This has been one of the major debates within environmental/decarbonization circles for decades (where I’ve spent my career; now in nuclear power)
These two schools of thought have many names but I like “Dark Green” and “Bright Green”. Where “dark green” is the idea of living smaller, more constrained lives to solve the problem, and “bright green” is the idea the technology will get us out of it. In its extreme, it’s sometimes called “ecomodernism”, where energy use is “decoupled” from environmental impact. And thus one of the most popular nuclear power podcasts is called “Decouple”.
Obviously, the bright green future is the more appealing one, and far easier to sell politically, as Jeff points out here.
In reality, I think it is going to take a little bit of both if we’re to get there and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
That said, my observation is that as soon as people realize that climate policies will have even the *smallest* impact on their consumer choices of way of life, they immediately punish the politicians that promulgate dark green policies. So you have things like in the US, Biden going basically only for bright green policies (dropping even modest Obama-era dark green policies like low-water appliances). And here in Canada, where our current (Trudeau) federal government went much heavier on dark green policies — well, just look at the polls. They’re at like late-Carter levels.
So I think the result is that we’re going to get the bright green policies only. Long run I do think technology will save us, but things are going to get pretty bad before 2050. Continued rampup of heat, extreme-weather events, global climate migration. Not the end of the world, but it will get bad. I also think that “geoengineering” (sulphur seeding in the atmosphere to cool temperatures etc.) is pretty quickly going to go from unthinkable to, the base plan.
Yglesias has written about this too, also urging Dems to drop all the Dark Green stuff. Politically it makes sense!
You might like my piece on the Inflation Reduction Act (https://tinyurl.com/3uxptczc), in which I argue that I'd prefer a carbon tax, but I know it's not going to happen, so this strategy in which we make big government investments in green tech and infrastructure is a decent Plan B. A carbon tax, I suppose, is "dark-green"-in-the-short-run-for-the-purposes-of-getting-to-"bright-green"-in-the-long-run, but that short run does involve making some things more expensive. Which is probably why it's such a hard sell. Even various "carbon tax and dividend" plans -- which really seem like they SHOULD work, politically -- have been a tough sell. So, I've basically accepted that this is the only politically viable option (for now, at least) and I'm hoping we can make it work.
Yeah I think you’re right. Here in Canada under the Liberal Party we just had 8 years of a substantial carbon tax (that meaningfully changed the price of gasoline and home-heating natural gas) with 100% of the carbon-tax revenues rebated to citizens. And the result is that the Conservative Party is now 20 points up in the polls going into an election next year, with plank #1 in their platform being “Axe the Tax”. Left wing parties everywhere else in the world are seeing the lesson.
Taxes on energy hurt poor people the most. Even if you try to frame it as “revenue neutral” this is a political loser- you can’t even get deep blue places like Washington State to vote for carbon taxes like this for F’s sake. Even if you could, China would just say “hey thanks for that advantage- we will make your fertilizer for you instead using coal.”
Energy needs to be inexpensive for a good quality of life. Clean energy needs to be even inexpensiver otherwise it doesn’t matter.
This is true at the moment, but environmentalists and need to keep up making the case for taxation of net emissions. Climate change was not overcome in a day.
But plan B ought to a) mimic the effects of a carbon tax as much s possible and b) be financed with consumption taxes. Even so, it will have greater costs than a carbon tax, so is slightly less bright green.
In reality, I think it is going to take a little bit of both if we’re to get there and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
A very little bit. Taxing net CO2 emissions will result in some readjustments that we'd rather not have to make, but not very painful adjustments and done gradually.
You missed the dumbest part of the essay, where he proudly declared that he doesn’t use a dishwasher. For those not in the know: water is a far more precious resource than energy especially going forward, and a dishwasher uses much less water than hand washing does.
It just goes to show that our intuitions about what is “good” or “bad” for the environment are not always correct. Air conditioning is another one: air conditioning in the summer can rely on solar power and be basically carbon neutral, while home heating is a massive carbon source. And heat pumps are the best possible solution to the latter, but what is a heat pump? Just an air conditioner run in reverse. So in fact if air conditioners are the thin end of the wedge that gets people to switch to heat pumps they may be a massive environmental win.
It obviously depends on where you are but there is so much water in the US East Coast and it's a renewable resource, too. Not even the slightest of problems. We have to figure out a way to get it out west.
So. The major problem with the issue of climate change is mostly that, and this is really important, that “wolf” has been cried far too often. And it’s worn society down.
The proponents have oversold the effects for three decades by a pretty massive margin.
This is DARE on marijuana levels of exaggeration.
“If we don’t do anything New York City will be under water by: 2004, 2008, 2012, 2020, 2025, 2035, or 2050”.
The problem with climate activists is that they are so thirsty to be right. And to be righteous that they massively oversell it by cherry picking the absolute worst “sky is falling” scenario in all of these studies and running it up the flag pole to try and literally scare everyone into “going green”.
And it’s a shit strategy. It’s literally the boy who cried wolf writ large.
I think by the third or fourth missed “climate apocalypse deadline” I really started tuning all of this out. If they’re not going to take this seriously why should I?
But that isn’t stopping anyone because there is no drug quite as addictive as righteous indignation. So they keep telling us that “all of humanity will die. Nowhere will be safe. Crops will never grow again. Billions of people will starve. All if we don’t do something yesterday!” Except that never happens. People just carry on. Things get a little hotter slowly and we, as always, adapt.
And I think that’s the way through. Adaptation. It’s kind of the thing human beings do better than animals. And it’s literally what separates us from animals. We can adapt like morherfuckers and already are.
The problem is druids, as Jeff points out, don’t want adaptation. They want capitulation. They want people to live an agrarian lifestyle “in perfect harmony with Mother Nature and the beautiful web of life”. Wearing hemp. Not using shampoo. Trying to pet bears and getting mauled. That kind of lifestyle.
This perfectly sums it up. If you ever wonder why right-wingers say things like “climate change is a hoax”, this is it.
The movement has done such a shitty job of selling itself in a sober, honest way. They’ve instead opted for finger wagging from the moral superiors in our society to chastise the plebes into compliance. In case you missed it, this doesn’t work.
Adding further comedic effect is the fact that the same people who tell you it is a moral imperative to give up your SUV, air conditioning, and cross-country flights are the same ones who ride in their up-armored Chevy Suburban to the airport where they board their private jet to fly across the world, before returning home to 1 of their 3 fully air conditioned mansions that is located in the same coastal areas they promise you are just minutes away from being swallowed by the ocean.
It’s also hard to sell people on climate change when most of the power players in Congress routinely use it as a Trojan horse for ramming through long-standing left-wing policy positions that have no logical connection to climate change as solutions.
Finally, the tendency to attribute everything to climate change contributes to the crying wolf phenomenon. Forest fires don’t just magically appear out of thin air. Most of them are caused by some form of arson. But we ignore that because it’s inconvenient to the narrative and we run deceptive headlines like “experts say climate change to blame for forest fire problem”.
Another great example is the fake statistics regarding hurricanes. The lie goes that climate change is making them so much more intense and deadly than they’ve ever been by using the monetary value of destruction as proof. It makes sense on its face until you realize that yes, some million dollar properties that got destroyed are worth more than a few shacks that people lived in back in the 1800’s. Contributing to the increased dollar value is the fact that the earth is more populous and more people are living in more concentrated suburban/urban areas, so it’s mostly a function of the amount of people and the things that they own existing in the path of the hurricane. That doesn’t mean they’re these deadly, basically nuclear hurricanes that will swallow the earth into a black hole.
You’re right that the world isn’t going to end, and the activists are going to pay the price for crying wolf too many times (already are — climate action is in retrenchment across the democratic world). Like I get why they wanted to hype up the collapse of the oceanic circulation — it’s apocalyptic! gets the donations flowing! — but serious climate scientists downplay the chances of that actually happening.
But let’s not kid around, the next 75 years isn’t going to be just a gentle warming while people “as always, adapt”. There are going to be a billion climate refugees and the strength of storms is going to pummel infrastructure. Think ever-increasing numbers and strength of fires, wind, and floods. Again, there’s not going to be a “Day After Tomorrow” superstorm. It is going to be a slow burn. But over time, it is going to just make life harder every year.
Which is good. The thing about a slow burn is you have time. I do thin the “billion climate refugees” is a bit overstating it. But yes there will be mass movement of people from inhospitable climates to hospitable climates.
The question is will the nimbys let us build the apartments we need.
The actual climate scientists aren't predicting disaster. It's stuff like "we're going to grow richer much more slowly because of all the climate problems" but not even any actual contractions, let alone collapse.
I know. That’s my point though. Those headlines don’t move papers. But “new study shows New York could be underwater by 2008 says new climate study from seniors at Oxford!”
I used to belong to a forum (remember those?) that had a lot of very cranky older white men MAGAs before MAGA was even a thing. One guy in particular was furious that incandescent bulbs were being phased out and bought several pallets of bulbs. Pallets. More than he could ever use in his lifetime because that'll show those commie Democrats trying to take his bulb choice away.
Well in fairness to old cranky bastards, the CFL bulbs they were trying to push on us in the beginning sucked ass…. But once decent LED lights came out the resistance largely stopped because they ended up being way better.
Again, it was mostly just culture wars between people who think the state should tell you what you can buy and reactionary people who refuse to change no matter what. Unfortunately that is a bottomless well that we will never find our way out of…
I don't remember what kind of bulbs they were at the time but whatever they were, they had a much longer lifespan than incandescent and put out as much light. I didn't understand why that twit would buy pallets of the old kind, especially considering how fragile they are. I'm sure he had more than a few that arrived broken.
As an aside, are there really people that think the state should tell us what to buy?
Maybe not a LOT who want to tell you exactly what you can buy (they do exist), but there are an awful lot who want to tell you what you can’t buy. If you spend any time listening to progressive/far left economic ideas what they say might shock you…
Incandescents should not have been banned. Maybe taxed at, say, two dollars a bulb. People who really wanted them because it was important could still get them but most people will just grab the cheapest thing.
The problem with the whole bulb gate issue is that this is what politicians do. See. We would almost certainly be in exactly the same economy when it comes to light bulbs today if the government did nothing. Because they are better and lose cost effective. Better and more cost effective is also sometimes called “the invisible hand”. But what do I mean that politicians “do this”.
They find an issue. See where the wind is blowing. Then jump out there holding a fan pretending “look at all the wind I caused!”
Capitalism gave us cheaper cost effective led bulbs. But it won’t get credit because some opportunistic politicians cobbled some bill together that made people buy them and got to claim credit.
I forget who said it and I’m going to butcher it. But the phrase is kind of like this “society is like a parade that is going by on its own without a leader. Politicians are like if people jump out in front of the parade with a big hat on. From an outside observer you might think that person must be leading this parade. But they’re not. They’re just pretending.”
I have often wondered if it will be the 15,681st dire climate change report that will convince the Chinese government to ease their use of coal. Sometimes I despair and think it may take upwards of 15,690 reports to finally get them to change policies.
Too many people just want to culture war about whether climate change is happening or not, but of course that is the shiny distraction. What matters is the technology available to China, India, Thailand, etc. as they develop. Oddly it seems the most internationally travelled people seem to have not noticed from their air conditioned resorts that it is miserably hot and humid in Asia and the people would gladly sell their first born children into sexual slavery for a Window A/C unit…
This is all a problem of scale. The world pumps around 5 billion gallons of oil out of the ground every day to make everything you have, and that is not going to be replaced by battery cars for rich people who want to feel good about themselves. All of the things that matter are large industrial systems and they will only change when the economics make sense, and no amount of ITC/PTC subsidy can change that. Everything is about technology development and anything else is a distraction.
The fact is, nobody actually cares and solutions to it don’t require abstention or revolution. It just requires that we stay on the broad track we are on and build lots of economic nuclear power plants over the next 50 or so years and make them cheaper than coal.
If we had been building nuclear plants for the LAST 50 years it probably would have done more good. But alas climate druids who revere Mother Earth just couldn’t accept the trade off that we might have a little nuclear waste laying around. Even if it did prevent the sun from cooking the planet.
The opposition of much of the environmental left to nuclear power is one of the most egregious mistakes a political movement has ever made. It’s shameful. Thankfully many have come around in the US (eg Clean Air Task Force founder Armond Cohen — who I respect a lot — started his career as an anti-nuke protester but has since pivoted his entire NGO to be hugely pro-nuclear). Europe is still a different story at least in some countries. (Especially Germany and Austria). Germany had the world’s best and safest fleet of nuclear power plants — I had hoped the last few might be saved but nope, shut’em down, and let’s burn lignite (braunköhle) instead. 🤪
It's convenient to blame hippies or druids, but the ani-nuke movement was and is a hell of a lot more mainstream than that. Or else it wouldn't have been successful.
Hippies and druids led the charges. And left quite the impressions on the filmmakers to at would make the anti nuke propaganda movies of the 70s and 80s.
See my comment below. I think that tech will save us in the long run (I am in the nuclear industry!), but in the meantime, we’re going to get 3+ degrees C of warming if we wait for technology to save us. I do think, though, that this is probably what’s going to happen in reality, as recent experience pretty clearly indicates that voters will not accept energy-constraining policies. At least not until the effects of climate change are far more obvious on our day-to-day lives. It’s an insidious problem since it’s global and it’s a slow burn.
Most of what I have read says we will be somewhere between 2-3 degrees in 2100. Remember, that would have been seen as a STAGGERING success when Al Gore put out his misinformation spectacular documentary in 2006- everyone was talking six degrees back then. We will keep getting better and the number will continue to go down as the future unfolds. As long as we keep fracking to replace coal with gas!
2-3° assumes a decarbonization path that we are not currently on. Post-Paris, various governments committed to things that _would_ have put us on such a path, but most of those commitments are being quietly unwound over the last two years. The climate community just doesn’t want to say it out loud, yet.
All due respect, but the “climate community” is the reason we are in this mess in the first place. I would recommend reading some of Roger Pielke Jr.’s Substack- he has great realistic scenario analysis explaining why the doomsday RCP8.5 (4.5°) type scenarios are completely implausible.
Salt grain taken though- only a damn fool tries to predict the future of a chaotic system 80 years from now, even with “Science^TM”. I guess I am just an optimist…
Ok now you’ve lost me. Politics and policies are open to everyone to debate — things like the tradeoff between decarbonization and energy affordability — but neither you nor I should think we’re qualified to discount the IPCC on where temperatures might go under different emissions scenarios which is a much purer science question.
Anyway, I didn’t say 4.5°. I said 3+ (my median guess is that we’ll land on 3.5° warming unless we do some geoengineering type emergency action “scorching the sky” with sulphur)
I’ve read quite a bit of the IPCC- and I don’t really dispute anything on the physical science side. Once they get into the policy stuff they get way over their skis because it becomes a political and advocacy project. The paths forward for humanity are not really a science question- they are a response to a series of political questions (as you implied, but including birth rate projections, technology, etc.). All science can do is inform potential outcomes. In reality, the difference between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees is likely not something that can be accurately calculated and is probably within the noise of any model humans can create that tries to predict that far out.
Anyway, the fact that we are having a conversation of a prediction difference of 1°C 80 years from now
Is a pretty good sign in my book. You can take the over and I’ll take the under and if we both live that long the winner buys a beer…
I see a lot of writing on "what we should do about problem x" where the writer doesn't have any relevant qualifications, but they do have a college degree, reasonably high social status and are good at writing authoritatively in a way that convinces decision makers. Often times, their solution is stupid or just really bad, but it gets taken seriously because with that college degree and social status they probably are pretty smart and speak to other similar people without subject expertise.
It also drives the idea that society should solve problem x in the way that highly educated people without subject expertise think we should solve it. I think it's a part of why degrowth as a solution to climate change was taken seriously for so long.
Not to be nitpicky, but if you listen to what he was saying, it seems like trump was talking about CFL bulbs, not LEDs. He actually has a point about CFLs. The problem is he’s still (surprise surprise) an idiot, because CFLs haven’t been the main thing for a number of years.
As Paul Drake mentioned below, it doesn't matter if we're 'bright green' or 'dark green' in the developed world. Take a look at Chart 1 at the bottom of this article:
We could cut out 50% of US and EU emissions, and it would barely make a dent in world CO2 emissions. Asia (India, SE Asia and China) is where the growth is. So, the whole world really needs to build solar, batteries, nuclear and upgrade their grids. And it probably wouldn't hurt to learn something about geo-engineering, because the time frame for switching to mostly renewables isn't going to be fast enough to avoid some significant effects from the CO2 that's already up there.
You’re totally right — it’s a global coordination problem. And the emissions from the US and EU are quickly becoming, if not quite *irrelevant*, definitely not the top driver of the problem anymore.
Two things are interesting about that thing that Matt wrote:
1 -- "coordination problem" is an odd way of putting it. That's like saying my robbing a bank is a "coordination problem" between my not being authorized and their cash dispensing system. In this case, in 2023 China built 95% of the new *coal* power plants in the world. The problem isn't coordination, it's that they want power plants operating now, and they have a lot of coal.
2 -- Matt wrote: "[l]ast week, I was talking to someone who doesn’t follow policy closely, who voted for Biden in 2020 but isn’t sure about 2024. She told me her top issue is climate change, which she described in fairly apocalyptic terms. I told her that Biden had enacted historic climate legislation and that Democrats had made this their top priority. She said if they’d really solved climate change, she would surely have heard about it"
This is so dumb it brings tears to my eyes. This is her top issue but she doesn't know about anything Biden's done over the last 4 years to address it, and she also apparently thinks Trump is equally likely to do something to help ameliorate it. And on top of that, she seems to think it's going to get "solved" in a few years.
I'm more a policies guy than a vibes guy, but if that's the level of policy analysis an undecided voter is going to apply, well, let's just have a dance party.
The entire tone of this article, and of nearly everything one sees on related topics, is little more than virtue signalling. The 1.2 billion people in the developed world will have little influence on the future of the global environment. It will be the other 6, soon to be 9, billion who seek to rise to the developed-world standard of living. And if you are making decisions about energy sources, in such a country, you will very likely go with coal. Locally available and cheap. Even if you were tempted to go in higher tech (and lower EROI) directions, the abysmal record of the West at honoring promises of financial support would push you away.
Great work as usual Jeff! Yesterday's podcast was awesome! Been ill, catching up on kudos.
I have a serious question considering your EPA background and "Economish" skills: Wouldn't it be more efficient to launch the Earth's nuclear waste towards the Sun instead of burying it under mountains for centuries at the cost of billions? Was this ever discussed within EPA during one of those used-to-be-trendy "think outside the box" retreats?
Ugh, yea, safety concerns? Rockets rarely crash these days unless the Musketeer is involved. No contracts for him. He's fed at the government trough enough anyway.
Again, this is a serious question I have pondered for years (and no, I don't use drugs) that is above my pay grade.
Or maybe one of your readers could chime in please?
Thing is, spent nuclear fuel is really only a significant radiological hazard for about 600 years when it still gives off Gamma and Beta decays. Once it is down to the Alpha emitters (Pu, TRU, etc.), you basically have to eat it for it to harm you (which I would not advocate…). There is also almost none of it in the world- we could build a Roman Colosseum and store it there for a few hundred years and that would take care of the whole “problem” for as long as it matters. Basically the “nuclear waste problem” is really not a problem in a technical sense- it is just a long running bureaucratic policy fight.
So let’s not bury it or send it to the moon. Let’s just put it in cement and steel casks and let it decay peacefully. I would support a more centralized interim storage location though- would make things easier to deal with and simplify regulation.
You have to get it into orbit fist, and then spend 30 km/s of delta-v. Let's say you can slingshot around Venus and so it'll only take 20 km/s of delta-v with clever mass.
A H2/O2 rocket with a specific impulse of 450 seconds will need a mass ratio of 75:1. That is, to get 1 kg of rocket+waste into the sun, you have to start with 75kg of rocket+waste+fuel.
You can get 1 kg into orbit for about $500 these days but that's using the rocket ship that's going to rescue the stranded Boeing astronauts, and we don't want to use those bozos. So we're looking more at about $5000 per kg.
So with our massless rocket and massless tank and massless engine, we can get 1kg of waste into the sun for only $375,000,000.
Or we dig a hole about 25 stories deep, store the waste on every other floor from sub-basement-1 through sub-basement-20, and then have someone drive a robot around once every few months to make sure nothing's leaking.
Spent nuclear fuel is a solid. It doesn’t leak anything.
And spent nuclear fuel is HEAVY! putting it in orbit would require massive amounts of rocket fuel, which is basically natural gas… so that would kinda defeat the whole using it to stop carbon emissions thing.
This has been one of the major debates within environmental/decarbonization circles for decades (where I’ve spent my career; now in nuclear power)
These two schools of thought have many names but I like “Dark Green” and “Bright Green”. Where “dark green” is the idea of living smaller, more constrained lives to solve the problem, and “bright green” is the idea the technology will get us out of it. In its extreme, it’s sometimes called “ecomodernism”, where energy use is “decoupled” from environmental impact. And thus one of the most popular nuclear power podcasts is called “Decouple”.
Obviously, the bright green future is the more appealing one, and far easier to sell politically, as Jeff points out here.
In reality, I think it is going to take a little bit of both if we’re to get there and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
That said, my observation is that as soon as people realize that climate policies will have even the *smallest* impact on their consumer choices of way of life, they immediately punish the politicians that promulgate dark green policies. So you have things like in the US, Biden going basically only for bright green policies (dropping even modest Obama-era dark green policies like low-water appliances). And here in Canada, where our current (Trudeau) federal government went much heavier on dark green policies — well, just look at the polls. They’re at like late-Carter levels.
So I think the result is that we’re going to get the bright green policies only. Long run I do think technology will save us, but things are going to get pretty bad before 2050. Continued rampup of heat, extreme-weather events, global climate migration. Not the end of the world, but it will get bad. I also think that “geoengineering” (sulphur seeding in the atmosphere to cool temperatures etc.) is pretty quickly going to go from unthinkable to, the base plan.
Yglesias has written about this too, also urging Dems to drop all the Dark Green stuff. Politically it makes sense!
You might like my piece on the Inflation Reduction Act (https://tinyurl.com/3uxptczc), in which I argue that I'd prefer a carbon tax, but I know it's not going to happen, so this strategy in which we make big government investments in green tech and infrastructure is a decent Plan B. A carbon tax, I suppose, is "dark-green"-in-the-short-run-for-the-purposes-of-getting-to-"bright-green"-in-the-long-run, but that short run does involve making some things more expensive. Which is probably why it's such a hard sell. Even various "carbon tax and dividend" plans -- which really seem like they SHOULD work, politically -- have been a tough sell. So, I've basically accepted that this is the only politically viable option (for now, at least) and I'm hoping we can make it work.
Yeah I think you’re right. Here in Canada under the Liberal Party we just had 8 years of a substantial carbon tax (that meaningfully changed the price of gasoline and home-heating natural gas) with 100% of the carbon-tax revenues rebated to citizens. And the result is that the Conservative Party is now 20 points up in the polls going into an election next year, with plank #1 in their platform being “Axe the Tax”. Left wing parties everywhere else in the world are seeing the lesson.
Taxes on energy hurt poor people the most. Even if you try to frame it as “revenue neutral” this is a political loser- you can’t even get deep blue places like Washington State to vote for carbon taxes like this for F’s sake. Even if you could, China would just say “hey thanks for that advantage- we will make your fertilizer for you instead using coal.”
Energy needs to be inexpensive for a good quality of life. Clean energy needs to be even inexpensiver otherwise it doesn’t matter.
This is true at the moment, but environmentalists and need to keep up making the case for taxation of net emissions. Climate change was not overcome in a day.
But plan B ought to a) mimic the effects of a carbon tax as much s possible and b) be financed with consumption taxes. Even so, it will have greater costs than a carbon tax, so is slightly less bright green.
In reality, I think it is going to take a little bit of both if we’re to get there and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
A very little bit. Taxing net CO2 emissions will result in some readjustments that we'd rather not have to make, but not very painful adjustments and done gradually.
I was more intrigued that this guy who wrote an anti aircon book 14 years ago managed to use that hook to get a NYT oped now!
(and his whole "we wash up by hand, we hang the laundry outside" - I'm reading a lot of "my wife" into that WE).
You missed the dumbest part of the essay, where he proudly declared that he doesn’t use a dishwasher. For those not in the know: water is a far more precious resource than energy especially going forward, and a dishwasher uses much less water than hand washing does.
It just goes to show that our intuitions about what is “good” or “bad” for the environment are not always correct. Air conditioning is another one: air conditioning in the summer can rely on solar power and be basically carbon neutral, while home heating is a massive carbon source. And heat pumps are the best possible solution to the latter, but what is a heat pump? Just an air conditioner run in reverse. So in fact if air conditioners are the thin end of the wedge that gets people to switch to heat pumps they may be a massive environmental win.
It obviously depends on where you are but there is so much water in the US East Coast and it's a renewable resource, too. Not even the slightest of problems. We have to figure out a way to get it out west.
So. The major problem with the issue of climate change is mostly that, and this is really important, that “wolf” has been cried far too often. And it’s worn society down.
The proponents have oversold the effects for three decades by a pretty massive margin.
This is DARE on marijuana levels of exaggeration.
“If we don’t do anything New York City will be under water by: 2004, 2008, 2012, 2020, 2025, 2035, or 2050”.
The problem with climate activists is that they are so thirsty to be right. And to be righteous that they massively oversell it by cherry picking the absolute worst “sky is falling” scenario in all of these studies and running it up the flag pole to try and literally scare everyone into “going green”.
And it’s a shit strategy. It’s literally the boy who cried wolf writ large.
I think by the third or fourth missed “climate apocalypse deadline” I really started tuning all of this out. If they’re not going to take this seriously why should I?
But that isn’t stopping anyone because there is no drug quite as addictive as righteous indignation. So they keep telling us that “all of humanity will die. Nowhere will be safe. Crops will never grow again. Billions of people will starve. All if we don’t do something yesterday!” Except that never happens. People just carry on. Things get a little hotter slowly and we, as always, adapt.
And I think that’s the way through. Adaptation. It’s kind of the thing human beings do better than animals. And it’s literally what separates us from animals. We can adapt like morherfuckers and already are.
The problem is druids, as Jeff points out, don’t want adaptation. They want capitulation. They want people to live an agrarian lifestyle “in perfect harmony with Mother Nature and the beautiful web of life”. Wearing hemp. Not using shampoo. Trying to pet bears and getting mauled. That kind of lifestyle.
Good luck with that.
This perfectly sums it up. If you ever wonder why right-wingers say things like “climate change is a hoax”, this is it.
The movement has done such a shitty job of selling itself in a sober, honest way. They’ve instead opted for finger wagging from the moral superiors in our society to chastise the plebes into compliance. In case you missed it, this doesn’t work.
Adding further comedic effect is the fact that the same people who tell you it is a moral imperative to give up your SUV, air conditioning, and cross-country flights are the same ones who ride in their up-armored Chevy Suburban to the airport where they board their private jet to fly across the world, before returning home to 1 of their 3 fully air conditioned mansions that is located in the same coastal areas they promise you are just minutes away from being swallowed by the ocean.
It’s also hard to sell people on climate change when most of the power players in Congress routinely use it as a Trojan horse for ramming through long-standing left-wing policy positions that have no logical connection to climate change as solutions.
Finally, the tendency to attribute everything to climate change contributes to the crying wolf phenomenon. Forest fires don’t just magically appear out of thin air. Most of them are caused by some form of arson. But we ignore that because it’s inconvenient to the narrative and we run deceptive headlines like “experts say climate change to blame for forest fire problem”.
Another great example is the fake statistics regarding hurricanes. The lie goes that climate change is making them so much more intense and deadly than they’ve ever been by using the monetary value of destruction as proof. It makes sense on its face until you realize that yes, some million dollar properties that got destroyed are worth more than a few shacks that people lived in back in the 1800’s. Contributing to the increased dollar value is the fact that the earth is more populous and more people are living in more concentrated suburban/urban areas, so it’s mostly a function of the amount of people and the things that they own existing in the path of the hurricane. That doesn’t mean they’re these deadly, basically nuclear hurricanes that will swallow the earth into a black hole.
You’re right that the world isn’t going to end, and the activists are going to pay the price for crying wolf too many times (already are — climate action is in retrenchment across the democratic world). Like I get why they wanted to hype up the collapse of the oceanic circulation — it’s apocalyptic! gets the donations flowing! — but serious climate scientists downplay the chances of that actually happening.
But let’s not kid around, the next 75 years isn’t going to be just a gentle warming while people “as always, adapt”. There are going to be a billion climate refugees and the strength of storms is going to pummel infrastructure. Think ever-increasing numbers and strength of fires, wind, and floods. Again, there’s not going to be a “Day After Tomorrow” superstorm. It is going to be a slow burn. But over time, it is going to just make life harder every year.
Which is good. The thing about a slow burn is you have time. I do thin the “billion climate refugees” is a bit overstating it. But yes there will be mass movement of people from inhospitable climates to hospitable climates.
The question is will the nimbys let us build the apartments we need.
The actual climate scientists aren't predicting disaster. It's stuff like "we're going to grow richer much more slowly because of all the climate problems" but not even any actual contractions, let alone collapse.
I know. That’s my point though. Those headlines don’t move papers. But “new study shows New York could be underwater by 2008 says new climate study from seniors at Oxford!”
I used to belong to a forum (remember those?) that had a lot of very cranky older white men MAGAs before MAGA was even a thing. One guy in particular was furious that incandescent bulbs were being phased out and bought several pallets of bulbs. Pallets. More than he could ever use in his lifetime because that'll show those commie Democrats trying to take his bulb choice away.
Well in fairness to old cranky bastards, the CFL bulbs they were trying to push on us in the beginning sucked ass…. But once decent LED lights came out the resistance largely stopped because they ended up being way better.
Again, it was mostly just culture wars between people who think the state should tell you what you can buy and reactionary people who refuse to change no matter what. Unfortunately that is a bottomless well that we will never find our way out of…
I don't remember what kind of bulbs they were at the time but whatever they were, they had a much longer lifespan than incandescent and put out as much light. I didn't understand why that twit would buy pallets of the old kind, especially considering how fragile they are. I'm sure he had more than a few that arrived broken.
As an aside, are there really people that think the state should tell us what to buy?
Maybe not a LOT who want to tell you exactly what you can buy (they do exist), but there are an awful lot who want to tell you what you can’t buy. If you spend any time listening to progressive/far left economic ideas what they say might shock you…
Not a lot? How’s that sugar ban going?
I seldom listen to the lunatic fringe. It's like trying to understand the thinking of an angry emu.
Incandescents should not have been banned. Maybe taxed at, say, two dollars a bulb. People who really wanted them because it was important could still get them but most people will just grab the cheapest thing.
The problem with the whole bulb gate issue is that this is what politicians do. See. We would almost certainly be in exactly the same economy when it comes to light bulbs today if the government did nothing. Because they are better and lose cost effective. Better and more cost effective is also sometimes called “the invisible hand”. But what do I mean that politicians “do this”.
They find an issue. See where the wind is blowing. Then jump out there holding a fan pretending “look at all the wind I caused!”
Capitalism gave us cheaper cost effective led bulbs. But it won’t get credit because some opportunistic politicians cobbled some bill together that made people buy them and got to claim credit.
I forget who said it and I’m going to butcher it. But the phrase is kind of like this “society is like a parade that is going by on its own without a leader. Politicians are like if people jump out in front of the parade with a big hat on. From an outside observer you might think that person must be leading this parade. But they’re not. They’re just pretending.”
I have often wondered if it will be the 15,681st dire climate change report that will convince the Chinese government to ease their use of coal. Sometimes I despair and think it may take upwards of 15,690 reports to finally get them to change policies.
Reports won’t change chinas mind! In order to to do that you have to glue your hand to a road in England!
Because if you glued your hand to a road in china it would be the last time your family ever saw you.
Too many people just want to culture war about whether climate change is happening or not, but of course that is the shiny distraction. What matters is the technology available to China, India, Thailand, etc. as they develop. Oddly it seems the most internationally travelled people seem to have not noticed from their air conditioned resorts that it is miserably hot and humid in Asia and the people would gladly sell their first born children into sexual slavery for a Window A/C unit…
This is all a problem of scale. The world pumps around 5 billion gallons of oil out of the ground every day to make everything you have, and that is not going to be replaced by battery cars for rich people who want to feel good about themselves. All of the things that matter are large industrial systems and they will only change when the economics make sense, and no amount of ITC/PTC subsidy can change that. Everything is about technology development and anything else is a distraction.
The fact is, nobody actually cares and solutions to it don’t require abstention or revolution. It just requires that we stay on the broad track we are on and build lots of economic nuclear power plants over the next 50 or so years and make them cheaper than coal.
If we had been building nuclear plants for the LAST 50 years it probably would have done more good. But alas climate druids who revere Mother Earth just couldn’t accept the trade off that we might have a little nuclear waste laying around. Even if it did prevent the sun from cooking the planet.
The opposition of much of the environmental left to nuclear power is one of the most egregious mistakes a political movement has ever made. It’s shameful. Thankfully many have come around in the US (eg Clean Air Task Force founder Armond Cohen — who I respect a lot — started his career as an anti-nuke protester but has since pivoted his entire NGO to be hugely pro-nuclear). Europe is still a different story at least in some countries. (Especially Germany and Austria). Germany had the world’s best and safest fleet of nuclear power plants — I had hoped the last few might be saved but nope, shut’em down, and let’s burn lignite (braunköhle) instead. 🤪
Nothing is more fun than watching those videos of hippie antinuke activists from 20 years ago where they say “but building NPPs will take 20 years”
No time like the present to get started. Although buolding during the ZIRP would have been a LOT cheaper…
It's convenient to blame hippies or druids, but the ani-nuke movement was and is a hell of a lot more mainstream than that. Or else it wouldn't have been successful.
Hippies and druids led the charges. And left quite the impressions on the filmmakers to at would make the anti nuke propaganda movies of the 70s and 80s.
Shit rolls downhill.
See my comment below. I think that tech will save us in the long run (I am in the nuclear industry!), but in the meantime, we’re going to get 3+ degrees C of warming if we wait for technology to save us. I do think, though, that this is probably what’s going to happen in reality, as recent experience pretty clearly indicates that voters will not accept energy-constraining policies. At least not until the effects of climate change are far more obvious on our day-to-day lives. It’s an insidious problem since it’s global and it’s a slow burn.
Most of what I have read says we will be somewhere between 2-3 degrees in 2100. Remember, that would have been seen as a STAGGERING success when Al Gore put out his misinformation spectacular documentary in 2006- everyone was talking six degrees back then. We will keep getting better and the number will continue to go down as the future unfolds. As long as we keep fracking to replace coal with gas!
2-3° assumes a decarbonization path that we are not currently on. Post-Paris, various governments committed to things that _would_ have put us on such a path, but most of those commitments are being quietly unwound over the last two years. The climate community just doesn’t want to say it out loud, yet.
All due respect, but the “climate community” is the reason we are in this mess in the first place. I would recommend reading some of Roger Pielke Jr.’s Substack- he has great realistic scenario analysis explaining why the doomsday RCP8.5 (4.5°) type scenarios are completely implausible.
Salt grain taken though- only a damn fool tries to predict the future of a chaotic system 80 years from now, even with “Science^TM”. I guess I am just an optimist…
Ok now you’ve lost me. Politics and policies are open to everyone to debate — things like the tradeoff between decarbonization and energy affordability — but neither you nor I should think we’re qualified to discount the IPCC on where temperatures might go under different emissions scenarios which is a much purer science question.
Anyway, I didn’t say 4.5°. I said 3+ (my median guess is that we’ll land on 3.5° warming unless we do some geoengineering type emergency action “scorching the sky” with sulphur)
I’ve read quite a bit of the IPCC- and I don’t really dispute anything on the physical science side. Once they get into the policy stuff they get way over their skis because it becomes a political and advocacy project. The paths forward for humanity are not really a science question- they are a response to a series of political questions (as you implied, but including birth rate projections, technology, etc.). All science can do is inform potential outcomes. In reality, the difference between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees is likely not something that can be accurately calculated and is probably within the noise of any model humans can create that tries to predict that far out.
Anyway, the fact that we are having a conversation of a prediction difference of 1°C 80 years from now
Is a pretty good sign in my book. You can take the over and I’ll take the under and if we both live that long the winner buys a beer…
Jeff, the climate police are going to lock you up for being sensible.
I see a lot of writing on "what we should do about problem x" where the writer doesn't have any relevant qualifications, but they do have a college degree, reasonably high social status and are good at writing authoritatively in a way that convinces decision makers. Often times, their solution is stupid or just really bad, but it gets taken seriously because with that college degree and social status they probably are pretty smart and speak to other similar people without subject expertise.
It also drives the idea that society should solve problem x in the way that highly educated people without subject expertise think we should solve it. I think it's a part of why degrowth as a solution to climate change was taken seriously for so long.
Not to be nitpicky, but if you listen to what he was saying, it seems like trump was talking about CFL bulbs, not LEDs. He actually has a point about CFLs. The problem is he’s still (surprise surprise) an idiot, because CFLs haven’t been the main thing for a number of years.
As Paul Drake mentioned below, it doesn't matter if we're 'bright green' or 'dark green' in the developed world. Take a look at Chart 1 at the bottom of this article:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
We could cut out 50% of US and EU emissions, and it would barely make a dent in world CO2 emissions. Asia (India, SE Asia and China) is where the growth is. So, the whole world really needs to build solar, batteries, nuclear and upgrade their grids. And it probably wouldn't hurt to learn something about geo-engineering, because the time frame for switching to mostly renewables isn't going to be fast enough to avoid some significant effects from the CO2 that's already up there.
Great points. Asia doesn’t seem to have the obsession with climate change that we in the west do.
Yglesias wrote about this a few weeks ago
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/global-warming-local-benefits
You’re totally right — it’s a global coordination problem. And the emissions from the US and EU are quickly becoming, if not quite *irrelevant*, definitely not the top driver of the problem anymore.
Two things are interesting about that thing that Matt wrote:
1 -- "coordination problem" is an odd way of putting it. That's like saying my robbing a bank is a "coordination problem" between my not being authorized and their cash dispensing system. In this case, in 2023 China built 95% of the new *coal* power plants in the world. The problem isn't coordination, it's that they want power plants operating now, and they have a lot of coal.
2 -- Matt wrote: "[l]ast week, I was talking to someone who doesn’t follow policy closely, who voted for Biden in 2020 but isn’t sure about 2024. She told me her top issue is climate change, which she described in fairly apocalyptic terms. I told her that Biden had enacted historic climate legislation and that Democrats had made this their top priority. She said if they’d really solved climate change, she would surely have heard about it"
This is so dumb it brings tears to my eyes. This is her top issue but she doesn't know about anything Biden's done over the last 4 years to address it, and she also apparently thinks Trump is equally likely to do something to help ameliorate it. And on top of that, she seems to think it's going to get "solved" in a few years.
I'm more a policies guy than a vibes guy, but if that's the level of policy analysis an undecided voter is going to apply, well, let's just have a dance party.
Nothing more fun than waking up in the middle of a hot summer night, soaked in sweat....marinading in my own juices.
Stay the hell away from my AC.
The entire tone of this article, and of nearly everything one sees on related topics, is little more than virtue signalling. The 1.2 billion people in the developed world will have little influence on the future of the global environment. It will be the other 6, soon to be 9, billion who seek to rise to the developed-world standard of living. And if you are making decisions about energy sources, in such a country, you will very likely go with coal. Locally available and cheap. Even if you were tempted to go in higher tech (and lower EROI) directions, the abysmal record of the West at honoring promises of financial support would push you away.
I assume that by "this article" you mean the NY Times article -- I have never claimed to have virtue.
FWIW, I think coal's days are numbered (we're already starting to see this shift), but the sooner it becomes an antiquated technology, the better.
"We’re going to solve climate change by advancing new technology,"
True, but we are not going to deploy those technologies without pricing net CO2 emissions.
This reminds me of Jonah Goldberg’s essay on his resistance to eating bugs to save the environment. https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/bug-eaters-and-thought-policers/
Great work as usual Jeff! Yesterday's podcast was awesome! Been ill, catching up on kudos.
I have a serious question considering your EPA background and "Economish" skills: Wouldn't it be more efficient to launch the Earth's nuclear waste towards the Sun instead of burying it under mountains for centuries at the cost of billions? Was this ever discussed within EPA during one of those used-to-be-trendy "think outside the box" retreats?
Ugh, yea, safety concerns? Rockets rarely crash these days unless the Musketeer is involved. No contracts for him. He's fed at the government trough enough anyway.
Again, this is a serious question I have pondered for years (and no, I don't use drugs) that is above my pay grade.
Or maybe one of your readers could chime in please?
Any info would be most appreciated!
Thanks!
Thing is, spent nuclear fuel is really only a significant radiological hazard for about 600 years when it still gives off Gamma and Beta decays. Once it is down to the Alpha emitters (Pu, TRU, etc.), you basically have to eat it for it to harm you (which I would not advocate…). There is also almost none of it in the world- we could build a Roman Colosseum and store it there for a few hundred years and that would take care of the whole “problem” for as long as it matters. Basically the “nuclear waste problem” is really not a problem in a technical sense- it is just a long running bureaucratic policy fight.
So let’s not bury it or send it to the moon. Let’s just put it in cement and steel casks and let it decay peacefully. I would support a more centralized interim storage location though- would make things easier to deal with and simplify regulation.
You have to get it into orbit fist, and then spend 30 km/s of delta-v. Let's say you can slingshot around Venus and so it'll only take 20 km/s of delta-v with clever mass.
A H2/O2 rocket with a specific impulse of 450 seconds will need a mass ratio of 75:1. That is, to get 1 kg of rocket+waste into the sun, you have to start with 75kg of rocket+waste+fuel.
You can get 1 kg into orbit for about $500 these days but that's using the rocket ship that's going to rescue the stranded Boeing astronauts, and we don't want to use those bozos. So we're looking more at about $5000 per kg.
So with our massless rocket and massless tank and massless engine, we can get 1kg of waste into the sun for only $375,000,000.
Or we dig a hole about 25 stories deep, store the waste on every other floor from sub-basement-1 through sub-basement-20, and then have someone drive a robot around once every few months to make sure nothing's leaking.
Spent nuclear fuel is a solid. It doesn’t leak anything.
And spent nuclear fuel is HEAVY! putting it in orbit would require massive amounts of rocket fuel, which is basically natural gas… so that would kinda defeat the whole using it to stop carbon emissions thing.
We will use nuclear power to synthesize natural gas that we use to power the rockets we use to put nuclear waste into the sun
😂