Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Great article. The green vortex is real and it's here. This is especially evident within climate-tech. A confluence of corporate acceptance, both voluntary and regulatory carbon markets, base-level technology breakthroughs (batteries, biotech, etc.) that open the door for new applications have led to a massive influx of talent and capital in just the past two years.
As someone in that ecosystem, I feel pretty strongly that we're in the steep part of the S curve of climate-tech right now, many of the hardest parts of the hardest problems have been solved, and there's a lot of really low hanging fruit to be picked. Also important to note how many of these advances are not subsidized by carbon markets or consumer premiums for low carbon products, but are improvements along every dimension (true win-wins).
There is still so much that is going to be required from a regulatory perspective, but I feel extremely optimistic that the next decade or two of private climate-tech companies will make much more impact than expected (and make the political concessions required... well, much easier to concede).
Many of the hardest parts of the hardest problems have been solved? Could you name a few?
Based on my limited understanding, the biggest problem in switching to all-renewable electricity is storage to carry the grid through nights and periods of low wind. I haven't heard any real progress in this area. I know there are batteries, but they are built to stabilize the network, and can't replace significant generation for any significant time. Enough batteries to get the US through an average night would require massively increasing world production of lithium (or lead, or nickel), dedicating all of this production to making batteries, taking all of these batteries for the US (leaving none for any other country), and using them only for backing up the electric grid (leaving none for electric cars, electronic devices, or other uses). And we'd have to devote this production to batteries forever, because the batteries would lose the ability to hold a charge within 5-10 years.
Resource limitations are way overstated as an issue for batteries. Just a fraction of the staggering effort we spend on getting oil from the most incredibly expensive locations (deep ocean, arctic, shale, etc.) would produce more than enough lithium/nickel/lead for anything we would need. On top of that, other storage methods like compressed air, heat storage, and sodium/sulfur batteries are not *that* far behind the lithium ion batteries that are currently the best deal for storage, and they don't strain any meaningfully limited resource.
We could go almost-all-carbon free electricity *right now* if we wished. I personally could add a Tesla Powerwall and a few more solar panels to my roof and we could run our house and electric car indefinitely. It's just that that would have a cost of about $15,000-$20,000, which is not favorable compared to the $50 a month or so I'm paying the utility company to provide power on demand. But it's just a tiny fraction of the value of my house; and similar economics apply on a national scale. The only reason we aren't is that it would be more expensive than the current course - but if you factor in the truly insane costs of global warming to come, it would be well worth it.
(I understand there are ramp-up issues; we can't provide enough panels, turbines, etc. *right now*. But that could be fixed in a couple of years if we, as a society, chose to.)
If you think resource limitations are overstated, please read through my reply to WL's ghost below. Tell me where you disagree. Or, provide your own estimate of resource requirements.
For your all-solar installation, you're a lot less secure than you seem to think. You could put solar panels on the roof and use the battery to get through the night. But, if you have a cloudy day (or a winter day) with less solar energy, your battery won't be charged, and you'll need the grid to get through the night. Or your power will go out.
But let's look at the Powerwall. It stores 13.5 kWh (https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/powerwall/Powerwall%202_AC_Datasheet_en_northamerica.pdf), and would need 2 kg of lithium metal (https://m.greenway-battery.com/news/How-Much-Lithium-is-in-an-Electric-car-Battery%3F-26.html). To scale this up for the whole country, we'd need about 4 billion Powerwalls to get the whole country through the night (55 million MWh). These Powerwalls would need 8 billion kg of lithium, or 8 million tons. The world currently produces about 100,000 tons of lithium per year. To build out these batteries in 5 years, we'd have to increase lithium production by a factor of 16. And we'd have to use all of the production for Powerwalls in the US, leaving nothing for other batteries or other countries. At this scale, the relevant question isn't "How much would it cost?", but "Would it be possible to scale up the industry this much?"
There are so many spruikers saying "we’ve got this", so it’s probably true. So long as you don’t read reports like MIT's The Future of Storage. It’s a free download and well worth the read. I assume there’s a fabulous press release and executive summary but I always avoid them.
One you get into the details of the report you find that despite encouraging words, scaling up mining of lithium, cobalt and nickel to anything like the level required is probably impossible. Plus there are resource constraints (how much has been found to date). That’s to use Lithium-ion batteries at scale.
Then they cover redox flow batteries. Maybe that’s going to be better?
"In general, RFBs remain a nascent technology. Strengthening the innovation pipeline to accelerate the progression from discovery science to supply chain and manufacturing development to demonstration, while also leveraging technology advances and lessons learned from adjacent fields (e.g., polymer electrolyte fuel cells, Li-ion batteries), may enable rapid improvements in performance and concomitant reductions in cost."
Ok, doesn’t sound like it. What about metal-air batteries?
"As with most battery technologies, the durability of metal-air batteries in utilityscale applications has not yet been demonstrated."
Ok, it’s all possibles and maybes. Does something work now that we can deploy? What about compressed air storage?
"CAES has been widely discussed as a potential grid-scale energy storage solution for decades, but the technology has seen no large-scale deployment in the last 30 years (two related projects were commissioned in 1978 and 1991). At present, significant hurdles exist to new CAES deployment at scale."
And so on.
What Brian Smith is explaining is that the spruikers have crayons and enthusiasm but no calculators. Once you look up the gargantuan scale of the grid and you have a calculator, storage of more than a few hours on the US grid even in 20 years time is just a pipe dream. Maybe future technology will change that. Let’s hope.
Hopefully our host, as a prominent public figure, can do an article and lay out why he thinks we have already storage for days and weeks. MIT doesn’t think so. I believe it would be beneficial for the public to find out the reality.
I think the very fact that this is now the "hardest problem" speaks to the progress. Our problem is now spreading our renewable energy throughout time, not creating low cost renewable energy. This problem seem eminently more soluble, with way more surfaces to attack (which some people have already mentioned in this thread)
When I say "hardest problem", I'm referring to physics, not economics.
For economics, I'm unconvinced that solar and wind are cost-competitive without subsidies. All the studies I've seen include various subsidies in their economic calculations. But, it's worse than that - if we were to go all solar and wind, we'd need a conventional generating system on standby to get us through the night. You can't ignore the cost of building, operating, and maintaining these facilities when you look at costs. But, this doesn't get us to "all renewables".
If you want details on how much battery material we'd need, read through my reply to WL's ghost below. If we need to increase worldwide production of lead or lithium by a factor of 20 or 30 to get make enough batteries to get the US through an average night, leaving nothing for the rest of the world, that's pretty close to a physical limit. It's not a question of how much money we'd have to spend - it's a question of whether there's any scenario where we could get close to enough material to meet the requirement. Or maybe the question is how many customers would have to be cut off for how many hours per year because we can't back them up.
I recognize there may be new solutions some day, but I'm not very optimistic. Battery technology has been around for nearly 200 years, and there haven't been any breakthroughs that fundamentally revolutionized the product.
The flow batteries being developed in the US (Lockheed Martin and Honeywell), which have reached full size demonstrations, appear to have a huge amount of potential as well.
The prices that Form is quoting for Iron-Air batteries, if legit, will utterly obliterate people's concept of what's possible. I bet those flow batteries will be competitive though. At those prices the grid will just be a giant network of batteries and intermittency NBD. At those prices all solar will be 24/7 installations.
Yes. This is my fear in the UK. Presently backup is mostly via gas-fired stations, and even some coal: ❝EDF has agreed to defer closure of two units at West Burton A power station by a further six months with closure now on 31 March 2023.❞ (https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-stations/west-burton). The backup is secured through the so-called "capacity market" where the government pays to keep stations available for when the wind stops blowing. The more renewable energy there is, the more capacity is required. This is very expensive.
How can we hope to move to an electric world as electricity gets ever more unaffordable?
Advocates trot out their favoured technology: batteries, compressed air, pumped storage. But there is nothing in the near future to replace present gas/coal backup.
Nuclear power, which could be, at some risk, be deployed at scale and fairly quickly, is stymied both by activist and public fear (Fukushima, Chernobyl). There is nothing else. Green Vortex indeed - it may swallow us all.
Over the next couple of decades we will see a lot of innovation in the storage technologies you’ve mentioned (plus hydrogen) and I anticipate (in the absence of a major meltdown) increasing acceptance of the need for fission power (SMRs could be key by leveraging standardization and learning rates). Net zero 2050 is the dream but net zero 2075 is doable.
"Wicked problems" are those where there is no agreement on what constitutes a solution and we certainly have that. The interaction between a weak and largely static climate science and energy policy adds another rich vein for controversy (does this make it a "wicked mess", I forget?). My fear is that Green policies will cause huge harm, and my fear is supported because I can find no coherent pathway to the promised land - just confusion and delusion.
He assumes we'd need enough storage to cover a week's demand, and bases his calculations on lead-acid batteries because they're cheapest. Assuming efficiencies not likely to be seen in the real world, he estimates we'd need 5 billion tons of lead to cover a week's demand, vs 80 million tons known lead reserves in the world at that time. Since then, known reserves have increased to 90 million tons (https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/lead-facts/20518).
I think we wouldn't necessarily need a full week's worth of storage. If we overbuild a ridiculous amount of solar and wind capacity, such that we can fully recharge the batteries every day, even on cloudy days in winter or windless days in summer, we'd only need to get through the night. Still, we'd need something like 500 million tons of lead vs,. annual production of about 4.5 million tons (https://www.statista.com/statistics/603544/distribution-of-world-mine-production-of-lead-by-select-country/). If you want to use lithium, the considerations are the same, but we'd only need about 70 million tons because lithium is lighter than lead (atomic weight 7 vs. 207). This would compare to current annual production of about 100,000 tons worldwide (https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/). (Correction: lithium requirement should be more like 17 million tons, not 70 million.)
These calculations are optimistic in the sense that they assume efficiencies that cannot be achieved in the real world. We'd actually need more batteries to have a secure electricity supply. My 500 million tons requirement also assumes we could afford to build and install so many solar panels that they could cover daily power requirements and fully charge the storage batteries even on the worst days - I won't even attempt to calculate the cost of such installations.
As I briefly mentioned above, we'd have to build the full storage capacity within 5 years, and then maintain the same production effort forever because the batteries would degrade over time and need to be replaced every 5 years. This is an inherent characteristic of rechargeable batteries, and lifetimes are about the same for lead, lithium, or nickel batteries.
You haven't mentioned hydrogen storage, it has round-trip efficiency of only 40%, but can be used to store energy practically indefinitely and the storage is much easier to scale than batteries, it could be used as a seasonal grid storage solution with hydrogen being produced in the summer and then burned during winter.
I haven't checked your calculations, but my understanding is that known lithium reserves in spodumene rock and underground brine reservoirs are around 70 million tons (correction: 21 million tons of known reserves and 86 million tons of resources), plus there's practically unlimited supply of lithium in seawater (hundreds of billions of tons) that is more expensive to extract. Also lithium batteries can be recycled, so it's unlikely that we'd ever run out of lithium. I don't know how expensive it would be to scale up lithium mining capacity, but I've seen some analyses that show there's plenty of room to grow.
Another point is that I've seen calculations that show 100% renewable grid would currently be extremely expensive, but it's covering the last 5-10% of energy needs that constitutes bulk of the cost. So a combined grid of 95% renewables and 5% non-renewables would be much more doable while accomplishing majority of the goal.
I didn't mention hydrogen because the subject was batteries. Hydrogen has its own problems. Aside from the low round-trip efficiency, hydrogen is a very tiny molecule; as a result it tends to seep through any solid material used to contain it. This further reduces efficiency and also creates fire/explosion hazards. I assume you are envisioning using fuel cells to convert the hydrogen back to electricity. Fuel cells are also expensive and have limited life before the cells have to be replaced,.
As far as lithium reserves, I've seen widely varying estimates. The USGS in 2020 estimated 17 million tons worldwide (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-lithium.pdf). This article (https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithium-reserves-world/) says the USGS estimated 80 million tons in 2019. I assume the difference is between estimates for ore (is this what you mean by "resources"?) and recoverable metal. I'm sure there's enough lithium in the lithosphere to build all the batteries anyone would want, but how much could be recovered, and how quickly, and at what cost, is a different question. I don't claim that there's no solution in the future. I was refuting Alex Brown's claim that the hardest parts had been solved.
As you say, I don't know why anyone would ever want to mess with hydrogen.
Pumped storage or stacking blocks in abandoned mines have an efficiency of about 50%. Not great for running everything off of intermittent power, but definitely a better idea than hydrogen.
I understood the subject to be energy storage in context of a renewable grid, not just batteries. I think the current vision is that the hydrogen would be burned in combined cycle power plants and hydrogen gas itself would be stored in underground caverns.
In mining "reserves" is used to refer to known measured deposits and "resources" to estimates of total deposits based on our best knowledge.
We have a massive commitment to offshore wind in the UK. Presently wind lulls, "dunkelflaute" as the Germans call them, are met by increased gas generation. The other option being pursued is interconnectors. I have found nothing else for the grid. The founder of JCB wants to burn hydrogen to power heavy machinery. Prototypes exist, UK government not interested AFAICT. Lithium batteries are need edfor cars (and Amazon delivery vans).
The generation statistics of the UK National Grid are available for download. I did a thread with some charts on Twitter about dunkelflaute generated from that data.
1. Given you have to maintain a conventional generation infrastructure in addition to the wind infrastructure, does the wind infrastructure make sense? Possibly, if wind can cover 95% of annual generation requirements, and the gas generators only come on occasionally.
2. Given that you have to build and maintain a gas generating capacity in order to have wind, how is this fact taken into account when calculating the cost of wind generation? Doesn't this blow another hole in the claim that "wind is cheaper"?
The German group deENet calculated in 20006 that only 6% of installed wind capacity in 2015 could be credited toward system capacity requirements - that is, of 40,000 MW planned installed capacity, only 2,400 MW could be counted toward capacity needs; the other 37,600 MW would have to be provided by conventional generation - either spinning reserve or standby. http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/events/2006_grid/Martin_Hoppe.pdf pg. 12.
2) The connection is not made. The late David MacKay FRS (https://www.withouthotair.com/) insisted that only whole system cost was relevant. But advocates ignore this. I have read, also, that recent lower bids for building offshore wind are not binding on the bidders and are, in fact, more akin to purchasing an option to build. But I have no reference for this.
BS. Of course parts of what you are saying are true but not the sentiment. You cannot make the transitions Noah and the left are talking about without impoverishing millions and probably billions.
If nuclear, you should recognize there's a tremendous political hill to climb. But I agree the technical issues are manageable, and it can be economical.
If renewables, you should recognize that renewables are economically viable only with large subsidies, and only to cover part of electric requirements. You'd need a conventional generating system on standby to cover requirements when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. Which would defeat the decarbonization objective. Or you'd have to come up with storage systems that have not yet been demonstrated at any scale or economic viability.
If any country has been committed to decarbonization, it's Germany. Despite spending a lot on building renewable generation, and paying much higher electricity prices, they are not impoverished. But they also haven't made a lot of progress on decarbonization.
None of these seem to be a problem? Seems pretty clear we can get mostly decarbonized electric generation, so much progress has been made in fertilizer production using new techniques (eg nitricity), transportation seems also pretty clear without any radical breakthroughs (with the exception of air transport -- it's going to have to look different than it does today)
I don't know the details on fertilizer production, so I can't comment there.
For transportation, we should look at it by subsector:
Autos: electric cars are feasible, but very expensive, especially when it comes time to replace the batteries.
Trucks: As far as I know, no one is working on an electric truck. Tesla announced one several years ago, but hasn't mentioned the topic since. As far as I know, none of the real truck makers are even working on an electric.
Trains: Electric trains are feasible, and operate in many areas. However, electrifying all the track would be extremely expenisve.
Ships: There's been talk of using wind, but as far as I know, there's not even a thought of a completely carbon-free ship for commercial purposes.
Aviation: The industry claims to be working toward Net Zero. With current engine technology, this would rely on biofuels with some petroleum added. I'm not at all convinced that biofuels can be scaled to support the industry, or that the environmental costs of massive biofuel production would be less than the environmental costs of carbon emissions.
I'm sorry but you're just really uninformed on this. There are very serious companies working on electric trucks and electric ships right now, with pilots out in the world
God what a world of white men did I just enter? So full of themselves and their techno knowledge, yet lacking so much holistic understanding and depth. Diversity and plurality can’t be your arguments if you can’t start by looking at yourself and your surrounding…
I think you have misunderstood. Degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism are not the strategy of climate change activists. Climate change is the strategy of degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism activists.
Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Nixon to China, I know, but I think it will be a Republican who basically vows to make energy free and gets the federal government behind that. Lots of nuclear to start, eventually geothermal and fusion. If energy is free, decarbonization is possible at scale. As is desalination. So is onshoring.
I'm generally conservative, but I consider myself an environmentalist, and support a carbon tax and plenty of govt investment in green energy and the like.
But I want to emphasize how counter-productive and annoying the doomerism and ever-more-ridiculous exaggeration of the likely effects of climate change are.
I'm in Alabama, and even here most people aren't coal-rollers who just love coal and are just reflexively opposed to green energy.
I think they can eventually be persuaded, but the screeching of climate activists and anticapitalists makes it much more difficult.
Because so many of the claims are clearly ridiculous, a lot of people here are convinced that climate change is just being used as a vehicle to promote leftist economic nonsense.
I don't know how to shut these people up, or remove their access to the media spotlight, but it needs to be done if you want a chance at persuading more than a sliver of Red America.
I think an important point to remember is that much of the world’s population sustains itself through industrialized agriculture and infrastructure. Petrochemicals go into thousands of products and their derivatives also feed into fertilizers. If you crash industrial agriculture a lot of people will run out of food.
Honestly, a technological solution to climate concerns is the only moral one unless you are willing to de-industrialize and hazard an unprecedented global famine.
I believe you are correct. However, when we look at the environment holistically, artificial fertilizers or petroleum derivatives can be very polluting or damaging to ecosystems if they are not used responsibly.
Yet, we cannot abandon their use without a REALISTIC replacement.
Other issues stem from the use of pesticides of various sorts which critically increase or protect crop yields but, again, have an environmental cost.
I think Noah has the right vision. We can and should innovate through problems.
Genetically modified crops are likely the only ethical future for us as we cannot abandon our current agricultural output without a global famine.
Good piece Noah. The one thing that I think is missing is acknowledging the climate activists who have been telling this optimistic story already for years. Saul Griffith and Rewiring America come to mind (Leah Stokes who you quote is an advisor). And Inslee. And RMI. And a lot of activists at the state and local level who helped pass very good legislation in a bunch of states.
I have to say you hit the nail on the head. You need a positive vision of the future. To many non-leftists, the Left just comes across as a profoundly unhappy movement staffed with militant people who see everything as “problematic” in some way.
I think that as soon as you discourage people from having children you have lost the argument. People will write you off.
The American Left increasingly seems like a movement dedicated to telling people what they shouldn’t do, say or think versus offering a vision for human flourishing.
Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
"There’s just one catch: The organizations that advocate Green New Deal style programs support growth, but only if it comes via the abolition of capitalism."
Noah is correct to point out that this approach is about as popular, and about as plausible, as straightforward degrowth.
I think, though, that there's a bigger catch. Green New Deal style programs might plausibly result in measured increases in GDP, but only by making anything reliant on energy much more expensive. This would still result in dramatically lower living standards, which are the real sticking point. Green New Deal is just degrowth coupled with socialism.
The biggest consideration, though, seems beyond the imagination of climate change activists: What is the convincing argument that the cost of preventing climate change is less than the cost of dealing with climate change? I believe the current consensus among climate scientists it that there has been about 1C of warming over the last 150 years. The alarmist position is that a further 1C will be disastrous. The scientific basis for this projection is entirely speculative. Why can't we adapt to 1C of further warming as well as we've adapted to the 1C we've already seen?
Scare stories about "unprecedented heat waves" shouldn't be convincing to scientifically and mathematically literate people. To take just one example - record high temperature in the UK. The world is a big place. It has about 58 million square miles of land area. The UK has about 94,000 square miles of land area - about 1/6 of 1 percent of the earth's land area. If there were no temperature trend at all, but only random variation within a fixed distribution, and if we had 150 years of reliable temperature data, then we would expect to see new all-time high temperatures in about 1/150 of the earth's surface each year, or about 4 new records covering UK-sized areas each year. And a similar number of new record lows. Also a similar number of new record floods and droughts, of wildfires and storm surges.
I don't claim that there is no long-term warming trend, but dramatic events don't demonstrate it. Especially, listing dramatic events does nothing to demonstrate that there is a trend in dramatic events. Getting back to the question (Is the cost of preventing climate change less than the cost of dealing with climate change?), it seems to me that voters in the US and other democracies have a better intuitive grasp of the question and its answer than the activists.
Every month the National Centers for Environmental Information publishes "Assessing the Global Climate" -- the one for June 2022 is available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202206. It shows a map of the world, split into squares along the lines you propose (except smaller in size, so about 2x or 3x of the number you propose). The squares are colored based on temperature variation -- white if near average, shades of blue if below average, shades of red if above average. The darkest blue and darkest red are reserved for the record coldest and record warmest for all the Junes in the historic record. Since the headline was that this was the sixth warmest June in the historic record, it's not surprising that there were quite a few -- maybe 75? -- darkest red squares, with clusters in China, North Africa, Indonesia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. It was much easier to count the darkest blue squares, since there weren't any. I looked at the maps for the past 12 months -- they all contained at least a handful of record high temperature squares, but they didn't have any record low temperature squares. I had to go back to May 2021 to find a record low temperature square -- there was just one, in eastern India. The relative imbalance between record highs and record lows is a persistent feature of these maps. Usually there are as many record high temperature squares as there are "much colder than normal" squares.
Thanks for that. I'll be a little more explicit than I was above. I think there's good evidence for an overall warming trend for at least the last 200 years or so. This shows in surface temperature records where such records exist, in upper atmosphere records from satellites, and in anecdotal information like ice freezes in winter. I don't mean to imply that there's no trend. I merely point out that loudly announcing "highest temperature ever at location X" doesn't add any useful information, and does nothing to establish whether warming is bad, or is likely to become bad.
Likewise, announcing "lots of wildfires in France and Spain" adds no useful information. It might be useful if you addressed topics like (a) the "normal" number of wildfires at this time of year, (b) whether there's been a trend in the number of wildfires, (c) whether there's been a trend in rainfall, (d) whether there's been any change in forest and land management practices.
It's also been noted widely that most of the observed warming comes in higher nighttime low temperatures, not in higher daytime high temperatures. This is consistent with your note that record low temperatures are very rare.
But again, establishing that there is a warming trend does not establish that there has been, or will be, any harm from that trend. If we talk about harms (like deaths from heat waves), we should probably also talk about benefits (like fewer deaths from cold). If anyone wants to argue for aggressive action to prevent future warming, they ought to explain how the costs of warming are greater than the costs of attempting to prevent warming. Very few people attempt this, and the ones who get the most attention give projections with little basis in science, and imply that warming is on the verge of disastrous.
Your NOAA link says that June 2022 was 1.57F higher than the 20th century average. The news reports Noah linked highlights apocalyptic stories, like the record high temperature in the UK. Not stated is that, without the warming trend, temperature would only have been about 1.6F (or 1C) cooler.
I agree that providing context around mentions of wildfires and heatwaves would strengthen the statements. Some news outlets do better at this than others. Although some people object to the "attribution science" of trying to determine the increased likelihood of weather events due to climate change, it is intended to take into account the factors you mention.
You put the burden of proof on anyone who wants to argue for aggressive action to prevent future warming. I think the burden falls on those who want to continue on our present course, given that we've entered the climate casino (William Nordhaus's term), where the risks of very bad outcomes are increasing. Uncertainty about those risks argues for reducing our exposure to them, not increasing it, as we do by pursuing our current high emissions course.
I respect your perspective. But you should recognize that you are no longer arguing science. You think we should reduce the risks associated with greenhouse gas emissions; at some level, I would agree. If there were some reliable, painless way to banish (or significantly reduce) greenhouse gas emissions, I'd be all for it. Actually, there are some - switching electric generation from coal to natural gas is such a measure, and it's being implemented worldwide wherever gas is available, because it is painless - in fact, it's more economical.
You are convinced that the risks of very bad outcomes are increasing, but what is the basis for this conclusion? All the "very bad outcomes" are speculative, and most are based on very little science and promoted by non-scientists. For instance, the often-repeated forecast that there will be more and larger tropical cyclones is not supported by any weather or climate scientists I know of. The often-repeated claim that tropical diseases will move north ignores the fact that "tropical diseases" such as malaria were once common in temperate regions, but have disappeared as societies have gotten richer and sanitation has improved. For example, malaria was once common in southern Europe and the southern US.
If you want to convince your fellow citizens that your risk mitigation is worth the cost, you should focus on some mitigation measures that are cheap and painless. you might also want to look at mitigation measures, and not focus entirely on prevention.
I live in UK. On Tuesday the thermometer in our back garden hit 38.8C. Very hot, some bad fires in London area. Also, oddly, frightening. The feeling that things are running out of control. Weather triggers ancient fears.
My real settled fear is that we will ruin our economy. The temperature today is 18C and it's wet. The extreme hear lasted two days, but this other fear persists.
I'm much more on the center-right Lomborg/Shellenberger side of this, where climate is a modest issue that will be solved by capitalist forces and mild gov path-clearing. Sue me later, but for now, I am rapidly decarbonizing and electrifying my home. I already own a Tesla and will be getting another. Not because I see gas as an existential threat, but because it's the best safest most awesome car. I'm getting a massive solar system installed at my home. Not because I want to lower my carbon footprint, but because I get immediate net-present-value by doing it: my electricity bill will be $100 lower than my solar loan on month 1, and I will save hundreds of thousands in the long term. I'm getting heat pumps to replace my propane furnace and boiler, not because I worry about emissions but because heat pumps are very efficient and operate on the same electricity that my oversized panel system creates. I'm replacing my gas cooktop with induction. My water heater with heat-pump water heat, and so on, and so on. All because it is an economically rational money-saving investment that is so good I'd be harming my family to NOT do it....not harming the climate or whatever, but simply making my own family poorer.
This is why I don't worry about climate change much, because your optimistic part of the article is right: no matter how much I despise the climate activists, no matter how counterproductive they are, the capitalist system is producing such low cost high quality environmentally friendly products that even a climate lukewarmist like myself cannot help but "go green." I'm like you but even more optimistic! My own experience leaves no room for doom.
Good article. Even though I’d see myself as a center right neoliberal economically in the vein of Reagan and Bush Sr, I always find your economic writings very insightful and thought provoking. Your one of my favorite economists on Twitter. Only thing I’d say is I don’t think the Green New Deal is necessarily anticapitalist. I know the original version pushed by the Green Party was but the more popular and well known version pushed by progressives in the Democratic Party mentions private public partnerships and reforming anti trust laws to ensure businesses have a fair shot at competing in the market.
Good to hear. There was some talk of a basic income or the equivalent, which some people see as anticapitalist even though it isn't. Not sure what happened with that.
Yeah I don’t think UBI is anti capitalist. Milton Friedman supported a means tested version of it called a negative income tax. I actually prefer UBI over our current welfare state. I think direct cash transfers with no strings attached and little administrative costs is much more effective than a confusing system of a hundred welfare programs that require a ton of admin costs and have built in welfare traps.
I'm about to get a loaner EV tractor to try out for a month, during which we'll park out diesel beast in the barn. Next up: A ground-based solar array (we already have one on our separate homestead) to power the house and all the equipment that we need on a sliver of acreage that we've never used for corps. Neighboring farmers will be watching -- and copying. We've been ignoring the potential for alternative energy generation where it is greatest -- in the red states and counties that have the excess land for the generating capacity. And, by the way, when I can show my neighbors that my electric tractor can outpull their old diesels, there will be a rush to adopt them.
The environmental costs of producing batteries is almost as high as O&G not to mention the toxic waste produced by end of life solar panels. To me more efficient diesel is a better choice.
"Almost as high", meaning less? So you produce the unit for less than O&G, but also reduce all the fossil fuel consumption during the lifetime of the vehicle (not just gas, but also oil, lube for parts, coolant, etc), and it has no emissions. How can that possibly be worse than diesel?
And that is probably before you factor in that the very environmental cost that you are quoting itself includes a lot of fossil fuel consumption that could be improved by moving to cleaner power sources.
Mining, it takes an insane amount of mining to get the required lithium. That's why in general I think hybrids are better than large pickup trucks. And in big cities having less ICE would greatly reduce air pollution.
Some version of the Green Vortex is the path we will take but I find the climate alarmism Noah embraces is more a social construct than a reflection of the best science. A great resource available to Noah in person is the Berkeley Earth (BE) project initiated by Richard Muller (a UC Berkeley Physics Professor at the time, now emeritus). Initially with intuitive scientifc skepticism he questioned the human dominance of AGW. With top level physical scientists (not climate scientists) they archive and analyzie all the available temperature data and besides peer reviewed articles all the data and data analysis methods are open source. They concluded that in fact it was human activity that dominated in the observed warming over the past 250 years. But reasonable attribution to AGW is only moderately well established for Heat Waves, and Coastal Flooding. It would be great if you interviewd Richard Muller, including discussing how an Astrophysicist thinks about the climate models. As a Physical Chemist who has done a lot of differnt types of modeling (though not any finite element) and having read about these models I'm naturally skeptical of the predictive skill of the climate models far into the future. At the core the climate models will never be able to treat water vapor and clouds from first principles, and never able to descritize the model grid on the small scale of the physical dimension of clouds. Frustratingly reducing grid sizes with these parameterized models increases error measured by backtesting.
On the Green Vortex side I observe anedodtadly the powerful sway of culture. In both the SF Peninsula where I just returned from a family funeral to Colorado where I live near Boulder the transition to electricity is well underway. Tesla's sedans, while not as common as BMW 3 series sedans, are so common they no longer stand out. Perhaps 50% of the houses in my neighborhood have solar and new developments often have solar on every house. I put 98% solar in about 4 years ago (which is dominantly impacted by AC in the summer). I'm replacing my 80% 20yr old furnace and AC with a modern heat pump (at 6000 ft in CO I also will put in a 97% gas booster) with a smart thermostat that can calculate when you need gas to heat based on your electrical and gas costs. It has become, among my friends from growing up through grad school and post-docs, something that is discussed almost competivly. I'm sweltering through a warm July with a broken HVAC system being replaced with the highest efficiency heat pump not delivered on time. I could downgrade the heat pump and get it installed earlier but I want to install the optimal system over a period likely far longer than I will live in this house. Economically it is probably a cost to me but it is net positive for the environment.
Something you might address: How do the electrifying regions of the world expand. What is the compelling argument? Where I have visited in parts of the world a 2-stroke motorbike is almost a red-line between individual winners and losers in younger peoples view of the world. I don't see any way this will change across the less devolped world.
Noah, I’d like to add one more factor. As the left increasingly identified climate change as “their issue” (which occurred for many reasons, such as fossil fuel companies’ support for Republicans, but also for less scrupulous reasons, such as the idea that climate change prevention could be a way to sneak socialism into the agenda), the scientific literacy of anti-climate change activists declined.
Now, both my parents are professors of atmospheric chemistry specializing in climate science. My first job was as a research assistant analyzing IPCC national communications documents. So I am extremely confident in saying that much of the rhetoric surrounding how bad climate change will be is simply false.
David Wallace-Wells is definitely one of the villains here. Anyone taking a 3 sigma-out possibility and presenting it as the obvious conclusion is not being honest, and while--as a follower of Toby Ord--I am very concerned about small existential risks, many communicators have misunderstood that climate models become less accurate the further you get from the expected average. This is not even discussing the basic facts about climate change people get wrong
- Methane is not 1000x worse than CO2 (it is 25 times worse of a 100 year estimated lifespan)
- Plants do not take CO2 out of the atmosphere, net. They temporarily sequester it in their biomass. Hence, cutting down a forest represents only a one-time emission, not a recurring loss.
- Greenhouse gases are in fact a distinct category from pollutants, traditionally defined (though there are overlaps, e.g. NOx and SOx)
- the US is not still the largest emitter (to be fair, people are probably confusing historical emissions with present-day ones, but they often insist on the error even when corrected)
- Courtesy of my mom: “Save the planet,” when the planet has experienced temperatures and CO2 levels this high during the Permian
- Organic farming is not a solution (???)
- Most emissions are not corporate emissions, and instead are individual emissions (cars, electricity, heating, and agriculture are the vast majority of all emissions)
- etc.
And these unscientific talking points are far from rare. They are parroted by elected officials, by radical leftists, and even by ordinary left-leaning Democrats. You yourself, in my estimation, have generally overestimated the costs (for a rich country like the United States--poor, equatorial countries will have a much harder time, which is a separate moral question) of adapting to climate change.
The abuse of science and statistics to turn a crisis into an apocalypse destroyed the credibility of many of the scientists who quietly work behind the scenes producing good data. Worse, it removed everyone who wasn’t willing to swallow and regurgitate bullshit from many of the major activist groups. The Sunrise Movement and Sierra Club regularly say things no self-respecting scientist or science communicator should.
Climate change will be brutally expensive. Much of the infrastructure we have built is designed for this climate and this sea level. Sea level rise, increased hurricanes, massive heat waves, cold shocks as far south as Texas--these are serious costs, and it costs far less to mitigate climate change than to rebuild trillions of dollars of infrastructure to suit our future conditions. But it will not be world-ending, and at worst (for rich countries) will cause stagnation.
A ridiculous amount of climate change can have devastating effects (consider the Permian-Triassic extinction event) but humans are very unlikely to cause the kinds of greenhouse gas concentrations the Siberian Traps ended up producing - something around 8000 ppm, compared to something like 400 today.
Glad you linked the climate change movement to anti capitalism. It is a political movement not scientific. Even the 2 degrees limit was political not scientific, as is the revised down 1.5 degrees. It is just an extension of peak oil and other Malthusian ideas.
As an old P&L manager who won major new product acceptance in Automotive due to the best ever Environmental regulation...CAFE... good goals and clear timeframes and economic penalties worked very very well. We should plagiarize this one.
I do see and think a number of entrepreneurs and investors see the Green Market Opportunities ahead. That's just Darwin providing free market awareness.
Nuclear Energy has a direct and simple, well rational path to broad acceptance in the US.
1. There is real Fear of Nuclear. Earned Fear.
2. Never deny Fear. Address it head on.
3. Be humble. Learn from the best. Replicate the French Nuclear energy approach because..... it Solved the Fear problem.
How:
As noted, the Experience curve and repetition drive down costs, reduce risks dramatically. A single US nuclear destign eliminates the core major risk of Plant 1 from A, plant 1 from B, plant 1 from C. No learning curve.
Standardized design lowers cost by higher purchased part counts, more replacement parts, and shared multi-site design and operating experience learning.
US: compete the Builds around the French design standard.
"Climate Activists" as described here seem to be more in love with their proposed solutions to the problem than solving the problem itself, because those solutions have become an ideological lifestyle.
At this point, if an miracle new energy technology solution was discovered, I suspect climate activists would oppose it because it isn't wind/solar/an-expensive-status-symbol-toy-car-that-I-can-pretend-makes-me-a-good-person.
Likewise, I have the funny feeling that the ones who are proposing anti-capitalism solutions are more like hammer salesmen trying to convince you that all your problems are nails.
I'll cop to being a very sentimental, "Many of these trees were my friends," crying-indian environmentalist. I have a zoology degree, I volunteer at a bird refuge, I raise tadpoles as a hobby. And yet when people talk about how important it is we Do Something about climate change, all I hear is *World Ending; Women and People of Color Most Affected, Give me money so I can buy a Tesla."
Yeah, but these people don't see themselves driving anything other than a Tesla. I don't otherwise have anything against the company nor it's largest shareholder, but fuck the obsession with them, they're the BMW for people who want to pretend their status-seeking consumption is virtuous.
I've been over-exposed to EV and renewables hype from watching a friend lose his soul in his quest to become the walking, talking, finger-snap-clapping avatar of what's currently popular among female college graduates (so, Queer/NB Black Climate Activism Male Feminist Marxism. I'm not making this up.), and dang he wanted that Tesla, communism be damned.
So I really, really fundamentally don't trust the motivations of anyone involved anymore. They're in it to be popular, and they're in it to push their ideological agenda, because that's how you become popular in that crowd.
""Climate Activists" as described here seem to be more in love with their proposed solutions to the problem than solving the problem itself,"
It's because they look at it as a moral issue rather than a pragmatic issue. If you look at this issue pragmatically, there are many many activities that can be of significant benefit, from amelioration of impacts to massive investment in carbon-free energy types that are not technically considered "renewable" (such as nuclear). Everything about this movement codes *moral* to me while garbing itself in the urgency of pragmatism. There is a significant gap between the level of urgency pushed by activists, and the level of urgency implied in their chosen solutions. I cannot unsee that, and it utterly destroys their "pragmatist trying to solve a problem" credibility with me.
Great article. The green vortex is real and it's here. This is especially evident within climate-tech. A confluence of corporate acceptance, both voluntary and regulatory carbon markets, base-level technology breakthroughs (batteries, biotech, etc.) that open the door for new applications have led to a massive influx of talent and capital in just the past two years.
As someone in that ecosystem, I feel pretty strongly that we're in the steep part of the S curve of climate-tech right now, many of the hardest parts of the hardest problems have been solved, and there's a lot of really low hanging fruit to be picked. Also important to note how many of these advances are not subsidized by carbon markets or consumer premiums for low carbon products, but are improvements along every dimension (true win-wins).
There is still so much that is going to be required from a regulatory perspective, but I feel extremely optimistic that the next decade or two of private climate-tech companies will make much more impact than expected (and make the political concessions required... well, much easier to concede).
HELL. YEAH.
Many of the hardest parts of the hardest problems have been solved? Could you name a few?
Based on my limited understanding, the biggest problem in switching to all-renewable electricity is storage to carry the grid through nights and periods of low wind. I haven't heard any real progress in this area. I know there are batteries, but they are built to stabilize the network, and can't replace significant generation for any significant time. Enough batteries to get the US through an average night would require massively increasing world production of lithium (or lead, or nickel), dedicating all of this production to making batteries, taking all of these batteries for the US (leaving none for any other country), and using them only for backing up the electric grid (leaving none for electric cars, electronic devices, or other uses). And we'd have to devote this production to batteries forever, because the batteries would lose the ability to hold a charge within 5-10 years.
What parts of this problem have been solved?
Resource limitations are way overstated as an issue for batteries. Just a fraction of the staggering effort we spend on getting oil from the most incredibly expensive locations (deep ocean, arctic, shale, etc.) would produce more than enough lithium/nickel/lead for anything we would need. On top of that, other storage methods like compressed air, heat storage, and sodium/sulfur batteries are not *that* far behind the lithium ion batteries that are currently the best deal for storage, and they don't strain any meaningfully limited resource.
We could go almost-all-carbon free electricity *right now* if we wished. I personally could add a Tesla Powerwall and a few more solar panels to my roof and we could run our house and electric car indefinitely. It's just that that would have a cost of about $15,000-$20,000, which is not favorable compared to the $50 a month or so I'm paying the utility company to provide power on demand. But it's just a tiny fraction of the value of my house; and similar economics apply on a national scale. The only reason we aren't is that it would be more expensive than the current course - but if you factor in the truly insane costs of global warming to come, it would be well worth it.
(I understand there are ramp-up issues; we can't provide enough panels, turbines, etc. *right now*. But that could be fixed in a couple of years if we, as a society, chose to.)
If you think resource limitations are overstated, please read through my reply to WL's ghost below. Tell me where you disagree. Or, provide your own estimate of resource requirements.
For your all-solar installation, you're a lot less secure than you seem to think. You could put solar panels on the roof and use the battery to get through the night. But, if you have a cloudy day (or a winter day) with less solar energy, your battery won't be charged, and you'll need the grid to get through the night. Or your power will go out.
But let's look at the Powerwall. It stores 13.5 kWh (https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/powerwall/Powerwall%202_AC_Datasheet_en_northamerica.pdf), and would need 2 kg of lithium metal (https://m.greenway-battery.com/news/How-Much-Lithium-is-in-an-Electric-car-Battery%3F-26.html). To scale this up for the whole country, we'd need about 4 billion Powerwalls to get the whole country through the night (55 million MWh). These Powerwalls would need 8 billion kg of lithium, or 8 million tons. The world currently produces about 100,000 tons of lithium per year. To build out these batteries in 5 years, we'd have to increase lithium production by a factor of 16. And we'd have to use all of the production for Powerwalls in the US, leaving nothing for other batteries or other countries. At this scale, the relevant question isn't "How much would it cost?", but "Would it be possible to scale up the industry this much?"
There are so many spruikers saying "we’ve got this", so it’s probably true. So long as you don’t read reports like MIT's The Future of Storage. It’s a free download and well worth the read. I assume there’s a fabulous press release and executive summary but I always avoid them.
One you get into the details of the report you find that despite encouraging words, scaling up mining of lithium, cobalt and nickel to anything like the level required is probably impossible. Plus there are resource constraints (how much has been found to date). That’s to use Lithium-ion batteries at scale.
Then they cover redox flow batteries. Maybe that’s going to be better?
"In general, RFBs remain a nascent technology. Strengthening the innovation pipeline to accelerate the progression from discovery science to supply chain and manufacturing development to demonstration, while also leveraging technology advances and lessons learned from adjacent fields (e.g., polymer electrolyte fuel cells, Li-ion batteries), may enable rapid improvements in performance and concomitant reductions in cost."
Ok, doesn’t sound like it. What about metal-air batteries?
"As with most battery technologies, the durability of metal-air batteries in utilityscale applications has not yet been demonstrated."
Ok, it’s all possibles and maybes. Does something work now that we can deploy? What about compressed air storage?
"CAES has been widely discussed as a potential grid-scale energy storage solution for decades, but the technology has seen no large-scale deployment in the last 30 years (two related projects were commissioned in 1978 and 1991). At present, significant hurdles exist to new CAES deployment at scale."
And so on.
What Brian Smith is explaining is that the spruikers have crayons and enthusiasm but no calculators. Once you look up the gargantuan scale of the grid and you have a calculator, storage of more than a few hours on the US grid even in 20 years time is just a pipe dream. Maybe future technology will change that. Let’s hope.
Hopefully our host, as a prominent public figure, can do an article and lay out why he thinks we have already storage for days and weeks. MIT doesn’t think so. I believe it would be beneficial for the public to find out the reality.
I think the very fact that this is now the "hardest problem" speaks to the progress. Our problem is now spreading our renewable energy throughout time, not creating low cost renewable energy. This problem seem eminently more soluble, with way more surfaces to attack (which some people have already mentioned in this thread)
When I say "hardest problem", I'm referring to physics, not economics.
For economics, I'm unconvinced that solar and wind are cost-competitive without subsidies. All the studies I've seen include various subsidies in their economic calculations. But, it's worse than that - if we were to go all solar and wind, we'd need a conventional generating system on standby to get us through the night. You can't ignore the cost of building, operating, and maintaining these facilities when you look at costs. But, this doesn't get us to "all renewables".
If you want details on how much battery material we'd need, read through my reply to WL's ghost below. If we need to increase worldwide production of lead or lithium by a factor of 20 or 30 to get make enough batteries to get the US through an average night, leaving nothing for the rest of the world, that's pretty close to a physical limit. It's not a question of how much money we'd have to spend - it's a question of whether there's any scenario where we could get close to enough material to meet the requirement. Or maybe the question is how many customers would have to be cut off for how many hours per year because we can't back them up.
I recognize there may be new solutions some day, but I'm not very optimistic. Battery technology has been around for nearly 200 years, and there haven't been any breakthroughs that fundamentally revolutionized the product.
Pumped storage? Compressed air? Hydrogen? Stacked blocks?
Scalable? Affordable? Demonstrated? Plausible?
I'm betting on Iron-Air and sodium-ion batteries.
The flow batteries being developed in the US (Lockheed Martin and Honeywell), which have reached full size demonstrations, appear to have a huge amount of potential as well.
The prices that Form is quoting for Iron-Air batteries, if legit, will utterly obliterate people's concept of what's possible. I bet those flow batteries will be competitive though. At those prices the grid will just be a giant network of batteries and intermittency NBD. At those prices all solar will be 24/7 installations.
Yes. This is my fear in the UK. Presently backup is mostly via gas-fired stations, and even some coal: ❝EDF has agreed to defer closure of two units at West Burton A power station by a further six months with closure now on 31 March 2023.❞ (https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-stations/west-burton). The backup is secured through the so-called "capacity market" where the government pays to keep stations available for when the wind stops blowing. The more renewable energy there is, the more capacity is required. This is very expensive.
How can we hope to move to an electric world as electricity gets ever more unaffordable?
Advocates trot out their favoured technology: batteries, compressed air, pumped storage. But there is nothing in the near future to replace present gas/coal backup.
Nuclear power, which could be, at some risk, be deployed at scale and fairly quickly, is stymied both by activist and public fear (Fukushima, Chernobyl). There is nothing else. Green Vortex indeed - it may swallow us all.
Over the next couple of decades we will see a lot of innovation in the storage technologies you’ve mentioned (plus hydrogen) and I anticipate (in the absence of a major meltdown) increasing acceptance of the need for fission power (SMRs could be key by leveraging standardization and learning rates). Net zero 2050 is the dream but net zero 2075 is doable.
"Wicked problems" are those where there is no agreement on what constitutes a solution and we certainly have that. The interaction between a weak and largely static climate science and energy policy adds another rich vein for controversy (does this make it a "wicked mess", I forget?). My fear is that Green policies will cause huge harm, and my fear is supported because I can find no coherent pathway to the promised land - just confusion and delusion.
Can you link to any studies to back up your points?
If you mean the math on batteries, I highly recommend Professor Thomas Murphy of UCSD (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/). His calculations are based on energy use around 2010.
He assumes we'd need enough storage to cover a week's demand, and bases his calculations on lead-acid batteries because they're cheapest. Assuming efficiencies not likely to be seen in the real world, he estimates we'd need 5 billion tons of lead to cover a week's demand, vs 80 million tons known lead reserves in the world at that time. Since then, known reserves have increased to 90 million tons (https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/lead-facts/20518).
I think we wouldn't necessarily need a full week's worth of storage. If we overbuild a ridiculous amount of solar and wind capacity, such that we can fully recharge the batteries every day, even on cloudy days in winter or windless days in summer, we'd only need to get through the night. Still, we'd need something like 500 million tons of lead vs,. annual production of about 4.5 million tons (https://www.statista.com/statistics/603544/distribution-of-world-mine-production-of-lead-by-select-country/). If you want to use lithium, the considerations are the same, but we'd only need about 70 million tons because lithium is lighter than lead (atomic weight 7 vs. 207). This would compare to current annual production of about 100,000 tons worldwide (https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/). (Correction: lithium requirement should be more like 17 million tons, not 70 million.)
These calculations are optimistic in the sense that they assume efficiencies that cannot be achieved in the real world. We'd actually need more batteries to have a secure electricity supply. My 500 million tons requirement also assumes we could afford to build and install so many solar panels that they could cover daily power requirements and fully charge the storage batteries even on the worst days - I won't even attempt to calculate the cost of such installations.
As I briefly mentioned above, we'd have to build the full storage capacity within 5 years, and then maintain the same production effort forever because the batteries would degrade over time and need to be replaced every 5 years. This is an inherent characteristic of rechargeable batteries, and lifetimes are about the same for lead, lithium, or nickel batteries.
Some points:
You haven't mentioned hydrogen storage, it has round-trip efficiency of only 40%, but can be used to store energy practically indefinitely and the storage is much easier to scale than batteries, it could be used as a seasonal grid storage solution with hydrogen being produced in the summer and then burned during winter.
I haven't checked your calculations, but my understanding is that known lithium reserves in spodumene rock and underground brine reservoirs are around 70 million tons (correction: 21 million tons of known reserves and 86 million tons of resources), plus there's practically unlimited supply of lithium in seawater (hundreds of billions of tons) that is more expensive to extract. Also lithium batteries can be recycled, so it's unlikely that we'd ever run out of lithium. I don't know how expensive it would be to scale up lithium mining capacity, but I've seen some analyses that show there's plenty of room to grow.
Another point is that I've seen calculations that show 100% renewable grid would currently be extremely expensive, but it's covering the last 5-10% of energy needs that constitutes bulk of the cost. So a combined grid of 95% renewables and 5% non-renewables would be much more doable while accomplishing majority of the goal.
I didn't mention hydrogen because the subject was batteries. Hydrogen has its own problems. Aside from the low round-trip efficiency, hydrogen is a very tiny molecule; as a result it tends to seep through any solid material used to contain it. This further reduces efficiency and also creates fire/explosion hazards. I assume you are envisioning using fuel cells to convert the hydrogen back to electricity. Fuel cells are also expensive and have limited life before the cells have to be replaced,.
As far as lithium reserves, I've seen widely varying estimates. The USGS in 2020 estimated 17 million tons worldwide (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-lithium.pdf). This article (https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithium-reserves-world/) says the USGS estimated 80 million tons in 2019. I assume the difference is between estimates for ore (is this what you mean by "resources"?) and recoverable metal. I'm sure there's enough lithium in the lithosphere to build all the batteries anyone would want, but how much could be recovered, and how quickly, and at what cost, is a different question. I don't claim that there's no solution in the future. I was refuting Alex Brown's claim that the hardest parts had been solved.
As you say, I don't know why anyone would ever want to mess with hydrogen.
Pumped storage or stacking blocks in abandoned mines have an efficiency of about 50%. Not great for running everything off of intermittent power, but definitely a better idea than hydrogen.
I understood the subject to be energy storage in context of a renewable grid, not just batteries. I think the current vision is that the hydrogen would be burned in combined cycle power plants and hydrogen gas itself would be stored in underground caverns.
In mining "reserves" is used to refer to known measured deposits and "resources" to estimates of total deposits based on our best knowledge.
We have a massive commitment to offshore wind in the UK. Presently wind lulls, "dunkelflaute" as the Germans call them, are met by increased gas generation. The other option being pursued is interconnectors. I have found nothing else for the grid. The founder of JCB wants to burn hydrogen to power heavy machinery. Prototypes exist, UK government not interested AFAICT. Lithium batteries are need edfor cars (and Amazon delivery vans).
The generation statistics of the UK National Grid are available for download. I did a thread with some charts on Twitter about dunkelflaute generated from that data.
https://twitter.com/peter_mott/status/1455923888068640771
EDIT: The longest dunkelflaute in UK data 2011-21 was 22 days in July 2013. This shows the scale of storage required.
My questions are:
1. Given you have to maintain a conventional generation infrastructure in addition to the wind infrastructure, does the wind infrastructure make sense? Possibly, if wind can cover 95% of annual generation requirements, and the gas generators only come on occasionally.
2. Given that you have to build and maintain a gas generating capacity in order to have wind, how is this fact taken into account when calculating the cost of wind generation? Doesn't this blow another hole in the claim that "wind is cheaper"?
The German group deENet calculated in 20006 that only 6% of installed wind capacity in 2015 could be credited toward system capacity requirements - that is, of 40,000 MW planned installed capacity, only 2,400 MW could be counted toward capacity needs; the other 37,600 MW would have to be provided by conventional generation - either spinning reserve or standby. http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/events/2006_grid/Martin_Hoppe.pdf pg. 12.
1) Wind power was a strategic error.
2) The connection is not made. The late David MacKay FRS (https://www.withouthotair.com/) insisted that only whole system cost was relevant. But advocates ignore this. I have read, also, that recent lower bids for building offshore wind are not binding on the bidders and are, in fact, more akin to purchasing an option to build. But I have no reference for this.
The largest development presently underway is part two of the East Anglia hub: https://www.scottishpowerrenewables.com/news/pages/overseas_next_generation_turbine_experience_and_cost_focus_clinches_east_anglia_hub_design_for_wood_thilsted.aspx
Siemens builds the turbines, the holding company is Spanish. But at least a Scottish outfit pours the concrete.
Over 3 weeks. Long time.
So it doesn't work.
That's a powerful point.
BS. Of course parts of what you are saying are true but not the sentiment. You cannot make the transitions Noah and the left are talking about without impoverishing millions and probably billions.
Seems obviously wrong and made-up
Decarbonization of which sectors do you think will necessarily impoverish millions/billions?
Electric generation, fertilizer production, and transportation come readily to mind.
Which sectors do you think can be easily decarbonized?
Since electric generation is clearly easily achieved with cheaper renewables, including nuclear, one has to assume you aren’t anxious for it to work.
Which is it - nuclear or renewables?
If nuclear, you should recognize there's a tremendous political hill to climb. But I agree the technical issues are manageable, and it can be economical.
If renewables, you should recognize that renewables are economically viable only with large subsidies, and only to cover part of electric requirements. You'd need a conventional generating system on standby to cover requirements when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. Which would defeat the decarbonization objective. Or you'd have to come up with storage systems that have not yet been demonstrated at any scale or economic viability.
If any country has been committed to decarbonization, it's Germany. Despite spending a lot on building renewable generation, and paying much higher electricity prices, they are not impoverished. But they also haven't made a lot of progress on decarbonization.
> Which is it - nuclear or renewables?
Both.
Support for nuclear energy is growing. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-study-charts-shifting-nuclear-attitudes
And geothermal is in its infancy and growing
Germany is un-mothballing coal because of Russian gas cut off. They will not, however, delay or reverse the closure of their nuclear power. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/germany-reactivate-coal-power-plants-russia-curbs-gas-flow)
I think you are right. You have convinced me. No reason to keep trying -- just enjoy ourselves until the end.
None of these seem to be a problem? Seems pretty clear we can get mostly decarbonized electric generation, so much progress has been made in fertilizer production using new techniques (eg nitricity), transportation seems also pretty clear without any radical breakthroughs (with the exception of air transport -- it's going to have to look different than it does today)
I don't know the details on fertilizer production, so I can't comment there.
For transportation, we should look at it by subsector:
Autos: electric cars are feasible, but very expensive, especially when it comes time to replace the batteries.
Trucks: As far as I know, no one is working on an electric truck. Tesla announced one several years ago, but hasn't mentioned the topic since. As far as I know, none of the real truck makers are even working on an electric.
Trains: Electric trains are feasible, and operate in many areas. However, electrifying all the track would be extremely expenisve.
Ships: There's been talk of using wind, but as far as I know, there's not even a thought of a completely carbon-free ship for commercial purposes.
Aviation: The industry claims to be working toward Net Zero. With current engine technology, this would rely on biofuels with some petroleum added. I'm not at all convinced that biofuels can be scaled to support the industry, or that the environmental costs of massive biofuel production would be less than the environmental costs of carbon emissions.
I'm sorry but you're just really uninformed on this. There are very serious companies working on electric trucks and electric ships right now, with pilots out in the world
Are you in favor of that?
God what a world of white men did I just enter? So full of themselves and their techno knowledge, yet lacking so much holistic understanding and depth. Diversity and plurality can’t be your arguments if you can’t start by looking at yourself and your surrounding…
Great article from Tsung Xu walks through the green vortex of varying green tech, found the battery section most interesting. https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/
So true!!! They even have a solution for Carbon-negative cement now: https://www.brimstone.energy/
That's a very exciting claim, but I don't see any actual evidence or even details.
Did I miss something on their website?
I think you have misunderstood. Degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism are not the strategy of climate change activists. Climate change is the strategy of degrowth, anticapitalism, and doomerism activists.
Nixon to China, I know, but I think it will be a Republican who basically vows to make energy free and gets the federal government behind that. Lots of nuclear to start, eventually geothermal and fusion. If energy is free, decarbonization is possible at scale. As is desalination. So is onshoring.
Came to jeer, stayed to cheer. Thank you for writing this.
I'm generally conservative, but I consider myself an environmentalist, and support a carbon tax and plenty of govt investment in green energy and the like.
But I want to emphasize how counter-productive and annoying the doomerism and ever-more-ridiculous exaggeration of the likely effects of climate change are.
I'm in Alabama, and even here most people aren't coal-rollers who just love coal and are just reflexively opposed to green energy.
I think they can eventually be persuaded, but the screeching of climate activists and anticapitalists makes it much more difficult.
Because so many of the claims are clearly ridiculous, a lot of people here are convinced that climate change is just being used as a vehicle to promote leftist economic nonsense.
I don't know how to shut these people up, or remove their access to the media spotlight, but it needs to be done if you want a chance at persuading more than a sliver of Red America.
I too am a conservative.
I think an important point to remember is that much of the world’s population sustains itself through industrialized agriculture and infrastructure. Petrochemicals go into thousands of products and their derivatives also feed into fertilizers. If you crash industrial agriculture a lot of people will run out of food.
Honestly, a technological solution to climate concerns is the only moral one unless you are willing to de-industrialize and hazard an unprecedented global famine.
I don't think that we are ever going to completely move away from petrochemical usage.
At least not anytime soon.
Ideally we get an energy surplus from renewables, and can dedicate much of that to carbon capture to offset the stuff we cannot feasibly decarbonize.
I'm pro-human, and pro-prosperity. I wouldn't support anything too extreme.
I don't think you usually burn the petroleum when you use them to make agricultural chemicals.
I believe you are correct. However, when we look at the environment holistically, artificial fertilizers or petroleum derivatives can be very polluting or damaging to ecosystems if they are not used responsibly.
Yet, we cannot abandon their use without a REALISTIC replacement.
Other issues stem from the use of pesticides of various sorts which critically increase or protect crop yields but, again, have an environmental cost.
I think Noah has the right vision. We can and should innovate through problems.
Genetically modified crops are likely the only ethical future for us as we cannot abandon our current agricultural output without a global famine.
Right, but my understanding that that it downstream often results in more CO2.
Unless the carbon is locked in a long-term stable form.
That might very well be the case. (I know cows produce a lot of methane...)
Good piece Noah. The one thing that I think is missing is acknowledging the climate activists who have been telling this optimistic story already for years. Saul Griffith and Rewiring America come to mind (Leah Stokes who you quote is an advisor). And Inslee. And RMI. And a lot of activists at the state and local level who helped pass very good legislation in a bunch of states.
Yep
Noah: “... a dire, angry, hectoring leftism...”
I have to say you hit the nail on the head. You need a positive vision of the future. To many non-leftists, the Left just comes across as a profoundly unhappy movement staffed with militant people who see everything as “problematic” in some way.
I think that as soon as you discourage people from having children you have lost the argument. People will write you off.
The American Left increasingly seems like a movement dedicated to telling people what they shouldn’t do, say or think versus offering a vision for human flourishing.
"There’s just one catch: The organizations that advocate Green New Deal style programs support growth, but only if it comes via the abolition of capitalism."
Noah is correct to point out that this approach is about as popular, and about as plausible, as straightforward degrowth.
I think, though, that there's a bigger catch. Green New Deal style programs might plausibly result in measured increases in GDP, but only by making anything reliant on energy much more expensive. This would still result in dramatically lower living standards, which are the real sticking point. Green New Deal is just degrowth coupled with socialism.
The biggest consideration, though, seems beyond the imagination of climate change activists: What is the convincing argument that the cost of preventing climate change is less than the cost of dealing with climate change? I believe the current consensus among climate scientists it that there has been about 1C of warming over the last 150 years. The alarmist position is that a further 1C will be disastrous. The scientific basis for this projection is entirely speculative. Why can't we adapt to 1C of further warming as well as we've adapted to the 1C we've already seen?
Scare stories about "unprecedented heat waves" shouldn't be convincing to scientifically and mathematically literate people. To take just one example - record high temperature in the UK. The world is a big place. It has about 58 million square miles of land area. The UK has about 94,000 square miles of land area - about 1/6 of 1 percent of the earth's land area. If there were no temperature trend at all, but only random variation within a fixed distribution, and if we had 150 years of reliable temperature data, then we would expect to see new all-time high temperatures in about 1/150 of the earth's surface each year, or about 4 new records covering UK-sized areas each year. And a similar number of new record lows. Also a similar number of new record floods and droughts, of wildfires and storm surges.
I don't claim that there is no long-term warming trend, but dramatic events don't demonstrate it. Especially, listing dramatic events does nothing to demonstrate that there is a trend in dramatic events. Getting back to the question (Is the cost of preventing climate change less than the cost of dealing with climate change?), it seems to me that voters in the US and other democracies have a better intuitive grasp of the question and its answer than the activists.
Every month the National Centers for Environmental Information publishes "Assessing the Global Climate" -- the one for June 2022 is available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202206. It shows a map of the world, split into squares along the lines you propose (except smaller in size, so about 2x or 3x of the number you propose). The squares are colored based on temperature variation -- white if near average, shades of blue if below average, shades of red if above average. The darkest blue and darkest red are reserved for the record coldest and record warmest for all the Junes in the historic record. Since the headline was that this was the sixth warmest June in the historic record, it's not surprising that there were quite a few -- maybe 75? -- darkest red squares, with clusters in China, North Africa, Indonesia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. It was much easier to count the darkest blue squares, since there weren't any. I looked at the maps for the past 12 months -- they all contained at least a handful of record high temperature squares, but they didn't have any record low temperature squares. I had to go back to May 2021 to find a record low temperature square -- there was just one, in eastern India. The relative imbalance between record highs and record lows is a persistent feature of these maps. Usually there are as many record high temperature squares as there are "much colder than normal" squares.
Thanks for that. I'll be a little more explicit than I was above. I think there's good evidence for an overall warming trend for at least the last 200 years or so. This shows in surface temperature records where such records exist, in upper atmosphere records from satellites, and in anecdotal information like ice freezes in winter. I don't mean to imply that there's no trend. I merely point out that loudly announcing "highest temperature ever at location X" doesn't add any useful information, and does nothing to establish whether warming is bad, or is likely to become bad.
Likewise, announcing "lots of wildfires in France and Spain" adds no useful information. It might be useful if you addressed topics like (a) the "normal" number of wildfires at this time of year, (b) whether there's been a trend in the number of wildfires, (c) whether there's been a trend in rainfall, (d) whether there's been any change in forest and land management practices.
It's also been noted widely that most of the observed warming comes in higher nighttime low temperatures, not in higher daytime high temperatures. This is consistent with your note that record low temperatures are very rare.
But again, establishing that there is a warming trend does not establish that there has been, or will be, any harm from that trend. If we talk about harms (like deaths from heat waves), we should probably also talk about benefits (like fewer deaths from cold). If anyone wants to argue for aggressive action to prevent future warming, they ought to explain how the costs of warming are greater than the costs of attempting to prevent warming. Very few people attempt this, and the ones who get the most attention give projections with little basis in science, and imply that warming is on the verge of disastrous.
Your NOAA link says that June 2022 was 1.57F higher than the 20th century average. The news reports Noah linked highlights apocalyptic stories, like the record high temperature in the UK. Not stated is that, without the warming trend, temperature would only have been about 1.6F (or 1C) cooler.
I agree that providing context around mentions of wildfires and heatwaves would strengthen the statements. Some news outlets do better at this than others. Although some people object to the "attribution science" of trying to determine the increased likelihood of weather events due to climate change, it is intended to take into account the factors you mention.
You put the burden of proof on anyone who wants to argue for aggressive action to prevent future warming. I think the burden falls on those who want to continue on our present course, given that we've entered the climate casino (William Nordhaus's term), where the risks of very bad outcomes are increasing. Uncertainty about those risks argues for reducing our exposure to them, not increasing it, as we do by pursuing our current high emissions course.
I respect your perspective. But you should recognize that you are no longer arguing science. You think we should reduce the risks associated with greenhouse gas emissions; at some level, I would agree. If there were some reliable, painless way to banish (or significantly reduce) greenhouse gas emissions, I'd be all for it. Actually, there are some - switching electric generation from coal to natural gas is such a measure, and it's being implemented worldwide wherever gas is available, because it is painless - in fact, it's more economical.
You are convinced that the risks of very bad outcomes are increasing, but what is the basis for this conclusion? All the "very bad outcomes" are speculative, and most are based on very little science and promoted by non-scientists. For instance, the often-repeated forecast that there will be more and larger tropical cyclones is not supported by any weather or climate scientists I know of. The often-repeated claim that tropical diseases will move north ignores the fact that "tropical diseases" such as malaria were once common in temperate regions, but have disappeared as societies have gotten richer and sanitation has improved. For example, malaria was once common in southern Europe and the southern US.
If you want to convince your fellow citizens that your risk mitigation is worth the cost, you should focus on some mitigation measures that are cheap and painless. you might also want to look at mitigation measures, and not focus entirely on prevention.
I live in UK. On Tuesday the thermometer in our back garden hit 38.8C. Very hot, some bad fires in London area. Also, oddly, frightening. The feeling that things are running out of control. Weather triggers ancient fears.
My real settled fear is that we will ruin our economy. The temperature today is 18C and it's wet. The extreme hear lasted two days, but this other fear persists.
Hey, good post.
I'm much more on the center-right Lomborg/Shellenberger side of this, where climate is a modest issue that will be solved by capitalist forces and mild gov path-clearing. Sue me later, but for now, I am rapidly decarbonizing and electrifying my home. I already own a Tesla and will be getting another. Not because I see gas as an existential threat, but because it's the best safest most awesome car. I'm getting a massive solar system installed at my home. Not because I want to lower my carbon footprint, but because I get immediate net-present-value by doing it: my electricity bill will be $100 lower than my solar loan on month 1, and I will save hundreds of thousands in the long term. I'm getting heat pumps to replace my propane furnace and boiler, not because I worry about emissions but because heat pumps are very efficient and operate on the same electricity that my oversized panel system creates. I'm replacing my gas cooktop with induction. My water heater with heat-pump water heat, and so on, and so on. All because it is an economically rational money-saving investment that is so good I'd be harming my family to NOT do it....not harming the climate or whatever, but simply making my own family poorer.
This is why I don't worry about climate change much, because your optimistic part of the article is right: no matter how much I despise the climate activists, no matter how counterproductive they are, the capitalist system is producing such low cost high quality environmentally friendly products that even a climate lukewarmist like myself cannot help but "go green." I'm like you but even more optimistic! My own experience leaves no room for doom.
Good article. Even though I’d see myself as a center right neoliberal economically in the vein of Reagan and Bush Sr, I always find your economic writings very insightful and thought provoking. Your one of my favorite economists on Twitter. Only thing I’d say is I don’t think the Green New Deal is necessarily anticapitalist. I know the original version pushed by the Green Party was but the more popular and well known version pushed by progressives in the Democratic Party mentions private public partnerships and reforming anti trust laws to ensure businesses have a fair shot at competing in the market.
Good to hear. There was some talk of a basic income or the equivalent, which some people see as anticapitalist even though it isn't. Not sure what happened with that.
Yeah I don’t think UBI is anti capitalist. Milton Friedman supported a means tested version of it called a negative income tax. I actually prefer UBI over our current welfare state. I think direct cash transfers with no strings attached and little administrative costs is much more effective than a confusing system of a hundred welfare programs that require a ton of admin costs and have built in welfare traps.
I'm about to get a loaner EV tractor to try out for a month, during which we'll park out diesel beast in the barn. Next up: A ground-based solar array (we already have one on our separate homestead) to power the house and all the equipment that we need on a sliver of acreage that we've never used for corps. Neighboring farmers will be watching -- and copying. We've been ignoring the potential for alternative energy generation where it is greatest -- in the red states and counties that have the excess land for the generating capacity. And, by the way, when I can show my neighbors that my electric tractor can outpull their old diesels, there will be a rush to adopt them.
The environmental costs of producing batteries is almost as high as O&G not to mention the toxic waste produced by end of life solar panels. To me more efficient diesel is a better choice.
"Almost as high", meaning less? So you produce the unit for less than O&G, but also reduce all the fossil fuel consumption during the lifetime of the vehicle (not just gas, but also oil, lube for parts, coolant, etc), and it has no emissions. How can that possibly be worse than diesel?
And that is probably before you factor in that the very environmental cost that you are quoting itself includes a lot of fossil fuel consumption that could be improved by moving to cleaner power sources.
Mining, it takes an insane amount of mining to get the required lithium. That's why in general I think hybrids are better than large pickup trucks. And in big cities having less ICE would greatly reduce air pollution.
Some version of the Green Vortex is the path we will take but I find the climate alarmism Noah embraces is more a social construct than a reflection of the best science. A great resource available to Noah in person is the Berkeley Earth (BE) project initiated by Richard Muller (a UC Berkeley Physics Professor at the time, now emeritus). Initially with intuitive scientifc skepticism he questioned the human dominance of AGW. With top level physical scientists (not climate scientists) they archive and analyzie all the available temperature data and besides peer reviewed articles all the data and data analysis methods are open source. They concluded that in fact it was human activity that dominated in the observed warming over the past 250 years. But reasonable attribution to AGW is only moderately well established for Heat Waves, and Coastal Flooding. It would be great if you interviewd Richard Muller, including discussing how an Astrophysicist thinks about the climate models. As a Physical Chemist who has done a lot of differnt types of modeling (though not any finite element) and having read about these models I'm naturally skeptical of the predictive skill of the climate models far into the future. At the core the climate models will never be able to treat water vapor and clouds from first principles, and never able to descritize the model grid on the small scale of the physical dimension of clouds. Frustratingly reducing grid sizes with these parameterized models increases error measured by backtesting.
On the Green Vortex side I observe anedodtadly the powerful sway of culture. In both the SF Peninsula where I just returned from a family funeral to Colorado where I live near Boulder the transition to electricity is well underway. Tesla's sedans, while not as common as BMW 3 series sedans, are so common they no longer stand out. Perhaps 50% of the houses in my neighborhood have solar and new developments often have solar on every house. I put 98% solar in about 4 years ago (which is dominantly impacted by AC in the summer). I'm replacing my 80% 20yr old furnace and AC with a modern heat pump (at 6000 ft in CO I also will put in a 97% gas booster) with a smart thermostat that can calculate when you need gas to heat based on your electrical and gas costs. It has become, among my friends from growing up through grad school and post-docs, something that is discussed almost competivly. I'm sweltering through a warm July with a broken HVAC system being replaced with the highest efficiency heat pump not delivered on time. I could downgrade the heat pump and get it installed earlier but I want to install the optimal system over a period likely far longer than I will live in this house. Economically it is probably a cost to me but it is net positive for the environment.
Something you might address: How do the electrifying regions of the world expand. What is the compelling argument? Where I have visited in parts of the world a 2-stroke motorbike is almost a red-line between individual winners and losers in younger peoples view of the world. I don't see any way this will change across the less devolped world.
Noah, I’d like to add one more factor. As the left increasingly identified climate change as “their issue” (which occurred for many reasons, such as fossil fuel companies’ support for Republicans, but also for less scrupulous reasons, such as the idea that climate change prevention could be a way to sneak socialism into the agenda), the scientific literacy of anti-climate change activists declined.
Now, both my parents are professors of atmospheric chemistry specializing in climate science. My first job was as a research assistant analyzing IPCC national communications documents. So I am extremely confident in saying that much of the rhetoric surrounding how bad climate change will be is simply false.
David Wallace-Wells is definitely one of the villains here. Anyone taking a 3 sigma-out possibility and presenting it as the obvious conclusion is not being honest, and while--as a follower of Toby Ord--I am very concerned about small existential risks, many communicators have misunderstood that climate models become less accurate the further you get from the expected average. This is not even discussing the basic facts about climate change people get wrong
- Methane is not 1000x worse than CO2 (it is 25 times worse of a 100 year estimated lifespan)
- Plants do not take CO2 out of the atmosphere, net. They temporarily sequester it in their biomass. Hence, cutting down a forest represents only a one-time emission, not a recurring loss.
- Greenhouse gases are in fact a distinct category from pollutants, traditionally defined (though there are overlaps, e.g. NOx and SOx)
- the US is not still the largest emitter (to be fair, people are probably confusing historical emissions with present-day ones, but they often insist on the error even when corrected)
- Courtesy of my mom: “Save the planet,” when the planet has experienced temperatures and CO2 levels this high during the Permian
- Organic farming is not a solution (???)
- Most emissions are not corporate emissions, and instead are individual emissions (cars, electricity, heating, and agriculture are the vast majority of all emissions)
- etc.
And these unscientific talking points are far from rare. They are parroted by elected officials, by radical leftists, and even by ordinary left-leaning Democrats. You yourself, in my estimation, have generally overestimated the costs (for a rich country like the United States--poor, equatorial countries will have a much harder time, which is a separate moral question) of adapting to climate change.
The abuse of science and statistics to turn a crisis into an apocalypse destroyed the credibility of many of the scientists who quietly work behind the scenes producing good data. Worse, it removed everyone who wasn’t willing to swallow and regurgitate bullshit from many of the major activist groups. The Sunrise Movement and Sierra Club regularly say things no self-respecting scientist or science communicator should.
Climate change will be brutally expensive. Much of the infrastructure we have built is designed for this climate and this sea level. Sea level rise, increased hurricanes, massive heat waves, cold shocks as far south as Texas--these are serious costs, and it costs far less to mitigate climate change than to rebuild trillions of dollars of infrastructure to suit our future conditions. But it will not be world-ending, and at worst (for rich countries) will cause stagnation.
A ridiculous amount of climate change can have devastating effects (consider the Permian-Triassic extinction event) but humans are very unlikely to cause the kinds of greenhouse gas concentrations the Siberian Traps ended up producing - something around 8000 ppm, compared to something like 400 today.
Glad you linked the climate change movement to anti capitalism. It is a political movement not scientific. Even the 2 degrees limit was political not scientific, as is the revised down 1.5 degrees. It is just an extension of peak oil and other Malthusian ideas.
Excellent Noah.
As an old P&L manager who won major new product acceptance in Automotive due to the best ever Environmental regulation...CAFE... good goals and clear timeframes and economic penalties worked very very well. We should plagiarize this one.
I do see and think a number of entrepreneurs and investors see the Green Market Opportunities ahead. That's just Darwin providing free market awareness.
Nuclear Energy has a direct and simple, well rational path to broad acceptance in the US.
1. There is real Fear of Nuclear. Earned Fear.
2. Never deny Fear. Address it head on.
3. Be humble. Learn from the best. Replicate the French Nuclear energy approach because..... it Solved the Fear problem.
How:
As noted, the Experience curve and repetition drive down costs, reduce risks dramatically. A single US nuclear destign eliminates the core major risk of Plant 1 from A, plant 1 from B, plant 1 from C. No learning curve.
Standardized design lowers cost by higher purchased part counts, more replacement parts, and shared multi-site design and operating experience learning.
US: compete the Builds around the French design standard.
"Climate Activists" as described here seem to be more in love with their proposed solutions to the problem than solving the problem itself, because those solutions have become an ideological lifestyle.
At this point, if an miracle new energy technology solution was discovered, I suspect climate activists would oppose it because it isn't wind/solar/an-expensive-status-symbol-toy-car-that-I-can-pretend-makes-me-a-good-person.
Likewise, I have the funny feeling that the ones who are proposing anti-capitalism solutions are more like hammer salesmen trying to convince you that all your problems are nails.
I'll cop to being a very sentimental, "Many of these trees were my friends," crying-indian environmentalist. I have a zoology degree, I volunteer at a bird refuge, I raise tadpoles as a hobby. And yet when people talk about how important it is we Do Something about climate change, all I hear is *World Ending; Women and People of Color Most Affected, Give me money so I can buy a Tesla."
I do think giving people money to buy an electric car sounds like a very good idea.
Yeah, but these people don't see themselves driving anything other than a Tesla. I don't otherwise have anything against the company nor it's largest shareholder, but fuck the obsession with them, they're the BMW for people who want to pretend their status-seeking consumption is virtuous.
I've been over-exposed to EV and renewables hype from watching a friend lose his soul in his quest to become the walking, talking, finger-snap-clapping avatar of what's currently popular among female college graduates (so, Queer/NB Black Climate Activism Male Feminist Marxism. I'm not making this up.), and dang he wanted that Tesla, communism be damned.
So I really, really fundamentally don't trust the motivations of anyone involved anymore. They're in it to be popular, and they're in it to push their ideological agenda, because that's how you become popular in that crowd.
Where does the money come from? We can't all subsidize ourselves.
""Climate Activists" as described here seem to be more in love with their proposed solutions to the problem than solving the problem itself,"
It's because they look at it as a moral issue rather than a pragmatic issue. If you look at this issue pragmatically, there are many many activities that can be of significant benefit, from amelioration of impacts to massive investment in carbon-free energy types that are not technically considered "renewable" (such as nuclear). Everything about this movement codes *moral* to me while garbing itself in the urgency of pragmatism. There is a significant gap between the level of urgency pushed by activists, and the level of urgency implied in their chosen solutions. I cannot unsee that, and it utterly destroys their "pragmatist trying to solve a problem" credibility with me.