What’s impressed me most about this crisis is the likemindedness of European people. Despite Russian/Belarussian/Hungarian leadership that is at odds with liberal values, citizens of those countries (especially younger ones) seem to be on the same page as their counterparts in Western Europe in protesting the war and espousing European unity. Really destroys arguments claiming fundamental differences between the former USSR sphere/rest of the continent that can’t be bridged.
Dream scenario is Putin pushed out by popular protests, Navalny as interim leader, free elections soon thereafter. Then a massive Marshall-esque aid effort, allowing Ukraine to join EU/NATO first, and Russia in the medium term. Not likely, but also not impossible I hope.
Russia has been ruled by its security services, who are often venal and self-serving, since the 17th century and the days of the Tsars. If we offer to pour money into CapEx, most of it will end up lining the dachas of whatever elites survive the current scramble / reshuffling / purges after Putin.
I wrote about why that is over on Quora a few years ago, but the reasoning hasn't changed:
A couple of thoughts on the "renewable weapon" idea:
- "So we could conceivably do this again, if we could bring down oil (and gas) prices dramatically and permanently. For gas, this means switching rapidly to solar and wind."
Less than 25% of European natural gas is used for electricity generation. Industry uses more (for process heating, and as a primary material to make plastics, fertilizers, and others). And building heating uses the most: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eiagov/29053772892
Most of the industrial heating applications could be replaced with green hydrogen, which is in turn produced by renewables. The big challenge isn't scaling up solar and wind farms and plugging them into transmission lines - it's replacing the furnaces and water boilers of the 75 million European and UK households that rely on Russian gas with heat pumps. (Bill McKibben suggests using the Defense Production Act to massively scale up the production of heat pumps and selling them to Europe at cost: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/heat-pumps-for-peace-and-freedom)
- "But it also means building “clean firm” power to provide backup for solar and wind, at least until energy storage technology gets good enough that we don’t need backup."
Not necessarily. Storage isn't the only solution.
To explain, renewable intermittency works at two time-scales:
1. day-to-night (no sun / less wind in the evening) or day-to-day (sunnier / windier days)
The idea is you build up more wind and solar than you need in the summer, so you still have enough capacity to supply the winter load, when the sun and wind drop. This ends up being dramatically more cost effective, and straightforward, than scaling up storage (though many grids will and should do both). And in the summer, you can just throw away all that excess power, or use it to (inefficiently) produce the green hydrogen you need to decarbonize industry. For overbuilding to work, you need some (clean) baseload power, but a lot less than you think. Europe probably already has enough in the form of nuclear. The trick is just to build a lot of wind and solar.
So tldr is it really the "clean electrification" weapon, and the hard part of that is the "electrification," not the "clean (power)".
(Electric building heating and overbuilding renewables are both highly overlooked dimension of the decarbonization puzzle. I highly recommend reading Electrify by Saul Griffith on these topics - it would make for a great book review! He starts by visualizing the entire American energy economy, and works out how to implement and finance clean electrification at scale.)
I read pieces like this about solar and wind all the time and people just simply overlook three fundamental issues.
1) People mention the battery storage issues as an aside, but it is THE main cost issue. Right now, in the US, if you added up all of the batteries available throughout the country (including unavailable sources like your iphone or remote control batteries) the US has enough storage to power the country for a grand total of 3 min! It will cost, trillions of dollars to get the battery storage we need...even to get to the "over night" situation outlined above.
3) Deploying wide-scale solar and wind farms will cause an ecological disaster due to the amount land it would take to power the entire country on these sources.
Thanks for your points, JC! The question of how we're going triple our electricity supply cleanly is incredibly important, so it's critical to kick the tires on any proposed solutions.
I've been trying to get to the bottom of the issues you raised, so I'd (sincerely) love to see any sources you have to back your claims, because they don't jive with mine. (It seems like you may be pulling from this? https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered?s=r)
I'll respond to your points one at a time, and I'll state the claim I think I'm responding to, to avoid strawmaning.
1. Claim: "A huge reason solar panels have collapsed in price is because they are being manufactured by slave labor in China."
- I highly doubt this, because the cost of solar has been declining exponentially (due to learning curves) since the 1970's, much longer than China has been producing panels: https://bit.ly/3htNE1g.
(China's solar panel production basically started in the late 90's, and only bypassed Germany's output in 2015: https://bit.ly/3hsscKd)
So the 10x cost declines of the past decade are actually the continuation of a 50+ year trend. Okay, fine, but maybe this last round of cost reductions is being largely driven by forced labor?
Doubtful: Xinjiang mostly produces silicon, not the final panels. (according to the Politico article linked to by your Foreign Policy article: https://politi.co/3C4bASg) Silicon is a very small part of the cost of the final panel - usually less than 10% (according to NREL: https://bit.ly/3M8R3Rc). Therefore, it's very unlikely that forced labor in silicon production is "a huge reason" for why solar has gotten so cheap over the past decade.
(And, as an aside, let me state the obvious: slave labor is awful and we shouldn't support it. And the US, at least, is attempting not to: Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans imports from Xinjiang unless they can prove they weren't made with forced labor.)
2. Claim: "It will cost trillions of dollars to get the battery storage we need...even to get to the "over night" situation outlined above." (And, I'm assuming you're also claiming this cost issue prevents us from powering the grid largely with wind and solar.)
You didn't mention overbuilding, but it's worth stressing that we need an order of magnitude less storage if we overbuild renewables by 50% in order to deal with seasonal intermittency.
It's pretty striking. To see this, check out this curve: https://bit.ly/3hxNBBG. In a study done on Minnesota's grid, the (levelized) cost of usign solar to produce 1 kWh of electricity is 27 cents - with no overbuilding. This is far above the current grid cost of 5 cents/kWh, and the difference is overwhelmingly due to storage costs. By the time you get to 50% solar overbuilding, you need so little storage that the cost per kWh drops from 27 cents to 4, cheaper than the electricity currently powering the grid.
But let's set aside seasonal intermittency, since you said "it will cost trillions of dollars to get the battery storage we need...even to get to the "over night" situation outlined above."
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation to check this: installing enough batteries to power the average household overnight currently costs around $10k. There are 120 million households. That works out to $1.2 trillion total. This only covers residences, not all buildings, so you're in the ballpark! (For what it's worth, the feds would subsidies a quarter of cost.)
But is this too expensive to make a renewable grid viable? Probably not, for two reasons: cost reductions, and financing.
- Cost reductions: Lithium-ion batteries, like solar panels, are also on learning curves: the price has already dropped by 97%, and continues to drop by 20% every time we double the deployment. (https://bit.ly/3Ckkqf7) This means that installing batteries across 120 million households (and however many other buildings) would end up costing far less than $10k per household.
- Financing: Electrical machines are expensive to install, and cheap to operate. Fossil fuel machines are cheap to install, but expensive to operate - because of fuel costs. If we provide loans with interest rates of 2.9%, comparable to a mortgage, the average household ends up saving $1,000 a year after fully electrifying their home and installing solar panels and batteries. (https://bit.ly/3IAHN6r, page 24) The fuel for their fossil-powered machines ends up costing more than the financed capital cost of electrification + solar + batteries.
So, we can not only afford the batteries we need for day-night intermittency. With the proper federal financing, households will actually lose money if they don't install batteries (and solar and heat pumps). And batteries will only get cheaper as we scale up deployment.
3. Claim: "Deploying wide-scale solar and wind farms will cause an ecological disaster due to the amount of land it would take to power the entire country on these sources."
Wind turbines don't take up much space. They can co-exist with crops, and farmers are happy to have the extra revenue.
Solar panels have a bigger footprint. So let's see how much space they would take to power the entire country - after we electrify all cars and buildings.
A groundbreaking paper recently came out that tries to answer this exact question. It assumes that we power our grid with 50% solar, 45% wind, and 5% natural gas (or ideally an emissions-free non-intermittent power source). And it also assumes that we overbuild wind and solar by a third to address seasonal intermittency, and install batteries for day-to-night intermittency.
Conclusion: the amount of solar we'd need to build would cover only a fourth of one percent of the area of the continental US. (https://bit.ly/3pu78Y5)
This could be achieved by putting panels on buildings, parking lots, landfills, hydro reservoirs, and the rights of way for railroads, power lines, expressways, and gas pipelines. That's without touching farmland, never mind forest, so the ecological impact would be close to zero (https://bit.ly/3HNdet3). If we couldn't get that creative, and we could only put panels on buildings and parking lots, we'd only need to use about 1% of the farmland for the rest. If surrounded by native plants, the solar farms would probably help, not hurt, the local ecology.
4. Claim: "nuclear is the only real answer." I'm going to assume you mean "nuclear is the only real answer to replacing our current dirty power and producing all the additional power we'll need to run our electric homes and cars," since it's clearly possible to incorporate at least some renewables into the grid.
Running the grid largely on nuclear is certainly possible, since that's what France does. I'm not at all opposed: the US should speed up the production of current-gen plants and massively invest in advanced nuclear.
(The facts and arguments that follow are pulled from Electrify by Saul Griffith, page 70.)
However, because of regulations and widespread political opposition, the US nuclear industry is essentially moribund: only 1 reactor has been built since 1996, Watts Bar Unit 2, and it took 43 years to build. It would be extremely hard to scale in time without serious reform.
Assuming you could win the politics for said reforms, nuclear power would likely remain very expensive, and the combination of overbuilt renewables and battery storage is likely to prove far most cost effective and politically palatable.
Then there's a serious geographical problem: current nuclear plants need river or ocean water to cool them down. Two-thirds of all US freshwater already passes through the cooling cycle of power plants. In many states there is not enough enough cool water to install more nuclear plants. That means we could only double or triple the amount of nuclear power we currently produce (with current technology), which would only supply 10-25% of the total we need to decarbonize.
Again, nuclear is worth pursuing, but it's not the "only real answer." Arguably, the political, economic, and geographical issues around nuclear make it a long, hard, and insufficient road to decarbonizing the grid - much more so than renewables. But I suspect the "real answer" here, as everywhere else in climate policy, is likely "yes and."
Man, this piece is just such speculative BS. The historical analogy to the Marshall plan is so outlandish given the differences in political norms between Russia and western Europe. Geopolitics (and frankly American politics) just ain’t your bag, Noah. Goddammit, please maintain your focus on western market economics. That’s your expertise; interpretive political takes are not.
I swear, your substack critics seem unusually personal and nasty. Lack of paywall probably contributes some, but it does seem worse than comparable blogs (i.e. astralcodexten) Care to offer groundless speculation as to why?
This is all very well thought out (renewables = anti-Russia weapon), but the Marshall plan part is (noble) wishful thinking.
1) Unless the fighting stops very soon, it is likely that Russian army would go much more brutal with air, artillery and MLRS strikes => more devastation of Ukraine infrastructure. Zelensky already requests short-circuiting path to EU membership and if it happens, it would be both in Europe interest and morally superior to help Ukraine recover, not Russia. After all, they are the victims of our aggression.
2) Marshall plan didn't happen in the 1990s, when there was much more of the "end of history" idealism in the air. Still, without putting my conspiracy hat on, I guess many State department hardliners that time saw it in US strategic interest to weaken Russia in the long-term (as China threat was not anywhere on the horizon). How likely it would be to come back with a Marshall plan now - when we suddenly proved that Bzhesinskies of this world were right all along?
It is generally agreed that the punitive reparations imposed on Germany after World War I led to the rise of Hitler. The more generous treatment of Germany after World War II coupled with de-Nazification led to Germany becoming a leader of the EU. One can see the same pattern repeating itself with Russia. After de-Putinization, putting Russia on a modern economic footing and integration with the EU would put the old czarist imperial mentality to rest.
This is a lot of speculation built atop an insane premise -- that "[deposing] Putin", even absent direct Western influence, wouldn't result in massive calamity for Russia and Eastern Europe in general, that the in-cohesiveness of the subsequent government wouldn't jeopardize policymaking as a whole...
Reading the thoughts of people on Ukraine reminds me of quack doctors of yore trying to treat cancer or something: "just starve the patient!" suggests the sanction crowd; "just start ripping the head off!" you suggest here.
In the mean time, what's the off-ramp for Putin and / or the West assuming Putin stays in power (the most likely outcome, as far as I know) and deposes the current government of Ukraine (also highly likely)?
The status quo has a high risk of civilization-ending nuclear war that would kill billions of people. If feels like this risk should be taken more into account, and therefore we should be thinking of ways to try to de-escalate already.
In that case we do the Cold War 2 thing, harden the defenses of our NATO allies, make sure MAD is firmly in place, and undermine Russia's economy by transitioning very quickly to renewables.
I'm Ok with MAD for the US and Canada. Maybe the UK. But I don't know why we have MAD in place for NATO allies that are friendly countries, but not close cooperators in most other respects. It's one thing to take a bullet for a friend. It's another thing to just in front of a guy WITH your whole family and everyone on your street for someone you barely know.
In any case, that sounds like basically another decade or two with the existential risk of civilization ending nuclear war.
The good news is Russia probably weakens over that timescale regardless of what we do. They are declining in population and suffering from as many social problems as we are. They have a big Aids problem, drug addiction problems and alcoholism. The declining share of ethnic Russians in favor of Muslim ethnicities is likely to create social cohesion problems for them, too. I don't really see how they are a long term threat to anyone but their nearest neighbors if we leave them pretty much alone.
Why didn't this happen in the 90s? There should have been a Marshall Plan then. Why wasn't Russia invited to join NATO when Yelstin was president?
These two questions make me a little pessimistic about your excellent proposal because I think the chances of that happening say in 1997, when there had been a decade of improved relations between the West and first the Soviet Union and then Russia, were higher than they would be even if a democratic leader emerged in Russia today.
"What really needs to happen, in order to end this war, is for Russian leaders to depose Vladimir Putin" -this plan worked so well with Assad, I'm sure it will work out better this time!
Your blog really is across the board hysterically funny midwittery, from your twee insistence that we live in a time of great technological progress to your defense of Georgism (I'm sure the renter techbros in SF and their employers will go for this, and, like, basically nobody else in the universe) .... this, profoundly unhelpful nonsense. At least I know where to go for cutting edge "appeals to zoom office workers" opinions which are guaranteed to have little relation to the world of matter, and little appeal to people who live in it.
People should feel pain when they say stupid things. Of course many of them have undeveloped nervous systems and are unable to feel normal sensations which inform them of how abysmally stupid they are, but there isn't much I can do about that short of the bastinado.
Why is it necessary to allow Ukraine to join NATO? This is a matter for the current member states to decide and if Ukrainian neutrality seems more likely to lead to peace in the long term, that's what should be agreed.
(In fact this outcome was looking pretty likely just before the invasion. It seemed as if Putin's saber-rattling had scored a huge diplomatic coup for Russia, and then he threw it away by actually using the saber. NATO membership for Ukraine is more likely now than it was a week ago, but I'm still not convinced it's a good idea.)
Politicians are always proposing things like this for West Virginia, for the same reasons, and it never really works there. Why should we expect a different outcome for Russia?
* This changes the (cold) wargoal to removing Putin, ensuring he does not retreat. The chances of retreat are low, but there's the welfare of Ukrainians to consider.
* China gains an interest in preventing Russian defeat or at least preserving Putin, since this new Marshall plan sure looks as an attempt to ensure Russia is in the Western camp.
* Divides the Western alliance. Steps like ensuring quotas of Russian products sound like a reward even when it isn't given the preceding conditions.
In return... mildly higher changes of Putin being removed? I'm not sure, since it may turn him more paranoid (which is both good and bad for the West). Removal is a low probably event right now in any case.
So these are good ideas, but IMHO this is just not the time to say it, and definitely not explicitly. When Ukraine military situation is clearer calculus may change.
I expect Russian economic isolation to last as long as Cuba. The main ruling coalition in Russia consists of Putin-ultranationalist thinkers-military leadership-oligarchs, and the current round of sanctions have basically removed oligarchs' economic power. When Putin is gone, the coalition becomes his successor-ultranationalist thinkers-military leadership, which is what has sustained the Iranian regime, which is still standing after 4 decades of isolation. Their view of the West is inherently mistrustful, much like Iran, buttressed by an increasingly blind-nationalist populace in siege mentality.
Even if the West offers a renegotiation of economic ties in the future settlement, Russia may not be attuned to the apparent goodwill, and will instead double down on its confrontational stance. Economically Russia will also come to resemble Iran and adopt "Resistance Economy" as their guiding ideology, which precludes reintegration into the global economic order. Some of ultranationalist thinkers in fact anticipate its replacement by a multipolar order with the fall of the US and EU.
Compare Noah’s pro-green energy + pro-nuclear energy approach to Michael Shellenberger’s pro-fracking + pro-nuclear + anti-solar + anti-wind op-ed. While I disagree with Shellenberger overall, perhaps there is some merit to bringing down gas prices and reducing foreign energy dependence by boosting domestic supply. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered
What’s impressed me most about this crisis is the likemindedness of European people. Despite Russian/Belarussian/Hungarian leadership that is at odds with liberal values, citizens of those countries (especially younger ones) seem to be on the same page as their counterparts in Western Europe in protesting the war and espousing European unity. Really destroys arguments claiming fundamental differences between the former USSR sphere/rest of the continent that can’t be bridged.
Dream scenario is Putin pushed out by popular protests, Navalny as interim leader, free elections soon thereafter. Then a massive Marshall-esque aid effort, allowing Ukraine to join EU/NATO first, and Russia in the medium term. Not likely, but also not impossible I hope.
Russia has been ruled by its security services, who are often venal and self-serving, since the 17th century and the days of the Tsars. If we offer to pour money into CapEx, most of it will end up lining the dachas of whatever elites survive the current scramble / reshuffling / purges after Putin.
I wrote about why that is over on Quora a few years ago, but the reasoning hasn't changed:
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-reason-that-Russia-is-and-has-always-been-so-poor-despite-having-the-biggest-amounts-of-natural-resources-in-the-world-being-twice-the-size-of-the-USA-and-having-2-5-times-less-population-What-makes-this-country-so-miserable/answer/Steve-Estes
A couple of thoughts on the "renewable weapon" idea:
- "So we could conceivably do this again, if we could bring down oil (and gas) prices dramatically and permanently. For gas, this means switching rapidly to solar and wind."
Less than 25% of European natural gas is used for electricity generation. Industry uses more (for process heating, and as a primary material to make plastics, fertilizers, and others). And building heating uses the most: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eiagov/29053772892
Most of the industrial heating applications could be replaced with green hydrogen, which is in turn produced by renewables. The big challenge isn't scaling up solar and wind farms and plugging them into transmission lines - it's replacing the furnaces and water boilers of the 75 million European and UK households that rely on Russian gas with heat pumps. (Bill McKibben suggests using the Defense Production Act to massively scale up the production of heat pumps and selling them to Europe at cost: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/heat-pumps-for-peace-and-freedom)
- "But it also means building “clean firm” power to provide backup for solar and wind, at least until energy storage technology gets good enough that we don’t need backup."
Not necessarily. Storage isn't the only solution.
To explain, renewable intermittency works at two time-scales:
1. day-to-night (no sun / less wind in the evening) or day-to-day (sunnier / windier days)
2. seasonal (there's less sun in the winter)
Battery storage can solve the day-to-night or day-to-day issue. It will remain way too expensive (even assuming massive cost declines) to storage up the summer's rays for the winter. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/
Pumped hydro, green hydrogen, and other forms of non-battery storage can help with the seasonal gap. But there's a far cheaper, non-storage option that always gets overlooked: overbuilding. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X18312714
The idea is you build up more wind and solar than you need in the summer, so you still have enough capacity to supply the winter load, when the sun and wind drop. This ends up being dramatically more cost effective, and straightforward, than scaling up storage (though many grids will and should do both). And in the summer, you can just throw away all that excess power, or use it to (inefficiently) produce the green hydrogen you need to decarbonize industry. For overbuilding to work, you need some (clean) baseload power, but a lot less than you think. Europe probably already has enough in the form of nuclear. The trick is just to build a lot of wind and solar.
So tldr is it really the "clean electrification" weapon, and the hard part of that is the "electrification," not the "clean (power)".
(Electric building heating and overbuilding renewables are both highly overlooked dimension of the decarbonization puzzle. I highly recommend reading Electrify by Saul Griffith on these topics - it would make for a great book review! He starts by visualizing the entire American energy economy, and works out how to implement and finance clean electrification at scale.)
I read pieces like this about solar and wind all the time and people just simply overlook three fundamental issues.
1) People mention the battery storage issues as an aside, but it is THE main cost issue. Right now, in the US, if you added up all of the batteries available throughout the country (including unavailable sources like your iphone or remote control batteries) the US has enough storage to power the country for a grand total of 3 min! It will cost, trillions of dollars to get the battery storage we need...even to get to the "over night" situation outlined above.
2) A huge reason solar panels have collapsed in price is because they are being manufactured by slave labor in China. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinjiang-uyghur-labor/. Moral issues aside, changing our energy requirements from Russia to China doesn't seem like a good trade-off.
3) Deploying wide-scale solar and wind farms will cause an ecological disaster due to the amount land it would take to power the entire country on these sources.
tl;dr - nuclear is the only real answer.
Thanks for your points, JC! The question of how we're going triple our electricity supply cleanly is incredibly important, so it's critical to kick the tires on any proposed solutions.
I've been trying to get to the bottom of the issues you raised, so I'd (sincerely) love to see any sources you have to back your claims, because they don't jive with mine. (It seems like you may be pulling from this? https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered?s=r)
I'll respond to your points one at a time, and I'll state the claim I think I'm responding to, to avoid strawmaning.
1. Claim: "A huge reason solar panels have collapsed in price is because they are being manufactured by slave labor in China."
- I highly doubt this, because the cost of solar has been declining exponentially (due to learning curves) since the 1970's, much longer than China has been producing panels: https://bit.ly/3htNE1g.
(China's solar panel production basically started in the late 90's, and only bypassed Germany's output in 2015: https://bit.ly/3hsscKd)
So the 10x cost declines of the past decade are actually the continuation of a 50+ year trend. Okay, fine, but maybe this last round of cost reductions is being largely driven by forced labor?
Doubtful: Xinjiang mostly produces silicon, not the final panels. (according to the Politico article linked to by your Foreign Policy article: https://politi.co/3C4bASg) Silicon is a very small part of the cost of the final panel - usually less than 10% (according to NREL: https://bit.ly/3M8R3Rc). Therefore, it's very unlikely that forced labor in silicon production is "a huge reason" for why solar has gotten so cheap over the past decade.
(And, as an aside, let me state the obvious: slave labor is awful and we shouldn't support it. And the US, at least, is attempting not to: Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans imports from Xinjiang unless they can prove they weren't made with forced labor.)
2. Claim: "It will cost trillions of dollars to get the battery storage we need...even to get to the "over night" situation outlined above." (And, I'm assuming you're also claiming this cost issue prevents us from powering the grid largely with wind and solar.)
You didn't mention overbuilding, but it's worth stressing that we need an order of magnitude less storage if we overbuild renewables by 50% in order to deal with seasonal intermittency.
It's pretty striking. To see this, check out this curve: https://bit.ly/3hxNBBG. In a study done on Minnesota's grid, the (levelized) cost of usign solar to produce 1 kWh of electricity is 27 cents - with no overbuilding. This is far above the current grid cost of 5 cents/kWh, and the difference is overwhelmingly due to storage costs. By the time you get to 50% solar overbuilding, you need so little storage that the cost per kWh drops from 27 cents to 4, cheaper than the electricity currently powering the grid.
But let's set aside seasonal intermittency, since you said "it will cost trillions of dollars to get the battery storage we need...even to get to the "over night" situation outlined above."
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation to check this: installing enough batteries to power the average household overnight currently costs around $10k. There are 120 million households. That works out to $1.2 trillion total. This only covers residences, not all buildings, so you're in the ballpark! (For what it's worth, the feds would subsidies a quarter of cost.)
But is this too expensive to make a renewable grid viable? Probably not, for two reasons: cost reductions, and financing.
- Cost reductions: Lithium-ion batteries, like solar panels, are also on learning curves: the price has already dropped by 97%, and continues to drop by 20% every time we double the deployment. (https://bit.ly/3Ckkqf7) This means that installing batteries across 120 million households (and however many other buildings) would end up costing far less than $10k per household.
- Financing: Electrical machines are expensive to install, and cheap to operate. Fossil fuel machines are cheap to install, but expensive to operate - because of fuel costs. If we provide loans with interest rates of 2.9%, comparable to a mortgage, the average household ends up saving $1,000 a year after fully electrifying their home and installing solar panels and batteries. (https://bit.ly/3IAHN6r, page 24) The fuel for their fossil-powered machines ends up costing more than the financed capital cost of electrification + solar + batteries.
So, we can not only afford the batteries we need for day-night intermittency. With the proper federal financing, households will actually lose money if they don't install batteries (and solar and heat pumps). And batteries will only get cheaper as we scale up deployment.
3. Claim: "Deploying wide-scale solar and wind farms will cause an ecological disaster due to the amount of land it would take to power the entire country on these sources."
Wind turbines don't take up much space. They can co-exist with crops, and farmers are happy to have the extra revenue.
Solar panels have a bigger footprint. So let's see how much space they would take to power the entire country - after we electrify all cars and buildings.
A groundbreaking paper recently came out that tries to answer this exact question. It assumes that we power our grid with 50% solar, 45% wind, and 5% natural gas (or ideally an emissions-free non-intermittent power source). And it also assumes that we overbuild wind and solar by a third to address seasonal intermittency, and install batteries for day-to-night intermittency.
Conclusion: the amount of solar we'd need to build would cover only a fourth of one percent of the area of the continental US. (https://bit.ly/3pu78Y5)
This could be achieved by putting panels on buildings, parking lots, landfills, hydro reservoirs, and the rights of way for railroads, power lines, expressways, and gas pipelines. That's without touching farmland, never mind forest, so the ecological impact would be close to zero (https://bit.ly/3HNdet3). If we couldn't get that creative, and we could only put panels on buildings and parking lots, we'd only need to use about 1% of the farmland for the rest. If surrounded by native plants, the solar farms would probably help, not hurt, the local ecology.
4. Claim: "nuclear is the only real answer." I'm going to assume you mean "nuclear is the only real answer to replacing our current dirty power and producing all the additional power we'll need to run our electric homes and cars," since it's clearly possible to incorporate at least some renewables into the grid.
Running the grid largely on nuclear is certainly possible, since that's what France does. I'm not at all opposed: the US should speed up the production of current-gen plants and massively invest in advanced nuclear.
(The facts and arguments that follow are pulled from Electrify by Saul Griffith, page 70.)
However, because of regulations and widespread political opposition, the US nuclear industry is essentially moribund: only 1 reactor has been built since 1996, Watts Bar Unit 2, and it took 43 years to build. It would be extremely hard to scale in time without serious reform.
Assuming you could win the politics for said reforms, nuclear power would likely remain very expensive, and the combination of overbuilt renewables and battery storage is likely to prove far most cost effective and politically palatable.
Then there's a serious geographical problem: current nuclear plants need river or ocean water to cool them down. Two-thirds of all US freshwater already passes through the cooling cycle of power plants. In many states there is not enough enough cool water to install more nuclear plants. That means we could only double or triple the amount of nuclear power we currently produce (with current technology), which would only supply 10-25% of the total we need to decarbonize.
Again, nuclear is worth pursuing, but it's not the "only real answer." Arguably, the political, economic, and geographical issues around nuclear make it a long, hard, and insufficient road to decarbonizing the grid - much more so than renewables. But I suspect the "real answer" here, as everywhere else in climate policy, is likely "yes and."
#3 is absolutely not true (and I am skeptical about #1 and #2 as well, but I know for a fact you are wrong about #3).
Good plan!
Man, this piece is just such speculative BS. The historical analogy to the Marshall plan is so outlandish given the differences in political norms between Russia and western Europe. Geopolitics (and frankly American politics) just ain’t your bag, Noah. Goddammit, please maintain your focus on western market economics. That’s your expertise; interpretive political takes are not.
If you have any sort of counterargument, I'm all ears. 😊
I swear, your substack critics seem unusually personal and nasty. Lack of paywall probably contributes some, but it does seem worse than comparable blogs (i.e. astralcodexten) Care to offer groundless speculation as to why?
He shouldn't let free subscribers comment... oh, wait
This is all very well thought out (renewables = anti-Russia weapon), but the Marshall plan part is (noble) wishful thinking.
1) Unless the fighting stops very soon, it is likely that Russian army would go much more brutal with air, artillery and MLRS strikes => more devastation of Ukraine infrastructure. Zelensky already requests short-circuiting path to EU membership and if it happens, it would be both in Europe interest and morally superior to help Ukraine recover, not Russia. After all, they are the victims of our aggression.
2) Marshall plan didn't happen in the 1990s, when there was much more of the "end of history" idealism in the air. Still, without putting my conspiracy hat on, I guess many State department hardliners that time saw it in US strategic interest to weaken Russia in the long-term (as China threat was not anywhere on the horizon). How likely it would be to come back with a Marshall plan now - when we suddenly proved that Bzhesinskies of this world were right all along?
I like when Noah when goes off market econ. I wish he'd do more movie reviews - his post on Django Unchained was great!
It is generally agreed that the punitive reparations imposed on Germany after World War I led to the rise of Hitler. The more generous treatment of Germany after World War II coupled with de-Nazification led to Germany becoming a leader of the EU. One can see the same pattern repeating itself with Russia. After de-Putinization, putting Russia on a modern economic footing and integration with the EU would put the old czarist imperial mentality to rest.
Insightful as usual.
This is a lot of speculation built atop an insane premise -- that "[deposing] Putin", even absent direct Western influence, wouldn't result in massive calamity for Russia and Eastern Europe in general, that the in-cohesiveness of the subsequent government wouldn't jeopardize policymaking as a whole...
Reading the thoughts of people on Ukraine reminds me of quack doctors of yore trying to treat cancer or something: "just starve the patient!" suggests the sanction crowd; "just start ripping the head off!" you suggest here.
In the mean time, what's the off-ramp for Putin and / or the West assuming Putin stays in power (the most likely outcome, as far as I know) and deposes the current government of Ukraine (also highly likely)?
The status quo has a high risk of civilization-ending nuclear war that would kill billions of people. If feels like this risk should be taken more into account, and therefore we should be thinking of ways to try to de-escalate already.
In that case we do the Cold War 2 thing, harden the defenses of our NATO allies, make sure MAD is firmly in place, and undermine Russia's economy by transitioning very quickly to renewables.
I'm Ok with MAD for the US and Canada. Maybe the UK. But I don't know why we have MAD in place for NATO allies that are friendly countries, but not close cooperators in most other respects. It's one thing to take a bullet for a friend. It's another thing to just in front of a guy WITH your whole family and everyone on your street for someone you barely know.
In any case, that sounds like basically another decade or two with the existential risk of civilization ending nuclear war.
The good news is Russia probably weakens over that timescale regardless of what we do. They are declining in population and suffering from as many social problems as we are. They have a big Aids problem, drug addiction problems and alcoholism. The declining share of ethnic Russians in favor of Muslim ethnicities is likely to create social cohesion problems for them, too. I don't really see how they are a long term threat to anyone but their nearest neighbors if we leave them pretty much alone.
Yes, and I would add that our threats on behalf of allies we barely know are not very credible.
Why didn't this happen in the 90s? There should have been a Marshall Plan then. Why wasn't Russia invited to join NATO when Yelstin was president?
These two questions make me a little pessimistic about your excellent proposal because I think the chances of that happening say in 1997, when there had been a decade of improved relations between the West and first the Soviet Union and then Russia, were higher than they would be even if a democratic leader emerged in Russia today.
"What really needs to happen, in order to end this war, is for Russian leaders to depose Vladimir Putin" -this plan worked so well with Assad, I'm sure it will work out better this time!
Your blog really is across the board hysterically funny midwittery, from your twee insistence that we live in a time of great technological progress to your defense of Georgism (I'm sure the renter techbros in SF and their employers will go for this, and, like, basically nobody else in the universe) .... this, profoundly unhelpful nonsense. At least I know where to go for cutting edge "appeals to zoom office workers" opinions which are guaranteed to have little relation to the world of matter, and little appeal to people who live in it.
What exactly do you get out of spending your time writing personal attacks on the authors of articles you disagree with?
Comment threads are useful when they're open-minded and kind, and this comment detracts from that. If you don't like the writing, don't read it!
People should feel pain when they say stupid things. Of course many of them have undeveloped nervous systems and are unable to feel normal sensations which inform them of how abysmally stupid they are, but there isn't much I can do about that short of the bastinado.
Why is it necessary to allow Ukraine to join NATO? This is a matter for the current member states to decide and if Ukrainian neutrality seems more likely to lead to peace in the long term, that's what should be agreed.
(In fact this outcome was looking pretty likely just before the invasion. It seemed as if Putin's saber-rattling had scored a huge diplomatic coup for Russia, and then he threw it away by actually using the saber. NATO membership for Ukraine is more likely now than it was a week ago, but I'm still not convinced it's a good idea.)
Politicians are always proposing things like this for West Virginia, for the same reasons, and it never really works there. Why should we expect a different outcome for Russia?
I'm late, but there are several issues with this:
* This changes the (cold) wargoal to removing Putin, ensuring he does not retreat. The chances of retreat are low, but there's the welfare of Ukrainians to consider.
* China gains an interest in preventing Russian defeat or at least preserving Putin, since this new Marshall plan sure looks as an attempt to ensure Russia is in the Western camp.
* Divides the Western alliance. Steps like ensuring quotas of Russian products sound like a reward even when it isn't given the preceding conditions.
In return... mildly higher changes of Putin being removed? I'm not sure, since it may turn him more paranoid (which is both good and bad for the West). Removal is a low probably event right now in any case.
So these are good ideas, but IMHO this is just not the time to say it, and definitely not explicitly. When Ukraine military situation is clearer calculus may change.
I expect Russian economic isolation to last as long as Cuba. The main ruling coalition in Russia consists of Putin-ultranationalist thinkers-military leadership-oligarchs, and the current round of sanctions have basically removed oligarchs' economic power. When Putin is gone, the coalition becomes his successor-ultranationalist thinkers-military leadership, which is what has sustained the Iranian regime, which is still standing after 4 decades of isolation. Their view of the West is inherently mistrustful, much like Iran, buttressed by an increasingly blind-nationalist populace in siege mentality.
Even if the West offers a renegotiation of economic ties in the future settlement, Russia may not be attuned to the apparent goodwill, and will instead double down on its confrontational stance. Economically Russia will also come to resemble Iran and adopt "Resistance Economy" as their guiding ideology, which precludes reintegration into the global economic order. Some of ultranationalist thinkers in fact anticipate its replacement by a multipolar order with the fall of the US and EU.
Compare Noah’s pro-green energy + pro-nuclear energy approach to Michael Shellenberger’s pro-fracking + pro-nuclear + anti-solar + anti-wind op-ed. While I disagree with Shellenberger overall, perhaps there is some merit to bringing down gas prices and reducing foreign energy dependence by boosting domestic supply. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered