Why the Climate Bill Will Pass

Via Andrew Revkin, James Murdoch has a good op-ed in the Washington Post spelling out the conservative case for a cap-and-trade bill, and for environmental protection more generally.  It’s basically the same case that Peter Huber made in Hard Green, and it suggests that at least some influential voices in the conservative movement are beginning to see the advantages of getting involved in shaping climate policy rather than doubling down on obstructionism in support of the narrow interests of the coal industry.  Murdoch is clearly aiming at conservatives rather than liberals here, and his arguments include a bunch of stuff about things like reducing dependence on foreign oil and improving American competitiveness in production of solar power equipment relative to China.  There’s a lot of nationalist sentiment behind these objections that is pretty far from the mindset of the liberals and environmental groups who tend to speak up more about this stuff, but the upshot is the same.  As Murdoch notes, some prominent Republican politicians like Lindsey Graham are coming out in favor of cap-and-trade, which is a market-based approach that appeals to conservatives on both ideological and practical grounds, especially in contrast to command-and-control regulation (the most plausible alternative).  News Corporation is hardly a marginal player in the conservative movement, so this is a sign that prospects for cap-and-trade legislation are actually pretty good regardless of what happens in Copenhagen.

Drops in the Bucket

I think the fact that the renewable energy industry is fairly indifferent to Copenhagen and focused more on procuring government subsidies mostly just goes to show how small a part of the overall energy system it still is.  With an international agreement in place use of renewable energy would presumably increase, but it’s starting from such a low level that it’ll be a while before it has a large impact on emissions.  Conservation and shifts in the usage of fossil fuels are where the big impacts in the short term are going to be, and for those impacts to happen an effective system to price carbon is going to be essential.

Curb Your Malthusiasm

The Economist has an interesting piece on the rapid decline in fertility rates in developing countries as they grow wealthier.  This is a strong rebuke to the recent upsurge in Neo-Malthusian thinking, which is associated with the Peak Oil crowd and various “dark green” movements.  Alex Steffen of Worldchanging makes some smart points in this post about the problems with the “transition town” dark green movement, although I don’t really agree with the second half of the post.  He also has a useful post from a while back outlining what these various “green” terms mean.

The current fad for “dark green” Neo-Malthusianism is of course stimulated mainly by climate change, and a lot of its popularity likely stems from the increasingly dire nature of a lot of research on global warming.  The peak oil folks are coming at this from a slightly different direction, but a clearly related one.  I’ll admit to having written about this stuff in somewhat positive terms myself, but I’m reluctant to go too far down the Malthus-hole.  One of the major influences on my thinking has been Peter Huber‘s Hard Green, which is a problematic book in a lot of ways that can probably be deduced largely from its subtitle(s), but which is also an important challenge to environmentalists, especially those who rely overly on Malthus and models.  Huber’s a conservative, and the book has lots of standard-issue environmentalist-bashing, but it also puts forth a vision of a conservative environmentalism that Huber calls “hard green,” in contrast to the “soft green” of the Malthusians and the model-builders and the EPA regulators.  (The fact that he lumps all these groups together is one of the major problems with the book.)  “Hard green” is basically old-fashioned conservationism of the sort Teddy Roosevelt engaged in, and Huber talks about Roosevelt a lot in the book.  Unlike “soft green,” which is based fundamentally on concerns for human health, “hard green” is based primarily on aesthetics.

To Huber, nature is worth conserving because it’s beautiful, not because we need it.  He makes a lot of strange arguments in support of this, starting with the idea that human ingenuity and free markets can find substitutes for any and all natural resources (which is just straightforwardly wrong, as Robert Ayres shows in an interesting though somewhat odd paper).  He is most convincing, however, in discussing the problems with relying too much on models, whether environmental or economic.  He doesn’t quite practice what he preaches, but he makes the important and indisputably true point that it’s not actually possible to predict the future, so we should be hesitant about relying on models that purport to do so.  There is a long line of such models that got their predictions laughably wrong, starting of course with Malthus himself.  Huber also talks about the exact same phenomenon that the Economist piece discusses, namely the way wealth leads to lower fertility, which reinforces the growth in wealth, which ultimately (he claims) results in more environmental protection than a poor society can produce.  His solution for environmental problems is thus to promote economic growth rather than to regulate anything.

I obviously don’t agree with a lot of the things Huber says, but he’s right about some things, and since reading his book I’ve been shying away from the Malthusiasts and reverting more to my natural optimism when it comes to climate change.  I have no idea which climate models are better than others or what the future holds for global climate.  It does seem clear that global warming has begun and at least some of its effects are likely irreversible, so adaptation will almost certainly be important, along with mitigation of further effects, but beyond that I won’t make any predictions.  I’m fairly optimistic about efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill (a mechanism Huber supports in the book, by the way, though he doesn’t apply it to carbon specifically) in the US.  I’m not necessarily opposed to fossil fuels, however, and while I do think wind and solar energy are important and worthy of strong support I don’t see how we can realistically depend on them for a substantial portion of electricity production anytime soon.

So that’s where I stand as of now.  There may well be limits to growth, but trying to predict them is a fool’s wager, and the future is always full of surprises.  I’m just along for the ride.

AYRES, R. (2007). On the practical limits to substitution Ecological Economics, 61 (1), 115-128 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2006.02.011

Navajo Nation Gets Smart Grid Grant

Among the local utilities receiving federal stimulus money to upgrade their systems with “smart grid” technology is the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.  It’ll be interesting to see how they do at implementing this.  Smart grids will be an important factor in getting renewable energy to places where it’s most in demand, but the Navajo Nation is rural and sparsely populated in addition to being in an area likely to be used to produce solar and possibly wind power generation, so the challenges NTUA faces are rather different from those faced by a typical utility in a densely populated area far from power sources.  In addition, a substantial number of Navajos are off the grid entirely, and NTUA will likely have to balance the smart grid stuff with that basic reality and decide how important it is to upgrade service where it exists relative to putting it in where it doesn’t.

Even Solar Power Uses Water

I recently mentioned the underappreciated fact that power projects tend to use a lot of water, which can become a major issue in places that don’t have much.  That particular item was a proposed nuclear plant in Utah, but the issue exists for solar projects as well.  Indeed, given that the arid Southwest tends to get the most sun and therefore is the best location for large-scale solar plants in the US, water is a particular problem for solar, perhaps more so than for other types of energy.

Not all water is created equal, of course, so it’s really the details that matter.  The guy quoted in the article saying that using the water for solar power is more efficient and responsible than using it to grow alfalfa has a point, I think.  He’s saying that mainly to promote his solar project, of course, but still.

Green Jobs!

It seems a German firm that is the world’s largest maker of solar inverters, which transform the direct current put out by solar panels into alternating current that can be carried by the electric grid, will be building its first US plant in Denver.  Solar is still a niche energy source in the US at this point, but Germany has been pushing it in a big way, and with a price on carbon it’ll start looking a lot more attractive.  And the US Southwest gets a lot more sun than Germany.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the latest in my ongoing series of blog experiments.  Those of you who are familiar with Gambler’s House, my blog about Chaco Canyon and its relevance to issues our society is grappling with today, are no doubt aware that I’ve begun discussing climate change and the energy industry quite a bit there recently.  I think there is a lot of mutual relevance between those issues and both archaeology in general and Chaco specifically, but I recognize that there isn’t a complete overlap in the sets of people interested in reading about energy and archaeology.  I’ve decided, therefore, to start a new blog, this one, to talk in a more focused way about energy.  I intend to discuss both scholarly research and media reports about ongoing issues in this very important field of inquiry.  Most of the posts here will likely be short and focused on individual things I’ve read, in contrast to the longer, more in-depth discussions I’ve often done at Gambler’s House.  I may, however, do similar sorts of longer-form posts here as well, depending on how things go.

To add some actual content to this introductory post, I’d like to draw attention to President Obama’s speech today at MIT, where he discussed a lot of issues in energy policy, not least the cap-and-trade bills working their way through Congress.  There’s a lot of empty rhetoric and meaningless platitudes in the text of the speech, of course, but I think it’s interesting to note how seriously the Obama Administration seems to be taking these issues, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on the bills in Congress along with the policies promulgated by various Executive Branch agencies.