We have a society that is being run by a literal cabal of necromancers, gaining wealth by tapping into the energies of the long-ago dead. Who wants to help overthrow the necromancers?
Noah - I appreciate your writing on this. I started digging into the chart that you posted from Lazards that shows the massive drop in Solar PV costs. Using the information they provide, I don't see how you can say "As a result, decarbonization no longer involves a large amount of economic sacrifice — just a lot of willpower and investment."
There are two points that I would love to understand how we solve:
1) First, from Lazards info, the cheap price of solar is based off Solar PV which is based on Solar farms in high efficiency locations. Distributed solar costs rise significantly (about the same price they list as Nuclear which is currently uneconomic). Solar farms as opposed to distributed Solar makes a difference because they need a very large amount of land to replace current fossil fuel production in the US (somewhere between Maryland and W. Virginia). To be clear, distributed takes even more, but then your just attaching it to everything you build - its just much, much less efficient and therefore more costly.
2) Even if you assume you have the current lowest price available for solar, you still need to address the storage issue. From the same Lazard report, it lists the costs of storage. If you add that to the costs of the cheapest solar, the price goes back up to being more expensive than Nuclear which again is consider uneconomic.
Now maybe your point is that technology will continue to improve these and drop the costs even further, which very well may be true, - I'm personally very interested in geothermal - but its an assumption that we'll continue to make progress and that we haven't picked the lowest hanging fruit and further improvements won't be increasingly expensive.
I couldn’t agree more. I work in the industry and wholeheartedly wish for a lower carbon future. Unfortunately everything I have seen so far suggests that when forced to pick two out of three among clean, cheap, and reliable, politicians pick the first two and hope for the best - which is why we are where we are. To get to the reliability we expect from a fossil based grid with renewables plus storage requires a degree of overbuild people are (in general in my experience) not willing to pay for.
I can't help but think about the analogy to the internet vs. phone a long while ago. There was a set of people who said that reliability was really important and the internet almost by design couldn't support that. It was true, but it was so different and plentiful that it fell by the wayside as a concern.
What do you mean the internet can’t support reliability? It was designed as ARPANet to withstand a potential nuclear strike! The whole point of picking packet-switching over circuit-switching! Of course you’d have node failures, but the network itself can work around those failures instead of crashing down. It may be the case that data storage is cheap and plentiful, but the internet was designed differently because reliability was a requirement.
OK, slightly poorly communicated. I was referring specifically to people using VOIP and other real time protocols in earlier days. There was a clear disadvantage to not getting your own circuit for a particular call. Once your call went through on a traditional phone line, you had a circuit and your call would work.
The ability to survive a nuclear strike wasn't relevant in the course of a particular phone call. IP is by definition unreliable and most VoIP services don't use TCP. So the reality was that for real people those kinds of applications *were* unreliable.
My point is just that the issues theoretically still exist but as the internet built out the theoretical issues no longer mattered.
If every home were built with PVs and backup battery storage, they would be putting less demand on the existing grid that is woefully under stress and in need of upgrading.
Nuclear could be economical but I think in order for that to happen, we have to have nationalized program that uses one or two designs that are repeated for economic sake.
The transition to EVs would be massively sped buy policies like a strong carbon tax, which the public opposes. Same for the power sector and other industries. The public bears some blame here because they (in fossil fuel states) are to the right of the major publicly traded companies. Just as the taste for SUVs has thus far negated benefits from EVs. Senators like Ted Cruz are significantly right of companies like Chevron or Shell and he reflects the attitude of the Republican base in fossil fuel states. So the public, as Yglesias points out, definitely bears some blame. Pointing to Exxon’s 90’s era disinformation, while obviously egregious, is given way too much weight in terms of it’s assumed efficacy.
Because people hate taxes especially the ones they see themselves and not some abstract rich people paying.
As for solution, how about funding social security with carbon taxes and getting rid of payroll taxes in the process? Tax bad things like carbon not good things like work. Once people see the immediate uplift in their paychecks it should help the sale
I think your solution will run into the problem that gas taxes have. As people migrate away from ICE, gax taxes aren't sufficient for current road maintenance and have to be subsidized. If you replace payroll taxes with carbon taxes, then as people move away from using carbon (the goal of the tax) you won't have enough revenue to fund what payroll taxes currently do.
You by-passed the problem: people hate carbon taxes, because of the resulting higher electricity prices (during the transition to green). So...try again, while
Well, in Canada the Trudeau government introduced carbon taxes, and pays back most of it as a benefit...so, something like this would make it more popular I would think (e.g. cutting taxes, or paying a sum each year...).
Great article Noah! Agree with most of it. Something I think that may have been subtlety implied but needs more attention about "who is the problem" is lobbyists. The lobbyists (of the fossil fuel industry) are the ones who are amplifying the disinformation campaigns, the lobbyists are the ones that are bridging the gap between the fossil fuel industry / players themselves and the politicians who are stonewalling action.
In Bernie Sander's most recent op-ed, which he published on Fox News to reach an audience that doesn't normally hear from him, he said "At a time of record-breaking forest fires, drought, rising sea levels and extreme weather disturbances the fossil fuel industry has, since 2000, spent more than $2 billion on lobbying to protect its special interests and prevent the federal government from making cuts in carbon emissions to protect our planet." Link to op-ed below.
Like most things in American government, the problem is the money in politics. Take that out of the equation and I truly believe that the truth will bubble up to overtake public opinion, which in turn will cause the representatives who are voted in by the public to follow that public opinion. With money in politics, it skews the game and pushes politicians to follow other interests than what the public wants .... something other than the glaring truth.
I think that lobbyists may actually be influencing politicians but the interesting thing to me is that if a politician is a rational actor it seems like doing the bidding of lobbyists is no longer smart. There is so much individual money in politics (vs. corporate money) that there certainly isn't a fundraising advantage any more. There might be an advantage in post-office job offers but I'm not sure that even is so big any more.
Yet classical economics - postulating the efficiency of self-interest in "invisible hand" markets - IS to blame.
Explanation:
1. Renewables plus storage is still more expensive than coal/gas/oil; if it were not, the fossil industry itself would voluntarily make the transition ....provided profits could be maintained.
2. Compensation for displaced fossil employees - for the enforced closure of their profitable industry - is necessary, to remove opposition to the transition from this quarter. Where's the money coming from?
3. Orthodox economists want carbon pricing, as the mechanism to release private sector investment in renewables, but that will increases prices for consumers. Politicians and the (self-interested) electorate hate this idea.
It's time economic heterodoxy became mainstream: the public sector ought to be able to *fund itself*, rather than being required to tax or borrow from the private sector.
Note: the public sector possesses its own treasury and central bank, because government (the public sector) is required to issue the nation's currency and create a 'clearing union' for private sector banks, aka the reserve bank. Hence government should NOT need to tax or borrow in order to spend, rather the function of taxation (in various forms) should be confined to controlling inflation.
Further note: ANY spending whether private or public has the potential to cause inflation; the nation's spending choices ought to be in the hands of an informed electorate, not solely in the hands of private sector players who are by definition self-interested; only the public sector can and ought to consider community well-being ...and (gasp) *global* well-being, in the case of issues like pandemics and AGW climate change.
With this awareness, public sector investment in renewables COULD flow as quickly as required, indeed as quickly as possible, all the while continually lowering prices for consumers, as more and more of the economy is fueled by sun and wind. We agree ...why hold back the transition to *cheaper* energy? (Some 'opportunity costs' might be involved, but if we are indeed cooking the planet....)
As for CCS: storing CO2 underground is conceptually untidy/unsatisfying; will the stored gas stay in place, how much underground space is required for vast quantities of gas, etc. Storing nuclear waste underground in the form of syn-rock seems more feasible. Workable CCS technology is probably as far away as nuclear fusion technology; we don't have the time to wait for either of them.
To conclude with the issue of "justice": justice requires a balance of public and private sector interests as outlined above. MMT describes the mechanism to effect this balance.
1. ANY spending (public or private.).... has the potential to be inflationary.
2. Spending *choices* (public versus private) ought be in the hands of an informed electorate and voted on - , consistent with the inflation constraint.
Note: The REAL constraint for government - unlike households - is the nation's available resources and productive capacity , not any particular level of debt or deficit.
Some-one needs to teach Manchin fast, or Biden won't have a leg to stand on at Glasgow (nor will he be able to claim "China isn't doing enough".....).
This is just delusional. Mr. Smith frequently claims that technology has made solar and wind energy cheaper than fossil fuels. If this were true, then utility regulators throughout the world would be requiring all new generating capacity to be solar or wind. This is not the case.
Mr. Smith doesn't mention that wind energy requires "hot backup" to pick up load whenever wind drops off. This "hot backup" is almost always gas turbines. Germany has calculated that every 100 MW of on-line wind energy requires 80 MW of spinning reserves to keep the system from collapsing.
Mr. Smith invokes batteries, but doesn't even attempt to assess their viability as large-scale storage. Getting the US through an average night would require something like 55 million MWHr of storage. This would require all the lead, lithium, or nickel production in the world for years to produce enough batteries. By the time the batteries were all built, it would be time to replace them, since they would only last 5-7 years before normal degradation made them incapable of holding a charge. And it would leave no lithium, nickel, or lead for any other uses, and no batteries for the rest of the world.
Mr. Smith claims that green energy would create more new jobs than the jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry. I suppose this is true, but what it really means is that green energy is much more expensive than fossil fuels - rather than paying 100 oil workers to give us a certain amount of energy, we'd pay 200 (or whatever number) of solar workers to produce the same amount of energy. If you look at these two numbers in isolation, you still might think you're ahead on jobs, but the higher costs would have to be paid, and that would mean less money to spend on other things, which would mean jobs lost in other fields.
Who is the real problem? I guess you first have to define what the problem is. If the problem is that no one is working seriously to implement a zero-emissions economy, the problem is physics. If the problem is that no one is listening to the alarmists, then the problem is that the alarmists' predictions of doom keep not coming true.
The most delusional part is the claim that the fossil fuel industry spends its ill-gotten wealth pulling strings to prevent climate action. There is far more money available from Messrs Gates, Musk, and Bezos, pushing ever more government-controlled resources to subsidize unprofitable alternative energy, than the fossil fuel industry can use to block them.
Where to even begin? The idea that regulators are rational actors, not captured by utilities "If this were true, then utility regulators throughout the world would be requiring all new generating capacity to be solar or wind. This is not the case."?
Or perhaps this utterly absurd nonsense "Germany has calculated that every 100 MW of on-line wind energy requires 80 MW of spinning reserves to keep the system from collapsing."?
Or the ever popular idiocy of pretending that batteries are the only storage you'd use "This would require all the lead, lithium, or nickel production in the world for years to produce enough batteries. "?
Or thinking that cost is composed entirely of labour "Mr. Smith claims that green energy would create more new jobs than the jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry. I suppose this is true, but what it really means is that green energy is much more expensive than fossil fuels"?
Point 1: Let's stipulate for discussion that US regulators are entirely captive to the utilities. As matters of policy, Germany and Spain committed to building more and more renewable generation. However, they are retreating from this commitment because of the high cost and low reliability of the renewable generation installed.
Point 2: It is widely recognized that due to wind's unpredictable output, backup generation capacity is required to maintain reliability. I've seen different figures quoted. Here's a report by a E.On, major German electric utility. My old link doesn't work any more, but you can find it through the Wayback machine. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080730030237/http://www.countryguardian.net/eonwindreport2005.pdf) Page 9:
"In 2004 two major German studies investigated the size of contribution that wind farms make towards guaranteed capacity. Both studies separately came to virtually identical conclusions, that wind energy currently contributes to the secure production capacity of the system, by providing 8% of its installed capacity".
I will concede that this is a less favorable claim than the one I made.
Point 3. I discussed batteries because that was what Noah Smith focused on. If you think other storage technologies are better, which ones? As for the use of battery material (lithium in particular), see my reply to Mr. Mukherjee below.
Point 4. Essentially all cost of producing anything is labor. Raw material cost is based on the labor to produce the raw material. Capital cost is based on the labor to produce the capital equipment. Maintenance cost is the labor to perform the maintenance, plus the labor to produce the expendable materials and spare parts used in maintenance.
What cost would you propose as being independent of labor?
1) No they're not. Germany is having some NIMBY problems with wind and transmission but is otherwise committed. I don't know why you'd think Spain has regrets. Their idiotic attempt to exact a windfall tax on renewables because gas prices rose?
2) It's the numbers that are utterly absurd, not the idea that a variable resource needs some kind of firm backup. And note that firm backup does *not* mean spinning reserve.
3) It's not about something else being 'better'. If they can cycle regularly (every day at least), batteries are very good. But they're *comically* bad at seasonal storage. Which is why dishonest detractors use only batteries when calculating storage costs. Hydrogen OTOH is bad when used regularly as it's inefficient, but much better for long duration storage as the actual storage part is quite cheap.
4) There are some things like land rent but that's small and a wash, or even in FF's favour. The big one is profit! FF extraction costs are across a very wide range, and commodities like FFs are priced marginally, so low cost producers make *enormous* profits. Something like 7/8ths of the money you spend buying oil from Saudi Arabia is their profit, for instance. So it should be easy to imagine how replacing that with something else could essentially trade their profits for jobs.
Now that said this *is* mostly politics. Really, we want to destroy jobs by increasing productivity, but that's sadly not a wise thing to say to an economically illiterate public.
If that were all there were to the story, I would agree that this is not really an improvement; that it's an equivalent to taking away profits (from some of the nastiest businesses and governments on Earth, but still) and using them to pay people to dig ditches. However, including the social cost of fossil fuels - as should obviously always be done - more than counteracts this.
The numbers don't line up at all. The average daily energy consumption in the US is around 10 million MWh, not 55. At current battery prices, that's around a trillion dollars. However, prices continue falling, and nobody is asking this money to be spent overnight.
There is a great Reddit thread BTW on lithium requirements by the way that goes into a lot of detail (https://np.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/lijfbq/fear_and_loathing_and_lithium/), and we really don't need that much lithium. 10 million MWh is around 1.5 million tonnes of lithium - we will not run out. Secondly NMC is not the only battery chemistry, LFP is great too that neither needs nickel not cobalt. LFP is less energy dense than NMC, but that doesn't matter for grid storage.
Thanks for checking me. I wanted to keep my overall post reasonable, so I didn't go into a great deal of detail on the battery calculation. I based my estimates on those done by Professor Thomas Murphy of the University of California, San Diego about 10 years ago: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/. He assumed that all current fossil fuel uses would be replaced by renewables (not just electricity). This would involve improved efficiency in many areas, most notably transportation, since electric motors would be more efficient than internal combustion engines. However, it would mean something like an average 2 TW (2 million MW) of energy production continuously, or 50 million MWh per day. He doesn't really address the economic questions, but focuses on physics; I followed this. He assumes we'd need 7 days' storage, or 336 million MWh. He doesn't address the economics of this energy system, but he implicitly assumes we'd only produce "enough" generating capacity to meet needs. If we ignore economics, we could assume we'd massively overbuild generating capacity; I assume we'd need only one day's storage - we'd at least need enough to get through the night.
As far as battery material, using your estimate of material required, 50 million MWh would require 7.5 million tonnes of lithium. Current production is only 82,000 tonnes, (https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/), but we could probably increase production to 100,000 tonnes without much investment. This would mean we'd need 15 years' production to finish the US battery backup. Assuming we don't need any of the lithium for electronics, or electric vehicles, or ceramics, or any of the other current uses. But, the batteries would start to wear out long before we were finished building. So, we'd need to at least double world production to be able to complete the US battery backup and keep up with batteries that wear out. And we'd need to further quadruple production to cover backup needs for Europe, Japan, and the rest of the world. And, we'd probably need to further double production to accommodate growth in energy use in the developing world. So, we'd need to increase world production to something like 1.6 million tonnes per year. At this rate, we'd go through all identified reserves in something like 10 to 15 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves_and_occurrence). I'm not addressing production costs, because change on this scale would dramatically change the economics of the industry.
If we use all available battery technologies to cover backup requirements, we could probably write a scenario where we don't use up the whole world's matter. But, the larger point is that we are a very long way from eliminating fossil fuels. And not because the fossil fuel companies are blocking progress.
"If we ignore economics, we could assume we'd massively overbuild generating capacity;"
You mean, just like how we do now? What do you think peakers are? Peak demand is far higher than minimum demand, so we build huge amounts of capacity that doesn't run most of the time. We effectively have many power plants that we only run in (insert higher demand season), many power plants that we only run in the evening etc. This gets spread around a lot so it just looks like less-than-100% capacity factors, but that's effectively what it is.
If we rely on wind and solar, we'd need much more excess capacity. Leaving aside inherent supply issues (wind doesn't always blow, and solar doesn't work at night), we'd also have to cover unexpected variability of supply. If we don't want to build storage to cover a week or month of unexpected low availability, or a winter when the sun is predictably less available, we'd need to build a whole lot more capacity. For instance, New York City has less than a third the incoming energy in December that it has in June (http://www.solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-irradiance.html). You might retort that this doesn't matter because electricity demand is higher in the summer, but if we require heating to come from "clean" sources, I expect that winter heating requirements would be higher than summer air conditioning. Solar panels produce 10-25% of normal output on cloudy days, so we'd need to overbuild by an additional factor 10, or accept power outages on cloudy days.
If we're only concerned with physical limitations, we could "just do it". But, this level of overbuilding would blow up any claims of economic competitiveness made by Noah.
You are using two extremes to try to make the situation look ridiculous - we either build a week of storage, or we massively overbuild renewables. But the reality will be a mixture of many things. Renewable spillage, transmission to balance their variability (and the variability of demand of course), firm resources like nuclear and geothermal and bioenergy, storage including batteries and pumped hydro and chemical storage (probably hydrogen).
What you (and many other detractors) are doing is akin to saying we can't run the grid on only baseload, or on only peakers, they're not flexible enough/too inefficient. Which is of course true, which is why we mix them together so they can cover the others' weaknesses.
So, you're saying there's no need to rely exclusively on renewables. Fine. My post was in response to Noah Smith's post, which said that we are ready to rely exclusively on renewables. You used some terms I've never heard before. What does "renewable spillage" mean. What do you mean by "transmission to balance their variability"?
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough on the overbuilding part, though. If we build only "enough" generation capacity to meet average demand, we'd need to build months' worth of storage. I don't know enough of the details (I expect no one else does, either yet), but I expect relying on renewables without storage would require us to build enough that most generated power was wasted. This might sound like a minor thing, but I'm not so sure. California has actually paid neighboring states to take its surplus solar power (https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/). I don't know why California couldn't just turn off the renewables, but apparently it's not that easy.
That's why one of the reasons a national grid is so important. So that cloudy days in NYS can be managed by solar from Nevada and wind from the East Coast and wind from Montana. Let's say we need 10 times the electricity generation needed, for overbuilding too - that's 12 million MW of installed solar+wind. A week of solar/wind fluctuation can occur over a state, but for a country of US' size it simply doesn't happen on a national scale.
At current prices, both solar and wind cost approximately $1 per watt of nameplate. Thus, at current prices also, we need 12 trillion USD to build 12 million MW of nameplate capacity. You need 3 trillion over that for a national grid. However, two things - solar and wind costs are consistently falling, unlike nuclear or coal or gas. Secondly, solar and wind have far lower operating costs and are almost completely immune to gas and coal price fluctuations.
Also, winter heating requirements should still be lower because of heat pumps.
As I said, we're just spinning fantasy scenarios. I'm not a power industry professional, but I doubt that any power industry professionals know enough to confidently redesign the national power system to reliably deliver power while replacing essentially all generating capacity and reworking the delivery grid. If you can do that, more power to you.
Another way to look at this would be the averaged primary energy consumption for the US is approx 3TW. At 20% capacity factors, and a factor of 2 overbuilding, this would mean 30 trillion dollars of wind+solar investment at current prices. That's a lot, but such a system, if nationally connected would have very little backup needs. Also, a lot of this energy consumption is in transportation itself, where you don't need any backup storage (as the vehicle comes with it's own). And these are all 2020 prices. Given current trends, that number should be lower than 10 trillion before this decade ends.
True. Per capita energy consumption has remained essentially flat over the years. Secondly, the non electricity power sources (such as oil for transportation and agriculture) has efficiencies that never cross 50%. 3TW is a pretty much upper limit, given both energy consumption and population trends.
Most of our infrastructure does require periodic and pretty consistent upgrades anyway - that's pretty much baked into the whole depreciation values. From oil rigs to chip fabs to pipelines - this is everywhere. But to a huge extent that is why a national grid and overbuilding is so great - you don't need gigantic batteries that are running at full charge-discharge cycles daily.
Solar cells are around 150 watts per square meter. Now take a 20% operating value, so you get at 30 watts per square meter averaged (takes into cloudy days). This runs for 8 hours daily, so your daytime energy consumption (which BTW is more than double the night-time) can and should be entirely run off battery PV without dipping to batteries. Thus around 6 million MWh of the daily should be coming from solar PV, which needs around 12,500 sqmi of land. That's BTW slightly more than double the land used by the oil and gas industry today, and less than the total fossil fuel land use if you add coal. Cost wise, it's around $1.6 trillion dollars.
But, we are not done yet. The idea should be also to set up wind that provides for more than 10 million MWh per day. Let's say that it's 12 million MWh, which at winds' capacity factors come 2 million MW of nameplate capacity. That's again 2 trillion dollars (1 dollar per watt of nameplate capacity).
Basically, at around 4 trillion USD trillion dollars, even at current prices you can easily build nameplate generation of 4 million MW of nameplate capacity, which is 8 times the averaged US electricity consumption.
The third part of this puzzle is a national grid, which Ygliesas has talked about, you want wind power from Montana to reach Florida, and solar from Florida to reach South Dakota. Such a system will almost probably never need more than 2 days of national battery backup. Double the solar and wind installs, and you rarely, if ever need to tap into your batteries - which BTW also prolongs the cycle life.
I don't understand why Tom Murphy of UCSD thinks we need 7 days of battery backup - because if nationally the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine for a whole week - we have way bigger problems on our hands.
OK. We're all talking about fantasy scenarios. My main point was that Noah Smith is wildly delusional to think that we're ready for a large-scale conversion to renewable energy, if not for the evil fossil fuel companies.
Professor Murphy assumed 7 days' backup to guarantee against power interruptions. As he explained, this wouldn't necessarily mean 7 days with no power generated, but could be 2 weeks at half normal output, or a month at 75% normal output.
I respect your calculations, but you need to keep in mind that not all days are average. In fact, not all months are average. To focus on solar, we have an entire season with much lower solar energy available - it's called winter. So, you'd need to dramatically increase your overbuilding - there's no way to build enough storage to get through the winter, even with reduced power input from solar panels.
I think you're unrealistic to think that any renewable-only system could get by without significant storage capacity. And significant would be in the tens of millions of MWh. Which would be daunting on the economic, industrial, and physics levels. I won't go into more detail, because I'd just be arguing my fantasy scenario against yours.
There is already enormous energy storage. We do it for gas because gas wells produce at near 100% all the time, whereas demand is highly irregular (far higher in winter, of course). So we store massive quantities of it.
That could be, but Noah specifically mentioned cheaper batteries as a key enabling technology. Pumped storage doesn't face the kind of resource constraint that limits batteries, but it would require a whole lot of real estate. We'd need to pump something like the volume of Lake Michigan up 100 meters every night. You need very specific geography to make a site - a flat area for a lower pond near a flat area for an upper reservoir, with a major vertical distance between them. And construction would be expensive. And you'd need a lot of water nearby.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying we're a long way from implementing on a large scale. It's not just fossil fuel companies blocking the way.
Actually, I don't know a lot about these batteries. Except that they're apparently still not ready for prime time. Mr. Smith's claim is that technology has changed, making zero-emissions energy not only feasible, but more economical. This is patently absurd.
Another point is that a large part of the reason some of the *other* agents have been less helpful than they could be is the fossil fuel industry (FFI) manipulating them. The FFI funded anti-AGW research for many years, creating individuals with interests in minimizing AGW, literature denialists can use to minimize the effects, and (I believe) a general culture that has caused predicted results to tend to undershoot the actual outcome, because researchers think their work needs to be super-defensible against denialist, but not activist, criticism. Likewise the public is less concerned than it should be partly due to aggressive disinfo. And I strongly suspect they fund bad actors amongst the climate activists, not because I have any direct evidence but because it's become common in politics and the cost is below rounding error for what they already spend on disinfo and bogus research.
The right answer is tech to solve this. Full stop.
Doing new laws has so many veto points in a divided society that you can say, fairly safely, relying on a political solution to anything other than an immediate threat is a fools errand.
I don't have to get Joe Manchin's approval to invent a 10x more useful solar panel. I just need to find some clever engineers, give them a goal and some money, make the R&D happen, and figure out a way to deploy the technology that requires as few votes as possible.
What will save the climate is the fact that most of the CO2 comes from sources for which there are more efficient options, right now, in 2021. And as batteries get better, solar gets better, etc - people will adopt those things regardless of the benefit, as they are simply better for the consumer.
Imagine the world where solar is so cheap, battery storage is so plentiful, that you can charge your Tesla for free and never pay for mobility again. That is the world I want.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
For many, it is easy to dismiss the fact that 90 corporations are responsible for 2/3rds of carbon emissions and who spent the last 30 years spreading disinformation about climate change, the impacts of climate, the cost of doing too much compared to doing too little.
When the same 90 corporations still spend a lot of time deflecting blame back onto the general public when they ask "What have YOU done personally to save the planet?" we get think pieces about how individuals and the fecklessly performative protesting Leftie aren't doing enough of the serious work to restructure a culture built upon endless extraction and consumption in a decade's time.
I'm not as optimistic as Noah that that billionaires like Musk are going to do much to save the planet when the very same cohort profits mightly from the very economic model of extraction and consumption that needs to change. Insisting the Ubermensch of Tech will save us from ourselves is wishful thinking.
Green technology can bridge the gap as we increase nuclear energy and if you want to ease the economic transition of O&G workers into green infrastructure, they could easily start by retrofitting the tens of thousands of gas filling stations into charging stations and upgrading utility infrastructure. Decarbonizing our energy systems can be done and decarbonizing our transportation systems (including cars) is already happening. But we need a big political push for that to happen. And with the GOP standing athwart the path of progress, we're looking at another decade of bullshit resistance, status quo-ism, and passing bills that label pipeline protestors as domestic terrorists.
I guess what I don't understand is if investment in these technologies is all upside with no tradeoffs, then why aren't private companies rushing in to invest in them?
Some companies are. I am the senior member of the tech support team for Tesla Industrial Storage.
We'd probably be seeing this move even faster except that the competition -- the incumbent fossil fuel companies -- are still subsidized beyond the dreams of Croesus. You think subsidies for EVs or renewables are high, hah, you ain't seen nothin'. Go take a look at the aggregate of oil and gas subsidies.
Some of it is also about regulation. Figuring out exactly how storage is going to integrate into the grid is complicated. That's partly because of real technical challenges. But a LOT of it is dumb regulation that incentivizes the transmission operators and retail utilities to resist the shift toward distributed resources, even though a grid full of distributed generation and storage will in the long run be cheaper than a grid that follows business-as-usual.
Please - explain the "aggregate of oil and gas subsidies". What is the form, and what is the magnitude?
Most of the claims I've seen for fossil fuel subsidies are things like "LIFO cost accounting", and "not taxing the externalities". Do you have anything more substantive?
I mean, it's not my core area of expertise, I'm trusting what I've heard from folks who _are_ experts on the financial side of the industry and on the politics. Your google-fu may be as good as mine, but here're some examples...
To quote the report that Brookings is endorsing, "G20 governments provided $584 billion1 annually (2017–2019 average) via direct budgetary transfers and tax expenditure, price support, public finance, and SOE investment for the production and consumption of fossil fuels at home and abroad."
The TL,DR from that article is: In terms of permanent tax expenditures, fossil fuels beat renewables by a 7-1 margin. The primary federal tax supports for renewable energy — the investment and production tax credits, respectively — are not permanent. They are set to phase out over the next five years, and are politically vulnerable in the meantime. But if you include them, Stephen Kretzmann of OCI confirmed for me over email, permanent fossil tax breaks still win, at $7.4 billion to $5.6 billion [per year].
(And again, that $7.4B is _only_ the direct production credits.)
No matter how you slice it, we are spending _more_ money to subsidize fossil energy than we are spending to subsidize renewables. Which is plainly insane. You want to say the government shouldn't pick winners and losers, fine, let's see how the coal, oil, and gas industries hold up without Uncle Sam doing so much for them.
You're comparing apples and ping pong balls. The Brookings study identifies production and consumption subsidies to come up with its $500B figure. One third of this is subsidies to consumption by just 5 countries: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and India. I don't support such subsidies, but they are hardly US policy.
For US policy, Brookings refers to a report from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute that claimed $20B of US production subsidies. Most of this ($12.9B) allegedly comes from tax treatment of intangible drilling costs for oil and gas. I'm not a tax expert, but we're not talking about phony, or imaginary, or bogus costs here. In most industries, a company's costs of production are deductible as expenses. An exception is improvements to real estate (for instance, improving a building, or building a road) - these are considered as increasing the value of the land, and go into the cost basis for the land, which would decrease reported gains when the land is sold. Congress has decided that, for instance, building a road to allow oil drilling, is not really an investment, but an expense. I don't see the outrage here - I think the Environmental and Energy Study Institute was working pretty hard to find their scandal.
They descended into absurdity by claiming LIFO cost accounting and Master Limited Partnerships as subsidies - these are simply accounting treatments that are allowed by the law for any company to use. They may or may not be appropriate - I'm not familiar with the arguments either way, but they're hardly fossil fuel subsidies.
I don't really have time to go through the Vox article - I'll just say that I have yet to read any item on Vox that provided useful information or analysis.
OK - I had a bit more time than I thought. The Vox article refers to a paper by an organization calling itself Oil Change International. It trots out the familiar (at least, familiar to me) list of "subsidies" - intangible drilling costs, Master Limited Partnerships, LIFO accounting. Just because some tax treatment could be less favorable than law allows doesn't mean that fossil fuels are subsidized.
It also claims that royalties from oil, gas and coal production are too low. I'm not an expert on such things - perhaps there's reason to abrogate existing leases and force changes. Again, though, this hardly counts as subsidy for fossil fuels.
From an accounting point of view, foregoing taxes or royalties only from certain companies is exactly the same as applying the normal tax rate and auction procedures but then giving it back subsidies to certain companies. It might not feel like it, but again, the earth feels flat, does not mean it is.
Exactly one of the provisions I mentioned applies exclusively to the oil industry. If you want to call that a subsidy, feel free. My point was that the vast majority of the claimed "subsidies" are not unique to the oil industry. "Oil industry subsidies" is a dishonest argument made by people who want to distract attention from the very real, very large subsidies for "green technology", and from the fact that most of these technologies would be viable only for specific niche applications without the subsidies.
Private companies are rushing in, whenever subsidies are large enough, for instance home rooftop solar power. These are the only conditions in which there is all upside. Except for taxpayers - they have all the downsid.
Is the problem the Carbon in Coal,or the burps and farts, of the 300 million bovine of India ?
Climate Change due to carbon and methane is irreversible,because the Alt-options,have a huge cost,which humans cannot and will not bear.
Let us Say that humans eat synthetic meat and milk - and it comes free ! That will ruin the agri-economics,as plant wastes and residues and oil cakes will have no use - and so,agri prices will have to rise 2-3 times - and no one will pay for that ! AND THEN ALL THAT AGRI WASTE WILL HAVE TO BE BURNT !
The solution is to eat synthetic meat and gene modified agri crops - which creates less waste,lesser need for water and fertilisers,lesser time, lesser sunlight and photosynthesis, higher yield,and which is cropped throughout the year.That is another quantum leap.
But that is what is happening.Uncle Bill is into Synthetic meat and Gene modified agri - and if you cut down the population,and the hunan life span - then you have a solution
Humans will NOT pay for Climate Change.
And that is Y,substituting the food inputs of cattle,will not work - as the existing agri economics,will be blown up,and agri prices will have to triple.
The OTHER solution is to breed a new DNA of livestock - which has much higher yield,lower cost of maintenance,no impact of disease,higher potency,engineered to a new diet and more beef
TRUTH IS THAT INDIANS HAVE A COSMIC BOND WITH DUNG !
Hindoos eat Cow Dung,Cock Dung, Bird Dung . Goat Dung ,Cow Piss and Goat Piss and Elephant Piss ! dindooohindoo
Elephant Urine
Elephant urine “gajamutra” is used as an alkaline decoction preparation for a supposed cure to malignant sores. [ Ci.9.16 ] [ Ray 131 ]
Goat Dung and Urine
Goat droppings “ajashakrt” are prescribed as an accessory to surgical cauterization and is used for cauterizing diseased skin.
Cock Dung and other Birds’ Droppings
The dung of a specially fed cock “kukkutapurisha” is prescribed as an ingredient for a plaster used to cure malignant skin diseases [ Ci.9.15 ] [ Ray 132 ] Vulture droppings “grdhrapurisha” is an ingredient of a plaster fro bursting of non-boils [ Su.37.9 ] [ Ray 132 ].
Mr Haq said that a Minister said that the solution to jobs in India - is to gift a cow to Indians who have no jobs ! The man is right ! At least then,Indians can gp to the GCC to clean camel dung - like this brilliant Goan ! dindooohindoo
AND THAT IS ALSO WHAT IS SAID BY A GOAN MINISTER PRATAP RANE - A GOAN ! HE SAID THAT GOANS EXCEL IN TOILET CLEANING,IN UK AND EU ! THAT IS DUE TO THE TRAINING IN COW FARMING AND COW SHEDS AND COW DUNG,AND COW URINE !
India CANNOT and WILL NOT make any carbon commitment !
There are 300 million cows in Hindoosthan ! 1 cow eats and excretes 15-20 times - w.r.t an Indian, every day.In addition,the live stock pullulates at a much higher rate.Besides,the daily water needs of a cow,is 100 times that of an Indian !
So the population of Hindoosthan is 1.2 billion humans,and 5 billion quasi Hindoos = approx 7 billion = close to the world HUMAN population !
THAT IS THE PROBLEM !
300 MILLION COWS TO 1.2 BILLION HUMANS,IS 1:4
AS TIME PASSES,THE INDIANS WILL BE AT 2:4 (vs the cows) ,AS THE NEED FOR MEAT AND MILK,WILL RISE EXPONENTIALLY - AND CANNOT BE IMPORTED !
THAT IS THE DIS-ASS-TER ZONE ! dindooohindoo
AND SO,WE HAVE TO ASK THE BASIC QUESTION - WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF HUMANS FARTING IN GLASGOW ?
What people miss is the progression of yield and costs,in the Re sector.
In the last 15 years,year by year,what has been the yield increase in energy generation in each source ? Is the incremental growth slowing or stagnating ?
Let us look at the BOM (Bill of Material) of the Components of each RE source.The Component costs might have declined - but that is not relevant.What is relevant is the purchase rates of the MATERIALS USED IN THOSE COMPONENTS.It is the PURCHASE PRICE PER KG OF THAT MATERIAL - AND NOT THE PURCHASE COST OF THAT MATERIAL IN THAT COMPONENT
You will find that the PURCHASE PRICE PER KG OF THAT MATERIAL is INCREASING.
THAT IS BAD NEWS
WHEN RE IS SCALED UP SHARPLY - THESE RAW MATERIALS WILL EXPLODE OR BE NOT AVAILABLE.
EVEN THE DECLINE IN THE RAW MATERIAL COSTS IN THE COMPONENTS HAS STAGNATED (INSPITE OF MATERIAL SUBSTITUTION.NANOTECH.AI AND VALUE ENGINEERING ETC.).THIS ALSO MEANS THAT THE COSTS OF THE MATERIALS WILL EXPLODE IF THE RE IS SCALED UP !
THE WORLD HAS NO PLAN !
CAPITALISM HAS ENSURED THAT TECH AND COMMERCIAL EFFICIENCES IN RE TECH - ARE AT THE MERCY OF THE MARKET - WHICH IS AT THE MERCY OF BANKS. Y WILL BANKS ALLOW THE SUCCESS OF RE POWER,IF IT IT BLOW UP CONVENTIONAL BUSINESSES - TO WHICH BANKS HAVE TRILLIONS OF USD OF EXPOSURE ?
NATO and the West,know that there is no solution and that RE is a diversion.The West has to be free of OPEC and PRC.E-Vehicles,are a mortal threat,to the Western Economies.So the West is comfortable with OPEC and GCC.
The Only Solution is Population reduction,and Climate Change is an EXCUSE,to reduce the population - but in that process,the players will try all the options (knowing that they will fail - as they fund the options !),and ultimately convince the masses,to bite the poison pill
But then people ask - Y do the players fund all the alt-options, knowing that it will fail ?
It simple - the players want to be SURE,that all the options will fail - and so,they fund each leg of it - so that they have the results of all the research,and intelligence on the options - to navogate the minds of the hapless populace. dindooohindoo
Shifting to E-Vehicles , with the E - from Renewables, places the security of the US, in the hands of the PRC.With OPEC, the USA has no risk,as the US controls all the key players of the OPEC, and all the nations of the GCC.
Will the US accept that ?
E-Vehicles and charging might be scaling up rapidly,BUT WHAT IS THE PROGRESSION ON THE MATERIAL SUBSTITUTION OF RARE EARTHS AND OTHER MATERIALS SUPPLIED FROM PRC ?
Reduction in Oil prices only helps PRC !
Is the US pushing E-Vehicles - only because it allows it to import dual use rare earths and materials for use in military and space applications ?
What is the Plan B of the US for the rare earths ? Moon or Mars ? dindooohindoo
Yeah, I agree that the fossil fuels industry is a major part hindering the transition to green energy... but, there still is the fact that, in the short-term, renewable energy (with a few exceptions, such as hydro power and maybe geothermal energy), will be more expensive than fossil fuels ... not long-term of course, but most people don't think long-term...
I mean, just look at countries that use a lot of (non-hydro) renewable energy, like Germany or Denmark. They have among the highest energy prices in the world...of course, countries like Canada or Norway, Sweden etc. with lots of hydro power have much lower energy prices...so as long as Germany and Denmark can be used as negative examples to opponents of renewable energy, then a transition will be slower... just look at the energy crisis in Europe this autumn...
And I think that voters should definitely be blamed, because, as I wrote above, they think short-term, and that means renewable energy prices look more expensive than they really are... and, at least in the US, Canada and Australia, climate change and what to do about it has become a culture war issue...so it will be harder to change people's opinions on it, based on their "tribal affiliation"... similar to how the greens in Germany are set on opposing nuclear power no matter the benefits...
Nothing like 2 weeks span of radiation poison. First time in years I have lost some much hair. Chunks are coming out of my head. Tummy aches from stress and hissing in my ears. Weight gain even though I hardly eat or drink the water here anymore. Clearly digestion issues play a key roll in the bigger picture. Identity theft and stolen checks by none other then babysitting house mate. Seasons Only 10 months without a job and every inch breathing down my neck. Tactics displayed are the scariest most desperate I've ever seen. Never know who's knocking at the door , could be a gun or someone to walk thru my house unexpected since its being shown to public. At least we know that the awful echo and hollow sounds do actually come from a real well. Turns out I was correct and the house sits on a well. Too bad none disclosures are apparent. Wouldn't matter anyways , no one listens or helps or even comes around ever. You wouldn't guess I were even a real person or a wife of someone. Of course I don't do any banking or have personal accounts b.c I know how to manage money. I did receive a letter from the state unemployment saying they paid an overage on my unemployment over a years worth of checks. Oddly enough I never applied or received one single payment in my life from said government and or state offices. I figured I know who cashed in on that past years spoils. Still here sure I am and tattoo the one who holds a leash round my neck, still here . I wouldn't want to ruin the story for the audience and alert anyone that out look not so good. I believe your sun and moon will die by strife and choice. Tried to do that much, only they shocked
me back to life over and over and over again. No rest In peace for me , I am . the wicked suffer and greater then ever known to a human in history. Bringing the dead back to life and for torch. Please make positive I'm totally dead before you wish my way ended. There's a sun shining but its not me. 11 hour 24 hour days now and have been for each new year . rounded the 3rd year in hell. 4th martial anniversary. Reruns aired. Who am I really? I am not a cloned robot or a SIM twin. She's a real alive women. Her name printed on my hand , take a closer look. Can you believe God sent his messenger to save the universe the 4th coming of Christ and not one person knew how to save a life. Climate change in your dreams maybe, I think it's a sign or may be a fire signal. HEAVEN CALLED SHE SAID ITS DEAD. THERE IS NO HEAVEN OR SAVIOR FOR YALL . ps, inner ramblings diary. 2016. Well dear random House 2021 never wrote a word sure did read what you said and you know who needs to make it up if you have too. How is that reflection looking back at you? I won't ask how do you sleep at night, I can tell you don't sleep , or have actual brains, bones. Steel cage isn't a steel trap, it's cranium that surrounds twitch supporting the brain steady equally stable. That's why we don't smash babies on the head or shake them about, it kills and causes brain damage. Thankfully nanny cams are about in teddy bears ECT. I still suffer from the concussion, I don't receive a dime from insurance though.
Don't worry I will not pursue an eye for an eye nor a tooth for a tooth. Gizmo. Congratulations on your hard work. You won the worst faux plastic pop cycle sicko a goat couldn't quit of gandered, tic tac toe , Larry curly moe, the ring finger queen.
If you don't know what this means clearly it's not for you to read move on. Ty. Love ur bestie. Slip Knott nurses or tuna in the sea? Chicken shit? I like ham okay but my favorite is turkey. F.U. from us both love THE brushers family.
We have a society that is being run by a literal cabal of necromancers, gaining wealth by tapping into the energies of the long-ago dead. Who wants to help overthrow the necromancers?
Noah - I appreciate your writing on this. I started digging into the chart that you posted from Lazards that shows the massive drop in Solar PV costs. Using the information they provide, I don't see how you can say "As a result, decarbonization no longer involves a large amount of economic sacrifice — just a lot of willpower and investment."
There are two points that I would love to understand how we solve:
1) First, from Lazards info, the cheap price of solar is based off Solar PV which is based on Solar farms in high efficiency locations. Distributed solar costs rise significantly (about the same price they list as Nuclear which is currently uneconomic). Solar farms as opposed to distributed Solar makes a difference because they need a very large amount of land to replace current fossil fuel production in the US (somewhere between Maryland and W. Virginia). To be clear, distributed takes even more, but then your just attaching it to everything you build - its just much, much less efficient and therefore more costly.
2) Even if you assume you have the current lowest price available for solar, you still need to address the storage issue. From the same Lazard report, it lists the costs of storage. If you add that to the costs of the cheapest solar, the price goes back up to being more expensive than Nuclear which again is consider uneconomic.
Now maybe your point is that technology will continue to improve these and drop the costs even further, which very well may be true, - I'm personally very interested in geothermal - but its an assumption that we'll continue to make progress and that we haven't picked the lowest hanging fruit and further improvements won't be increasingly expensive.
I couldn’t agree more. I work in the industry and wholeheartedly wish for a lower carbon future. Unfortunately everything I have seen so far suggests that when forced to pick two out of three among clean, cheap, and reliable, politicians pick the first two and hope for the best - which is why we are where we are. To get to the reliability we expect from a fossil based grid with renewables plus storage requires a degree of overbuild people are (in general in my experience) not willing to pay for.
I can't help but think about the analogy to the internet vs. phone a long while ago. There was a set of people who said that reliability was really important and the internet almost by design couldn't support that. It was true, but it was so different and plentiful that it fell by the wayside as a concern.
What do you mean the internet can’t support reliability? It was designed as ARPANet to withstand a potential nuclear strike! The whole point of picking packet-switching over circuit-switching! Of course you’d have node failures, but the network itself can work around those failures instead of crashing down. It may be the case that data storage is cheap and plentiful, but the internet was designed differently because reliability was a requirement.
Now if we can packet-switch electricity too…
OK, slightly poorly communicated. I was referring specifically to people using VOIP and other real time protocols in earlier days. There was a clear disadvantage to not getting your own circuit for a particular call. Once your call went through on a traditional phone line, you had a circuit and your call would work.
The ability to survive a nuclear strike wasn't relevant in the course of a particular phone call. IP is by definition unreliable and most VoIP services don't use TCP. So the reality was that for real people those kinds of applications *were* unreliable.
My point is just that the issues theoretically still exist but as the internet built out the theoretical issues no longer mattered.
If every home were built with PVs and backup battery storage, they would be putting less demand on the existing grid that is woefully under stress and in need of upgrading.
Nuclear could be economical but I think in order for that to happen, we have to have nationalized program that uses one or two designs that are repeated for economic sake.
Judging by other posts, Noah's answer consists of one word: "Batteries".
The transition to EVs would be massively sped buy policies like a strong carbon tax, which the public opposes. Same for the power sector and other industries. The public bears some blame here because they (in fossil fuel states) are to the right of the major publicly traded companies. Just as the taste for SUVs has thus far negated benefits from EVs. Senators like Ted Cruz are significantly right of companies like Chevron or Shell and he reflects the attitude of the Republican base in fossil fuel states. So the public, as Yglesias points out, definitely bears some blame. Pointing to Exxon’s 90’s era disinformation, while obviously egregious, is given way too much weight in terms of it’s assumed efficacy.
Yeah but most new EVs seem to be SUVs anyway...🤔
Why does the public oppose carbon taxes, and what is your solution to that dilemma?
Because people hate taxes especially the ones they see themselves and not some abstract rich people paying.
As for solution, how about funding social security with carbon taxes and getting rid of payroll taxes in the process? Tax bad things like carbon not good things like work. Once people see the immediate uplift in their paychecks it should help the sale
I think your solution will run into the problem that gas taxes have. As people migrate away from ICE, gax taxes aren't sufficient for current road maintenance and have to be subsidized. If you replace payroll taxes with carbon taxes, then as people move away from using carbon (the goal of the tax) you won't have enough revenue to fund what payroll taxes currently do.
You by-passed the problem: people hate carbon taxes, because of the resulting higher electricity prices (during the transition to green). So...try again, while
noting your first sentence, which is correct.
Well, in Canada the Trudeau government introduced carbon taxes, and pays back most of it as a benefit...so, something like this would make it more popular I would think (e.g. cutting taxes, or paying a sum each year...).
Great article Noah! Agree with most of it. Something I think that may have been subtlety implied but needs more attention about "who is the problem" is lobbyists. The lobbyists (of the fossil fuel industry) are the ones who are amplifying the disinformation campaigns, the lobbyists are the ones that are bridging the gap between the fossil fuel industry / players themselves and the politicians who are stonewalling action.
In Bernie Sander's most recent op-ed, which he published on Fox News to reach an audience that doesn't normally hear from him, he said "At a time of record-breaking forest fires, drought, rising sea levels and extreme weather disturbances the fossil fuel industry has, since 2000, spent more than $2 billion on lobbying to protect its special interests and prevent the federal government from making cuts in carbon emissions to protect our planet." Link to op-ed below.
Like most things in American government, the problem is the money in politics. Take that out of the equation and I truly believe that the truth will bubble up to overtake public opinion, which in turn will cause the representatives who are voted in by the public to follow that public opinion. With money in politics, it skews the game and pushes politicians to follow other interests than what the public wants .... something other than the glaring truth.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/sen-bernie-sanders-biden-3-5t-plan-working-families-democratic-unity
I think that lobbyists may actually be influencing politicians but the interesting thing to me is that if a politician is a rational actor it seems like doing the bidding of lobbyists is no longer smart. There is so much individual money in politics (vs. corporate money) that there certainly isn't a fundraising advantage any more. There might be an advantage in post-office job offers but I'm not sure that even is so big any more.
Yet classical economics - postulating the efficiency of self-interest in "invisible hand" markets - IS to blame.
Explanation:
1. Renewables plus storage is still more expensive than coal/gas/oil; if it were not, the fossil industry itself would voluntarily make the transition ....provided profits could be maintained.
2. Compensation for displaced fossil employees - for the enforced closure of their profitable industry - is necessary, to remove opposition to the transition from this quarter. Where's the money coming from?
3. Orthodox economists want carbon pricing, as the mechanism to release private sector investment in renewables, but that will increases prices for consumers. Politicians and the (self-interested) electorate hate this idea.
It's time economic heterodoxy became mainstream: the public sector ought to be able to *fund itself*, rather than being required to tax or borrow from the private sector.
Note: the public sector possesses its own treasury and central bank, because government (the public sector) is required to issue the nation's currency and create a 'clearing union' for private sector banks, aka the reserve bank. Hence government should NOT need to tax or borrow in order to spend, rather the function of taxation (in various forms) should be confined to controlling inflation.
Further note: ANY spending whether private or public has the potential to cause inflation; the nation's spending choices ought to be in the hands of an informed electorate, not solely in the hands of private sector players who are by definition self-interested; only the public sector can and ought to consider community well-being ...and (gasp) *global* well-being, in the case of issues like pandemics and AGW climate change.
With this awareness, public sector investment in renewables COULD flow as quickly as required, indeed as quickly as possible, all the while continually lowering prices for consumers, as more and more of the economy is fueled by sun and wind. We agree ...why hold back the transition to *cheaper* energy? (Some 'opportunity costs' might be involved, but if we are indeed cooking the planet....)
As for CCS: storing CO2 underground is conceptually untidy/unsatisfying; will the stored gas stay in place, how much underground space is required for vast quantities of gas, etc. Storing nuclear waste underground in the form of syn-rock seems more feasible. Workable CCS technology is probably as far away as nuclear fusion technology; we don't have the time to wait for either of them.
To conclude with the issue of "justice": justice requires a balance of public and private sector interests as outlined above. MMT describes the mechanism to effect this balance.
"It's all about (the funding mechanism), stupid".
So - "Any spending whether private or public... ought to be in the hands of an informed electorate." Isn't this the model tried in the Soviet Union?
You misquoted me:
1. ANY spending (public or private.).... has the potential to be inflationary.
2. Spending *choices* (public versus private) ought be in the hands of an informed electorate and voted on - , consistent with the inflation constraint.
Note: The REAL constraint for government - unlike households - is the nation's available resources and productive capacity , not any particular level of debt or deficit.
Some-one needs to teach Manchin fast, or Biden won't have a leg to stand on at Glasgow (nor will he be able to claim "China isn't doing enough".....).
No. The Soviet Union was exclusively a planned economy, without private sector markets, unlike the US....or China, for that matter.
This is just delusional. Mr. Smith frequently claims that technology has made solar and wind energy cheaper than fossil fuels. If this were true, then utility regulators throughout the world would be requiring all new generating capacity to be solar or wind. This is not the case.
Mr. Smith doesn't mention that wind energy requires "hot backup" to pick up load whenever wind drops off. This "hot backup" is almost always gas turbines. Germany has calculated that every 100 MW of on-line wind energy requires 80 MW of spinning reserves to keep the system from collapsing.
Mr. Smith invokes batteries, but doesn't even attempt to assess their viability as large-scale storage. Getting the US through an average night would require something like 55 million MWHr of storage. This would require all the lead, lithium, or nickel production in the world for years to produce enough batteries. By the time the batteries were all built, it would be time to replace them, since they would only last 5-7 years before normal degradation made them incapable of holding a charge. And it would leave no lithium, nickel, or lead for any other uses, and no batteries for the rest of the world.
Mr. Smith claims that green energy would create more new jobs than the jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry. I suppose this is true, but what it really means is that green energy is much more expensive than fossil fuels - rather than paying 100 oil workers to give us a certain amount of energy, we'd pay 200 (or whatever number) of solar workers to produce the same amount of energy. If you look at these two numbers in isolation, you still might think you're ahead on jobs, but the higher costs would have to be paid, and that would mean less money to spend on other things, which would mean jobs lost in other fields.
Who is the real problem? I guess you first have to define what the problem is. If the problem is that no one is working seriously to implement a zero-emissions economy, the problem is physics. If the problem is that no one is listening to the alarmists, then the problem is that the alarmists' predictions of doom keep not coming true.
The most delusional part is the claim that the fossil fuel industry spends its ill-gotten wealth pulling strings to prevent climate action. There is far more money available from Messrs Gates, Musk, and Bezos, pushing ever more government-controlled resources to subsidize unprofitable alternative energy, than the fossil fuel industry can use to block them.
Where to even begin? The idea that regulators are rational actors, not captured by utilities "If this were true, then utility regulators throughout the world would be requiring all new generating capacity to be solar or wind. This is not the case."?
Or perhaps this utterly absurd nonsense "Germany has calculated that every 100 MW of on-line wind energy requires 80 MW of spinning reserves to keep the system from collapsing."?
Or the ever popular idiocy of pretending that batteries are the only storage you'd use "This would require all the lead, lithium, or nickel production in the world for years to produce enough batteries. "?
Or thinking that cost is composed entirely of labour "Mr. Smith claims that green energy would create more new jobs than the jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry. I suppose this is true, but what it really means is that green energy is much more expensive than fossil fuels"?
Point 1: Let's stipulate for discussion that US regulators are entirely captive to the utilities. As matters of policy, Germany and Spain committed to building more and more renewable generation. However, they are retreating from this commitment because of the high cost and low reliability of the renewable generation installed.
Point 2: It is widely recognized that due to wind's unpredictable output, backup generation capacity is required to maintain reliability. I've seen different figures quoted. Here's a report by a E.On, major German electric utility. My old link doesn't work any more, but you can find it through the Wayback machine. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080730030237/http://www.countryguardian.net/eonwindreport2005.pdf) Page 9:
"In 2004 two major German studies investigated the size of contribution that wind farms make towards guaranteed capacity. Both studies separately came to virtually identical conclusions, that wind energy currently contributes to the secure production capacity of the system, by providing 8% of its installed capacity".
I will concede that this is a less favorable claim than the one I made.
Point 3. I discussed batteries because that was what Noah Smith focused on. If you think other storage technologies are better, which ones? As for the use of battery material (lithium in particular), see my reply to Mr. Mukherjee below.
Point 4. Essentially all cost of producing anything is labor. Raw material cost is based on the labor to produce the raw material. Capital cost is based on the labor to produce the capital equipment. Maintenance cost is the labor to perform the maintenance, plus the labor to produce the expendable materials and spare parts used in maintenance.
What cost would you propose as being independent of labor?
1) No they're not. Germany is having some NIMBY problems with wind and transmission but is otherwise committed. I don't know why you'd think Spain has regrets. Their idiotic attempt to exact a windfall tax on renewables because gas prices rose?
2) It's the numbers that are utterly absurd, not the idea that a variable resource needs some kind of firm backup. And note that firm backup does *not* mean spinning reserve.
3) It's not about something else being 'better'. If they can cycle regularly (every day at least), batteries are very good. But they're *comically* bad at seasonal storage. Which is why dishonest detractors use only batteries when calculating storage costs. Hydrogen OTOH is bad when used regularly as it's inefficient, but much better for long duration storage as the actual storage part is quite cheap.
4) There are some things like land rent but that's small and a wash, or even in FF's favour. The big one is profit! FF extraction costs are across a very wide range, and commodities like FFs are priced marginally, so low cost producers make *enormous* profits. Something like 7/8ths of the money you spend buying oil from Saudi Arabia is their profit, for instance. So it should be easy to imagine how replacing that with something else could essentially trade their profits for jobs.
Now that said this *is* mostly politics. Really, we want to destroy jobs by increasing productivity, but that's sadly not a wise thing to say to an economically illiterate public.
If that were all there were to the story, I would agree that this is not really an improvement; that it's an equivalent to taking away profits (from some of the nastiest businesses and governments on Earth, but still) and using them to pay people to dig ditches. However, including the social cost of fossil fuels - as should obviously always be done - more than counteracts this.
The numbers don't line up at all. The average daily energy consumption in the US is around 10 million MWh, not 55. At current battery prices, that's around a trillion dollars. However, prices continue falling, and nobody is asking this money to be spent overnight.
There is a great Reddit thread BTW on lithium requirements by the way that goes into a lot of detail (https://np.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/lijfbq/fear_and_loathing_and_lithium/), and we really don't need that much lithium. 10 million MWh is around 1.5 million tonnes of lithium - we will not run out. Secondly NMC is not the only battery chemistry, LFP is great too that neither needs nickel not cobalt. LFP is less energy dense than NMC, but that doesn't matter for grid storage.
Thanks for checking me. I wanted to keep my overall post reasonable, so I didn't go into a great deal of detail on the battery calculation. I based my estimates on those done by Professor Thomas Murphy of the University of California, San Diego about 10 years ago: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/. He assumed that all current fossil fuel uses would be replaced by renewables (not just electricity). This would involve improved efficiency in many areas, most notably transportation, since electric motors would be more efficient than internal combustion engines. However, it would mean something like an average 2 TW (2 million MW) of energy production continuously, or 50 million MWh per day. He doesn't really address the economic questions, but focuses on physics; I followed this. He assumes we'd need 7 days' storage, or 336 million MWh. He doesn't address the economics of this energy system, but he implicitly assumes we'd only produce "enough" generating capacity to meet needs. If we ignore economics, we could assume we'd massively overbuild generating capacity; I assume we'd need only one day's storage - we'd at least need enough to get through the night.
As far as battery material, using your estimate of material required, 50 million MWh would require 7.5 million tonnes of lithium. Current production is only 82,000 tonnes, (https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-of-lithium/), but we could probably increase production to 100,000 tonnes without much investment. This would mean we'd need 15 years' production to finish the US battery backup. Assuming we don't need any of the lithium for electronics, or electric vehicles, or ceramics, or any of the other current uses. But, the batteries would start to wear out long before we were finished building. So, we'd need to at least double world production to be able to complete the US battery backup and keep up with batteries that wear out. And we'd need to further quadruple production to cover backup needs for Europe, Japan, and the rest of the world. And, we'd probably need to further double production to accommodate growth in energy use in the developing world. So, we'd need to increase world production to something like 1.6 million tonnes per year. At this rate, we'd go through all identified reserves in something like 10 to 15 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves_and_occurrence). I'm not addressing production costs, because change on this scale would dramatically change the economics of the industry.
If we use all available battery technologies to cover backup requirements, we could probably write a scenario where we don't use up the whole world's matter. But, the larger point is that we are a very long way from eliminating fossil fuels. And not because the fossil fuel companies are blocking progress.
"If we ignore economics, we could assume we'd massively overbuild generating capacity;"
You mean, just like how we do now? What do you think peakers are? Peak demand is far higher than minimum demand, so we build huge amounts of capacity that doesn't run most of the time. We effectively have many power plants that we only run in (insert higher demand season), many power plants that we only run in the evening etc. This gets spread around a lot so it just looks like less-than-100% capacity factors, but that's effectively what it is.
No, I mean on a much larger scale than we do now. Current total installed generating capacity in the US is 1.2 million MW (https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-generating-capacity#:~:text=As%20of%20February%202021%2C%20America,than%204%25%20of%20all%20capacity.). Total consumption averages 10 million MWh per day, so average load is 0.44 million MW - we have "overbuild" of nearly 3x. This includes peakers, which were built for high-demand usage, but also older plants that are not economic to operate, but are maintained for peak usage, or just not decommissioned yet.
If we rely on wind and solar, we'd need much more excess capacity. Leaving aside inherent supply issues (wind doesn't always blow, and solar doesn't work at night), we'd also have to cover unexpected variability of supply. If we don't want to build storage to cover a week or month of unexpected low availability, or a winter when the sun is predictably less available, we'd need to build a whole lot more capacity. For instance, New York City has less than a third the incoming energy in December that it has in June (http://www.solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-irradiance.html). You might retort that this doesn't matter because electricity demand is higher in the summer, but if we require heating to come from "clean" sources, I expect that winter heating requirements would be higher than summer air conditioning. Solar panels produce 10-25% of normal output on cloudy days, so we'd need to overbuild by an additional factor 10, or accept power outages on cloudy days.
If we're only concerned with physical limitations, we could "just do it". But, this level of overbuilding would blow up any claims of economic competitiveness made by Noah.
You are using two extremes to try to make the situation look ridiculous - we either build a week of storage, or we massively overbuild renewables. But the reality will be a mixture of many things. Renewable spillage, transmission to balance their variability (and the variability of demand of course), firm resources like nuclear and geothermal and bioenergy, storage including batteries and pumped hydro and chemical storage (probably hydrogen).
What you (and many other detractors) are doing is akin to saying we can't run the grid on only baseload, or on only peakers, they're not flexible enough/too inefficient. Which is of course true, which is why we mix them together so they can cover the others' weaknesses.
So, you're saying there's no need to rely exclusively on renewables. Fine. My post was in response to Noah Smith's post, which said that we are ready to rely exclusively on renewables. You used some terms I've never heard before. What does "renewable spillage" mean. What do you mean by "transmission to balance their variability"?
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough on the overbuilding part, though. If we build only "enough" generation capacity to meet average demand, we'd need to build months' worth of storage. I don't know enough of the details (I expect no one else does, either yet), but I expect relying on renewables without storage would require us to build enough that most generated power was wasted. This might sound like a minor thing, but I'm not so sure. California has actually paid neighboring states to take its surplus solar power (https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/). I don't know why California couldn't just turn off the renewables, but apparently it's not that easy.
That's why one of the reasons a national grid is so important. So that cloudy days in NYS can be managed by solar from Nevada and wind from the East Coast and wind from Montana. Let's say we need 10 times the electricity generation needed, for overbuilding too - that's 12 million MW of installed solar+wind. A week of solar/wind fluctuation can occur over a state, but for a country of US' size it simply doesn't happen on a national scale.
At current prices, both solar and wind cost approximately $1 per watt of nameplate. Thus, at current prices also, we need 12 trillion USD to build 12 million MW of nameplate capacity. You need 3 trillion over that for a national grid. However, two things - solar and wind costs are consistently falling, unlike nuclear or coal or gas. Secondly, solar and wind have far lower operating costs and are almost completely immune to gas and coal price fluctuations.
Also, winter heating requirements should still be lower because of heat pumps.
As I said, we're just spinning fantasy scenarios. I'm not a power industry professional, but I doubt that any power industry professionals know enough to confidently redesign the national power system to reliably deliver power while replacing essentially all generating capacity and reworking the delivery grid. If you can do that, more power to you.
Another way to look at this would be the averaged primary energy consumption for the US is approx 3TW. At 20% capacity factors, and a factor of 2 overbuilding, this would mean 30 trillion dollars of wind+solar investment at current prices. That's a lot, but such a system, if nationally connected would have very little backup needs. Also, a lot of this energy consumption is in transportation itself, where you don't need any backup storage (as the vehicle comes with it's own). And these are all 2020 prices. Given current trends, that number should be lower than 10 trillion before this decade ends.
And most of that energy consumption is wasted as heat. We do not need to nor want to replace it.
True. Per capita energy consumption has remained essentially flat over the years. Secondly, the non electricity power sources (such as oil for transportation and agriculture) has efficiencies that never cross 50%. 3TW is a pretty much upper limit, given both energy consumption and population trends.
Most of our infrastructure does require periodic and pretty consistent upgrades anyway - that's pretty much baked into the whole depreciation values. From oil rigs to chip fabs to pipelines - this is everywhere. But to a huge extent that is why a national grid and overbuilding is so great - you don't need gigantic batteries that are running at full charge-discharge cycles daily.
Solar cells are around 150 watts per square meter. Now take a 20% operating value, so you get at 30 watts per square meter averaged (takes into cloudy days). This runs for 8 hours daily, so your daytime energy consumption (which BTW is more than double the night-time) can and should be entirely run off battery PV without dipping to batteries. Thus around 6 million MWh of the daily should be coming from solar PV, which needs around 12,500 sqmi of land. That's BTW slightly more than double the land used by the oil and gas industry today, and less than the total fossil fuel land use if you add coal. Cost wise, it's around $1.6 trillion dollars.
But, we are not done yet. The idea should be also to set up wind that provides for more than 10 million MWh per day. Let's say that it's 12 million MWh, which at winds' capacity factors come 2 million MW of nameplate capacity. That's again 2 trillion dollars (1 dollar per watt of nameplate capacity).
Basically, at around 4 trillion USD trillion dollars, even at current prices you can easily build nameplate generation of 4 million MW of nameplate capacity, which is 8 times the averaged US electricity consumption.
The third part of this puzzle is a national grid, which Ygliesas has talked about, you want wind power from Montana to reach Florida, and solar from Florida to reach South Dakota. Such a system will almost probably never need more than 2 days of national battery backup. Double the solar and wind installs, and you rarely, if ever need to tap into your batteries - which BTW also prolongs the cycle life.
I don't understand why Tom Murphy of UCSD thinks we need 7 days of battery backup - because if nationally the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine for a whole week - we have way bigger problems on our hands.
OK. We're all talking about fantasy scenarios. My main point was that Noah Smith is wildly delusional to think that we're ready for a large-scale conversion to renewable energy, if not for the evil fossil fuel companies.
Professor Murphy assumed 7 days' backup to guarantee against power interruptions. As he explained, this wouldn't necessarily mean 7 days with no power generated, but could be 2 weeks at half normal output, or a month at 75% normal output.
I respect your calculations, but you need to keep in mind that not all days are average. In fact, not all months are average. To focus on solar, we have an entire season with much lower solar energy available - it's called winter. So, you'd need to dramatically increase your overbuilding - there's no way to build enough storage to get through the winter, even with reduced power input from solar panels.
I think you're unrealistic to think that any renewable-only system could get by without significant storage capacity. And significant would be in the tens of millions of MWh. Which would be daunting on the economic, industrial, and physics levels. I won't go into more detail, because I'd just be arguing my fantasy scenario against yours.
There is already enormous energy storage. We do it for gas because gas wells produce at near 100% all the time, whereas demand is highly irregular (far higher in winter, of course). So we store massive quantities of it.
Guess what we know how to turn electricity into?
Point taken. Oil and coal are also stored. But they wouldn't fit in a zero-carbon energy system, which is what this post addressed.
Powerplant-scale storage would almost certainly be pumped hydro or similar, not a building-sized stack of lithium batteries.
That could be, but Noah specifically mentioned cheaper batteries as a key enabling technology. Pumped storage doesn't face the kind of resource constraint that limits batteries, but it would require a whole lot of real estate. We'd need to pump something like the volume of Lake Michigan up 100 meters every night. You need very specific geography to make a site - a flat area for a lower pond near a flat area for an upper reservoir, with a major vertical distance between them. And construction would be expensive. And you'd need a lot of water nearby.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying we're a long way from implementing on a large scale. It's not just fossil fuel companies blocking the way.
as you know, The all-iron flow batteries could last 20 years, I have my hopes pinned on them
Actually, I don't know a lot about these batteries. Except that they're apparently still not ready for prime time. Mr. Smith's claim is that technology has changed, making zero-emissions energy not only feasible, but more economical. This is patently absurd.
Another point is that a large part of the reason some of the *other* agents have been less helpful than they could be is the fossil fuel industry (FFI) manipulating them. The FFI funded anti-AGW research for many years, creating individuals with interests in minimizing AGW, literature denialists can use to minimize the effects, and (I believe) a general culture that has caused predicted results to tend to undershoot the actual outcome, because researchers think their work needs to be super-defensible against denialist, but not activist, criticism. Likewise the public is less concerned than it should be partly due to aggressive disinfo. And I strongly suspect they fund bad actors amongst the climate activists, not because I have any direct evidence but because it's become common in politics and the cost is below rounding error for what they already spend on disinfo and bogus research.
The right answer is tech to solve this. Full stop.
Doing new laws has so many veto points in a divided society that you can say, fairly safely, relying on a political solution to anything other than an immediate threat is a fools errand.
I don't have to get Joe Manchin's approval to invent a 10x more useful solar panel. I just need to find some clever engineers, give them a goal and some money, make the R&D happen, and figure out a way to deploy the technology that requires as few votes as possible.
What will save the climate is the fact that most of the CO2 comes from sources for which there are more efficient options, right now, in 2021. And as batteries get better, solar gets better, etc - people will adopt those things regardless of the benefit, as they are simply better for the consumer.
Imagine the world where solar is so cheap, battery storage is so plentiful, that you can charge your Tesla for free and never pay for mobility again. That is the world I want.
That is the same world where nuclear power makes electricity too cheap to meter. The one that was just around the corner in 1954. Ref. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
For many, it is easy to dismiss the fact that 90 corporations are responsible for 2/3rds of carbon emissions and who spent the last 30 years spreading disinformation about climate change, the impacts of climate, the cost of doing too much compared to doing too little.
When the same 90 corporations still spend a lot of time deflecting blame back onto the general public when they ask "What have YOU done personally to save the planet?" we get think pieces about how individuals and the fecklessly performative protesting Leftie aren't doing enough of the serious work to restructure a culture built upon endless extraction and consumption in a decade's time.
I'm not as optimistic as Noah that that billionaires like Musk are going to do much to save the planet when the very same cohort profits mightly from the very economic model of extraction and consumption that needs to change. Insisting the Ubermensch of Tech will save us from ourselves is wishful thinking.
Green technology can bridge the gap as we increase nuclear energy and if you want to ease the economic transition of O&G workers into green infrastructure, they could easily start by retrofitting the tens of thousands of gas filling stations into charging stations and upgrading utility infrastructure. Decarbonizing our energy systems can be done and decarbonizing our transportation systems (including cars) is already happening. But we need a big political push for that to happen. And with the GOP standing athwart the path of progress, we're looking at another decade of bullshit resistance, status quo-ism, and passing bills that label pipeline protestors as domestic terrorists.
I guess what I don't understand is if investment in these technologies is all upside with no tradeoffs, then why aren't private companies rushing in to invest in them?
Some companies are. I am the senior member of the tech support team for Tesla Industrial Storage.
We'd probably be seeing this move even faster except that the competition -- the incumbent fossil fuel companies -- are still subsidized beyond the dreams of Croesus. You think subsidies for EVs or renewables are high, hah, you ain't seen nothin'. Go take a look at the aggregate of oil and gas subsidies.
Some of it is also about regulation. Figuring out exactly how storage is going to integrate into the grid is complicated. That's partly because of real technical challenges. But a LOT of it is dumb regulation that incentivizes the transmission operators and retail utilities to resist the shift toward distributed resources, even though a grid full of distributed generation and storage will in the long run be cheaper than a grid that follows business-as-usual.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-month-everything-in
https://www.volts.wtf/p/rooftop-solar-and-home-batteries
Ideally every household should have something like PowerWall, or we should have a Megapack at every neighborhood substation.
Please - explain the "aggregate of oil and gas subsidies". What is the form, and what is the magnitude?
Most of the claims I've seen for fossil fuel subsidies are things like "LIFO cost accounting", and "not taxing the externalities". Do you have anything more substantive?
I mean, it's not my core area of expertise, I'm trusting what I've heard from folks who _are_ experts on the financial side of the industry and on the politics. Your google-fu may be as good as mine, but here're some examples...
Brookings thinks that, if you define subsidies broadly (not just production credits but the value of subsidized loans, and various things governments do to subsidize the consumption end), the aggregate expenditure comes to something like _half a trillion dollars a year_: https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-global-fossil-fuel-subsidies-how-the-united-states-can-restart-international-cooperation/
To quote the report that Brookings is endorsing, "G20 governments provided $584 billion1 annually (2017–2019 average) via direct budgetary transfers and tax expenditure, price support, public finance, and SOE investment for the production and consumption of fossil fuels at home and abroad."
David Roberts broke down the US' expenditures in more detail in Vox: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/6/16428458/us-energy-coal-oil-subsidies
The TL,DR from that article is: In terms of permanent tax expenditures, fossil fuels beat renewables by a 7-1 margin. The primary federal tax supports for renewable energy — the investment and production tax credits, respectively — are not permanent. They are set to phase out over the next five years, and are politically vulnerable in the meantime. But if you include them, Stephen Kretzmann of OCI confirmed for me over email, permanent fossil tax breaks still win, at $7.4 billion to $5.6 billion [per year].
(And again, that $7.4B is _only_ the direct production credits.)
No matter how you slice it, we are spending _more_ money to subsidize fossil energy than we are spending to subsidize renewables. Which is plainly insane. You want to say the government shouldn't pick winners and losers, fine, let's see how the coal, oil, and gas industries hold up without Uncle Sam doing so much for them.
You're comparing apples and ping pong balls. The Brookings study identifies production and consumption subsidies to come up with its $500B figure. One third of this is subsidies to consumption by just 5 countries: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and India. I don't support such subsidies, but they are hardly US policy.
For US policy, Brookings refers to a report from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute that claimed $20B of US production subsidies. Most of this ($12.9B) allegedly comes from tax treatment of intangible drilling costs for oil and gas. I'm not a tax expert, but we're not talking about phony, or imaginary, or bogus costs here. In most industries, a company's costs of production are deductible as expenses. An exception is improvements to real estate (for instance, improving a building, or building a road) - these are considered as increasing the value of the land, and go into the cost basis for the land, which would decrease reported gains when the land is sold. Congress has decided that, for instance, building a road to allow oil drilling, is not really an investment, but an expense. I don't see the outrage here - I think the Environmental and Energy Study Institute was working pretty hard to find their scandal.
They descended into absurdity by claiming LIFO cost accounting and Master Limited Partnerships as subsidies - these are simply accounting treatments that are allowed by the law for any company to use. They may or may not be appropriate - I'm not familiar with the arguments either way, but they're hardly fossil fuel subsidies.
I don't really have time to go through the Vox article - I'll just say that I have yet to read any item on Vox that provided useful information or analysis.
OK - I had a bit more time than I thought. The Vox article refers to a paper by an organization calling itself Oil Change International. It trots out the familiar (at least, familiar to me) list of "subsidies" - intangible drilling costs, Master Limited Partnerships, LIFO accounting. Just because some tax treatment could be less favorable than law allows doesn't mean that fossil fuels are subsidized.
It also claims that royalties from oil, gas and coal production are too low. I'm not an expert on such things - perhaps there's reason to abrogate existing leases and force changes. Again, though, this hardly counts as subsidy for fossil fuels.
From an accounting point of view, foregoing taxes or royalties only from certain companies is exactly the same as applying the normal tax rate and auction procedures but then giving it back subsidies to certain companies. It might not feel like it, but again, the earth feels flat, does not mean it is.
Exactly one of the provisions I mentioned applies exclusively to the oil industry. If you want to call that a subsidy, feel free. My point was that the vast majority of the claimed "subsidies" are not unique to the oil industry. "Oil industry subsidies" is a dishonest argument made by people who want to distract attention from the very real, very large subsidies for "green technology", and from the fact that most of these technologies would be viable only for specific niche applications without the subsidies.
I answer this, in my comment above.
Private companies are rushing in, whenever subsidies are large enough, for instance home rooftop solar power. These are the only conditions in which there is all upside. Except for taxpayers - they have all the downsid.
Is the problem the Carbon in Coal,or the burps and farts, of the 300 million bovine of India ?
Climate Change due to carbon and methane is irreversible,because the Alt-options,have a huge cost,which humans cannot and will not bear.
Let us Say that humans eat synthetic meat and milk - and it comes free ! That will ruin the agri-economics,as plant wastes and residues and oil cakes will have no use - and so,agri prices will have to rise 2-3 times - and no one will pay for that ! AND THEN ALL THAT AGRI WASTE WILL HAVE TO BE BURNT !
The solution is to eat synthetic meat and gene modified agri crops - which creates less waste,lesser need for water and fertilisers,lesser time, lesser sunlight and photosynthesis, higher yield,and which is cropped throughout the year.That is another quantum leap.
But that is what is happening.Uncle Bill is into Synthetic meat and Gene modified agri - and if you cut down the population,and the hunan life span - then you have a solution
Humans will NOT pay for Climate Change.
And that is Y,substituting the food inputs of cattle,will not work - as the existing agri economics,will be blown up,and agri prices will have to triple.
The OTHER solution is to breed a new DNA of livestock - which has much higher yield,lower cost of maintenance,no impact of disease,higher potency,engineered to a new diet and more beef
TRUTH IS THAT INDIANS HAVE A COSMIC BOND WITH DUNG !
Hindoos eat Cow Dung,Cock Dung, Bird Dung . Goat Dung ,Cow Piss and Goat Piss and Elephant Piss ! dindooohindoo
Elephant Urine
Elephant urine “gajamutra” is used as an alkaline decoction preparation for a supposed cure to malignant sores. [ Ci.9.16 ] [ Ray 131 ]
Goat Dung and Urine
Goat droppings “ajashakrt” are prescribed as an accessory to surgical cauterization and is used for cauterizing diseased skin.
Cock Dung and other Birds’ Droppings
The dung of a specially fed cock “kukkutapurisha” is prescribed as an ingredient for a plaster used to cure malignant skin diseases [ Ci.9.15 ] [ Ray 132 ] Vulture droppings “grdhrapurisha” is an ingredient of a plaster fro bursting of non-boils [ Su.37.9 ] [ Ray 132 ].
Mr Haq said that a Minister said that the solution to jobs in India - is to gift a cow to Indians who have no jobs ! The man is right ! At least then,Indians can gp to the GCC to clean camel dung - like this brilliant Goan ! dindooohindoo
http://www.navhindtimes.in/goan-youth-trapped-in-saudi-desert-village-as-a-camel-herder/
AND THAT IS ALSO WHAT IS SAID BY A GOAN MINISTER PRATAP RANE - A GOAN ! HE SAID THAT GOANS EXCEL IN TOILET CLEANING,IN UK AND EU ! THAT IS DUE TO THE TRAINING IN COW FARMING AND COW SHEDS AND COW DUNG,AND COW URINE !
https://www.indiatvnews.com/politics/national-pratapsingh-rane-controversial-remark-goans-abroad-do-toilet-cleaning-jobs-congress-rahul-gandhi-456890
India CANNOT and WILL NOT make any carbon commitment !
There are 300 million cows in Hindoosthan ! 1 cow eats and excretes 15-20 times - w.r.t an Indian, every day.In addition,the live stock pullulates at a much higher rate.Besides,the daily water needs of a cow,is 100 times that of an Indian !
So the population of Hindoosthan is 1.2 billion humans,and 5 billion quasi Hindoos = approx 7 billion = close to the world HUMAN population !
THAT IS THE PROBLEM !
300 MILLION COWS TO 1.2 BILLION HUMANS,IS 1:4
AS TIME PASSES,THE INDIANS WILL BE AT 2:4 (vs the cows) ,AS THE NEED FOR MEAT AND MILK,WILL RISE EXPONENTIALLY - AND CANNOT BE IMPORTED !
THAT IS THE DIS-ASS-TER ZONE ! dindooohindoo
AND SO,WE HAVE TO ASK THE BASIC QUESTION - WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF HUMANS FARTING IN GLASGOW ?
What people miss is the progression of yield and costs,in the Re sector.
In the last 15 years,year by year,what has been the yield increase in energy generation in each source ? Is the incremental growth slowing or stagnating ?
Let us look at the BOM (Bill of Material) of the Components of each RE source.The Component costs might have declined - but that is not relevant.What is relevant is the purchase rates of the MATERIALS USED IN THOSE COMPONENTS.It is the PURCHASE PRICE PER KG OF THAT MATERIAL - AND NOT THE PURCHASE COST OF THAT MATERIAL IN THAT COMPONENT
You will find that the PURCHASE PRICE PER KG OF THAT MATERIAL is INCREASING.
THAT IS BAD NEWS
WHEN RE IS SCALED UP SHARPLY - THESE RAW MATERIALS WILL EXPLODE OR BE NOT AVAILABLE.
EVEN THE DECLINE IN THE RAW MATERIAL COSTS IN THE COMPONENTS HAS STAGNATED (INSPITE OF MATERIAL SUBSTITUTION.NANOTECH.AI AND VALUE ENGINEERING ETC.).THIS ALSO MEANS THAT THE COSTS OF THE MATERIALS WILL EXPLODE IF THE RE IS SCALED UP !
THE WORLD HAS NO PLAN !
CAPITALISM HAS ENSURED THAT TECH AND COMMERCIAL EFFICIENCES IN RE TECH - ARE AT THE MERCY OF THE MARKET - WHICH IS AT THE MERCY OF BANKS. Y WILL BANKS ALLOW THE SUCCESS OF RE POWER,IF IT IT BLOW UP CONVENTIONAL BUSINESSES - TO WHICH BANKS HAVE TRILLIONS OF USD OF EXPOSURE ?
NATO and the West,know that there is no solution and that RE is a diversion.The West has to be free of OPEC and PRC.E-Vehicles,are a mortal threat,to the Western Economies.So the West is comfortable with OPEC and GCC.
The Only Solution is Population reduction,and Climate Change is an EXCUSE,to reduce the population - but in that process,the players will try all the options (knowing that they will fail - as they fund the options !),and ultimately convince the masses,to bite the poison pill
But then people ask - Y do the players fund all the alt-options, knowing that it will fail ?
It simple - the players want to be SURE,that all the options will fail - and so,they fund each leg of it - so that they have the results of all the research,and intelligence on the options - to navogate the minds of the hapless populace. dindooohindoo
Shifting to E-Vehicles , with the E - from Renewables, places the security of the US, in the hands of the PRC.With OPEC, the USA has no risk,as the US controls all the key players of the OPEC, and all the nations of the GCC.
Will the US accept that ?
E-Vehicles and charging might be scaling up rapidly,BUT WHAT IS THE PROGRESSION ON THE MATERIAL SUBSTITUTION OF RARE EARTHS AND OTHER MATERIALS SUPPLIED FROM PRC ?
Reduction in Oil prices only helps PRC !
Is the US pushing E-Vehicles - only because it allows it to import dual use rare earths and materials for use in military and space applications ?
What is the Plan B of the US for the rare earths ? Moon or Mars ? dindooohindoo
Yeah, I agree that the fossil fuels industry is a major part hindering the transition to green energy... but, there still is the fact that, in the short-term, renewable energy (with a few exceptions, such as hydro power and maybe geothermal energy), will be more expensive than fossil fuels ... not long-term of course, but most people don't think long-term...
I mean, just look at countries that use a lot of (non-hydro) renewable energy, like Germany or Denmark. They have among the highest energy prices in the world...of course, countries like Canada or Norway, Sweden etc. with lots of hydro power have much lower energy prices...so as long as Germany and Denmark can be used as negative examples to opponents of renewable energy, then a transition will be slower... just look at the energy crisis in Europe this autumn...
And I think that voters should definitely be blamed, because, as I wrote above, they think short-term, and that means renewable energy prices look more expensive than they really are... and, at least in the US, Canada and Australia, climate change and what to do about it has become a culture war issue...so it will be harder to change people's opinions on it, based on their "tribal affiliation"... similar to how the greens in Germany are set on opposing nuclear power no matter the benefits...
Are you not suspect of the American Petroleum Institute's job numbers ... !?
Nothing like 2 weeks span of radiation poison. First time in years I have lost some much hair. Chunks are coming out of my head. Tummy aches from stress and hissing in my ears. Weight gain even though I hardly eat or drink the water here anymore. Clearly digestion issues play a key roll in the bigger picture. Identity theft and stolen checks by none other then babysitting house mate. Seasons Only 10 months without a job and every inch breathing down my neck. Tactics displayed are the scariest most desperate I've ever seen. Never know who's knocking at the door , could be a gun or someone to walk thru my house unexpected since its being shown to public. At least we know that the awful echo and hollow sounds do actually come from a real well. Turns out I was correct and the house sits on a well. Too bad none disclosures are apparent. Wouldn't matter anyways , no one listens or helps or even comes around ever. You wouldn't guess I were even a real person or a wife of someone. Of course I don't do any banking or have personal accounts b.c I know how to manage money. I did receive a letter from the state unemployment saying they paid an overage on my unemployment over a years worth of checks. Oddly enough I never applied or received one single payment in my life from said government and or state offices. I figured I know who cashed in on that past years spoils. Still here sure I am and tattoo the one who holds a leash round my neck, still here . I wouldn't want to ruin the story for the audience and alert anyone that out look not so good. I believe your sun and moon will die by strife and choice. Tried to do that much, only they shocked
me back to life over and over and over again. No rest In peace for me , I am . the wicked suffer and greater then ever known to a human in history. Bringing the dead back to life and for torch. Please make positive I'm totally dead before you wish my way ended. There's a sun shining but its not me. 11 hour 24 hour days now and have been for each new year . rounded the 3rd year in hell. 4th martial anniversary. Reruns aired. Who am I really? I am not a cloned robot or a SIM twin. She's a real alive women. Her name printed on my hand , take a closer look. Can you believe God sent his messenger to save the universe the 4th coming of Christ and not one person knew how to save a life. Climate change in your dreams maybe, I think it's a sign or may be a fire signal. HEAVEN CALLED SHE SAID ITS DEAD. THERE IS NO HEAVEN OR SAVIOR FOR YALL . ps, inner ramblings diary. 2016. Well dear random House 2021 never wrote a word sure did read what you said and you know who needs to make it up if you have too. How is that reflection looking back at you? I won't ask how do you sleep at night, I can tell you don't sleep , or have actual brains, bones. Steel cage isn't a steel trap, it's cranium that surrounds twitch supporting the brain steady equally stable. That's why we don't smash babies on the head or shake them about, it kills and causes brain damage. Thankfully nanny cams are about in teddy bears ECT. I still suffer from the concussion, I don't receive a dime from insurance though.
Don't worry I will not pursue an eye for an eye nor a tooth for a tooth. Gizmo. Congratulations on your hard work. You won the worst faux plastic pop cycle sicko a goat couldn't quit of gandered, tic tac toe , Larry curly moe, the ring finger queen.
If you don't know what this means clearly it's not for you to read move on. Ty. Love ur bestie. Slip Knott nurses or tuna in the sea? Chicken shit? I like ham okay but my favorite is turkey. F.U. from us both love THE brushers family.