Split from 2020 Elections: Energy Technology

[Parasaurolophus]

I am also always amused when the climate science is trotted out with the discussion by members of the public focusing at about the 3-5 level on the technology effects.  The changes that would have to be made to move the needle with our current level of technology are pretty unpalatable to the people who will need make the daily changes.  The people who get the immediate negative consequences are not those who get the medium-term benefits.

Even the temporary behavioral changes necessary for COVID when the technologies are on the horizon with better therapeutics and vaccines are a hard sell in most of the country.  It's pretty common to hear something like: You can't expect people to basically stay home for two years!

But we can expect people with very comfortable lives due to the modern conveniences that all rely on energy consumption unimaginable a century ago to dramatically reduce forever?  I have this bridge for sale.

I also think the way the discourse focuses on technology is laughable. The tech focus is pie-in-the-sky bullshit. If the tech materializes, great, but you can't actually make nonexistent tech the centrepiece of your plan of attack. Most of the tech discourse focuses on carbon capture and storage, which exists but is seriously inefficient, and the hopes for improving it sufficiently are actually pretty dim.

But a few other things are worth noting. First, the overwhelming bulk of GHG emissions are industrial, not lifestyle, emissions. Even if you cut lifestyle emissions back to the bone, you'd still have anthropogenic climate change. Second, industrial emissions skyrocketed in the early aughts, at the same time as we were busy stripping the last vestiges of most local industrial capacity (especially manufacturing) and shipping it overseas to the lowest bidder so that all that was tangibly left of many corporations was their branding (and also thereby externalizing what were previously local emissions). Third, the US military is the single largest emitter on the planet. It's also a bullshit, useless entity that's been allowed to bloat to incredible proportions since WWII (well, since WWI, really, but post-II is when it gets serious about bloat).

Getting serious about emissions doesn't mean leading the life of a medieval peasant. Again, in the 1990s and early aughts, it would actually have meant quite minimal lifestyle changes. At this point, however, thirty years of total inaction and ramped-up emissions means that the lifestyle changes would be much more significant. Even so, however, we're only talking about cutting back to the way things were in the 1990s, and that was pretty good. It just means that you're not flying several times a year or buying a new phone every year. And--gasp!--maybe reducing your meat intake somewhat.

The more serious changes that are required are at the industrial level. And those are big changes now, there's no getting around that. Which is why we need to fight for a just transition, to minimize the economic harms associated with that transition, and why, in the US, we need to fight for some type of universal healthcare (i.e. healthcare not tied to employment, which covers everyone, and, preferably, which is free at the point of service).

One relatively easy change would be to drastically reduce the US military's budget. It's not clear to me why the US needs much of a standing army at all, but even so, there's no reason why it needs to be such a behemoth. Cut the funds, use them for a New Deal-style (greening) jobs program, and you'll have made a huge dent in national emissions. Another easy set of changes is simply to end the exploration and opening of new oil and gas wells, and curtail or end fracking. We know those fossil fuels have to stay in the ground, after all, and the oil majors already have something like 100 years' worth of it on tap.

Climate change is especially difficult to deal with effectively because it's a deferred, backloaded, and resilient phenomenon in addition to being a huge collective action problem that stretches across time as well as geography. Make no mistake: we will have to address it at some point in the increasingly near future. And the later we do so, the more enormous the costs and hardships involved, even if "dealing with it" ends up just involving mitigating the consequences when they're manifested (e.g. in terms of flooding, fires, smoke, refugees, mass extinctions, etc.). The cumulative costs of doing so will be enormous. It's not a question of doing basically nothing and ignoring it and not paying a dime for it; ignoring it is actually incredibly expensive.

I'm optimistic that much of the world will somewhat rise to the occasion, and we'll succeed in significantly limiting our emissions in the next decades. I'm not optimistic that we'll actually succeed in avoiding 4° of warming in the next hundred or so years, and that's horrific. I also don't think the US will be meaningfully participating in the effort for decades to come, and that's really disappointing, but I'm glad that China has picked up the baton and is leading the charge.

[marshwiggle]

But a few other things are worth noting. First, the overwhelming bulk of GHG emissions are industrial, not lifestyle, emissions. Even if you cut lifestyle emissions back to the bone, you'd still have anthropogenic climate change. Second, industrial emissions skyrocketed in the early aughts, at the same time as we were busy stripping the last vestiges of most local industrial capacity (especially manufacturing) and shipping it overseas to the lowest bidder so that all that was tangibly left of many corporations was their branding (and also thereby externalizing what were previously local emissions). Third, the US military is the single largest emitter on the planet. It's also a bullshit, useless entity that's been allowed to bloat to incredible proportions since WWII (well, since WWI, really, but post-II is when it gets serious about bloat).

Getting serious about emissions doesn't mean leading the life of a medieval peasant. Again, in the 1990s and early aughts, it would actually have meant quite minimal lifestyle changes. At this point, however, thirty years of total inaction and ramped-up emissions means that the lifestyle changes would be much more significant. Even so, however, we're only talking about cutting back to the way things were in the 1990s, and that was pretty good. It just means that you're not flying several times a year or buying a new phone every year. And--gasp!--maybe reducing your meat intake somewhat.

The more serious changes that are required are at the industrial level. And those are big changes now, there's no getting around that. Which is why we need to fight for a just transition, to minimize the economic harms associated with that transition, and why, in the US, we need to fight for some type of universal healthcare (i.e. healthcare not tied to employment, which covers everyone, and, preferably, which is free at the point of service).

One relatively easy change would be to drastically reduce the US military's budget. It's not clear to me why the US needs much of a standing army at all, but even so, there's no reason why it needs to be such a behemoth. Cut the funds, use them for a New Deal-style (greening) jobs program, and you'll have made a huge dent in national emissions. Another easy set of changes is simply to end the exploration and opening of new oil and gas wells, and curtail or end fracking. We know those fossil fuels have to stay in the ground, after all, and the oil majors already have something like 100 years' worth of it on tap.

What are these "industries" that have nothing to do with consumers? I have a hard time seeing how "lifestyle" is not one of, if not "the", primary driver of industrial emissions. Anything which makes industry more environment-friendly is going to have significant effects on consumer prices.

We want stuff, and especially cheap stuff. No questions asked. That's the problem.

[mamselle]

Three thousand plastic baby Yodas vs. three nuclear submarines might suggest the issue, which is both materials-intensive and energy-expensive as well as unbalanced in an order-of-magnitude kind of way.

M.

[marshwiggle]

Three thousand plastic baby Yodas vs. three nuclear submarines might suggest the issue, which is both materials-intensive and energy-expensive as well as unbalanced in an order-of-magnitude kind of way.

M.

Except that the packaging and disposal of the nuclear submarines is much more carefully handled than the baby Yodas. Does NYC stil just tow their garbage out into the ocean and dump it there?

[jimbogumbo]

https://theweek.com/articles/947824/left-just-got-crushed for those who are still insisting that somehow a tie within rounding is a real win that will matter.

A mandate from a big win for a given platform means passing legislation or rejiggering appropriations is easier because most of the newly/re-elected are on the same page about what needs to be done to satisfy the electoreate. 

Being essentially tied means equal numbers of people want very different things with the result that an idea of serving everyone equally doesn't really work when nearly half the people will be angry at any action.  Abandoning the idea of serving everyone in favor of pushing through dramatic change is not going to fly at all.

I am also always amused when the climate science is trotted out with the discussion by members of the public focusing at about the 3-5 level on the technology effects.  The changes that would have to be made to move the needle with our current level of technology are pretty unpalatable to the people who will need make the daily changes.  The people who get the immediate negative consequences are not those who get the medium-term benefits.

Even the temporary behavioral changes necessary for COVID when the technologies are on the horizon with better therapeutics and vaccines are a hard sell in most of the country.  It's pretty common to hear something like: You can't expect people to basically stay home for two years!

But we can expect people with very comfortable lives due to the modern conveniences that all rely on energy consumption unimaginable a century ago to dramatically reduce forever?  I have this bridge for sale.

Going to ask for you to don your optimist cap for a minute, and school me on alternative energy development. Everywhere I go it seems there is significant progress with wind and solar. Am I just imagining this?

Keep in mind I'd rather not be depressed, but can handle it if necessary.

[marshwiggle]

I am also always amused when the climate science is trotted out with the discussion by members of the public focusing at about the 3-5 level on the technology effects.  The changes that would have to be made to move the needle with our current level of technology are pretty unpalatable to the people who will need make the daily changes.  The people who get the immediate negative consequences are not those who get the medium-term benefits.

Even the temporary behavioral changes necessary for COVID when the technologies are on the horizon with better therapeutics and vaccines are a hard sell in most of the country.  It's pretty common to hear something like: You can't expect people to basically stay home for two years!

But we can expect people with very comfortable lives due to the modern conveniences that all rely on energy consumption unimaginable a century ago to dramatically reduce forever?  I have this bridge for sale.

Going to ask for you to don your optimist cap for a minute, and school me on alternative energy development. Everywhere I go it seems there is significant progress with wind and solar. Am I just imagining this?

Keep in mind I'd rather not be depressed, but can handle it if necessary.

I'm a big fan (no pun intended) of wind and solar. However, the big limitation is storage. It's especially big since the focus in on centralized, grid-level storage. The real way forward for wind and solar is to push toward distributed production and storage, a.k.a. every house has its own panels and storage, with the grid to allow arbitrage. (To do this, I would propse changing building codes to require 5% of the cost of a building to some combination of panels, turbines, batteries, and electronics, chosen to fit the site.)   

However, in keeping with the points Polly has made, this is a long term shift, as new construction replaces older buildings. If it started tomorrow it would still be decades before it would reach 50% of buildings.

[Parasaurolophus]

What are these "industries" that have nothing to do with consumers? I have a hard time seeing how "lifestyle" is not one of, if not "the", primary driver of industrial emissions. Anything which makes industry more environment-friendly is going to have significant effects on consumer prices.

We want stuff, and especially cheap stuff. No questions asked. That's the problem.

The largest GHG-emitting sectors are energy (including transportation--but note that the emissions involved in individual transportation pale in comparison to those involved in maintaining global supply lines, etc.; on the energy front, electricity generation is the largest source of emissions, and again, the energy expended on heating and cooling homes pales in comparison to that used for commercial and industrial purposes), agriculture, land use change, industrial processes (that's in addition to the electricity industry consumes), and waste.

Shifting over the bulk of electricity-generation from coal, natural gas, etc. to 'clean' sources would make a huge difference. But again, the point is that while household electricity usage is significant, it pales in comparison to other uses. Likewise, although individual transportation is a significant source of GHGs, it pales in comparison to the emissions generated by commercial transportation.

We're long past the point where individual choices can make enough of a difference to change the outcome. What we need to do is start going after the source of the problem. And yes, that might mean that $5 T-shirts and yearly iPhones are a relic of the past. But we're not talking about $100 T-shirts and no more iPhones.

I'm a big fan (no pun intended) of wind and solar. However, the big limitation is storage. It's especially big since the focus in on centralized, grid-level storage. The real way forward for wind and solar is to push toward distributed production and storage, a.k.a. every house has its own panels and storage, with the grid to allow arbitrage. (To do this, I would propse changing building codes to require 5% of the cost of a building to some combination of panels, turbines, batteries, and electronics, chosen to fit the site.)   

However, in keeping with the points Polly has made, this is a long term shift, as new construction replaces older buildings. If it started tomorrow it would still be decades before it would reach 50% of buildings.

That's right: the big obstacle is storage capacity. And while we have made and will continue to make improvements on that front, it's simply not realistic to bank our hopes on a new super-battery which will probably never come (and whose global distribution will be impossible anyway).

And all that's why we've really screwed the pooch. The time to start getting serious about all this was thirty years ago. Or twenty years ago. Or ten. The longer we defer starting, the more monumental and disruptive the task will be, and the more the short- and medium-term costs will accrue.

[jimbogumbo]

I am also always amused when the climate science is trotted out with the discussion by members of the public focusing at about the 3-5 level on the technology effects.  The changes that would have to be made to move the needle with our current level of technology are pretty unpalatable to the people who will need make the daily changes.  The people who get the immediate negative consequences are not those who get the medium-term benefits.

Even the temporary behavioral changes necessary for COVID when the technologies are on the horizon with better therapeutics and vaccines are a hard sell in most of the country.  It's pretty common to hear something like: You can't expect people to basically stay home for two years!

But we can expect people with very comfortable lives due to the modern conveniences that all rely on energy consumption unimaginable a century ago to dramatically reduce forever?  I have this bridge for sale.

Going to ask for you to don your optimist cap for a minute, and school me on alternative energy development. Everywhere I go it seems there is significant progress with wind and solar. Am I just imagining this?

Keep in mind I'd rather not be depressed, but can handle it if necessary.

I'm a big fan (no pun intended) of wind and solar. However, the big limitation is storage. It's especially big since the focus in on centralized, grid-level storage. The real way forward for wind and solar is to push toward distributed production and storage, a.k.a. every house has its own panels and storage, with the grid to allow arbitrage. (To do this, I would propse changing building codes to require 5% of the cost of a building to some combination of panels, turbines, batteries, and electronics, chosen to fit the site.)   

However, in keeping with the points Polly has made, this is a long term shift, as new construction replaces older buildings. If it started tomorrow it would still be decades before it would reach 50% of buildings.

Completely agree. An example near me is a rural school district which owns and operates its own wind turbine, which provides for 100% of the MS-HS building's electric needs. I'm thinking of advances in large scale solar generation in Sun Belt states, which appears to be getting much more efficient and inexpensive.

[mythbuster]

I live in the Sun Belt, and every utility company here is fighting solar panels tooth and nail. Every house with it's own panels and battery would kill the utilities. Further complicating this is the fact that some utilities (like where I live) are own by their municipalities and so are a major source of governmental revenue.

The Dems really need to find ways to explain their solutions to these issues (climate change, health care etc) that still preserve some semblance of a normal economy. The example I just gave is a good illustration of these issues. Until they figure out how to do that, the vote will continue to be essentially money concerns vs everything else.

[marshwiggle]

I live in the Sun Belt, and every utility company here is fighting solar panels tooth and nail. Every house with it's own panels and battery would kill the utilities. Further complicating this is the fact that some utilities (like where I live) are own by their municipalities and so are a major source of governmental revenue.

This is ridiculously short-sighted of them. Natural gas utilities rent water heaters to consumers, and it makes a revenue stream. Utilities could rent (lease, whatever) solar panels, batteries, etc. to consumers. The deal for the consumer is that their average energy bill would go down. The deal for the utility is that part of the power (at least the surplus, as on sunny days), goes into the grid for the utility.

Part of the problem for utilities is maintaining a grid which has to be able to handle peak demand. With more distributed production and storage, the grid wouldn't need to be nearly as oversized.

It's not hard to figure out how to make this pay if the focus is on the future (and how things will eventually be, regardless), rather than trying to just preserve the past (which will become increasingly impossible, regardless).

The Dems really need to find ways to explain their solutions to these issues (climate change, health care etc) that still preserve some semblance of a normal economy. The example I just gave is a good illustration of these issues. Until they figure out how to do that, the vote will continue to be essentially money concerns vs everything else.

As in the example above, part of the way to do this is to highlight how proposed solutions address well-known problems with the existing infrastructure (such as grid maintenance above) so that current players have an opportunity to actually be part of the solution.

[dismalist]

Go nuclear, young man, go nuclear.

[mamselle]

Uh, no.

Three-mile Island, anyone?

Chernobyl?

Solar's safer.

M.

[marshwiggle]

Uh, no.

Three-mile Island, anyone?

Chernobyl?

Solar's safer.

M.

But the storage problem means that places with more solar and wind rely more heavily on nuclear and fossil fuel plants at night when there is zero solar output.

[ciao_yall]

I live in the Sun Belt, and every utility company here is fighting solar panels tooth and nail. Every house with it's own panels and battery would kill the utilities. Further complicating this is the fact that some utilities (like where I live) are own by their municipalities and so are a major source of governmental revenue.

This is ridiculously short-sighted of them. Natural gas utilities rent water heaters to consumers, and it makes a revenue stream. Utilities could rent (lease, whatever) solar panels, batteries, etc. to consumers. The deal for the consumer is that their average energy bill would go down. The deal for the utility is that part of the power (at least the surplus, as on sunny days), goes into the grid for the utility.

Part of the problem for utilities is maintaining a grid which has to be able to handle peak demand. With more distributed production and storage, the grid wouldn't need to be nearly as oversized.

It's not hard to figure out how to make this pay if the focus is on the future (and how things will eventually be, regardless), rather than trying to just preserve the past (which will become increasingly impossible, regardless).

The Dems really need to find ways to explain their solutions to these issues (climate change, health care etc) that still preserve some semblance of a normal economy. The example I just gave is a good illustration of these issues. Until they figure out how to do that, the vote will continue to be essentially money concerns vs everything else.

As in the example above, part of the way to do this is to highlight how proposed solutions address well-known problems with the existing infrastructure (such as grid maintenance above) so that current players have an opportunity to actually be part of the solution.

I wonder if they are not willing to risk the investment in these new revenue streams. If there are private investors in there who like their returns; or if there are a lot of union jobs tied up with maintaining the current infrastructure, these can be two big barriers to change.

[MonsterX]

Go nuclear, young man, go nuclear.

There is always that guy, who suggests nuclear. Why? I mean, why?

Solar is the cheapest energy https://webstore.iea.org/world-energy-outlook-2020, except in some places wind is cheaper. There technology is here.  It doesn't need subsidies, it just needs and open, level market.  Which, because this is a collective decision in most respects, it doesn't have.

I know nuclear is familiar, and so a go-to for many people. It is even featured on the Simpsons.  In my view, that is not a recommendation.  So stop recommending it. 

Yes, with solar and wind, presumably in some locations supplemented by  biomass, geothermal, and hydro, you need storage and/or other ways to cope with intermittency.  That's just part of the system, but it can and will be built out as it is needed.   This is not hard, there are smart people who are doing this stuff and it all just needs to scale up.

The only reason we aren't shifting away form fossils fuels in a massive way is that there are interest groups that have politicians by the short hairs, and energy transition is in most respects, as I  said before, a collective decision.   There are some specific uses where this transition is more challenging, but in general  for most of the world the solutions are all there, and no real decline  of living standards is required.  Except for people with a vested interest in fossil fuels, who will really lose a lot of money, so it will be protracted and contested transition process, which probably will not happen soon enough to save us from massive ecological disasters.