will be hard hit.
Look, I don't want to sound too condescending here because I really think that you don't come from a place of malice. That being said, it's clear that you don't know a single thing about this topic. It's not the experts who "haven't thought very seriously about mitigation", it's you. Which honestly makes it hard for me to figure out where to begin.
For starters, look at satellite visualisations of India during a typical heat wave from the last few years. I'm not sure if my post gets hidden if I post a link here, but they are not too hard to find on Google. What you're gonna see there is that there are very few specks of lands in India that aren't affected by heat waves and droughts. So the idea that the people from those affected areas can just move to the "highlands" if those heat waves manifest themselves thanks to climate change is a fantasy. (Also, who houses those migrants? Who provides the infrastructure? Who moderates the societal strifes that are sure to come out of this?)
It's also pretty interesting that you immediately jump to "India" when I mention the 2.5 billion people at risk of displacement by climate change. The problem is a lot bigger than India. Floods in Bangladesh, droughts in the MENA region, forest fires and heat waves in South America, floods in Southeast Asia and basically the entire Pacific region... 2.5 billion might even be a conservative estimate. The UN IPCC estimates the number of people living in areas particularly vulnerable to climate change as high as 3.3 billion.
As an aside: We actually don't know how much mitigation we'll need to do, because one thing that scientists have learned over the last few years is that the planet already acts crazier than predicted. Heat waves are more brutal, floods are more frequent, droughts are more prolonged than estimated. There are very weird things happening with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that scientists can't really explain. So the idea that Bangladesh can just build dams or whatever, EVEN IF THE FINANCING IS SOMEHOW SECURED, sounds more sensible than it is.
But back to our numbers from before. Let's conservatively estimate that the number of people living in regions particularly vulnerable to climate change is more like 1.5 billion. Let's say that twenty percent of those actually need to leave their region at some point, that makes it 300 million people. According to the UN, 58 percent of refugees are displaced internally, whereas 42 percent try to find their luck abroad. Applying those numbers to our 300 million people, that makes it 126 million people who flee to other countries of the world. That's 2.5 times the total number of refugees living abroad right now, which is 50 million.
Granted, those 126 million probably leave over the span of several decades, but more than tripling the total number of refugees SOLELY because of climate change... that seems pretty bad to me. Look how quickly western democracies lost their minds with refugee numbers way smaller than that. I'm not saying that we are nearing the apocalypse or anything; that's obviously dumb. But the idea that "people in the hardest-hit countries can just emigrate"... yeah, that's pretty ignorant, I'm sorry.
I agree with your pointing out the cost without or WITH adaption. That's exactly what goes into the models that estimate the rate of taxation of net emissions [or other policies even if they have higher costs] that we need to minimize those costs.
I’m less ignorant than you suppose. The migration necessitated by climate change will be difficult and expensive. However, it will be less difficult and less expensive than any realistic alternative.
You talk about 300 million refugees. That number can be greatly reduced through deploying air conditioning to hot places. Deaths from heat stroke are regrettable, but so is extreme poverty. Current increases in global emissions are driven by newly industrializing countries. It is more important that these countries continue winning the war against extreme poverty than it is to keep the planet a degree cooler.
You’re right that mitigation is possible. But you’re wrong if you think that any of these efforts zero out the harms they are addressing.
I don’t. I do note that hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese (and quite a few Indonesians and Brazilians) have, in the past two decades, escaped privation through joining industrial, high energy civilization.
This is a good point in principle, but in practice I believe that adaption costs avoided (seawalls ain't cheap :)) are folded into the benefits of mitigation and therefor into the estimate of the optimal tax on net emissions.
A very underused frame for Democratic energy policy is something like: Freedom from the tyranny of gas prices.
Turns EV adoption from a culture war issue into an energy independence and pocketbook one. And resounds in national security in a way that highlights the urgency of the clean energy infrastructure buildout.
"And if your policymaking is responsive to the demands of interest groups whose ideas don’t make sense, you end up making bad policies." - a one-sentence summation of the failures of the Biden administration
"But it does mean saying a firm 'no' to degrowth"
I pumped my fist in the air strongly when I read this. This needs to be the first thing on the minds of every single person who wants to advocate on behalf of the environment. People will not stand for a lower quality of living, those who do advocate for it vastly underestimate how much more miserable their own lives would be, and anyone who advocates for degrowth policies needs to be strongly attacked as such.
After that, the next step needs to be a full embrace of nuclear energy, and deploying as much of it as possible. This would pretty much solve tackling the electricity wedge of fossil fuel usage. It also disarms getting into fights with preservationists over mass solar and wind farms. Matt is correct that permitting reform needs to be at the heart of this effort, and that also covers expanded geothermal drilling. Hydroelectric energy production also must be maintained.
Once you have the electricity wedge tackled, then the transportation wedge is not that far away--keep grinding on battery development and making electric cars reliable, and building out networks of charging stations to make it viable everywhere. After that, we're just down to the industrial and agricultural wedges that are tougher, but much more manageable.
Finally, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We are going to need to do plenty of mining to get the resources we need to build cleaner energy--let's do it more responsibly and within our own domestic power. And yes, that does mean in the interim we also need cleaner forms of fossil fuels to prevent degrowth. Thus, we should here to call out those who call out stances in favor of fracking--Ooo, YES!
I endorse almost all of this. My only quibble is with the idea of deploying as much nuclear as possible to solve "tackling the electricity wedge of fossil fuel usage." I'd say we should continue with Biden's very strong support of nuclear power and give the industry everything it needs to stop "blowing it" with ridiculously expensive reactors and overpromising and under-delivering.
IMO, many nuclear advocates are a tad delusional about how to cost effective it would be to build out a clean grid with "as much nuclear as possible." Using Vogtle as an example, The cost of its output averaged over its lifetime is about 15 cents per kWh (wholesale). Transmission and distribution and other misc costs would mean that the total cost of getting its output to retail users is around 25-30 cents per kwh. The average retail electricity price in the US is around 16 cents. It's likely if we built 10 more Vogtles (and we should), the cost of the output from the last one would be more like 10 cents per kwh. That still yields a retail cost of 20-25 cents or more. Also, this ignores the fact that nuclear power can't economically follow load, so on a grid, it needs to be paired with either flexible generation or batteries.
Currently, nuclear power plant construction is too risky for the private sector to finance it. The only way nuclear gets built is with the government somehow underwriting its cost overrun risk or pushing it onto ratepayers. There have been a few examples of tech companies financing SMRs, but those are just demo/pilot designs that won't be ready for mass deployment for at least a decade and likely more. The reality is that due to private market financing constraints, nuclear power is unlikely to even maintain its current contribution to electric power generation for the next 10-20 years.
I am certainly onboard with the government underwriting the cost overrun risk.
Yes. Me too. But the public isn't at all. Not because they're anti-nuclear, but because they don't want higher electricity costs or higher taxes. Every poll I've seen shows almost no willingness by the public to pay much of anything extra for clean electricity. Meanwhile, the bankruptcies and cost overruns at Vogtle and Summer killed any change for a fast nuclear renaissance that's private sector lead. SMRs funded by tech companies may eventually get us there, but not before 2040 or so.
IRA is a cost to taxpayers, too.
How much do you estimate we're talking here, and how does it compare to the massive federal budget as a whole?
I don't understand the way federal budgeting works well enough to know the exact answer to this.
Vogtle units 3 and 4 cost about $35 billion total. Ten of those would cost $350 billion, but that's not reality-based. The total cost of 10 Vogtle-like plants with 2 reactors each would probably cost between 100-200 billion.
The trick is figuring out how to structure the government guarantees for possible cost overruns. The Vogtle debacle bankrupted or caused severe financial distress to almost everyone involved, so the private sector wants almost nothing to do with nuclear power in general. The goal would be some sort of cost overrun guarantee that assuages the fears of private industry without creating wildly perverse incentives for them to pad out their profits or be reckless with costs.
For context we're getting just 12 new Ohio-class (SSBN(X)s) nuclear submarines for $100B. Definitely sign me up for these 10 new nuclear plants.
Thanks.
I'd add not to discount the possibility that CCS can become cheep enough so as NOT to have to "decarbonize" completely.
Fair--I'm more skeptical on the efficacy of this but I could be wrong. We also probably shouldn't discount sucking GHGs out of the atmosphere either--although that too is going require abundant clean energy.
I very much WANT to think abut CCS. We have to make it cheaper to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than some alternative way of displacing the higher marginal value use of fossil fuels. Something like a dedicated nuclear plant reducing CO2 back to C and O2 and then rebury the artificial coal we just created. :)
I agree with the vast majority of what you say here, Matt, but I'm pessimistic that the next Trump administration is going to simultaneously kneepcap green energy for the sake of "owning the libs" and even more strongly negatively polarize Democrats against anything having to do with fossil fuels.
Trump should invite a green energy CEO to be involved in his administration, that would certainly assuage this concern.
Maybe Musk can convince Trump of the merits of green energy, EVs, etc., but I suspect that there are going to be a lot more people around Trump on a day-to-day basis in the White House who think converting the entire US government vehicle fleet to "rolling coal" would be a swell idea.
Poe's Law: I genuinely can't tell if that comment was made tongue in cheek.
That took me a moment to get.
Yeah, the companies that Trump is a slave to don't want to produce more- they want prices to spike by getting rid of their competition.
Does Exxon think they can drive BP out of business? Really?
No, but they can try to drive electric vehicles off the road. They can smash as much solar and wind capacity as possible and block nuclear buildouts.
I believe there is some reason to doubt Exxon is more powerful than Tesla in the next Trump admin.
I don’t think Exxon is 100% anti-EV https://www.ogj.com/energy-transition/article/55131456/exxonmobil-completes-appraisal-drilling-in-quest-to-become-leading-lithium-supplier
Unfortunately, Trump will _keep_ all the subsidies to high-cost green energy schemes instead of "repeal and replace" with lower cost direct subsidies to CO2 removal with equal effect.
When I talk to my fellow progressives about how climate change is real but not existential, I draw the analogy to Covid
I agree that it is unimaginably terrible. Apocalyptic scenes, wildfire, drought, storms. The average person who spends almost zero time thinking about it, now has their life undeniably altered. (If you secretly hope for a crisis so you can take a run at capitalism, you'll get it.)
It follows that with the benefit of foresight, the average person would care about this issue a lot more. It also follows that there are many prudent things society should be doing right now to prepare before the political consensus moves into sharp concurrence.
But, like COVID it's not literally existential. Millions of people died who didn't have to, but societies kept going. Afterwards the schools reopened and you could not even tell which city or region was hit harder than another. For all the economic cost, economies are already stronger just from the passage of time. Climate change would be the same only on slow motion - a slowly unfolding calamity washed out by continual societal adaption.
Lastly if you think of the average person in a developing country, they already live in conditions you and I would characterize as apocalyptic. They are rightly much more concerned with the building of the society than the rebuilding of society. If I ask what progressives should prioritize, I find an inversion of the climate justice framework - If you are chiefly concerned with the global poor than you should emphasize anti-poverty development over decarbonization.
Antipoverty development need not be in contrast to "decarbonization" (or better said net zero by 20xx; CCS may make total decarbonization unnecessary). Even the poorest country can have an excise tax on first sale of carbon-containing fuels at very low deadweight loss. If they are fossil fuel importers, they may even see their import bill go down as the world reduces its demand for fossil fuels.
Right now, energy consumption is pretty strongly correlated with GDP, and so it follows that economic development will coincide with those developing countries consuming much more energy.
Similarly the cheapest forms of energy are carbon intensive. Until green technology advanced to the point that it literally makes fossil fuels obsolete, the most cost effective way to develop will be carbon intensive as well. So anti-poverty development will lead directly to carbon emissions - Yglesias gave the example of China in the past few decades.
For advanced economies it's true that if we proceed towards net zero faster it will mean cheaper energy prices (of all types) in developing countries. It would also allow those developing countries a great carbon budget (before whatever global climate consequences kick in).
That's all fine if we are pursuing green policies for our own sake, to know that it has positive knock-on effects for other countries. But if the primary purpose of our green policies is regard for the impact on other countries, there are many better ways to proceed with anti-poverty development than installing solar panels in Western countries.
To put it one way, if the West paid massive climate reparations to developing countries, letting them choose how to spend the money in development, the proximal impact would be to increase rather than decrease global emissions.
What I am trying to say is that we should be promoting both anti-poverty growth AND making that growth less net CO2 emission intensive, not slow growth in order to slow net CO2 emissions.
As long as we grapple with the fact that there are real tradeoffs here:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/tradeoffs-are-real
I think we agree that the energy abundance is going to be the best path forward:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance
A tax on net emissions recognizes the tradeoff head-on. _Energy_ abundance is good because abundance is good.:)
What is the genuine end-goal American (and world) climate policy. For the environmental Groups, the goal seems to be hanging oil company execs or some other thing that harms oil companies and brings the Groups catharsis. But those aren't serious goals. But the "serious" people don't seem to have a climate end-goal. They know that CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere, and that burning hydrocarbons since Industrialization means there is more CO2 in the atmosphere now than in 1850. Therefore, the atmosphere is warmer now than in 1850. But what is so sacred about the climate of 1850? And if it is sacred, do we have to return to it? Or if it is not, what is the goal instead? Matt is right that atmospheric warming won't cause human exinction. Maybe it will cause more natural distasters, but those happened in 1850 also, so responding to them is just a matter of spending priorities, not some test of moral worth. What atmospheric warming will likely do is cause glaciers to retreat further and coral reefs to shrink. Those really are just asthetic concerns. But even if humanity stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow the atmosphere would still be warmer than it was in 1850. Getting the atmosphere and the asthetics of 1850 back requires geoengineering, which none of the "serious" climate people want to do.
If you believe that non-human life has moral value, then coral reefs shrinking is not just an aesthetic concern. Or maybe the other way to put it is that I see aesthetic concerns as the actual purpose of life at the top of Maslow's hierarchy. I personally see a thriving city like Tokyo and a thriving coral reef as very similar. The highest form of life is complex, dynamic, and interdependent.
Ok, but what does that moral intuition say about what humanity should do in response? Curtailing current CO2 emissions will only limit future warming, which means that we are accepting that coral reefs will shrink in the future. To actually prevent reef shrinkage or even get reef growth means we have to make ocean water less acidic and create new areas for reef growth, which requires geoengineering.
It says that we should build a 200 year Noah's Ark of intensively managed wildlife sanctuaries to preserve biodiversity until we can get the natural environment back to a place where it can be self-sustaining.
Ok, maybe we should do that (Im not against it). But that is completely different from limiting current CO2 emissions, which is the only thing the "serious" climate people want to do.
Do you think there's some risk that your description of "serious climate people" has become something of a straw man? If we pointed out people who do want to preserve biodiversity, or do want to suck carbon from the air, would that adjust your sense of the movement, or would you just say "no, I'm not talking about those guys"?
I'm talking about all the dignitaries and wealthy people who attend things like the UN COP conventions and the World Economic Forum. The people with the power and the money to "do something." They come up with these great plans to limit future CO2 emissions and act like thats the only thing humanity should do solve the problem of climate change, even though that won't solve climate change according to every definition of climate change I know of. I'm actually more sympathetic to the biodiversity and asthetic concerns that result from atmospheric warming than I am about vague platitudes about future warming. I want an Operation Warp Speed for direct-air capture of CO2! If there is a chance we can reverse atmospheric warming then why aren't we trying?
Reminded me of the bottleneck to breakthrough paper written up here https://news.mongabay.com/2019/02/the-view-from-the-bottleneck-is-nature-poised-for-a-big-comeback/
Just limiting ourselves to direct effects on humans, a number of ways humans have adapted to the environment—the crops we grow, the lands we settle—rely on assumptions about climate that become non-viable if the climate changes significantly. For many temperate areas (or for extreme climates in rich countries, like Arizona or Florida), significant climate change will mean lower quality of life and shorter lifespans, as well as increased costs for insurance and infrastructure. For poor countries with extreme climates, the result of significant warming would be mass displacement for the lucky ones, and for the unlucky, death from heat, drowning, or famine. So to the extent we can mitigate climate change and its effects, we save people from those fates.
I don’t see why “natural disasters happened in 1850 too” is any more serious than the people you complain about. Crime also happened in 1850. Poverty and stagnation happened in 1850. Wars happened in 1850. All of these could also be described as matters of spending priorities, but money isn’t the only resource that gets spent—effort is spent, lives are spent. If policy *ever* has a moral aspect I think stopping the upending of the lives of the planet’s least fortunate people surely qualifies.
You are just restating what is pretty nearly universally agreed. The continued emission of CO2 into the atmosphere has costs. Given that reducing emissions has a cost how much reduction should we do to so that the marginal cost of reducing. equal the marginal cost of CO2 accumulation.
Ok, but atmospheric warming is already baked-in even if humanity stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow. So limiting current emissions only limits future warming. It doesn't do anything to get the atmosphere back to its pre-industrialization state. That's a fine outcome, but we shouldn't pretend that limiting current emissions is a panacea.
Sure, but I don't see why that disagrees with anything I wrote. The key sentence in what I wrote is "So to the extent we can mitigate climate change and its effects, we save people from those fates [of displacement and death]." That is in line with the "fine outcome" that you describe!
I alluded to this in another comment but maybe I would understand your argument better with a sense of who you're writing against. Who is it that is *not* a "lynch the Exxon execs" fanatic but also believes that limiting current emissions is a panacea, and is treated as "serious" (and treated that way by whom)? The way you framed your original comment it sounded like you were skeptical about climate policy full stop, since you named two groups and said that neither of them had worthwhile goals. But every time someone here has pointed out a benefit of limiting emissions you've said "Sure, that's a good idea." So it feels like maybe there's more seriousness on offer than you thought?
The 1850 climate isn’t sacred, but ecosystems take a long time to adapt to a new normal, and there’s usually lots of suffering in the process, so it’s better at the margin if the new normal they are adapting to is closer to what they are already adapted to.
That is a valid response, but that does mean accepting living a in a world that is fundamentally warmer than in 1850. The "serious people" should be straightforward about that instead of catastrophizing everything.
But "serious people" do talk about a warmer world. That's where COP's 1.5 or 2.0 increase ceilings imply.
I can't speak for other "serious people," but for me it is enact a set of least cost policies that according to the best geophysical-economic model we cna build leads to a least cost (literally highest benefit net of the dead weight losses of the policies) trajectory of the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. An approximation of that is a trajectory rates of taxation of net CO2 emissions applied by all countries that get us net zero by 20xx. The higher the tax rates the smaller is 20xx.