Realism vs Doomerism

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

I recently read an interesting post by climate scientist Hannah Ritchie titled Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change. She doesn’t use the term, but in it Ritchie scolds the “doomers” out there who she feels are deceiving the youth and actually hurting their own cause. Overall, I think I agree with her message. She cites a few extreme examples of people really exaggerating the likely outcomes, at least from a scientific view. She makes a number of excellent points about the dangers of exaggeration, and about the problem of doomsaying. She acknowledges that that things aren’t happening fast enough, and she empathizes with people who feel hopeless.

Her viewpoint is one of a scientist, and I certainly won’t question her understanding of climate science. That being said, as with most scientists, she really swings and misses on the social and political implications of the climate crisis. Granted, that isn’t the primary focus of the piece so it would be unfair to read too much into it. Perhaps she’s an astute political observer and it just doesn’t come across. My point is not to criticize what she wrote, just the opposite. The article is thoughtful, information, and definitely worth a read. It got me thinking about my own outlook and the tone that I set on this page.

As someone whose knowledge and interest are more firmly in the political rather than scientific realm, I know I lean closer to the “doomer” point of view. I often feel a bit despondent at our chances of success. One of my main concerns is the potential for climate change to destabilize political regimes across the world. Historically, in times of crisis, people have frequently turned to authoritarian regimes, and we’re already seeing the emergence of authoritarian tendencies among right-wing political parties, including here in the United States. Combine climate disasters with the specific brand of end times Christianity that is extremely popular in this country, and we may be in serious trouble.

Not only would political instability lead to abuse and possibly warfare, it would also hamper our ability to solve climate change. Large, powerful, and wealthy fossil fuel companies would be more than happy to prop up strongmen as long as the profits keep flowing. This isn’t conjecture, it’s history, and it’s still going on.

Ritchie’s main point is spot on. We don’t need to exaggerate the dangers of climate change. They are substantial, and we are definitely not moving fast enough. Time is running out to hit the 1.5o C target. In fact, as Ritchie says, I think the probability of hitting that target is essentially zero. In all likelihood we’ve already missed that window. We’re currently on pace to exhaust that carbon budget in 11 years.

That means we should be focusing on 2o C. We need to be realistic about what will happen as the planet warms. This means many island nations may disappear. It means millions of refugees. It means heat waves, hurricanes, droughts and floods. It means crop shortages, diseases, and instability.

However, it does not mean game over. Civilization isn’t simply going to collapse when we get to 1.51o C. That being said, let’s not pretend civilization is guaranteed to last either. By all metrics, we endanger of societal collapse sometime this century. The climate crisis is a contributing factor, but it’s hardly the only one.

Predictions of civilizational collapse have been wrong before. But they were wrong because people did something about it. No one is going to save us from ourselves. The road ahead is long and treacherous, but there is still a road ahead. We aren’t doomed (yet), but we also aren’t out of the woods.

Half a Trillion for the Climate

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Yesterday, President Biden announced the new “framework” for his Build Back Better agenda. As we know, his agenda is split into two big bills, one is a so-called ‘bipartisan infrastructure bill’, which focuses on traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges, pipes, transit, and rail projects. This bill totals $1 trillion in spending and when it passed the Senate back in August, it had 19 Republican votes. This was a shockingly high number of GOP votes. The bill, also known as BIP, is still sitting in the House, where progressives have used it for leverage to pass the partisan bill (which I’m going to call BBB from now on).

BBB started off at $6 trillion when it was proposed by Bernie Sanders. This was reduced to $3.5 trillion when it was introduced in the House, and now thanks to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, it’s been lowered to $1.75 trillion. On the surface that may look like a huge sacrifice, but this is how things always go. We were never going to pass the Bernie Sanders plan, even if the Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate and 350 in the House, they’d never do something that big. $3.5 trillion, however, has the backing of 48 Democrats in the Senate. In order to get to $1.75T, a number of priorities like paid family leave have evidently been cut completely, while other programs have been shortened or reduced in scale.

That being said, let’s focus on the climate provisions. In total, the BBB has $555 billion for climate provisions, mostly in the form of tax incentives. These incentives are for clean energy like wind, solar, and energy storage, along with incentives to decarbonize industrial sectors like concrete, aluminum, and steel. There are credits for electric vehicles, as well as improving energy efficiency in buildings, and grants for developing new technology.

This framework was specifically designed to win the support of Senator Joe Manchin, who has said publicly that he supports “innovation, not elimination (of fossil fuels)”. Obviously, we aren’t going to innovate our way out of this mess, we need to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuels from every sector of the economy, but as long as Manchin is the deciding vote, we simply aren’t going to get that through Congress. The president has to work with what he has, and he’s come out swinging for climate action.

Combined with the energy aspects of the BIP, this would be a big down payment on climate action. It certainly is not sufficient to get us where we need to be, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.

One really important question is whether or not the tax credits are refundable. This is a huge question for equity and equality.

You see, currently tax credits for solar and EVs are not refundable. That means that in order to get the full value of the tax credit, you have to have enough federal “tax liability”. That sounds a little complicated, but it really isn’t.

Let’s look at an example. If you buy a solar system for your home that costs $20,000, you can take the federal tax credit at 26%. .26 x 20,000 = $5,200. However, you don’t get that money from the government, that’s a reduction in the amount of taxes you need to pay. So, if you owe the government at least $5,200 in taxes, you can take the full tax credit. If, however, you only owe $2,000, you can take $2,000 this year and then up to $3,200 next year, as long as you owe that much. Considering that roughly half the US population doesn’t even pay federal taxes, this means that the main solar incentive is unusable for a very large % of the population. Of course, people who don’t pay federal taxes are also less likely to own property, so they can’t take the tax credit anyway since they can’t install a PV system. This is an entirely separate, but equally important issue for a different post.

The bottom line is, under the current system, if you own your home and you pay little to no federal taxes, it’s more expensive for you to buy solar panels that it is for someone with a large tax bill. This means that solar and EVs are largely limited to upper income households. By making the tax credits refundable, we can help alleviate this inequality.

With a refundable tax credit, you always get the full value of the credit. If you owe enough in taxes, you can take the credit the normal way, but if you don’t owe enough in taxes, you simply get the credit as a cash refund. This means that the new tax credits will be accessible to millions of new people, and greatly increase the number of moderate to low income households who can affordably buy solar panels and electric vehicles.

The EV credits are worth $12,500. For economy vehicles, this could make the price of the EV version pretty close to that of the standard version. For example, the Hyundai Kona starts at $21,150 while the EV version lists at $34,000. The Mazda CX 30 starts at $22,500 while the new electric Mazda MX 30 starts at $34,645. The standard Kira Niro starts at $24,690 while the EV version is at $39,990. This is essential if we want EVs to become the norm for most buyers. Most of us aren’t luxury car drivers and we never will be.

Even if this bill passes, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done. The good news is, we know what we need to do, and this massive investment by the federal government would really accelerate things. I won’t celebrate until we’re over the finish line, but I will say that I’m very pleased with the framework that the president has given us. I was very concerned that climate would get cut significantly, but so far the total amount of spending has only been trimmed slightly, even if the programs have been changed.

Tax incentives for popular, high growth sectors seem like they’d be pretty popular, but it remains to be seen if any Republicans will put common sense over partisanship. I’m skeptical, but I’ve been wrong before.

Here Come the Reports

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

In the lead up to COP26, a number of organizations are releasing climate reports. From places as disparate as the Lancet (a leading medical journal), the Pentagon, and the UN, these reports are tackling the climate problem from various angles. In the coming week, I expect we’ll see a few more released, along with an increase in the typically modest coverage of climate in the media.

Not surprisingly, these reports are bleak. One study showed that the promised “green” recovery from Covid19 was really a boon to fossil fuel production. Another indicated that most fossil fuel-producing countries plan to increase their production in the next decade. The Lancet called climate “the defining narrative of human health”.

These reports are just the climax on a year of very dire and increasingly desperate reports outlining the crisis. In August, the UN Secretary called climate change a “code red for humanity“, and people have started adopting that terminology in subsequent coverage.

Unfortunately, all of these warnings have lead to almost zero action. President Biden’s climate plan is being stifled by one obstinate senator. An energy crisis grips much of the world, and the climate disasters keep coming. These reports only confirm what we already know: things are bad.

It would be very easy for someone like me (and maybe someone like you) to get lost in these reports. We must fight the urge to give up. No matter what happens, no matter how bad things get, we can still try to move forward. Any climate mitigation and adaptation is going to help in the long run, even if we miss all of our targets.

COP26 will be full of a lot of pretty talk, and we may even get a few big commitments, but commitments are meaningless without real action. Under the current level of commitments, we would still warm 2.7o C by the end of the century. And we aren’t even on pace to hit those commitments.

I’ve been feeling rather defeated recently. Joe Manchin’s greed and/or stupidity is just too much to handle. The arguments against climate action are silly, and even though I try to give him the benefit of the doubt, it’s getting harder and harder. I guess it isn’t surprising that a guy whose personal fortune is heavily invested in fossil fuels would stand tall for them.

That’s all for now. Be safe and have a great weekend.

COP26 Primer

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

We are about 2 weeks from the beginning of the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) to be held in Glasgow. This is the most important climate conference of the year, it’s been held annually (except for last year) since 1995. This year’s COP is the most important COP since 2015 and represents a rare opportunity to get us on the right path towards a carbon neutral economy.

However, the COP is riddled with potential pitfalls. The system itself has been around for 27 years and done very little to slow down our increase in Greenhouse Gasses (GHG). In fact, carbon emissions have risen sharply since 1995, driven largely by an increase in coal production in China, India, and other “emerging” markets. Meanwhile, most developed countries, especially the United States, have done little reduce their emissions. There has never been a meaningful piece of climate legislation passed by the US Congress.

The high water mark of the COP system came in 2015 at COP21 in Paris. You may have heard of the “Paris Agreement”, well this was a product of COP21. This agreement was the largest and most comprehensive global agreement on climate change in human history. It set a goal of keeping warming under 2o C with a reach goal of 1.5o C.

There are almost zero countries on pace to meet their targets, which require the world to be carbon neutral by 2050 (or more accurately, to be carbon neutral before we burn up all of our remaining carbon budget). At the current pace, we will pass the 2o tipping point by 2030.

As I’ve said before, this conference may be our “last, best chance” to start moving in the right direction. There are a confluence of factors, the looming US elections, the rapidly-approaching deadlines, and the time required to decarbonize that make this a key inflection point.

The thing is, this is not the first “last, best chance” we’ve had. 2015 was a last best chance. There were probably others. However, we may not get another chance to keep warming under 2o. Unfortunately, things aren’t looking very good. The UK government, which is hosting the conference, has already moved the goal posts. President Biden’s big bills (both of which have climate provisions) appear to be floundering in Congress. President Xi Jinping of China just announced he won’t even be attending the conference.

There is still time to turn things around. If the Democrats can pass their bills with the climate provisions mostly in tact, then it will change the tone of the conference dramatically. If President Xi is not present, it opens the door for President Biden to take center stage. However, without a big win at home, it’s doubtful he’ll have much influence.

I expect the next few weeks will see an increase in the typically modest coverage of climate change. Only time will tell what happens at COP26. In the end, agreements and commitments mean nothing without implementation. As they say, talk is cheap.

I’ll follow the COP26 negotiations as closely as I can. We still have the two big bills working through Congress, and even if we get everything we want, we’ll need to turn our attention to the states, where more action is needed.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Why I’m not hitting the panic button

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

This week was the deadline that a group of “moderate” Democrats pushed on Speaker Pelosi to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Package (BIP). This group of relative unknowns felt like they’d walked away with some great victory. Well, the deadline has come and gone and it looks like we won’t be seeing a vote for some time now. I doubt many people are surprised, the deadline was silly and artificial and I think Pelosi largely agreed to it to help her rebellious members save face after making an embarrassment of themselves. It doesn’t look like any of them are speaking up about it, which is smart. They tried to force her hand and she literally laughed in their faces.

The House Progressive Caucus has said since the beginning that its 94 members wouldn’t vote on the BIP unless it was in conjunction with the $3.5T partisan “reconciliation package”. They’ve been consistent about this and Pelosi understood that the BIP was headed for a major defeat (House Republicans aren’t going to vote for it, which makes the “bipartisan” label kind of ridiculous).

Rather than panicking, I think the HPC did the right thing here. I think there are a lot of moderates in both houses who would have voted for the BIP and then bailed on the partisan bill. Many moderates simply aren’t committed to the kind of investments we need to combat the climate crisis, and the only way to get their votes is by using whatever leverage we have.

The September 27 deadline was always unrealistic. President Biden is still negotiating with holdouts Sinema and Manchin in the Senate, and we still have time. Neither senator has been particularly impressive, both seem to lack basic knowledge about the plan, and neither has a salient objection to what the president wants to do. Biden is hardly a progressive champion, and the $3.5T already represents $2.5T in concessions by progressives. It’s possible that these two could tank the president’s whole agenda by sheer intransigence, but I think that’s unlikely.

Manchin, who loves having his name in the papers, is known for his theatrics. He will probably make a big show of things, extract some minor concessions and then vote for the bill. Sinema is more of a wild card because she’s so new, and has previously been pretty absent from her job. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would hold out against the entirety of her own party, including the president, so I think she’ll get in line at some point.

Pelosi and Biden have been around a long time. They’re both shrewd operators and they are probably the most qualified to get this thing done. If they can’t do it, then I doubt anyone else can either. No matter what happens, we will still have a herculean task ahead of us.

Rather than panicking, we need to keep the pressure on. A failure here would be near catastrophic, but the game isn’t over just yet.

Book Review – Breaking Boundaries

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It probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that I’m a huge fan of Sir David Attenborough. I’ve watched every documentary I could find that he’s involved with. From groundbreaking work like Planet Earth and Blue Planet to more recent Netflix collaborations like David Attenborough a Life on Our Planet and Our Planet I feel like he has been a constant companion in my home, and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.

So of course I was excited to watch Breaking Boundaries which debuted in 2021. I was fascinated by the message he had to give, and so I jumped at the chance to read the book that accompanied this film. Breaking Boundaries: The Science of our Planet was written by Johan Rockstrom and Own Gaffney, two scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. It expands on a paper they originally published in 2009.

The central argument of the book is that our civilization is safe guarded by 9 planetary boundaries: climate, ozone, biosphere, novel entities (plastics and other trash), aerosols, ocean acidification, biochemical flows (nutrient pollution), freshwater, and land system change (habitat destruction). The authors use expensive research to support the idea that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. They argue that the Holocene Epoch, which started approximately 11,000 years ago, ended in the 1950s and our current epoch began. The evidence they present is damning and convincing. They use the 9 planetary boundaries to illustrate how humanity’s impact has exploded in the past 70 years and that we are now the primary force of change on the planet.

What’s essential to understand is that each of these systems has an outer boundary of what is desirable for human habitation. For some, such as novel entities, we ideally wouldn’t have any. But, for most of them, there is an acceptable amount of degradation we can commit while maintaining the planet’s livability for human civilization. Of the 9 categories, and two subcategories, we are into the danger zone for at least two of them, biochemical flows and biosphere integrity. For the moment, climate and land system change remain in the “caution” zone, though both are steadily approaching the danger zone.


Courtesy of https://www.stockholmresilience.org/

Of the nine boundaries, only ozone depletion is moving in the right direction. That’s because it was the first of the problems that global policymakers took seriously when they passed the Montreal Protocol in 1987. In about 30 years, the ozone layer should be completely restored.

Once these systems are moving the wrong direction, it takes a long time to turn them around, and even longer to repair the damage. Breaking Boundaries puts a lot of emphasis on feedback loops and tipping points. To understand why this is critical, let’s do a quick dive into each of these concepts. (If you know what the are already, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs).

Feedback loop: This is a system that is self-reinforcing. Sometimes called a vicious or virtuous cycle, it is a key concept in systems thinking. We’ve all experienced this in some way or another and it’s pretty simple to understand. If you’re stressed out, it’s hard to sleep, and if you’re sleep deprived, it stresses you out even further. The longer the cycle continues, the more stressed and sleep deprived you become. One reinforces the other until something breaks the system (either you get help or have a nervous breakdown).

Tipping point: This is a point at which a process suddenly accelerates and becomes much more difficult or even impossible to reverse. Often there is a lot of time and energy put into a process with little results, until something tips and then things accelerate. Literally pushing a boulder up a hill until you reach the top and then letting it roll down the other side is an actual tipping point. Once it starts rolling, you have little chance of stopping it before it smashes into something.

Climate change is greatly affected by both tipping points and feedback loops. Here are just a few examples.

The Greenland Ice Sheet was formed over thousands of years, mostly during the last Ice Age, when global average temperatures were much lower. As the planet warms, the ice sheet melts. The ice sheet is about 2 miles thick, and the ice at the top thaws and refreezes each year. However, as the ice sheet thaws, it does not completely refreeze. Some of the ice is permanently lost. As the ice sheet gets shorter, it enters warmer air (since higher altitudes are colder). The shorter the ice sheet gets, the more it melts, and the more it melts, the shorter it gets. Eventually, we hit a point where the ice loss is irreversible and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, only to slow it down. If the ice sheet melted completely, it would raise global sea levels by about 6 feet. It’s possible that we have already passed this tipping point and the only question is how fast it melts.

Albedo is an effect in which light colors reflect sunlight and dark colors absorb it. We’ve all experienced this. When I was a kid we went to a public pool. Like many kids, I couldn’t be bothered with shoes at the pool, so I just went barefooted. In the parking lot there was blacktop and white lines marking the parking spaces. I would walk across the white lines and sprint across the blacktop, since it was scalding hot. I’m sure we’ve all done things like this. This process is hugely important for thermal regulation of our planet. In the northern latitudes, there is perpetual snow and ice. That snow is obviously light colored, and it reflects heat back into space. As the snow melts, it reveals darker colored ground beneath it. Rather than reflecting heat, these darker surfaces absorb the heat, causing the planet to heat more. This increased heating then accelerates the melting of ice, which accelerates the loss of albedo. As with the Greenland Ice Sheet, we may already have passed this tipping point, as more of the Arctic becomes ice free during the summer.

Frozen in the world’s permafrost is a massive amount of methane. Methane, while shorter lived in the atmosphere, is much more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. As this permafrost melts, it releases this methane, which then traps more heat, thus melting more permafrost. The melting of permafrost will continue long after our economy stops emitting greenhouse gases, the planet is simply too warm to hold onto it. Thus, we’ve likely passed the tipping point for permafrost melting.

Each of these examples illustrates that getting to a carbon neutral economy is really the second step of a long process (the first is capping our annual emissions and then reducing them year over year). We will then need to become carbon negative (which means drawing more carbon out of the atmosphere than we emit), and we will need to restore ecosystems around the world (some, like coral reefs, we may need to bring back from extinction), we’ll also need to adapt our civilization to a new reality, and prevent this from happening again. Ice sheets will continue to melt long after we hit carbon neutrality, and sea levels will keep rising for at least a few centuries.

Breaking Boundaries is not an uplifting book. You can feel the desperation of these scientists who have been screaming into the void for over a decade. However, it is succinct, easy to understand, and very clear about our situation. It presents the 9 life support systems in a way that anyone can understand, and it expertly shows how they are interrelated, and how action to address one can often help address the others. They are ambiguous about our need for systemic change as soon as possible, and they illustrate just exactly what our lives would be like if we blow past 2 degrees C warming.

In reality, these systems are actually quite fragile, and we humans have done our best to wreck them. Anyone who thinks we are too insignificant to change the entire climate should remember that 2.5 billion years ago, a tiny ocean life form called cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) managed to alter the Earth’s atmosphere and cause a catastrophic mass extinction. Humans are the first species since then to have this big of an impact. The Earth survived the Great Oxidation Event and it will survive us.

On Nuclear Fusion

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

This year there have been some major announcements regarding nuclear fusion. From the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to a company based down the road from me in Cambridge, MA called Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) it seems like we’re on the verge of some major advancements in this futuristic technology. The CEO of CFS is just the latest person to argue that fusion is an “essential” component of decarbonizing our world. I am in no way qualified to evaluate the technology being used here, or if the timelines presented by the various fusion backers are realistic, however even if they are correct (this is a big if), then that really doesn’t change the fundamental truth, that fusion probably won’t play a major role in decarbonizing our economy.

Let’s look at why. First, according to the timelines presented by the backers, we may have a working fusion reactor by 2025 and a commercial reactor by 2030. These targets seem pretty ambitious to me, considering we’ve been “10 years from fusion” since the 1960s, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they are correct.

A working commercial fusion reactor would be an amazing achievement. It isn’t hard to imagine a future where fusion plays an important role in powering our society. Maybe fusion reactors will power our starships, or help us suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

But, they are unlikely to play a major role in decarbonizing our economy. If we have our first commercial fusion reactor by 2030, then that means we have managed to clear all the regulatory hurdles in at least one jurisdiction. But, that doesn’t mean every jurisdiction will automatically accept it. Creating regulations for a brand new type of power plant, particularly one with the word “nuclear” in it, would be challenging. Under normal circumstances, it would take years to get these regulations approved, and in the United States, much of this regulation is done by individual states. So we’re talking about potentially hundreds of individual jurisdictions who have to give their approval, and then each individual power plant has to win approval, potentially over the objections of local opposition. Siting new power plants is slow, combative, and bureaucratic.

Further, it takes years to build a new power plant. So if the first commercial plant is operational in 2030, how many others will be built that same year? One? Ten? How much power will these plants produce and at what cost? We have no idea what these costs would be, and it seems unlikely that the first iteration of a nuclear fusion plant would be the cheapest, and even if fusion is a wonderful technology, if it can’t compete with renewables on price, it isn’t going to get built (without subsidies).

That being said, even if we are able to build cheap, abundant nuclear fusion plants by the 2030s, and they are quickly approved by every major jurisdiction, we still have other problems.

Of the major sectors that require decarbonizing, the electrical grid is the easiest. Followed by light transportation and mass transit, and then building heat. Industry, heavy transportation, and agriculture are likely the hardest sectors to decarbonize. This is why the Biden climate plan focuses on decarbonizing the electricity, light transportation and building heat sectors between now and 2030, with research and development aimed at the other sectors in anticipation of decarbonization between 2030 and 2050.

Fusion reactors don’t create usable energy on their own. They create an enormous amount of heat that is used to boil water, which creates steam that is used to turn a turbine that generates electricity (all fossil fuel power plants follow the same principle).

As you can see, the timelines just don’t add up. If we decarbonize the electricity sector by 2030 or 2035, there won’t be much need for nuclear fusion. And if wind, solar, and storage have all become even cheaper than today, then fusion may not even compete on price and reliability.

Waiting for fusion reactors to become available before decarbonizing would be a disaster. At the current rate of emissions, we will use up our carbon budget in 10 years. If we wait that long to decarbonize, we will lock in 2 or 3 degrees C warming. 2 degrees would be extremely difficult, 3 degrees would be catastrophic.

However, in case you think I’m against fusion, let me be clear that I’m very much in favor of it. It’s an amazing technology that could play an important role in making our society truly sustainable. It’s possible (and perhaps likely) that there are ways fusion could help decarbonize our economy that I haven’t even thought of. And, having cheap, abundant, reliable, and pollution-free energy at our disposal is an unambiguously good development.

But, the danger is complacency. We cannot wait for some miraculous technology to save us. This isn’t an Ancient Greek play where the gods are going to swoop in at the last moment. We still don’t know if commercial fusion reactors are even viable, and we certainly don’t know if they will be available by 2030. We have solutions in hand that can help us cap and reduce our emissions immediately, and we need to implement them. Even if wind and solar are eventually supplanted by fusion reactors sometime in the future, we need to cut our emissions right away.

These advancements in fusion technology should be celebrated. These companies and labs should be funded, and we should encourage people to study the sciences and develop these and other sustainable technologies. But, we cannot put our faith in techno-wizardry with no guarantees of success. We simply don’t have time to wait for a miracle, especially when we can get moving in the right direction with the solutions we already have.

Climate Solutions Friday – Solar Electricity

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

This week the Biden Administration released a roadmap to expand our solar energy capacity dramatically over the next 2 decades. The report is titled “The Solar Futures Study” and was created by the National Renewable Energy Lap (NREL) at the Department of Energy (DOE). The Biden Admin claims that solar, which currently supplies 4% of our electricity needs, could meet 45% of our needs by 2050. To get there, we would need a significant expansion in the amount of solar we install each year.

2020 was already a record year for solar installations, when 15 gigawatts of solar capacity were added to the grid. For reference, one average single family house needs roughly 10 kilowatts of capacity to meet their needs, so 15 gigawatts is approximately enough for 1.5 million homes. To get to 45% by 2050, we would need to double our annual installations every year from now until 2025 and then double them again, to 60 GW per year after that.

There are a huge number of challenges in doing this. First, it’s not so easy to double the amount of solar capacity installed in just one year. We need massive investments in supply chains, in worker training, and incentives. A great deal of this will have to be done by utilities, many of whom may resist adding so much solar to their generation assets. And, in order to hit this target without totally destabilizing the grid, we will need unprecedented investments in energy storage, as well as in transmission lines, both of which come with their own problems.

That’s not to say that we can’t do it. I am very pleased with the Biden Admin’s goals here. But we should be realistic about what it will take to get there.

Part of the administration’s plan involves something called a clean energy payment plan, this would be a subsidy for utilities to switch to renewables. Many utilities are slow to adopt changes, even if they are making big commitments on climate. The best way to get them there without a mandate (which can’t happen without Republican support) is with financial incentives.

Solar is, in many jurisdictions, the cheapest form of electricity. In some instances, it’s actually cheaper to build a solar facility than it is to keep running an old coal-fired power plant. However, while fossil fuel plants can be concentrated in specific locations (something that causes no shortage of environmental justice issues), solar facilities have to be spread out in much larger areas. Solar can also be put on houses, businesses, over parking lots or parking decks, or even above roads. The grid was designed for large, centralized power plants, not distributed energy resources like solar. And, the best solar resources are often far from population centers. This means that we need colossal investments in the electrical grid, including the construction of large (unsightly) transmission lines. These are all significant challenges that a require funding, as well as advocacy (who wants power lines running through their neighborhood?).

The challenge to make this happen is enormous, but the potential rewards are even greater. In addition to lower carbon emissions, we would drastically cut all sorts of air pollution, including sulfur dioxide, smog, particulate matter, aerosols, and mercury. Cleaner air means healthier lungs.

The Biden plan is good and if we can implement it, we will begin the heavy work of moving ourselves away from the climate-altering experiment we’ve been performing for the past century.

However, as I’ve said, securing the funding is only the first step.

Climate Solutions Friday – Sept 3

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to be frank, the past 2 weeks have been pretty awful. Between the chaotic and tragic scenes in Afghanistan, the terrible Supreme Court abortion ruling, the rise of people using horse de-wormer instead of an FDA approved vaccine, and the powerful, deadly hurricane I’m feeling more than a bit overwhelmed. So many people are more personally and acutely effected than me. I’m not an Afghanistan veteran or part of a Gold Star family, I don’t personally know anyone who has died of Covid-19, I wasn’t hit hard by the hurricane, and I don’t have a uterus. I recognize that all of these things are essentially priviledges for me. Still, watching these mostly preventable things happen in real time is hard to watch. Knowing that I have it easier than other people gives me no comfort.

I think it’s important to understand the role that politicians have played in all of these events. Warmongering politicians got us into Afghanistan in the first place. Anti-woman politicians passed the Texas abortion law and appointed the anti-woman justices. Anti-vaccine politicians are promoting the horse de-wormer. And climate denying politicians have prevented us from doing anything about climate.

Even this week, Senator Joe Manchin published an infuriating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, a fitting place for such a piece, stating that Democrats should hit the pause button on their $3.5T spending package. This package includes President Biden’s two signature climate policies: the clean energy payment plan, and the extension of the clean energy tax credits. Even these two market-based schemes will probably be inadequate, but it’s the best he could do under the Senate’s crazy, anti-democratic structure.

And now Manchin’s op-ed has put us on our heels at the last minute. Is he bluffing? Is he just trying to appear “fiscally conservative”? In Manchin’s defense, he has a tendency to make big, bold proclamations challenging Democratic leadership only to vote along with his party when the time comes. Maybe that’s why his Senate colleagues aren’t ringing alarm bells.

If he and the other so-called moderates need to extract their pound of flesh, then so be it. But there’s a limit.

I apologize for sounding so negative in a climate solutions post. As I said, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.

The most important thing we can do for the climate is elect leaders who will take the issue seriously. In a perfect world, Democrats, Republicans and third parties would all work together on this issue. We’d be arguing about how to fight it, not whether or not we should.

If you’re a Republican or know a Republican, encourage them to vote in primaries. Vote for candidates who acknowledge climate change and want to do something about it. If you’re a Democrat, do the same in Democratic primaries. But more importantly, vote in as many primaries and elections as you’re legally allowed. Every level of government has a roll to play, and lower level elections, like the recall in California or the state elections in Virginia that are both coming up soon, tend to have very low turnout. Cities and state legislatures have the ability to make great progress on these issues, but the most reliable voters tend to be older and more conservative.

Climate change is fundamentally a political problem. We don’t need some magic technology, we have solutions already. We need to implement them as soon and as widely as possible. Every president since LBJ has known about climate change and every president since LBJ has failed miserably to address it. Some presidents, notably Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, actively worked to make things worse.

We’re running out of time to get this right. Vote, march, organize, run for office, do something to get the needle moving. Politicians who deny climate action must be punished at the ballot box. Systems that unfairly allow those politicians to stay in power must be altered.

Update on the Climate Bills

~ climate2021steve ~ Leave a comment

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that combined, Biden’s two bills would cut emissions 45% by 2030. This, he said, together with the actions on the state level by a cadre of high-income, left-leaning states (CA, HI, MA, MD, NY, NJ, among others), would get the US to Biden’s goal of cutting emissions 50% (compared to 2005) by 2030.

Sounds great, right? After all, scientists say we need to cut our emissions at least 50% by 2030 in order to be on pace for carbon neutrality by 2050. (If you’re wondering why it will take 20 years to go from 50% to 100% but only 9 years for the first 50%, not all sectors of the economy are equally difficult to decarbonize. Transportation and electricity are the biggest and easiest, and that’s where Biden’s bill puts most of its climate focus. Industry, heating, and agriculture will be harder and will take more time).

However, there are a lot of caveats here. First, the final version of the bill hasn’t been announced, Schumer says it will be announced by Sept 15. Until then, we are just guessing at what it contains, we have some topline numbers, but no details. The centerpieces of the reconciliation package are the clean energy payments program and the extension of the clean energy tax credits.

Second, this bill is almost certainly going to get cut. The topline number is $3.5 trillion, and a coalition of conservative Democrats, especially Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, will demand that the total amount be reduced. This will be of critical importance. How much will be cut and from which programs? The bulk of the spending is for social programs, so will they bear the brunt of the cuts? Or will climate be sacrificed because it isn’t the main focus of the bill?

We’ll need to keep an eye on both of these things. But, assuming it is actually passed (another question mark) and assuming the climate portions remain relatively unscathed, then what? Do we just sit back and celebrate?

If both of these proposals are passed, then I will celebrate for a day. However, the work is far from over. Immediately following the success or failure of these packages the COP26 summit will commence in Glasgow. Almost every nation in the world has failed to live up to its Paris Agreement commitments, and the Paris Agreement wasn’t sufficient in the first place. Time is running out to craft an effective international treaty that will cap emissions as soon as possible. The United States is fully back on board for the first time since 2015 (technically the 2016 conference happened during the Obama Admin, but he was a lame duck and Trump was elected while the conference was happening).

As I’ve said before, this is probably the last best chance for the US to do something big (and positive) on climate. It’s very unlikely that the Dems will hold both houses of Congress next year, and even if we capture both houses and keep the White House in 2024, it may be too little too late.

What happens, then, if everything goes right? Assuming we pass both bills and we get a strong COP commitment, then what do we do? If Schumer’s office is right, then the US will be on pace to meet its agreements domestically. But here’s the thing about projections for very large, very complex economic transitions, they’re very hard to get right. Projections for climate-related trends are almost always incorrect (for instance, renewable energy has gotten cheaper faster than expected, and extreme weather has happened faster than expected). So we must remain vigilant. Ideally we would cap global emissions in the next couple of years, and begin our steep decreases as soon as possible.

That means we will need to monitor our progress. It also means the US and other rich countries will need to send resources to developing countries, something they have largely failed to do so far. Domestically, here in the US we will need to shift our work back to state and local-level action. There is a lot of room for improvement in states. In blue states, where leaders have made big commitments, we must ensure they keep their promises. In swing states or red states, we must find ways to lower emissions without talking too much about climate. People of all political stripes care about saving money, breathing clean air, getting independence from your utility, or growing your local economy.

Cities can play a huge role by updating their building codes. This is a longer-term strategy, but we have 30 years to get everything right, and if we start now we can make some serious improvements. Cities can also invest in things like pedestrian and bike infrastructure, transit, and green space. Cities can build flood barriers and flood plans, and they can decarbonize their own buildings and fleets. Cities can change zoning laws to encourage density and walkability. All of these are tangential to climate, but would have positive climate benefits.

For now, though, the focus must remain on getting these bills passed with as few cuts as possible. To put it bluntly, nothing will really matter if we can’t get this done. Failure to do so will be catastrophic.