There was a good article in Bloomberg today describing the many aspects of Chinese dominance in EV’s. It’s useful if discouraging reading. How did this happen? Why is the West so far behind?
Obviously there are multiple items and reasons behind them. However all of them trace back to a single big one: the endlessly propagandized right-wing fantasy of the miraculous, all-knowing, perfectly-adaptive private sector.
In this case there were two principal failings of the private sector:
Denying climate change, because it was inconvenient for current operations.
Discounting any role for government, because the private sector by definition knew better
With these two failings the private sector was blindsided by a market transition they had gleefully dismissed as nonsense—because it didn’t fit with current mindset and current operations of business. The Chinese did strategic planning, and the private sector in this country congratulated itself on its ability to squelch it. The oil companies are still at it. Trump will do it again if he gets a chance. We lost four years of opportunities to position for change–an eternity for competition.
That is not a surprise. There are things the private sector does well—principally optimizing current operations. However the current economic powers-that-be are very poor at major transitions. Instead they will act, as in this case, to hang on to the optimized past and to delay that future for as long as possible. In other words to defend their their own immediate private interests against the interest of the country as a whole.
Government of course has no perfect crystal ball, but it doesn’t have the same limitations and the same vested interests. It can act to support future businesses even before their time has come. We have had some of that. Both Tesla and SpaceX exist because of Obama-era seed money. (Some readers may remember Romney’s ridiculing Obama for such initiatives!) The mRNA vaccines that stopped Covid were only possible because of decades of government-funded research. All of that in the face virulent right-wing opposition. The Chinese government locked up resources and initiated new businesses. We were too smart for that!
The bottom line here is explicit. The private sector is not a miracle machine. Its interests are not the same as our national interests, and it can’t even do a good job of providing for its own success. We need government to care about the well-being of our people and even about the well-being of its businesses.
As a final point here it’s worth noting that–contrary to the usual sloganeering–when Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, he was not arguing for government to stay out of the miraculous private sector. Instead he was making the case for a competitive “free” market, something only possible if government would stop the private sector from perverting the economy with monopolies and government influence. That’s still a battle today!
Monotheism amounts to an imperialistic assertion of primacy. That sounds like one of those wild-eyed slogans from the radical left or right. But in fact it is a simple statement of what drives quite a lot of policy, both domestic and international.
Let’s start close to home. In both Britain and the US there is a big problem with past imperial grandeur. The Brits just can’t get over their lost empire, and they keep doing completely illogical and crazy things (e.g. Brexit) in hopes of getting it back. The fact that the world has changed since then, with new powers and new bases for strength doesn’t register. Since the empire is taken to be an expression of British superiority (and of God’s grace raining down on Britain) there is no reason why it can’t just happen again. There is only one God and he’s ours.
The US has a similar problem, just a little later in time. We had the 1950’s and even 60’s when in the years following the destruction of the World War II the US was unquestionably the world’s only remaining superpower. If anything we were more dominant than the British as their peak. And we’re just as blind in looking back to it. Our dominance was a result of national superiority and God’s grace. We are the chosen rulers of the world and there’s nothing that ought to stop that.
The Chinese and the Russians have similar issues. Having lived in Italy at one point, there’s more than a bit of it (going back several centuries) there too.
The Old Testament (as I understand it) had a more limited notion of monotheism: each nation had it’s own god or gods and international struggles were also struggles of those gods. That sounds a little more accurate. Contemporary monotheism amounts to assertions of primacy. An astounding percentage of Americans are ready to talk about God’s protective shield over the US and our God-given role in running the rest of the world. That gets in the way of any notion international cooperation or any workable national objectives. With God on your side, reality just doesn’t matter.
The Brits have already driven themselves to at least a short-term future of poverty. It is relevant to notice—although seldom mentioned—that the pre-EO version of Britain was much slower than the continent in recovering from World War II and generally poorer per capita.
The US is on the brink of doing the same thing. We’ve got a dictatorial theocracy going, as well as a “we don’t need anyone” ethos on the right that denies any need to interact with the rest of the world except under terms of dominance. Furthermore the pervasive xenophobia denies the (currently enormous) contribution of foreigners to the economic strength of the US.
However the biggest problems are not even that. As climate change and also Covid and the Ukraine crisis show us, we have only one world. All the national gods are going to have to cooperate if we’re going to get out of this mess. Enough with national monotheism.
The most important division in American society is not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s within the Democratic Party itself.
As an indication of what I’m talking about, I think about an episode of the program Peaky Blinders. In that episode the hero Thomas Shelby’s sister’s boyfriend is a communist, and the hero has to figure out how to keep him alive. When the subject comes up with the police, the answer is “Normally we don’t have to worry about those people. They’re so busy killing each other that they’re just not a problem.”
The Republicans can say amen to that for our tamer version of the left:
We’re still living down “defund the police”
We’ve had an endless supply of articles about how privileged, racist whites just have to get used to taking a well-deserved hit, including for education.
Virtually any statement made about “neo-liberals” is a whitewashing of Republican failures so that chosen Democrats can be blamed instead. One hopes George W. Bush is duly grateful.
We had a chance to pass a Biden agenda, but the Democratic Party spent so much time posturing and pretending that Manchin and Sinema didn’t exist that when they finally got around to voting it was too late–inflation was THE issue and it was easy for Manchin to hide. The left wing of the party is gleefully blaming Biden, without any alternative policy or blame for Republicans.
Democrats are actually fighting over whether Biden will be the nominee in 2024—when the real issue is the 2022 midterm election. The only result of this fight is weaking the remaining days of the Biden administration and undermining the Democrats’ message for 2022.
With friends like this who needs enemies. As in the Peaky Blinders quote, they hate each other so much that it trumps any desire to do anything good for anybody. It’s hard even to count the self-inflicted wounds.
Just think about it. That Democrats can do anything good at all—given this nonsense—means that they could perhaps do something really big if they could get organized and stop the knife stabbing. If they stopped providing amunition to Republicans, they might just be able bridge the other divisions we hear so much about.
At least half of these deaths were due to deliberate misinformation from political interests calling the whole pandemic a left-wing plot. For month after month the most popular story in the Wall Street Journal was the latest reason why there was really nothing going on: it was just like normal flu; it was worst in New York because it was only in disgusting cities full of disgusting people.
Everyone in the country suffered, including very many who bought into the party line because they thought the propagandists were on their side. Since vaccines were coming, deaths delayed could be deaths avoided. What’s worse, almost of half the people who died were unvaccinated when they could have been, convinced by the arguments of people like the Fox hosts-who were actually vaccinated for themselves.
This Covid story is unfortunately typical of what’s happening in this country. The “populists” are the Kochs and the Mercers and the Thiels—people with the money to fill newspapers with issues they don’t care about (abortion, guns) so they can ride them all the way to the bank. The only major piece of legislation passed in the Trump years was the monumental tax cut for the rich. As with Covid, the supporters drawn in with identity issues are the ones who will suffer—in jobs, healthcare, education, climate, you name it.
Taking this one step further, it is worth noting that the damage with Covid was not from action but from inaction. Most of the endless discussions of our fractured political system are missing the point. The country is ungovernable because they want it that way. If government can’t act, the powers that be are running things. As Steve Bannon put it, all we need to do is create chaos.
This story isn’t complicated, just lost in the cacophony of bought media.
It seems to me more important than ever that we think about real scenarios for dealing with climate change. There’s so much religion here that we can be missing the boat. I’m going to take an extreme position in this piece, both because I think it should be on the table and because I think it’s more likely than a lot of what is taken for granted.
I believe that fusion is going to work and be deployable in about the next ten years. We’re going to know quite soon where that stands. Both the Commonwealth Fusion people and Helion (among others) plan to generate net positive energy by 2025. There are also regularly new developments: more powerful magnets, longer plasma retension times, higher energies attained, even AI-based methods for controlling stability of reactor plasmas. Higher temperature superconductors have been game-changers. It is time to be serious about fusion.
The consequence is that we are entering (in the relatively near term) into an era not of energy scarcity but of energy abundance. That’s not just a matter of fusion—solar, wind, and better in-network storage also contribute—but fusion represents real abundance. That’s a different mindset with different conclusions than most of what gets discussed. I’ve argued earlier that it’s the proper mindset for the long-term, because it is the only serious way to address our worldwide problems. The difference is that progress in fusion has been such that we can move that indefinite future to the nearer term.
With that point of view, we can view the response to climate change as two distinct issues:
– Keeping things from getting too bad in the interim while the new energy sources get up to speed.
– Deploying abundant energy to combat climate change.
It’s important to look at the second issue first, because the first (assuming we can solve it) is temporary. The architecture for the second issue is relatively straightforward. We’re going to have generation stations of significant size with high-capacity interconnection for distribution to users. Electricity will be the basic form in which energy is delivered, but we’re going to have to deal with significant applications (industrial processes, air travel) where electricity itself is not the answer. For such applications we’ll need ways to convert electricity to other forms of energy. That may involve using electricity to make hydrogen or using electricity to achieve climate neutrality by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for synthetic fuels. (It’s interesting that carbon capture has value even without large-scale CO2 storage.)
The most important conclusion is straightforward: we’re going to have to vastly increase and improve the facilities to generate and distribute electricity! That is job number one and the most essential thing to be spending money on. Existing technology will contribute to but not solve that problem. We also need to figure out how to move everything that isn’t currently electric onto that network. Note that ultimately it is much less important how efficiently we use electricity than that electricity is what’s used. We’re not getting rid of air conditioners, and we’re not making sure that every electric hot water heater has a heat pump.
As to how we’re going to survive until then, the most important message is that survival means focusing on heavy hitters. It is not the case that every little bit helps. I’ve given this chart before for energy use in the US:
The key sectors are transportation, industrial, and electric power—not residential. Electric cars are clearly an important contributing technology, but even they are only an infrastructure investment until the underlying power plants are converted.
For the rest of the world, the corresponding charts can be quite different, often tilted toward industrial uses. Focusing exclusively on the US distorts the issue. We have to get world CO2 emissions down overall, regardless of where it comes from. This is not a question of “every country needs to do its part”. It’s a question of the most effective way to get the CO2 total down fast.
We have to think about where all the sources are and how to get at them. Carbon pricing schemes such as CCL are particularly helpful because of their wide impact. In this country a simple calculation tells you that the current annual subsidy to fossil fuel interests is about a trillion dollars, so we’re a long way from a rational economy. Putting solar panels on suburban roof tops—however useful—is not commensurate with the problem. Furthermore, as the following chart indicates, we rich countries need to get used to the idea of helping the others in a big way or the job will never get done!
As the latest IPCC report (2/28/2022) put it: “Rich governments must quickly and dramatically scale up the level of adaptation finance for low-income countries.”
Or else—there’s no getting around it—we’ll end up stuck with geoengineering and hope for the best. Simply stated (for those who haven’t heard) geoengineering delays global warming by filling the atmosphere with chemicals that put the whole world in shade. That can stop most (but not all) aspects of climate change, but with many known and unknown risks.
It’s hard to come to a proper judgment of geoengineering. On one hand, it’s exceedingly scary to start messing with the whole world’s atmosphere, but on the other hand we don’t yet have all the technologies we need and we’ve been slow to deploy the ones we do have, so we may well need to be buying time. One can argue that geoengineering reduces the motivation for alternative energy progress, but that work today seems to have its own motivation. So in the end there is nothing immoral about geoengineering, and we may have to use it. But given the risks and the fact that all that extra CO2 has to come out before we can quit, we had better do as little of it as possible. (These systems require regular replenishing, so turning them off isn’t a big issue; getting rid of the extra carbon dioxide is.)
You might wonder at this point why we brought up geoenginerring instead of the much-discussed topic of carbon capture? There’s a good reason. Despite all of the publicity around it, there’s no near-term silver bullet with carbon capture. For the yearly CO2 production in the US we would need huge infrastructure of processing plants full of giant fans—a multi-trillion dollar project using enormous amounts of energy to build and run it. And that’s before you even start to talk about where to put the output. The main reason carbon capture has such prominence is that it plays to the fossil fuel companies’ delaying tactics—if we can get rid of the carbon dioxide later, why worry about creating it now? Carbon capture is a project of energy abundance, AFTER we have somehow managed to survive. Going forward, unburning everything you burn is only sensible in particular application areas (e.g. air travel) where there is nothing else to be done.
Climate change unavoidably means a huge, expensive project—which is why it is important to be clear about what we’re doing. As general principles, conservation for conservation’s sake is wrong, a focus on local issues is wrong, and an exclusive focus on current technology is wrong. What’s right is to recognize that the future requires an electrical infrastructure capable of driving everything and that in the near-term we have to avoid distractions and focus on heavy hitters—worldwide—to keep from going over the edge. Near-term and long-term projects are not necessarily the same. Finally we should realize that despite our current concerns, we are actually moving toward a period of abundant energy with enormous benefits for all—if we can stop fighting over the pieces of a pie that will become much bigger.
As an analogy I remember the early days of voice over IP networks, where the whole focus was how we would ever meet the realtime performance needs of speech. It wasn’t so many years later that those same networks were handling realtime video to hundreds of millions of people worldwide—and voice was an almost invisible blip. That’s the kind of transformation we’re talking about. Limitless clean energy will change the world.
The dangers in Ukraine are enough to make one wonder about the current world order. We’d like to believe that it’s beyond the pale for one country to invade and take over another on the flimsiest of pretexts. Despite some current rhetoric, Crimea was not that: it had been an essential part of the Russian military infrastructure for centuries. Ukraine is different—what does it mean?
Regardless of how the Ukraine affair ends, the change it signifies is enormous. In the wake of the horrors of World War II, the US as remaining unscathed power helped put together a system of rules and organizations aimed at preventing another one. The idea was to prevent economic collapse and to resolve conflicts before they became wars. We got a UN, an IMF, and rules to govern international trade. The result was an extended period of world prosperity. The communist bloc stood outside all of that, but even in the days of the Cold War overt seizures of other countries were avoided.
Over the intervening years much of that liberal economic system remained, even as the world became much more complicated. Standards for permitted behavior lived on. In some sense, the Paris climate agreement was a kind of last hurrah. There was no enforcement mechanism, but the idea was that unanimity would shame the cheaters into compliance.
Trump broke that idea in a way that only an American President could. He asserted that there was no reason to obey any of those (US-initiated) international rules, and he got away with it. Until Trump people cared about WTO trade rules, climate progress, and democracy worldwide. Now essentially all of that is off the table. And the powerlessness behind many international institutions has been laid bare. If Putin decides to invade Ukraine, we’re in a world where the only consequences are the ones we manufacture for the event. The UN is manifestly irrelevant. Shaming has no force. There are no rules, and your friends can cover for you. It’s just the way things are. Military threats can be the first not the last of options.
This is a problem generally and for us in particular. Under Trump we developed adversarial relationships with just about everyone, with the view that they were all against us, and we had to show who’s boss. That limits our power. Most serious is what happened with China. Xi may be a megalomaniac and an autocrat, but we empowered Chinese hardliners and contributed to his nationalistic program by delivering threats echoing the imperialist past. When Trump said he would destroy the Chinese economy they took it seriously. The newly-revived alliance with Russia—a thorn in our side for Ukraine—was at least in part our own doing.
We have replaced our successful efforts for peace and stability with a new world view where we need no one, and any constraint on our ability to act is unacceptable. It’s easy to say (and many do say) so much the better. Every country needs to stand up for itself, and all of that international stuff just gets in the way. That’s an appealing slogan. It wasn’t just Trump’s line; it was behind Brexit and all the populist movements of the both the left and the right. However we’re not the only ones playing that game. That “freedom” is a freedom for any country to do anything, and the Ukraine affair is an early indicator of where that goes. We seem to have forgotten World War II and the Depression, and that’s just for starters.
Our own history gives an excellent example of what happens. That ocurred after the American Revolution, under the so-called Articles of Confederation. It took only a few years for the American states that had fought the British together to be at each other’s throats, torpedoing economic progress for everyone. Things got so bad that the states had no choice but to give up power to a new Constitution and a national government. In Europe there were centuries of wars that only ended when cooperation became manditory in the post World War II recovery.
It’s a fact that the liberal economic system has gotten a bad name in this country—”Bill Clinton let China in the WTO and there was nothing we could do about the Chinese assault on American jobs”—but that universally-repeated story is false. (It’s one example of what you might call bipartisan revisionist history—the left and right united against the center!) The main issue raised with China’s behavior has always been currency manipulation, which was in no way permitted under WTO rules. And as the following job loss chart makes clear, the loss of American jobs was 100% a phenomenon of the George W. Bush presidency:
That’s no accident. The radical neocons had us preoccupied with fighting a $3T war, and the same deregulation mania that produced the 2008 crash had us actually encouraging outsourcing abroad. For the business-friendly Bush people cheap off shore labor was good. All subsequent efforts to help the people hurt by that process were blocked by Congressional Republicans bent on sowing dissatisfaction ahead of the 2016 election. The liberal order conspiracy is a convenent fiction for both the right (to cover its tracks) and the left (to attack the center).
If we’re going to avoid economic and even potentially military disaster, we’ve got to get past the electoral propaganda and understand what we’ve done right and wrong. In particular we’ve got to wean ourselves from the siren-call of nationalism. We’re not going to “win” the future, but we can certainly all lose it. The real challenge is getting internationalism right, so that everyone has a stake in the action. We built unprecedented peace and prosperity after World War II. That job needs to be done again before we give it all up—in a way that has happened many times before. Both prosperity and peace are in question.
One important lesson of history is that economics precedes politics. The EU, for all its imperfections, is a vast improvement over centuries of status quo. What got that going was a step-by-step economic union, long before there was anything political on the table. In that sense, strangely enough, you can argue that the WTO is more important than the UN. Getting the WTO back on track is going to take considerable doing, but it has to happen. And perhaps climate change can yield an appropriate model.
Climate change is an unusual situation in that practically every country has veto power of the result. We all share the same atmosphere, and the CO2 concentration is only controlled when everyone cooperates. So the solution has to get a buy-in from everyone, rich countries and poor. In fact it can only work when rich countries recognize that—like it or not—they’re going to have to help the poor ones. Everyone will have to get used to the idea of an international project where the focus is less on who gets the best deal than on whether it delivers the necessary benefit for all.
A functioning WTO is a similar balancing act. As starting point there is one basic reality to be acknowledged: self-sufficiency is not a desirable or realizable goal even for large countries. Despite all the discussion of the evil Chinese, we would be vastly worse off if they just went away. Just in general, we are not always going to be the best at making everything, and our own industry will be crippled if we can’t build on what’s best.
Furthermore discussions of self-sufficiency tend to include a strong dose of the always-dangerous delusion “my people aren’t like that.” In fact domestic manufacture does not guarantee availability, quality, price, or appropriate technology. The single worst problem during the first stage of the Covid crisis was a lack of testing equipment—because the American manufacturer with a CDC contract to produce the tests had decided they could make more money doing something else. Similarly, self-sufficiency can do little to guarantee the well-being of the national workforce, as there is no substitute for government dealing with all relevant labor issues. Trade is more like climate change than it seems—it’s something we’ve got to make work.
The balancing act is in the many factors that have to be taken into account for fair trade: labor conditions, environmental rules, government involvement, and so forth. Those are both impediments and opportunities—they make the negotiations harder, but they are also leverage opportunities for a better world. Elizabeth Warren in her Presidential campaign made a long list of items she wanted to make as preconditions for trade with the US. Her standards were very high—it was pointed out at the time that no country met them—but her list was an indication of potential opportunities. Also, it is important that these rules should apply to everyone—including to us.
What this comes down to is that globalization, despite the rhetoric, is only anti-labor if we make it so—which is precisely what happened under George Bush. Instead of using it to establish worldwide labor standards, we used it deliberately to undermine workers everywhere. In other words thus far we’ve had globalization exclusively for the rich. If we don’t step in to control it, it will stay that way—populist movements or not. And if we don’t start learning how to create a world order for the benefit of humanity, no amount of national chest-beating will save us.
The Ukraine affair is dangerous in its own right, but even more dangerous as a symbol of a world out of control. What the world needs now is neither uncontrolled chaos nor world government, but a set of mutually-agreed rules to forestall a fight to the bottom. As with climate change, there is no way out other than to acknowledge we are now one interconnected world, and we will all either stand or fall together.
Since the coronavirus is at the top of everyone’s consciousness, there has been a lot written about what the coronavirus experience has to say on a great many issues. After a while you start to get numb. However for climate change the parallels are so explicit and telling that they need to be emphasized. The argument in this piece is not new, but it’s worth spelling out in detail.
The coronavirus shows just how hard it is for us as a country—or as a world—to act ahead of a disaster even when the evidence is clear. We were unprepared when the crisis came, because we just didn’t want to believe it could happen. Our reluctance not to believe was of course encouraged by players (foreign and domestic) who felt there was something to be gained by delay.
The result is measured both by the numbers of dead and by the economic consequences of the drastic measures taken to stop the exponential growth of cases and deaths. In the US that means on the order of 200,000 deaths and the worst job loss since the Great Depression. The weeks of delay made this situation exponentially worse. You can argue about the details, but there is no question that failure to act early cost us dearly on both counts. We’ll muddle through, but badly wounded.
The parallels to climate change are explicit—but for climate the muddling through is no sure thing. There are two primary points:
CO2 in the atmosphere just adds up—which means that whatever problems finally force us to act will keep getting worse until we can manage to stop fossil fuels completely. In other words from whatever time we recognize a crisis, we will be locked-in for many further years of worsening crisis.
That’s even worse than it sounds because—as with epidemics—there is an exponential growth aspect here too. To see this we can start with the example of hurricanes. For hurricanes, the damages in the wind-speed categories are such that each step makes the previous look trivial. In other words, as wind speed grows in a regular, linear way, damage goes up exponentially.
This isn’t just a matter of hurricanes; it’s typical for damage. For floods you go from marginal areas affected to major cities. In any category you can think of, damage goes up exponentially. The bottom line is that for all those years of lock-in, every additional ton of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere will pack a wallop. This is the stuff of nightmares.
The latest climate report gives us the timescale. To avoid catastrophic consequences CO2 production needs to drop 45% by 2030 and reach 0 by 2050.
We couldn’t get ourselves to believe the coronavirus would really happen, and climate disaster is even further from our past experience. So the tendency to disbelieve is even stronger.
There are plenty of well-connected, interested players out to convince us to wait. The oil companies and their allies are doing quite a good job of it. Pence and Pompeo (among many others) are Koch organization soldiers in a Trump organization out to sabotage all efforts to control climate change. Another indication of oil company power is Harvard University’s recent announcement of a commitment to fight climate change—by making their investment portfolio carbon-neutral starting in 2050, the year when the scientists say we need to be done!
That’s where we are. Climate change is the coronavirus on a bigger scale. It’s much more dangerous and with even more powerful forces out to convince us to wait, and wait, until it’s too late to matter anymore. We’ve been warned.
In addressing climate change, one problem is that short and long term issues are not always the same. As we’ve noted before, conservation is a legitimate short-term issue but not a primary long-term goal.
You can go a step farther with that: there is technology we don’t want at all long-term that is still the best we’ve got for now. That’s not just a matter of saving a little extra carbon dioxide; more importantly it’s buying time.
What the scientists have given us is not so much a schedule as a carbon budget—how much CO2 we can produce without irretrievable harm. Many of the technologies we need to get off of fossil fuels completely are not 100% up to snuff. What that means is that we can’t jump immediately into what we see as the right solution—more money won’t help. That means accepting non-optimal technologies that cut some CO2 now.
Cutting CO2 buys time. We need that time.
Here’s are a few areas that need work. It’s too easy to wish them away:
– Electric cars are still too expensive and slow-charging to replace current technology. This is a little like self-driving cars—the expectations have gotten ahead of the reality.
– Solar and wind may be cheap, but they’re not everywhere and not all the time. For electric power generation that’s a problem. In-network power storage is not up to the task of twenty-four hour operation. With the current US grid, solar power in Arizona is not going to drive the rest of the country.
As an example, California’s aggressive deployment of solar electricity has forced external contracting to handle power peaks. Currently the peaks are supplied by CO2-intensive fossil fuel plants in nearby states.
Local power generation can displace some residential and commercial demand, but at best that’s only 10% of the picture:
– For heavy industry—steel and cement for example—CO2 production is not just a matter of power consumption, it’s intrinsic to the industrial processes. There are no simple solutions to change that. Flue-based carbon capture just has to get better. (Direct air capture of CO2—despite much enthusiastic press—is even farther off.)
Prospects for fixing all of this are good, but we’ve got to buy time to get there. That means taking steps with what we’ve got now. Here are a few examples:
– We shouldthink moreabout hybrid cars. That’s increasingly cheaper technology, it saves considerable gas, and recent plug-in hybrids save more (perhaps leading even to upgradeable batteries). The biggest problem with the technology is that, despite improving sales, we’re still not selling enough of it. Initial carbon pricing should be aimed at universal hybrid penetration. Tesla is great, but it’s not going to have a big enough impact now.
– Replacement of coal by gas saves 50% of CO2 production. There aren’t always alternatives, for the reasons listed above. Furthermore, lumping all fossil fuels together makes it easy to excuse coal. When Germany and Japan closed nuclear plants, they didn’t go to gas, they went to coal.
While we’re currently seeing more growth of CO2 emissions with gas than with coal, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion. Coal and oil still represent the vast part of CO2 production, and any replacement is a win.
– Carbon capture is unavoidable. The first focus is on flue-based technologies, even if direct air capture is sexier. This needs real money, because the industrial sector is huge worldwide.
To those items we should add one more difficult bit of reality: the US needs a vastly improved national electric power network as a near-term prerequisite for much future work. That means more high-voltage power interconnections. That in turn means dealing with environmental issues and protection for the poorer neighborhoods that normally bear the brunt of such things. One way or another this has to be made to happen, even though it involves competing concerns.
All of this underlines the need for a real plan—with both domestic and international aspects. That needs to be a step-by-step prescription for what we should do about climate change. That is what money needs to be spent on what technologies when and where. For all their strengths, neither the Green New Deal nor the CCL’s carbon pricing is anything like a comprehensive plan.
Carbon pricing in particular remains a source of considerable confusion. Since it is a critical component, we end with a few comments to avoid misunderstanding.
– Carbon pricing has to be a clear signal to industry of where the world is going. It may start relatively low (as we’ve just discussed), but planned increases must send the message that the fossil fuel world is ending. We need to get to at least $100 a ton in 5-10 years. As such, proposals of $40 a ton with only nominal increases (coming from oil industry sources among others) are dead on arrival. Carbon pricing is not good or bad in the abstract; it’s good or bad based on the numbers.
– Carbon pricing is not a tax, it’s killing a silent subsidy. Carbon in the atmosphere costs all of us money in current and future climate change disasters. Keeping it free represents an annual subsidy to the fossil fuel industry in the US of approximately $1T yearly (lower numbers are based on flawed cost models and just plain wrong). That huge perversion of the economy has to end. The money belongs to the public; it’s not there for the taking. It needs to be given back in a way that mitigates the regressive effect of higher oil prices. If we need more money for climate change or anything else, that needs to be done through the tax and budgeting system. That’s where we make decisions about who pays.
– Carbon pricing will not solve all problems. Government has many active roles to play, for example in putting together the new national electric power infrastructure that will be critical for progress. Also government will need to address the enormous social consequences of remaking the economy. We need to have carbon pricing to prevent perversion of the economy, but it’s only one element in a comprehensive plan.
on the outside 