JULY WAS OFFICIALLY THE HOTTEST MONTH IN RECORDED HISTORY — PART TWO

NOW WHAT? — Part Two — Who Is Not Helping

Introduction To the Series

I’ve been an environmentalist since college in the late 20th century. I have worked professionally, off and on, toward clean air and water through public policy. That actually kind of worked until it didn’t. Clean air requirements put in place in the 1970’s led Midwestern American factories to build higher smokestacks to disperse pollution so no local area fell above a certain limit of particulates. Then we found the side-effect was to hit New England in the form of acid rain, the first hint of a global problem. Ten years later came the dawning awareness of global warming.

At that point, I decided a more personal response was needed. I looked at solar panels for our single-family detached home, but ultimately decided to buy wind power from the local utility, so our household electricity is renewably sourced (still have gas heat and hot water). Then I bought a plug-in electric car, the Chevy Volt. (Later, my wife bought a Nissan Leaf.) And so, we made a dent in our personal carbon footprint. And unlike UN negotiations, this was all something we could do personally.

I was all self-congratulatory, and even spent time volunteering at “Drive Electric Week” events to try to get more people interested, and to push local governments to build more community charging infrastructure. It was a tough sale. Most people would say, um I’d like to but what about…

Then 2021 came along, and I gotta rethink this. Following are 5 short notes.

- The Unthinkable is Here

- Thinking About the Unthinkable — Seeing the Unseen

- What I Did to Help (Not Enough)

- Who’s Not Actually Helping

- What You Can Do, What Can Be Done

- How to Change Minds

PART II

WHAT I DID TO HELP (NOT ENOUGH)

As noted in the introduction, I’ve been at this a while, and it may help to see the back story of energy policy in the U.S., and its interplay with the environmental movement.

I’ve been an environmentalist since college in the late 20th century. I have worked professionally, off and on, toward clean air and water through public policy.

I was drawn into the anti-nuclear movement back in the day. But I wasn’t comfortable just being against something, and so educated myself on energy conservation, as a short term measure, and solar power, which was just becoming a thing. (Jimmy Carter created the Solar Energy Research Institute in 1977 (!) (The Solar Energy Research Institute was later converted to the National Renewable Energy Lab, which was then privatized like other national labs by President Bush (the first). It became a convenient place for conservatives to throw some occasion money at “studying the problem” of needing renewable resources while not actually doing anything. (Win Win!!)

I went to work in 1979 for the state of Colorado Office of Energy Conservation. This was funded by Federal money, and then (Democratic) Governor Dick Lamm located that within the Governor’s office, to protect it from the Republican state legislature which was dominated by the oil and gas industry.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected and promptly appointed a dentist as Secretary of Energy — Secretary Edwards first speech noted his job was to shut down the department. As funding shrank, I fled Colorado thinking Washington D.C. might be a better option. Indeed, the still Democratic Congress was more friendly to green arguments, but it was largely a stalemate there.

Except for one thing I worked on, which was to successfully deregulate part of the electric utility industry, up until then a vertical monopoly (power plant generation, transmission lines, local distribution networks.) This legislative battle set the utilities against their large industrial customers, who had the political support to match. That deregulation is paying dividends today as competition in generation is largely favoring cheaper solar and wind options. (Intuitive — still capital costs, but the “fuel” is free.)

But also in the 1980’s, clean air requirements put in place in the 1970’s, when environmental legislation had some bipartisan support, led Midwestern American factories to build higher smokestacks to disperse pollution so no local area fell above a certain limit of particulates. We were proud of the accomplishment until we found the side-effect was to hit New England in the form of acid rain, the first hint of a global problem, in the mid-1980’s. Ten years later came the dawning awareness of global warming. (After complaining about environmental regulation killing jobs, Midwestern economies were hollowed out anyway as jobs in manufacturing were offshored, because the labor was cheaper — and non-union.)

I was largely absent from the energy business from 1990 to 2010, but learned a little bit about digital technology. I had pitched my telecom employers that they should be not only selling connectivity to homes, but also to cars. My amateur EV advocacy started up in 2012 when I bought an electric vehicle.

I spent five years as a Drive Electric event organizer, introducing people to EV’s (no one was buying) and trying to get governments and employers to build charging stations as the wave of the future (also no one was buying.) It was in some ways OK that no one was buying my advocacy of Level 2 charging, because charging infrastructure evolved quickly, so that now everything is about DC Fast Charging. As we’ll see in Part 3, range anxiety is dead.

So, my failure as an advocate was premature in the face of range anxiety, and a paucity of EV choices that really worked for most people. Tesla was ahead of the curve, but only at a high price. (High sticker price, but arguably even then lower cost of ownership over 10 year life — see Part 3 of this article.)

Even in progressive Boulder, rather than invest in such EV infrastructure, some local green demagogues picked a fight with the local utility to secede and form their own utility. They had political support from an aging local population who supported anything “green”.

But the logic was flawed, and went against what I learned in the digital world as “Metcalfe’s Law”, which states that the value of a network increases, and the cost per connection decreases, with the number of nodes on that network. But the sclerotic environmentalists were willing to throw away millions in tax money before the whole effort collapsed of its own weight.

But I guess sclerotic environmentalists is a big part of my story of “Who’s Not Really Helping,” so stay tuned.

(By the way, Texas is famous for its self-image of independence, such that it also ignores Metcalfe’s Law and walled off its electric grid from neighboring states, unlike the other 49 states who are interconnected. In the winter of 2021, an “unprecedented” (like they all are now, see Part 1 of this article) weather event crashed their grid and caused hundreds of deaths. https://www.texastribune.org/series/winter-storm-power-outage/ Since then, Texas has engaged in multiple exercises of “resilience”, but still refuses to interconnect “because Federal regulation.” Despite exceptions, the electric utility grid, even in Texas, now is part of the solution as we’ll see in Part 3.)

In the meantime, I invested in a program offered by the local utility called WindSource. So, I paid a premium in order to finance more wind energy on the grid, so displacing the carbon emissions of my share of electricity, thus reinforcing that my car was not only not spewing tailpipe emissions, but also was net zero carbon. Awareness of this program, beyond guys like me, was limited, and certainly not advertised by my home town who instead were at war with the utility.

WHO’S NOT ACTUALLY HELPING

Having done professional work in public policy and state government as noted above, I transitioned my career to telecommunications in the 2000’s. It is interesting (and relevant — see Part 3 of this essay) that the telecom industry moved entirely to national regulation (such as it is) and essentially a duopoly, while the electric utility industry maintained state level regulation (there is some increased concentration among investor-owned utilities, but they have to comply with regulation state-by-state.)

Starting in 2012, when I bought my first EV, the Chevy Volt, I began focusing my advocacy efforts around climate at the local and state level, and paying attention to climate policy at the national level as a political matter. Juxtaposing the personal with the political, it is my strong belief that, given the state of politics in this country, that personal action is what will make a difference. Personal consumer decisions, personal lifestyle decisions, and the like. The personal political decision to support climate-friendly policies might lead you to support one party over another, and one set of non-profit advocacy groups over another, the structure of those groups claiming to act in your interest has led them to overwhelmingly virtue signal their values, while devoting very little resources to change on the ground.

It is clear the Republican party and associated think tanks are predominately against any action on climate, along a spectrum from outright denial to pious “well we would support that but what about jobs? Inflation? War in the middle east?” Here’s the quick list, but I believe fighting them (or paying large, sclerotic environmental groups to fight them) wastes resources that could be better put into investing in alternatives — investing your time, your attention, your household budgets. (Yes I’m aware of the Biden/Manchin legislation; I am not persuaded that, having earmarked tax money, they wouldn’t have been better off just buying a bunch of people solar panels and electric cars.)

- National Governments

Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others consider oil reserves part of their national assets and paths to economic development. Interesting how they are also authoritarian and the benefits of the money go to very small percentages of their population.

The U.S. case is only slightly different. Recall Barack Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy — electric vehicle support, but also fossil fuel business as usual. And we catered to authoritarian regimes for years, until they killed journalists or invaded Ukraine.

- Big Enviro

The Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, etc. Their names are everywhere but their impact is minimal, if you look for example at carbon emissions over the last 40 years. Many well-meaning supporters give them money because they say they are working to transform the climate picture, but they are often bureaucratic and spend years “fighting” political administrations (when Republicans or moderate Democrats are in charge) with very little to show. Others organize periodic feel good events, like Plug-In America, that do nothing to actually put more EV’s on the road.

Just like the Biden Administration, I believe it would be more productive to take your annual contributions to those organizations and spend them buying solar panels or electric cars.

But even there, it’s not the organizations but people who like to say they are working to fight climate change because they give money to causes with climate in the title. Much like people put those Black Lives Matter signs on their front lawns of neighborhoods that have no Black people in them. I can’t tell you how many Green-identifying friends have come up with tortured rationales not to buy EVs. (See Part 3.)

- Small Government

It’s the nature of our splintered (and increasingly gerrymandered) electorate that islands of progressive thought are out there, but they fall into the same trap as Big and Small Enviro.

Exhibit A, my hometown of the City of Boulder, Colorado

Some years ago, as described above, a neighbor of mine launched a campaign to municipalize the city’s electricity infrastructure, in order to speed deployment of renewables. He got a city council seat out of it, hired a woman to negotiate the deal and paid her upwards of $300,000/year for a deal that ultimately made no sense and fell apart. But he was re-elected…

Another example of public policy inefficiency, our wealthy city got early Federal grants for charging stations; they gave the contract to the guy who manages the municipal fleet. He then buys the cheapest station alternative which a) are not networked so people can find them and, b) are not renewably sources power and, c) turn out to be always breaking down and generally unreliable. It was early days, but still money not well spent.

- The Democratic Party

Politics is the art of the possible. I’m not expecting miracles. But you can’t expect politicians to do all the work. But this is a party whose establishment came about in the 1970’s, and has steadily lost ground against Republican party, both in policy and strategy lack of climate progress, backwards movement on abortion). But they’ve kept their jobs. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi again virtue signal their support of climate policy, but have been outmaneuvered politically. They are sclerotic, and their personal measure of success is they still have jobs.

Exhibit B is Joe Manchin — they are willing to support him even though he is thoroughly embedded in the coal industry in West Virginia. If WV wants to generate all (88%) of their electricity, it’s not the biggest impact. It’s Manchin now outmaneuvering his own party at the expense of national policy. Again, the recent Biden/Manchin deal gives Manchin every coal and gas thing he wants.

This isn’t going to change any time soon, and so, like big enviro, don’t get your hopes up anymore.

One other note — the Green New Deal grew out of the progressive wing of the Democrats, but the Party doesn’t love it themselves. To be fair, it suffers a problem that the sclerotic Dems understand well, as noted by analyst Adam Tooze:

One of the things that I would fault about the Green New Deal vision is that it didn’t really spell out who its allies were going to be in the business community. I think because the Green New Deal project was formulated so strongly from the left — and in the context of a Black Lives Matter moment — it centered itself on a coalition of the marginalized, what they call front-line communities. Which is fine. But it’s also a way of picking a fight with every conceivable interest that’s actually got power.

- The Failure of Media

For a group that keeps getting criticized as liberal, the NY Times goes out of their way for bothsidesism.

“Experts say it will not be possible for electric vehicles to go from niche to mainstream without making electric charging stations as ubiquitous as corner gas stations.”

As previously mentioned, I recently (2021) drove round trips from Denver to Butte Montana 1400 miles, and Denver to Austin Texas (2000 miles), both trips with vast open prairies, and both with more charging stations than I needed. I actually am an “expert”. I wonder what “experts” they talked to, or maybe they just asked Joe down the hall in the print room and granted him “expert” status. (BTW, why aren’t newspaper stories footnoted?)

In another example from 2021, “From 4% to 45%: Energy Department Lays Out Ambitious Blueprint for Solar Power,” the Times reports,

The cost of batteries has been falling but remains too high for a rapid shift to renewables and electric cars, according to many analysts.”

Again, what “analysts”? and how many is “many”? Even with current supply chain issues, declining cost curves are a certainty for years to come.

On the renewables side, does the Times know that the Texas electric grid is 25% wind energy? Moreover, according to the Texas Electric Transportation Resources Alliance (did you know there was such an entity?)

Wind turbines and solar panels contributed nearly 39 percent of the power on the statewide grid, which is run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas,” reported the San Antonio Express News. “Solar generated 2,390 gigawatt hours of power, up 70 percent from the same time a year ago. That exceeded the total amount of solar power generated in Texas in all of 2017.” Wind, especially, contributed high amounts of power to the grid. Turbines generated about a third of the state’s power in May, a figure that was up by 37 percent from a year ago.

Oklahoma and Kansas are over 40% renewable electricity. Not a lot of tree huggers in those states, but you can drive across them with zero tailpipe emissions and dwindling power plant emissions. Some others:

- Wyoming 15%

- Montana 45%

- Colorado 25%

- Texas 25%

- California 35%

- New York 21%

Finally, in a story on Hurricane Ida, the Times bewails “the weakness of electric grids.” Why not mention that it is the centralized (i.e., fossil or nuclear fueled) electric grids that are not resilient? Renewable energy is inherently decentralized (e.g., microgrids) and hence more resilient. It would have been worth the Times noting that Texas, whose grid failed in earlier in 2021, killing hundreds, refuses to interconnect their grid with neighboring states, a common reliability strategy among every single one of the other 49 states.

- The Failure of the Free Market

How Should the Fed Deal with Climate Change? read a recent NY Times headline. “So far, Mr. Powell and other leaders at the central bank have taken a middle ground. They’ve committed to studying the ways global warming will affect the economy and the financial system, and they’re factoring those conclusions into their usual jobs of guiding the economy and regulating banks — but not trying to manage how loans and resources are allocated.”

So, first of all, this is no middle ground. (see previous section, The Failure of Media.) It is a strategy for doing nothing. But if studying global warming is factored “into their usual jobs”, would direct action/funding to mitigate the harmful effects of a carbon-based economy also come into their actual job description?

The Network for Greening the Financial System, an organization of 89 of the biggest central banks, who characterize themselves as “willing, on a voluntary basis, to share best practices and contribute to the development of environment and climate risk management in the financial sector and to mobilize mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy.” Wow, that’s quite a stand. They recently released a paper outlining possible actions.

- Recommendation n°1: Integrating climate-related risks into financial stability monitoring and micro-supervision.

- Recommendation n°2: Integrating sustainability factors into own-portfolio management.

o The NGFS recommends that the appropriate public authorities share data of relevance to Climate Risk Assessment (CRA) and, whenever possible, make them publicly available in a data repository.

o The NGFS emphasises the importance of a robust and internationally consistent climate and environmental disclosure framework. NGFS members collectively pledge their support for the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The NGFS encourages all companies issuing public debt or equity as well as financial sector institutions to disclose in line with the TCFD recommendations.

A pound of risk (to my money) management, not an ounce of prevention (of climate damage), alas.

- Gosh-Darn Pragmatists

There’s a special ring of hell for these types, also portrayed as “middle ground”. From a recent position paper by the Institute for Cultural Evolution

- So, what about reduced consumption and renewable energy? The Institute’s climate change policy proposal applauds and encourages the ongoing efforts of the environmental movement to change consumption habits and increase the percentage of renewables in our energy mix. But another hard truth is that renewable energy alone will not be able to meet domestic or international energy demands for a long time, even with anticipated technological improvements. And even significantly reduced consumption, which remains unpopular and unfeasible, cannot fill the gap. Given the rapid onset of global warming, Americans have neither the time nor the political will to pursue an “ecologically pure” strategy.

- Specifically, this means more rapidly developing breakthrough technologies such as advanced nuclear energy,4 next generation battery technology, large scale carbon capture, enhanced geothermal systems, regenerative agriculture, cultured meats and lab-grown dairy, and even geo-engineering.

So, you lost me at nuclear energy — as I type this, Putin is firing artillery shells at a nuclear power plant. See also, Fukushima in Japan. One might do a search of how many nuclear plants are near major population centers or the ocean. (a lot.) Did you know that all (that’s 100%) of the highly toxic waste commercial nuclear power plants ever produced is still stored on site, waiting for a “permanent” disposal site that has never appeared? Most of these sites are near population centers. (See Putin, op cit.) Oh also, as liability insurance was impossible for them to get, your tax dollars have been subsidizing existing nukes since forever.

Congress introduced the Price-Anderson Act in 1957. The Act required companies to obtain the maximum possible insurance coverage against accidents, determined to be $60 million, and provided a further government commitment of $500 million to cover any claims in excess of the private insurance. Companies were relieved of any liability beyond the insured amount for any incident involving radiation or radioactive releases regardless of fault or cause

It’s not that there might not be “more modern designs” for nuclear someday, but there are carbon free technologies ready now at competitive prices. Take Yes for an Answer. (See Part 3 of this article.) (I do however, support venture capital — not tax dollar — funding of moon shot carbon reduction. But solar and wind are real businesses now.)

- Resilience, or, We Have Already Declared Defeat!

Got this in my email box the other day:

The recent Infrastructure Bill Has billions for “resilience,” after years of Congressional inaction to forestall the disasters that cause the need for resilience. Right on cue, self-styled environmental organizations have pivoted to “regenerative recovery”.

You’re invited to the next Regenerative Recovery Coalition’s meeting! Together, we will go on a journey to explore the different elements of what makes a company truly regenerative and why it is so important. The event will feature a presentation by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the RRC and President of Natural Capitalism Solutions, on what it means to truly be regenerative.

So, RMI co-founder Amory Lovins was a pioneer advocate of renewable, distributed energy as “The Road Not Taken” as early as 1978. The Rocky Mountain Institute he founded is unfortunately one of the environmental groups mentioned above who are more about consulting contracts than action (and thus enabling fossil fuel or utility company contributors to talk about how much they are spending on renewable research (that doesn’t accomplish much.)

See Part 3 of this article for a more positive RMI initiative, an incubator for clean energy start-ups. Generating capital in support of clean energy is laudable, providing there are filters separating the impact from the green-wash (investors face pressure to appear green, not necessarily to build green.)

Anyway, resilience is all well and good, but every minute doing doomsday-prepping contributes to moving up the date of doomsday. See also, Ford F-150 powering your home in a blackout.. So how much carbon do you think F-150’s have putin the atmosphere in the last 50 years? Have to give Ford credit for understanding their audience.

A somewhat sadder story is that of Alex Steffens, a pioneer in warning about climate change, and who together with Al Gore put together the encyclopedia Worldchanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century in 2006. Ahead of their time and solutions-oriented.

Today, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project calls for action like writing letters. They give grants to:

• Raise awareness of the disproportionate impacts of climate change in frontline communities and the need for clean energy and energy efficiency.
• Mobilize communities against the fossil fuel industry and in support of emissions reduction.
• Engage communities in green workforce development opportunities (related to climate, natural disasters, environment, clean transportation, housing, water and wastewater infrastructure) or in working for a just transition to clean energy.
• Further community resilience to climate change, environmental injustices, and/or legacy pollution.

How about just giving grants for solar panels?

Steffen alas has now turned to Ruggedization. His diagnosis seems to be, it’s too late.

It’s not the end of the world, but it is the end of the world as we’ve known it.

We’re rightly concerned about the scale of deployment of clean energy supply, energy storage, energy efficiency technologies and demand-reduction plans and policies that are demanded to decarbonize the world’s energy supply. But low-carbon energy is only one part of the job we face; there are also emissions challenges with agriculture, methane, deforestation, chemicals, and so on. Bringing our civilization into balance with the carbon cycle is an epochal undertaking, and involves essentially rebuilding the world’s industries, even while we scale them up.

Ruggedizing ourselves will be a bigger — and no less pressing — task than cutting CO2.

Just catching up is a massive challenge. We must rebuild all the degraded systems around us, work our way out of technical debt and deferred maintenance, and build our way out of the current housing shortage, which is at least hundreds of millions of homes.

We need simultaneously to upgrade that whole process to accomodate our new realities. Engage in climate triage, and abandon all that is untenably brittle. Ruggedize our utilities and transportation grids and cities and everything else to thrive in a much wider range of circumstances than we’re used to expecting. Prepare to accommodate millions of new refugees and welcoming even more internal climate migrants. Speed is justice, and scale is inclusion.

I am not likely to go toe to toe with Alex Steffen on the facts, but his rhetoric leads to surrender. In fact, I bet he is well aware there are carbon reduction/life resilience win-win’s, such as decentralized solar/storage, including microgrids.

But there are other credible points of view that haven’t raised the white flag (at least not as high). From MIT’s Technology Review:

The grimmest scenarios that many fretted about just a few years ago look increasingly unlikely. That includes the 4 or 5 °C of warming this century that I and others previously highlighted as a possibility.

Some argue that it wasn’t all that plausible in the first place. And the scenario seems increasingly far-fetched given the rapid shift away from coal-fired power plants, initially to lower-emitting natural gas but increasingly toward carbon-free wind and solar.

Global emissions may have already flattened when taking into account recent revisions to land-use changes, meaning updated tallies of the forests, farmlands, and grasslands the world is gaining and losing.

Today, if you layer in all the climate policies already in place around the world, we’re now on track for 2.7 °C of warming this century as a middle estimate, according to Climate Action Tracker. (Similarly, the UN’s latest report found that the planet is likely to warm between 2.1 and 3.5 °C under its “intermediate” emissions scenario.)

If you assume that nations will meet their emissions pledges under the Paris agreement, including the new commitments timed around the recent UN summit in Glasgow, the figure goes down to 2.4 °C. And if every country pulls off its net-zero emissions targets by around the middle of the century, it drops to 1.8 °C.

This is an optimistic view by today’s standards of the debate, and it runs the similar but opposite risk of not motivating enough. It should be clear that tons of work remain to be done. The same article notes,

Climate/sustainability expertise has become a profession, like any other. Its primary offering is least-cost plans for incremental-but-socially-credible action. Generally, those plans defend organizations from criticism and pressure by making serious-sounding commitments to big-but-distant goals (like, “Net Zero by 2050”), paired with incremental and inexpensive steps in the near term. The two are then “triangulated” with arguments that small steps today are “in line” with a future of bold action. The key deliverable is the claim that the triangulator’s employer is “doing enough.”

This is not a bad summing up of the points I’ve been trying to call out in this Part 2 of the article: all the standard ways and policies of “taking action” don’t actually do very much.

Part 3 is about what you can do instead. You have the power.