Hope and climate change

Nothing can redeem the sequester. You have to forgive a politician a lot on the ideological purity of public policy he or she may be reduced to accepting. But political ineptitude is simply irredeemable.

Expect to be disappointed, John. Judging from the pre-announcement write-up on the White House blog, President Potemkin will announce a hodge podge of feel good, do nothing initiatives to be watered down and frittered away in subsequent skirmishes with the Congress.

Lets see if the limits are high enough to put anyone out of the market who is not out anyway. Natural gas is too cheap for old inefficient coal powerplants to stay in business anyway. If he does the right thing and anounces limits high enough to shut down all coal powerplants, the cost will be quite low for now.

Redeem himself?

F@ck that – lock him up him in The Hague together with Blair and Bush.

@6… well, there are a lot of power plants near the top of that list.

Obama has been a disappointment in all sorts of ways, but effective action on climate change would be sufficient, for me, to redeem his presidency. None of the other things we are fighting about will matter unless there is a livable planet on which to fight.

It’s necessary but far from sufficient for the rich nations to reduce emissions. China now emits more CO2 than the US and EU combined. Coal use in China is not expected to peak before 2030. India would like to follow China’s example but fortunately (?) dysfunction has kept coal production and use growing more slowly than planned. Are there hopeful signs that effective action from the US would spur parallel action in developing nations?

” it’s really up to Canadians to stop the oil sands menace”

Sadly action is unlikely under the current government. I can’t say I really blame those who work in the industry either. People need to eat and it is not like we have provided them with a plethora of good alternative career choices.

“Obama is making a speech today (Tuesday) ”

This hurts my brain. Obama (and I) lives in the US where today is Monday, and he is not making the speech until tomorrow. I was almost able to forgive you since you are writing from Australia (I guess?), but by Australia time Obama won’t be making his speech until Wednesday, and either way it’s tomorrow! What is this madness?!

Anyhoo, regulating power plant emissions would be huge. Shoulda been 4 years ago so he’s still a bad president, but this would make him at least better than average. I wonder how strict they’ll be–will they force many plants to shut down? I would! I guess the legal authority is just whatever the EPA “scientifically” (it’s inevitably a political decision, however informed by science) deems necessary. EPA’s probably scared stiff that the Supreme Court will make up some reason why their rules exceed their authority/aren’t necessary if they go “too far”, but how far is too far is impossible to predict. I say push hard, and assume the Supreme Court will try to pare the rules back but not throw them out entirely (that would contradict their previous ruling, and the pope is never wrong). Since they’ll be pared back, go so far that even the pared back rules will be strong!

When I say strong I mean the rules should be way harsher than the effect of the EU carbon pricing and way harsher than we would go for in a comprehensive American system. Since power plants are the only ones targeted, they need to emit even less to make up for not restricting other contributers. But above all, hit them hard so that the power generators can assume a comprehensive cap and trade system would be a better deal for them. Then let them and the coal senators push for such a program.

I also agree with the people worrying about China et al. I think we should be applying tariffs to all imports based on the global warming impact associated with those goods. That’s very hard to estimate for a finished good produced in another country, so the estimates would be very rough. And the rougher they are (the less the foreign government/company cooperates with investigators), the more we should err on the side of caution and make the tariff higher! This would require a new bureaucracy to make the assessments (Dept of Commerce I guess). It would also contradict lots of treaties, which is the excuse Obama and co. will trot out not to do it, but that’s stupid. Pass the the carbon tariffs and force the WTO to accept them (or pull out, effectively killing it off). I don’t care one bit if this disrupts trade with China. This is a separate matter from the measures Obama will hopefully announce tomorrow, but domestic restrictions can help achieve this goal. The more domestic producers have to follow carbon regulations, the more they’ll demand measures to impose the same costs on their foreign competition.

bob mcmanus,

The sequester has about the same chance of turning out to be some genius 11th dimensional chess move as I have of being elected President. Maybe it won’t end in much more disaster than it has already caused, but that will only happen if the Rs prove even more incompetent than past performance would suggest. That’s a tall order.

Lee

We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions, must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease; while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land; to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage; till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened; and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.

Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798.

P O”Neill @19 –I am trying to follow your reasoning. But I never heard the austerians to be Malthusians. While the climate anti-mitigationists seem to be technological optimists (when they are not being technological pessimists). I was struck by Lindzen’s comments at the Heartland Institute in 2009 (the video is on YouTube) that “warmism” has “always been a political movement, though it took me a while to realize this”, and it is “a vehicle for a post-modern coup d’etat or illicit profits”. These sudden comments puzzled me for a while, coming in the middle of a talk about climate, from a supposed scientist. Then I realized it is the same sort of stuff that accompanies the austerian fear of “Keynesian” fiscal stimulus because it will lead to further “socialism”. A fundamental characteristic of both the austerians and the climate anti-mitigationists is to take a position at the “individualist” pole of the individualist/collectivist axis on Mary Douglas’ cultural grid. It is purely emotional; there is no science or history required. How else can we explain Reinhart & Rogoff’s 90%-debt-cliff debacle? If so, our problem may not be a fight between pure capitalism and pure socialism, or a fight about the meaning of uncertainty in complex ecosystems. The problem may be that around one-third of the population has, quite simply, unnecessary fear: they misconstrue how most other people’s personal preferences are formed, perpetuated, and changed.

Arnold @ 18: It’s really not that difficult to see that abandoning a cheap method of producing energy that has long term negative consequences in favor of more expensive, cleaner standards is highly unlikely to improve global living standards unless environmental impacts are taken into consideration. There is a tendency to assume that investment in clean energy will create ‘green jobs’ but this really relies on the assumption that first, there are major structural problems with the economy (probably true, at least in the sense of poor monetary management) and that two, a carbon tax or whatever will fix these structural problems (why??). Of course, climate change denialists are going to overstate the economic impact because the purpose of being such a denialist is to advance your political view, not advance the discussion.

No, mpowell, the point is that a carbon tax/emissions quota system raises money for the government – money which would have had to be raised anyway. The question then is NOT whether this form of taxation is economically damaging (it is) but whether it is more damaging than the taxation it replaces. And proponents of the “no regret” principle – that is, that a carbon tax would do little harm even if the climate delusionists were miraculously correct – assert, with some good arguments on their side, that it isn’t really.

Of course doing it all by bans and regulation raises no money for the government so any resultant economic damage is just pure loss. You can then only justify that approach if you believe both that the tax approach is less politically feasible (dubious, IMO) and that the delusionists are wrong. But it’s very much a second-best method.

The thing about price mechanisms is that they really, really work. Short of a First Five Year Plan approach that inflicts truly massive damage to peoples’ lives it takes a long time to transform an economy and the consequent social attitudes. However if the history of capitalism teaches us anything it is that such transformation will happen when there are large and sustained price changes.

“The ‘green jobs’ argument is interesting. Supporters tout higher employment numbers for renewable electricity. Detractors say that using more people to produce the same amount of energy is an additional cost rather than benefit for everyone who uses electricity but isn’t employed to produce it.”

Been over this one many times. The cost of employing people is presumably included within the cost of the electricity. If the renewable electricity is close in cost to the non-renewable, but produces more employment, then it’s better. Why? Because in a society in which you only get paid if you have a job, people need employment.

Electricity that is similar in cost to renewable but has less associated employment must have greater resource use — less of the money goes towards labor, more goes to the costs of e.g. getting coal out of the ground. That’s not a cost that does anyone any good other than the electricity produced from it.

Rich, agreed that your analysis follows from the premises.

I don’t think a quasi-steady state of renewable electricity being close to that of non-renewable is likely to persist. Cost of production has dropped faster than most people expected. The price of wind and sun are never going up. The expenses to tap those forces more efficiently are largely one-time, like those to develop a new drug, and like drugs they eventually fall out of patent and can be manufactured free of licensing charge by all producers.

In various regions the anti-renewable arguments has quickly shifted from “solar and wind can’t produce enough energy to matter” to “cheap but intermittent solar and wind are undermining older dispatchable technologies — low price isn’t everything.” It’s a remarkably belated but rapid development of the ability to identify and speak against externalities.

There have been a couple of attempts to get the Alberta tar sands oil to China by building a pipeline across BC, but they have gone nowhere because of local opposition. So instead they are going to get the Americans to pipe the oil all the way across the US to a tax-free export zone in Texas where it can be refined and shipped to China. The economics will look better in a few years when the Chinese open up the new canal across Nicaragua.

Obama has been a disappointment in all sorts of ways

He’s only a disappointment if you believed all the hype to begin with.

Me, I’ve been with Perrin since the first of the ‘hopey-hopey change!’ speeches:

https://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/22/book-review-savage-mules/

Damn italics (should be all three paragraphs, of course).

I’m not as worried about methane leakage, because I take a longer view, and the methane decays ona roughly twelve year timespan. So if our fracking frenzy raises atmospheric methane levels but decreases CO2 levels because it substitutes for more carbon intensive fuels, after a couple of decades we will be ahead. And I’m a firm believer that people are going to have to witness/bear some serious effectives before we can go beyond quarter measures.

Matt: “The price of wind and sun are never going up.”

I think we may be disappointed there. Clearly in the narrow site specific sense, the cost to generate X megawatt hours on a specific site should continue to go down. But as penetration increases, so does the cost of integration, and (especially for wind) the best sites are developed first. And we will increasing have to bear the integration costs of variable sources. These include all sorts of mitigation measures -demand-response (throttling back some usages when power isn’t abundant),
large scale storage, and long range transmission, are all going to be in the cards. And I don’t think any of them will be cheap once they have to be done at scale. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for slowing the rate of transition -the costs of delay are so are much greater. But, lets not create unrealistic expectations about how easy it will be.

As long as my government thinks the best policy is to subsidice small scale solar installations on rooftops in the north (while not paying susidies for large scale installations which are just as usefull and much cheaper), burning plants, off shore wind and coal at the same time, while ignoring gas, im all for pushing gas. A switch to modern gas turbines from old coal can do half the job in electricity generation at very low costs, in particular in the US with the low prices. Thats a lot more than we get in Germany with a expensive zero emission+expensive and environemntal underwheliming biogas. A mix that costs us 0,4% of gdp
and growing a year.

Solar has come a long way. Thin film modules now trade at 400€. So large scale installations at locations close enough to the equator now look fabulous too combined with the low capital costs at the moment.

Heck, even we could produce solar energy at decent prices now if we would let the government build large scale installations on agricultural land in Southern Germany.
Our eco ideologous have settled for a different plan. We do not pay any susbdidy at all for large scale installations on agricultural . Nevermind that we do pay huge subsidies for biogas, which requires to use a multitude agricultural land and has a negative environmental impact. Wed need more agricultural land than we have to produce all energy this way. Nevermind that space is not an issue at all a 30*30 km area could produce all energy for the entire country. Nevermind that we pay subsidies that ensures10% of our agricultural land is not used at all. Nevermind that rooftop installations cost much more and have hardly any advantage, give a higher subsidy to those small installations, because big is always evil. Government ownership is not even up for debate, despite the great financing costs at the moment.
Nope, if the government gets involved, its through cheap credit for private equity firms that build off shore wind.

Realism is really tough with respect to peak oil / climate change / overpopulation / ecological collapse. The difference between Right and Left is a difference about where to focus denial and technological optimism.

Obama isn’t a well-meaning fumbler; he’s evil. That may be the most difficult point of realism to absorb. The Republican Clown Showâ„¢ is a variant Greek Chorus that gets its scripts from the same central office that supplies every episode of the Obama Tragedy Hour.

No matter what, the largest part of effective CO2 restraint would require energy conservation. We have to radically reduce the amount of energy we use.

There’s a lot of unwarranted technological optimism among the center-Left, about the prospective relative costs of “alternative” energy, which hide the dependence of alternative energy schemes on the foundation of the petroleum economy. Our ability to adapt depends on wise use of the tailend of the petroleum economy, which is what this natural gas “boom” is. And, there’s no awareness, no panic, when there should be.

Radical conservation is feasible, but would entail many changes in “lifestyle”, which the Right despises and rebels against, as much as it pretends to despise the one-world-government and centralized control, which managing the global climate would entail. By temperament, I expect many on the Right will fall back on adaptation and climate-engineering, as denialism loses its glow.

I’d like to think humans were capable of consciousness raising and visionary, enlightened self-interest might triumph in the end, but we are clinging to myopic incrementalism and rebellious resistance, as the twins of political contention, when both are badly out of touch with reality.

[I]t’s really up to Canadians to stop the oil sands menace.

When faced with an insoluble mess, it’s time to turn to the “fantasy roleplaying character invented by a kid who goes to mock United Nations camps instead of playing Dungeons & Dragons.”

Looks like that href didn’t work:
http://www.eia-international.org/explosion-of-super-greenhouse-gases-expected-over-next-decade
The title was:
Explosion of Super Greenhouse Gases Expected Over Next Decade

I’m too lazy to look up the Pew data or whatever, but judging from the giant SUVs everybody drives I’m guessing hardly any Americans give a damn about the climate. I don’t know how much any president can be expected to do. It’s like being an abolitionist in the 1820s. The best you can hope for is some sneaky 11-dimensional chess.

Exactly.

“Coal stocks jumped after President Obama’s speech on climate change, in which he laid out a sweeping initiative to limit carbon emissions from all power plants in the U.S.”

“Said Obama: ‘My first announcement today is, you should all take off your jackets.'”

hix: “Heck, even we could produce solar energy at decent prices now if we would let the government build large scale installations on agricultural land in Southern Germany.”
I fear the same kind of effect here. The cheapest by far PV, is utility scale plants, -especially in the US where the so called soft-costs -mainly permitting and inspections are so high. But also because we are too picky about our structural and electrical standards as applied to PV (certainly wrt what the Germans are doing). But, environmentalists and progressives absolutely hate utilityscale plants. Mainly they don’t like ownership by corporate or quasi-corporate bodies. I’ve been having this argument on numerous websites of late. With so much of our energy use in the industrial sector, residential rooftop just won’t cut it alone, we need a very healthy utilityscale sector.

Matt: “The price of wind and sun are never going up.”

I think we may be disappointed there. Clearly in the narrow site specific sense, the cost to generate X megawatt hours on a specific site should continue to go down. But as penetration increases, so does the cost of integration, and (especially for wind) the best sites are developed first. And we will increasing have to bear the integration costs of variable sources. These include all sorts of mitigation measures -demand-response (throttling back some usages when power isn’t abundant), large scale storage, and long range transmission, are all going to be in the cards. And I don’t think any of them will be cheap once they have to be done at scale. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for slowing the rate of transition -the costs of delay are so are much greater. But, lets not create unrealistic expectations about how easy it will be.

The best sites are developed first, but the better turbines are developed later. So far turbines are improving faster than better sites are being exhausted: capacity factor is slightly up for new US installations against those of a few years ago. Wind operation and maintenance costs per megawatt hour are also down. Offshore wind does not seem to be doing so well on costs, but there’s a long way to go before onshore is so crowded in the US that offshore looks reasonable. Building new transmission lines is expensive, but they also last a long time, so for any land-based energy project (renewable or not) they only amount to a fraction of a cent per kilowatt hour over the infrastructure’s lifetime.

Electricity storage is the real wild card. At present it is very expensive. There does not appear to be any “fundamental” reason that batteries should stay so expensive; the mineral inputs for some designs are very cheap. The fabrication may be intricate but it’s also repetitive, just like for any other mass produced product. Silicon, aluminum, and glass are not dramatically cheaper today than they were 10 years ago, but silicon PV modules are; I could imagine the same happening with batteries.

Let’s suppose for the moment that bulk electricity storage does not quickly come down in price. Rooftop solar offers the most dramatic “beneficial negative externalities” that can disrupt the fossil fueled electricity business. In some regions rooftop solar already has an unsubsidized instantaneous production cost lower than retail electricity from the grid. Self-consumption of rooftop solar power appears as demand reduction to the grid, little different than if you’d changed your lifestyle or bought more efficient appliances. If you use self-produced power you’re not taxed on it or paying for distribution over the grid. Distribution costs drop very little when demand drops, though it allows deferring distribution capacity upgrades, so the fixed infrastructural costs are either going to be spread over fewer kilowatt hours (if they are rolled into the unit price) or start appearing as a fixed charge independent of consumption. Either way, costs go up for all grid customers but non-solar-using customers see a larger relative increase. This encourages further demand reduction through behavioral changes, efficiency measures, or installing one’s own solar production, and the cycle continues. The difference is not in electricity source, but location: central large renewable installation that rely on the grid to get to end-users are just as affected as coal plants. But by happy coincidence most grid-reliant generation capacity is the fossil fueled stuff that we want to use less of. Even in the absence of feed-in tariffs or special tax credits, rooftop solar installation raises the systemic costs of legacy electricity and encourages a variety of responses that further reduce CO2 emissions. It’s truly an externality of beauty, like if riding a bicycle not only reduced your spending on gasoline but raised gas prices for everyone else.

Finally, note that switching from fossil fuels to wind/PV/hydro means a dramatic reduction in primary energy use even if you don’t use any less electricity than before. Fossil fueled and nuclear power plants are heat engines. 100% conversion of fuel energy content to electricity is impossible, and higher than 50% conversion is difficult; US coal plants typically achieve 1/3 conversion. Wind/water turbines and PV panels tap kinetic energy and photons instead of thermal gradients. Replacing 1 kilowatt hour of American coal electricity with 1 kilowatt hour of PV electricity eliminates 2 kilowatt hours of primary energy wasted as heat at the central plant on top of the 1 kilowatt hour of electricity observable to the end user. The efficiency gap between internal combustion engine transportation and electric transportation is even larger than 3 to 1. Bruce Wilder says “We have to radically reduce the amount of energy we use,” but it turns out that’s an intrinsic effect of switching away from heat engines rather than a campaign of conscious restraint that must be added on top of the switch to renewables.

Matt @55
Rooftop solar can often lead to a need to upgrade local grid capacity. If a customer decides to go to near netzero, unless his load is heavily concentrated when the sun shines, he needs roughly 5X his usage to make up for the low capacity factor. So there are times when 4 or more times his average consumption is flowing the other way. This can be more than his local wires and distribution transformer can handle. So investment by the utility company is required.
Currently net billing is available in most places for small customers, but many utilities are fighting to end that. Some is just pure greed (they want to generate your power and make you pay for it). But some reflects real costs that accrue to the grid operator as penetration levels increase.

I don’t see lots of small systems on rooftops as the way reach where we need to go. Installation costs per watt are much higher than for large ground mounts. Some of these costs (excessive paperwork and inspections etc.) can probably be rolled back, but needing to do custom small designs is inherently more expensive. Since we need many hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to even begin to replace fossils, we would be well served to look towards the cheapest cost per watt.
I also doubt batteries -and especially battery chemistries that one would want to have in a residential garage or basement as the likely best form of energy storage. Most likely most storage will be built in utility-scale facilities spread over the grid.

58/10,5= 5,5. If prices are the same as in Germany, 1,8 or less nowadays. This should be very profitable now without any subsidies beyond the de facto feed in tarif. 15000/10,5=1428 Despite more conversion efforts. Hum, i was expecting more. Maybe the performance ratio would also be better now.

@hix: Are we forgetting that France produces 80% of its electricity with no CO2 emissions?

= = = Bruce Wilder @ 4:42 pm
[…] There’s a lot of unwarranted technological optimism among the center-Left, about the prospective relative costs of “alternative” energy, which hide the dependence of alternative energy schemes on the foundation of the petroleum economy. Our ability to adapt depends on wise use of the tailend of the petroleum economy, which is what this natural gas “boom” is. And, there’s no awareness, no panic, when there should be. […] = = =

It is impossible to deny that there is truth in what you say. However, I don’t plan on committing suicide or un-engendering my children, and human beings have proven to be pretty adaptable and tough under very difficult circumstances (usually when pushed to it). So perhaps it is best to do what we can, and push as hard as we can for more as we go along?

Cranky

@58. “you might as well be discussing unicorns and mermaids, boys.”

It is the “boys” that I find most depressing about this comment.

I’d thought that people on the left prided themselves on being “reality-based.” Obama hinted, very strongly, that he would be blocking the Keystone pipeline. He announced a lot of other actions that environmentalists were very positive about.

And people here, apparently blinded by animus towards Obama, dismiss it all as meaningless. It isn’t just Republicans who have talked themselves into a bubble where they can’t admit error or acknowledge progress.

Green Jobs
Legalizing Heroin would create all sorts of jobs.
The point is, we should totally dissociate jobs and the environment.
Jobs are something the economy should provide; if it is broken (as it is) we should fix that.
Saving the environment is a separate thing that we have to do, like providing for widows and orphans. It doesn’t matter if green jobs are or are not created – I mean, if there is no planet, what does it matter ?

ezra abrams wrote, “The point is, we should totally dissociate jobs and the environment.”

Satire, I presume?

Rich Putzalsky “you’d be better off not using language…”

S’man clutches breast, staggers around room in circles, falls to floor, legs kicking in air. arms and legs extend and stiffen, flail and then drop to the ground and lie motionless. Uses no language.

@57, @64, @72

I concur that rooftop solar is primarily a demand reduction strategy. Net billing is only useful as long as there are customers for the excess capacity generated by solar users; or alternatively if the excess capacity can be stored. And my peak demand & nighttime usage require either stored excess capacity or another source. You can’t solve this problem through rooftop solar alone, but it seems to me that rooftop solar will be part of any sane solution. At least, that’s what the unicorn told me…

I think that rooftop solar demand reduction can go well beyond 15% for a few reasons. One, it sharpens users’ observation of electricity consumption, so that people who install solar are likely to substantially reduce use beyond the portion that is substituted from rooftop supply. (Layman’s experience, where solar + grid consumption was half of grid consumption alone prior to solar installation, does not appear atypical.) Two, as I keep saying, as solar penetration increases it raises grid electricity prices throughout a region, encouraging even non-users to reduce consumption. Three, oversized installations that sometimes produce a useless surplus of electricity, in exchange for providing a larger fraction of total consumption during less than optimal illumination, are currently cheaper than building storage for just-big-enough solar installations yet have some of the same central generation displacement effects as coupled solar and storage.

Since solar costs are mainly capital costs, the required return is crucial. A pure capital investor would consider electricty price volatily the major risk. A government can think different – the pv installation can be considered a hedge against societies conventional energy source price increase risk. So the risk free return rate is sufficient – about 0% real right now over the lifetime of a solar plant. (Thats sort of my disingenuis calculation why government owned solar is so cheap at the moment, suppose that also works for individuals who have a small solar allocation, but those wont set return demands).

Rich P, “I generally think that derisive spellings of people’s names is a grade school thing…”

Yes! That was my point. You get a gold star.

What is the basis of the argument that total energy consumption must negate efforts toward energy efficiency and renewables?

As Jevons pointed out nearly 150 years ago and as I have tried to point out repeatedly for the past two and a half years, the “economy of fuel” and the “economy of labour” are (allegedly) governed by the same principle but the socially-desired outcome for each of the two is the opposite. That is to say we want total fuel consumption to decline so we can conserve resources but we want employment to increase to accommodate population growth. The answer to this “complex” problem I get from Brad DeLong and Amory Lovins is to “solve” it independently for energy consumption and for employment and simply ignore the fact that energy and employment are inseparably joined at the hip. Just look at the historical data and tell me where you find the evidence for decoupling total energy consumption and aggregate waged employment.

The answer to the paradox seems to be that it is founded on a false premise. Neither economy of fuel nor labor lead to full demand rebound through something like the Jevons Paradox. It would be nice for employment, but it isn’t so. Surplus of labor does not magically create its own market demand, any more than the abundance of seawater or basalt have ever created a commensurately gargantuan demand.

Do international comparisons of energy and employment count? Trinidad and Tobago consume more than twice the primary energy per capita as the United States. Oman consumes about the same. The United Kingdom consumes less than half. Unemployment rates respectively are 6.6%, 7.6%, ~15%, and 7.8%. Oman has markedly worse employment despite similar energy consumption, while double-consumption Trinidad and Tobago does only slightly better than the US and half-consumption UK does barely worse.

Economic growth cannot be and will not be maintained indefinitely at any fixed positive percentage rate. Even smallish values like 1% lead to physics-violating absurdities in only a few thousand years. The total fertility rate is already below the replacement rate of 2.1 in half of the world’s nations. How many above-replacement nations are there where it is still rising? The bad news is that Earth’s natural services are already oversubscribed and it’s going to get worse. The good news is that nothing grows forever, not even human population.

Matt: “The answer to the paradox seems to be that it is founded on a false premise.”

Thank you! That is (almost) absolutely correct. That is why I included the parenthetical “allegedly.” Both Marx and Keynes refuted the principle. But pay close attention because “a false rumour is a real social fact” (Baczko). Whether true or false, the Jevons Paradox and the dogma that “the use of labor-saving machinery creates more jobs than it destroys” are inseparable. They are two ways of looking at the same body of evidence and theoretical propositions. They are either both true or both false — or both contingent and mutually so. No cherry picking.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been at this a long time. The good news is that the Jevons Paradox is not an “inevitability.” It remains, however, a possible outcome of deliberate policy choices. In that sense, I think J.Q. has stated the case backward. The “Paradox” would result from policies that pursue both energy efficiency and economic growth (to replace the jobs eliminated by labor-saving technology), as conventionally defined (cue the glib “redefinitionists” who seem to think that the material throughput basis of GDP is “optional”).

So, yes, the Jevons Paradox is founded on a false premise but it is a false premise that conventional economic thought is also founded on. “A false rumour is a real social fact.” Paul Krugman, Bruce Bartlett and others (even Megan McArdle) have been edging away from the false rumor recently in response to the “news” that labour’s share of income is declining (for the last 35 years) and that unemployment remains stubbornly high. But they haven’t yet realized the full implications of admitting the contingency of the automatic reabsorption of displaced labour argument.

@77

Right. The absence of net billing shouldn’t necessarily cause rooftop solar to scale down. At the right price, you’d design the system to maximize your energy savings, which in my case (and with panels from 2009) means cutting utility consumption in half. Newer panels are more efficient and cheaper. A dedicated rooftop solar program – with public funding and / or incentives – could make a big difference and act as an economic & employment stimulus as well.

As regards the sequester, what political ineptitude? Irresponsibility, yes. By Obama and the Republicans, and some Democrats. But we have yet to see the political endgame of the sequester. It is still possible for someone to win it.

I don’t see acquiring PV as changing peoples attitude towards energy. For the thoughtful and pro-green types like you and I, sure we start asking, how can I further decrease my net usage? Can I get it to zero, even though my system is undersized? But, where I live most PV is bought(contracted) so that people can continue to use energy in a profligate manner -and not be made to suffer from PG&E’s higher usage tiers (which can be 3times the rate that low users pay). I don’t think the typical buyer is a green-minded intellectual anymore -at least around here. And we dominate the country PVwise, I saw a survey of the top ten utilities for rooftop solar, and PG&Es installation number was the same as the next eight utilities combined.

Having a solar system with third party ownership may somewhat reduce the electricity user’s interest in reducing consumption. I’m hoping that third party ownership is the catalyst that gets installation costs down somewhere reasonable. If Americans could match the low labor costs of German installation (!) there are a lot more places that would already be past grid parity. The screwy tax incentive system gives back a percentage of system cost, including installation, rather than targeting something meaningful like energy production. Since third party owners are reselling electricity production at long term fixed rates or below grid rates, they have an incentive to optimize for long term production costs instead of initial tax rebates. It seems like that should mean figuring out how to install a couple of standard system sizes with minimal time and effort.

It’s possible that demand reduction, beyond demand substitution, is only something that will happen with early adopters. But it’s also been noted in large commercial organizations that deploy alternatives or even just ask their utility company for renewable power — making an expensive energy investment seems to get people over the threshold of awareness so that they look for cheaper demand reduction methods as well. Relevant data should be available from Hawaii soon. I think that rooftop solar penetration there is already well past the green early adopters, even though it’s a small electricity market as American states go. Australia seems like another good place to look for data: they’ve got more than a million rooftop solar systems and fewer than 8 million households.

I was going off the memory of the paper “A Roadmap for Reducing Rooftop Solar Costs by 50%.” It looks like my memory is flawed. Eyeballing the chart, it looks like US solar labor costs are roughly 3 times those of Germany. The text accompanying the graph hammers repeatedly on permitting as more expensive and less standardized in the US relative to Germany, and this appears true as far as it goes. But the nebulous “overhead” category is the single largest expense in the US chart, and almost invisible in the German chart. The text barely addresses this elephant other than to explain it is separate from permitting paperwork.

The large customer acquisition costs in the US seem like poor choices made by solar installers themselves, perhaps encouraged by the tax rebate model. Help, help, someone’s making me spend all this money on advertising, and he’s located in the executive suite.

If permitting and overhead are brought down to German levels in the US but the rest remains unchanged, it looks like a rooftop solar system would still be about 40% more expensive in the US. Probably a good deal on balance, given better insolation in large areas of the US, but quite different from the executive summary claiming that the US can reach cost parity with Germany just by simplifying and standardizing regulations.

Omega Centauri 06.25.13 at 2:13 pm

« I’m not as worried about methane leakage, because I take a longer view, and the methane decays ona roughly twelve year timespan. So if our fracking frenzy raises atmospheric methane levels but decreases CO2 levels because it substitutes for more carbon intensive fuels, after a couple of decades we will be ahead.»

Do you take in account that methane is a stronger GHG? And its elimination is by conversion to carbon dioxide and water? So the effect of methane is never less than the effect of the same quantity of carbon.

OC @98
I was replacing a roof last year and looked into solar as a concurrent project and that’s the moment I learned about the headaches of zoning, permitting, and homeowners association covenants. The long and short of it is though the roof went on in about 48 hours, I’m still working my way through how best to install solar and what type of system I can get approved.

Homeowners convenants are proving to be one of the largest hurdles. Many covenants were written long ago when the concern was about people putting gaudy satelite dishes and antennas on roofs and solar installations weren’t a thing to think about…changing or amending a covenant (or worse, getting a variance) is a more intractable problem than most are willing to undertake.

Clearly not a technical barrier, but a legal barrier which in some ways is worse because the equitable solution is so obvious, but getting people to open their eyes and see it is not.

@99:

Yeah, I noticed that one too, but didn’t bother to respond, because large holes in reasoning are scarcely unusual on these boards. Apparently OC’s “solution” amounts to increasing the use of accelerants in order to finally put out the fire.