An optimistic view on climate change

The US political situation scares me though. The Republicans by and large are circling their wagons. Several red states, most notably Ohio have overturned renewables requirements for the power grid. While a plurality of the public supports renewables are a decrease in emissions, the support is shallow, in the sense that other issues decide which candidate/party gets the vote. So an effective faux scandal could deliver a strongly anti-green government similar to what we;ve seen in Canada and Australia.

On the other hand, I’m seeing a lot of triumphalism on the part of clean energy supporters. It is now widely believed in the cleantech community that by the end of the decade wind/solar will almost universally be the cheapest electricity, and fossil fuel supporters will be fighting economics as well as environmentalism. But in the meanwhile a refusnik USA could easy derail a global agreement.

People, who are tempermentally disinclined to “panic” may need to step aside and let people, who need to panic to act at all, do so.

John Quiggin,
surely the world slow down in growth in the last decade could not have escaped your notice. Would the improvement you have mentioned have occurred without it?

Brad DeLong has estimated Gross World Product for 1,000,000 BCE. In 1990 U.S. dollars.

OK, then.

@2: ‘economically superior to’ is just another way of saying cheaper. Cheaper, without an increase in scale, means there is less money to be made, lower profits. So less money available to influence public opinion, or flat out bribe politicians.

Electric cars and mass market helicopters are about equal technological challenges; getting one and not the other is the political challenge.

Just look at how the prospects of nuclear nose-dived the moment someone made the mistake of saying the words ‘too cheap to meter’. Or how if you take any two technologies with a random set of characteristics, then the one that is more expensive will generally have it’s advantages lauded and its defects ignored, or sometimes treated as additional advantages.

A functional political system should be able to overcome that. But what about the other 85% of the world?

It won’t take much to whip up some reasons cheap solar should be banned, or have expensive precautions attached, while helicopters should be subsidised. In the absence of catastrophic climate change, the future is presumably going to be rich enough to make arbitrarily stupid decisions and more or less get away with it, at least in the short term. It just means you hit a steady state and stop getting richer.

Some would say this has already happened…

JQ I agree completely. Climate change is also going into extremes which are going to sway a few more of the remaining lobbyists and their daffy minions to shut-up, and to find another intellectually-corrupt paycheck. You should look at temperature predictions for the next week in the US Pacific northwest!

I’ve always been a little more on the optimistic side of this question for the following reasons:

1. Technologically the switchover is possible: rationally it is required.

2. There is no overriding left theory that I understand that describes why an unhealthy, oligarchy-controlled world system like ours can’t make the switchover. Capitalists will still own the new power sources and whatever abusive practices they now use will still be able to be used.

3. An the margin, greater evil is possible by staying with the current system — it’s more centralized (probably) and more expensive, etc. — and a whole lot of existing wealth is sunk into it. Bur our elite has not quite yet reached Bond Villain status and doesn’t yet make plans to kill most people off so that they can more completely control a smaller group. Rationality does affect them to some degree and eventually.

So in particular, I don’t understand the utility of panic in this connection. The public isn’t going to panic until it’s too late, and the public really has no control over what happens. Elite panic makes them act to depend sunk costs.

@PlutoniumKun

With India the key is setting up the infrastructure to use solar power. It’s actually mostly a country where solar makes a lot of sense… However, the populist government in charge in heavily dependent (electorally) on showing lots of progress “right now” – which is driving increasing coal consumption.

Trader Joe #16: “…makes a non-technical guy like me think, oh, maybe this is impossible after all.”

Another technological possibility is that we may extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and REDUCE the ppm. People in comments here have said, No! Impossible! — in much the way that the possibility of significant photovoltaic improvements has been dismissed here, for years. How would it work? Maybe a discovery or innovation in materials science that passively filters the atmosphere. Or genomics: Craig Ventner has proposed synthesizing a microorganism that would feed on gaseous CO2 and turn itself into gasoline, thus making a closed fuel cycle for planetary surface.

ZM: “in order for this to lead to helping in an emergency people also need to have some idea of what they can do help.”

I think that this is fundamentally kind of wrong-headed. At the level of what Trader Joe is talking about, there is nothing that people can do to help. Micro-decisions about personal consumption or production will have no real effect, even en masse. The only purpose in talking about them is to give people something useless to do so that they can feel like they’re doing something. This might be seen as avoiding panic, or it might be seen as discouraging political action.

The only thing that will really matter is what large-scale infrastructure gets built. This is currently a matter of elite decision: it has little to do with the market. Anything that an individual can do to affect elite decisions is worthwhile.

Rich Puchalsky,

“The only thing that will really matter is what large-scale infrastructure gets built. ”

This is not correct. It is a mix of individual and collective actions. I was just reading the other day about demonstration Eco-villages and Eco-neighbourhoods. Research into these have shown it is not just a matter of people being provided with infrastructure, they also need to change behavioural habits to conserve energy and material use.

Even if you get the government to order that everyone just has to accept rationing of energy and materials, unless people are ready and willing to make the behavioural change like during The Blitz they will just complain too much and the rationing will never work. So it has to be about individuals as much as collectives.

ZM
See, you’re doing it too. Where was the “Way to go, thanks for trying to do your part, nice job installing 10 panels.”

Instead I get – Why didn’t you recycle your appliances too? Write your congressman. Change your diet to eat more organic food….blah, blah, blah.

I spent 20 grand on friggin panels. That’s what I was able to do. I’m the only guy on my street that has’em and maybe I’ll be an example for others.

If I wanted to write my congressman I could have done that or changed my diet too. Maybe I will. But that’s not what I get from strong climate advocates – no “Atta boy, thank’s for helping.” Just the NOT GOOD ENOUGH, DO MORE.

If, as Rich suggests, everything I do is not good enough, and I’m on your side, can’t you see how its going to be bloody impossible to convince people who bear even a bit of skpeticism. How about encourage people to do something that they might think is doable and does make a difference rather than constantly bring down the fire and brimstone.

“At the level of what Trader Joe is talking about, there is nothing that people can do to help.”

This is rather hard to believe. Some 8 years ago I put a 10.5 kWh solar system on my roof. I’ve tracked the results since. I use about half the power from the grid I used before (by drawing power at night, etc), and 80% of what I do use I offset by the excess I send back into the grid for others to use (during periods where I overproduce). I’m aware that the latter benefits only accrue because others, e.g. My neighbor, are not also over-producing and can use my excess production,; but surely there’s some benefit to the excess production, and even without that it can’t be nothing to reduce your own power needs by half. And, I’m watching with great interest Elon Musk’s move into home energy storage technology.

“I’ve always been puzzled by this idea of changing consumption behavior. If you could get people to change daily consumption behavior en masse, wouldn’t it be even easier to just get them to change how they vote?”

Data on the relationship between petrol prices (or gas taxes) and petrol used suggests that it’s fairly easy to change consumption behavior; to say nothing of producer behavior.

Trader Joe: “If, as Rich suggests, everything I do is not good enough, and I’m on your side, can’t you see how its going to be bloody impossible to convince people who bear even a bit of skepticism.”

If people insist on looking at a collective problem as “What can I individually do about this collective problem?” then there is no honest answer you can give them other than “nothing”. Layman, above, put a 10.5 kWh solar system on his roof 8 years ago, which was a good thing to do. Did that solve the problem? No. Would it solve the problem if everyone in the world who had the individual wealth that Layman presumably does did the same thing? No.

Would a couple of simple collective decisions solve the problem? Yes. “Let’s not build any more coal plants: let’s invest what it takes to develop and implement large-scale renewables: let’s phase out gas for vehicles in favor of electricity.” The technology needed to do all of these things is already available: only a political decision is needed.

If Trader Joe is in contact with members of the elite who make decisions, probably the best thing he could do for the environment is to hire a sex worker to provide them with a really good time only on the condition that they use their influence the right way. That’s ridiculous, but it’s how our societies are set up. Somewhat less effectively, the usual avenues for political action are in theory available.

The reason that Germany has so many solar panels isn’t because Germans are so much more moral than everyone else. It’s because a governmental policy was put into place so that people will naturally put in solar panels.

As long as we have capitalism, there is zero incentive for any corporation or business to make those “collective” decisions. It’s not set up for that. It’s set up to grow or die. It’s set up with every incentive in the world to put profit over health and environmental concerns. All of those things cost money and take away from profit and personal compensation for business owners. Why would they sacrifice their personal accumulation of wealth just to do the right thing regarding the climate — or ecology overall?

They’re not going to. Capitalism, for a host of reasons, needs the endless round of production and consumption to escalate and expand, forever . . . and like debt, it’s set up to postpone paying the piper and to offload those costs to the populace as much as possible. They live for the next quarter, not for the next generation.

Keep capitalism in place and we are literally doomed. See the following:

http://thischangeseverything.org/

and

http://climateandcapitalism.com/

“The reason that Germany has so many solar panels isn’t because Germans are so much more moral than everyone else. It’s because a governmental policy was put into place so that people will naturally put in solar panels.”

This is of course correct, and I better understand your point. I agree that it will take government coercion to make a substantial difference. My own decision was made easier by government policies designed to encourage solar panels.

I didn’t mean ‘coercion’ in any pejorative sense. I meant government must create a system of incentives and penalties which produce the desired behavior.

For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to agree with Plume @31 on the broader issue of capitalism and the climate. That said, I also agree with the many posters who seem to be suggesting that part of the utility of individuals practicing more responsible consumption or lower-impact energy use is the way those actions subtly reinforce the necessity that action needs to be taken.
I think Trader Joe speaks for a significant segment of the population when he shares that he’s trying to do what he can, to a degree, but isn’t prepared to radically upend his life to go live in a carbon-neutral yurt.
I’m trying to be optimistic, too, but am increasingly of the mind that we need to get the percentage of the population for whom climate is one of their primary concerns. I think that, for a lot of people, a gateway into doing that is getting involved on the individual/household level. Once someone’s invested a certain amount of their time and identity into being the kind of person who takes something seriously, I guess I just assume (possibly naively) that they’re more likely to actually take it seriously.

Rich@38,

This has always been a danger in climate change rhetoric (and to a lesser extent, environmentalist rhetoric in general). Many people prefer to just sort of gloat over grim doomsday scenarios, because there’s always an unspoken (or openly spoken) “And then everyone will have to admit I was right!”* The end of the world is a small price to pay if we get to say “I told you so.”

*About capitalism, or patriarchy or vegetarianism or whatever the speakers favorite subject is.

RP @ 38

Are we going to make “the solution dependent on fixing every other problem”? It would be nice to solve the problem of global poverty at the same time as climate change, but it seems unlikely at best and a contradiction at worst.

On the other hand, I don’t see how the problems of global resource limits, overpopulation, the accelerating pace of technological advance, ecological collapse, and climate change can be neatly separated. There are good arguments to be made for thinking of the problem as being a foundational one, not of what energy source to exploit per se, but of too much energy use in general testing the assimilative capacity of the earth’s natural systems.

Rich @38,

We’re aware of your animus toward “the left,” even though you claim to be an anarchist. You have again confused the entire left with a very, very small part of its authoritarian past and present. Actual leftist traditions are far more likely to be anti-authoritarian than any other part of the spectrum, including the middle.

As for ecological concerns, Marx wasn’t the first to make the obvious and logical connections between capitalism and environmental disasters . . . and that leftist tradition has only accelerated since his death. I posted an excellent resource above. Ecosocialism, as a school of sorts, is probably its most concentrated and coherent form.

One makes a huge error if they believe the state capitalisms of the Soviet Bloc, China and NK represent actual leftist tradition. They don’t, especially when it comes to the environment.

And, with Bruce, I think we can’t fix this if we don’t view it holistically. If one feels better calling this important other problems into the mix, that’s fine with me. They are related, and there’s no getting around that.

JQ is right. Cynicism and despair are among the Bosses’ best friends.

I think the whole language of “tipping points” is a problem. It raises urgency before the supposed point is reached, but diminishes it after it’s definitely passed. I mean, once you’ve passed the point of no return, you’re not returning, right? — so full speed ahead.

And what I’ve read in ecology and evolutionary biology makes me skeptical that tipping point really exist. Things just get worse, increment, by increment; they can always get more worse. (In this sense the cynics are over optimistic.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point the fossil fuel companies roll out a new slogan: “What’s the Point? We’re Already Screwed.”

BW: “On the other hand, I don’t see how the problems of global resource limits, overpopulation, the accelerating pace of technological advance, ecological collapse, and climate change can be neatly separated. There are good arguments to be made for thinking of the problem as being a foundational one, not of what energy source to exploit per se, but of too much energy use in general testing the assimilative capacity of the earth’s natural systems.”

I don’t agree. Renewable energy resources are potentially huge, and we’re not locked into requiring a fixed amount of oil per unit of lifestyle, or something like that. World population is predicted to peak at 9.2 billion in 2075 and then taper off as far as anyone knows. Without ever-increasing population, and with energy that doesn’t face some obvious limit (except waste heat, which we’re nowhere near), I don’t think that we’re in a “Peak Everything” situation. We may well run short on other things other than energy, but let’s take one critical problem at a time.

It is tempting to look at something like overfishing, say, or ocean pollution, and think “Geez this is stupid: can’t we come up with some better social system that could be applied to all of these similar problems?” And of course to some extent I do that. But once again: no existing social system anywhere is really doing much better than bog-standard neoliberalism in this area, and if we’re really facing a problem which would kill billions of people than we’d be better off if we did what we could to make even neoliberalism capable of handling it. Which really it can…. maybe.

Layman: “If you think the government can more politically easily divert tax revenues to build solar plants which are designed to put existing private power generators out of business”

Are there really existing private power generators, at the largest scale? Of course this varies from country to country, but in the U.S. public utilities have a government-set rate of profit. The only reason why they are said to be privately owned is because … because it’s a large public asset, so someone has to privately own it because capitalism? I’ve never been very good at theology. At any rate, let the “owners” decide that they are going to take their chunk of the U.S. transmission network or whatever offline because they own it and they can do what they want with it, and they will find out that they don’t own it after all.

Of course it may be easier to convince the public of any particular country that “incentives” are great and “taxes” are horrible: that’s public relations. All that I was trying to say was that individual behavior doesn’t necessarily have to change. Maybe it would be better if it did, in many cases, but there is an enormous propaganda industry that tries to convince everyone that all problems are individual problems and should be addressed by individual action. I don’t think that we should be quick to agree with this, even if what we’re talking about is how individual actions are all guided by some kind of central incentive, whether policy or market based. Not when the production decisions are the important ones, and they already aren’t individual.

Air quality in the urban USA has improved dramatically since the 1970s, though there are regions that still don’t meet quality standards. Acid rain in both wild and urban areas of the USA has declined dramatically. 50% of species have most certainly not been wiped out in the last 50 years, though we are in the midst of a great extinction. That’s thanks to collective action implemented via government, though I also credit activist individuals who helped build support for action through government.

We both agree that the EPA doesn’t have enough power to enforce regulations on the books, and to update regulations to match new scientific discoveries, but even so regulations have been enormously beneficial. The obstructionist polluters do not always win. They have lost a lot of battles over the last 45 years. They are likely to lose a lot more over the next 45. They will also fend off a lot of challenges to their destructive practices. That’s reason to keep trying, not a reason to give up.

“Are there really existing private power generators, at the largest scale?”

Of course; I’d guess they’re mostly privately owned and/or publicly traded companies; though heavily regulated, as you noted.

As to individual behavior changing, that’s the whole objective. If you want people to drive electric cars, then they have to choose to buy them, and/or someone has to choose to make them. This could happen on its own, of course, but if you want it soon, it takes coercion to make that happen. You can order it, or incentivize it, or penalize the alternative. And incentives are also penalties – when I got a tax break to help fund my solar, you paid for it, so you were penalized.

Layman: “I’d guess they’re mostly privately owned and/or publicly traded companies; though heavily regulated, as you noted.”

It was a rhetorical question. I actually helped to make a list of them. My point was that the regulation is so heavy that they might as well not be.

Layman: “If you want people to drive electric cars, then they have to choose to buy them, and/or someone has to choose to make them. ”

You’re doing the same thing that I originally complained about: mixing up coercion as applied to an individual with coercion as applied to a large company. The number of car-making companies that need to be “coerced” is, what, like 4 or 5? After that, consumers can buy whatever car they like.

Aside from the obvious solution of replacing an economic system which will forever be in conflict with the planet, we are obviously now at the point where it’s absurd to assume that corporations will voluntarily do the right thing. There must then be outright bans on producing things that pollute and destroy ecosystems. We need to be draconian, if we want a planet that can sustain life in the future.

A change from capitalism would make it so we didn’t have to be draconian, at all, because it would naturally have radically different objectives, would naturally be centered on small is beautiful, local is beautiful, democratic is beautiful. It would naturally seek to work in harmony with the planet and with all of us, together. Capitalism, OTOH, couldn’t be more in conflict with the vast majority of us and the planet if it were paid to be — Oh, wait. It is.

“You’re doing the same thing that I originally complained about”

…because I think it’s a stupid complaint. Sorry.

It’s not really about declines in standards of living. It’s all about rethinking those standards.

It may be a cliche, but “the simple life” can often be the far higher quality life. If society is set up for it, then it will be. The real reason people even think in terms of more consumer stuff means a higher standard of living . . . . is because we’re brainwashed by the people who benefit most from that framing:

capitalists in general, and MNCs in particular.

It’s all relative. If we simply didn’t see the thousand and one different versions of product X, or any of the products that destroy the planet in the first place . . . . and instead saw local produce and local production and small is beautiful, and less is more, etc. etc. . . . we wouldn’t have anything to compare it with, as far as feeling like we were always losing out on something. And if you really break it down, if you really look carefully in our stores, it’s not hard to imagine us doing without 99% of it, and our landfills, our air and water, and the earth itself would be eternally grateful in the process.

The likely outcome is that with the reduction in McStuff, we’d have better stuff. Much, much less of it, true. But it would all be better, would last generations, etc. etc. IMO, fewer things, of higher quality, within a healthy ecosystem, means much, much higher standard of living. A few very well made things to help us get through life, rather than a ton of junk, endlessly needed quick replacements, etc. etc.

Population growth rates were seriously revised last year, using revised current birthrate data, and world population is NOT expected to level-off in the 21st century, possibly reaching 13 billion by 2100:

http://news.sciencemag.org/economics/2014/09/experts-be-damned-world-population-will-continue-rise

@ 63
Well from a public health viewpoint, I agree more with Plume. High capitalism is not just damaging the planet, it is making people unhealthy. Sooner or later mainstream economists such as yourself will need to recognise that there are serious conflicts between ‘what we need to do to create a way of life that is ecologically and socially sustainable’ and the ongoing push of capitalist corporations to have more and more control and derive more and more (unequally distributed) profit.

You can read about it in Naomi Klein ‘This changes everything’ but I also came across a very interesting piece of information the other day – apparently Sweden introduced healthy eating guidelines with a focus on sustainability recently, including recommendations such as eat less meat and choose locally grown food. Non-controversial one might think, but apparently the EU opposed them as being at odds with free trade provisions. Klein says the majority (I think, don’t have the book here right now) of disputes under free trade agreements have been over environmental or health protections.

This stuff is real, it’s happening. There is a clash between ecological sustainability and capitalism as we know it, and I think economists and political theorists do need to start recognising this.

For those who would like to know more about why ‘changes in lifestyle’ aren’t necessarily a bad thing, there’s a large literature on health co-benefits of climate change mitigation, including in the IPCC AR5 working group 2 report (I think it’s chapter 7 but can send a link later) and the Lancet has just published a new report.

I have started to put some of this info on my blog but might do some more soonish.

Val, You may be interested in three books:

The Politics of the Solar Age, by Hazel Henderson
Building a Win-Win World, by Hazel Henderson
The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by Gus Speth

These two people have been at the center of the multiple-NGO world movement on environmental, social and economic issues for the last 40 years and there are none who know more about the full plate of interlocking issues all the way down to the nuts and bolts, and what people are doing about it all over the planet.

Lee A. Arnold @ 66

I think that combines techno-optimism and abstraction in a dangerously misleading way. You are edging very close to the equivalent of perpetual motion machines with such claims, and obscuring the extent to which humans will have to combine increased technical efficiency with constraints on energy consumption, if we are to reduce human impact on the environment.

I’m all for an optimism that gets people to think practically about actually doing things, but I notice that it seems to slide seamlessly into fantasyland. If your “optimism” requires imagining a utopia in which efficiency soars so far that benefits swallow costs and never shit them out, you are just as crazy as those, who assuage their anxieties with an imaginary apocalypse.

It is especially dangerous as a path along RP’s “one problem at a time” approach — it is easy to forget that every “solution” is going to create its own new set of problems, not usher in the millennium.

Matt #70 “Wind and hydro power, rather surprisingly, do not increase waste heat at all.”

You are talking about production only, not use of the energy. There is no exception to the second law of thermodynamics.

@69
Thanks Lee for those references, I’ll have a look as soon as I can.

JQ @ 63
I think my comment to you above sounded a bit more dismissive than I intended (as often happens when I dash things off). I’m aware of course of all the good work you’ve been doing around bringing the TPP to people’s attention. We are also using an article of yours about food pricing in a unit on climate change and health I’m teaching in this year, so by no means do I intend to diminish your work! However, I do think you aren’t recognising sufficiently there is a fundamental clash between what can be broadly summarised as ‘EcoHealth’ and capitalism.

Bruce Wilder #71: “…very close to the equivalent of perpetual motion machines…benefits swallow costs and never shit them out…reduce human impact on the environment…every “solution” is going to create its own new set of problems…”

Energy production and use must have waste products, like CO2. The fact that some forms of energy can have waste products which don’t have to harm the environment like CO2, does not make them “perpetual motion machines”. It’s just physics. The only question is whether they would have enough motive force to do what we already do, and the answer is, yes, we can design around that too. You might specify a human impact on the environment which it is necessary to reduce, instead of just general hand-waving. For example, if it is the reduction of wilderness areas — well that’s a problem of land use restrictions and restoration ecology, and not a problem that renewable energy necessarily makes better or worse. Meanwhile the idea that every solution MUST create new problems sounds more like metaphor or superstition. There are usually new consequences, but whether they will all be problems needing solutions, remains to be seen. Simply putting restraints on energy production, which is not remotely in the cards anyway, would have consequences, and might create a new set of problems.

Matt #76,

Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry. I misread you to say that there was no additional waste heat at point of use. Of course there is. Your point is that it would have been dissipated somewhere else, anyway. So we can have a high-energy future without changing the total natural energy budget of the biosphere: we are just rearranging the concentrations of the dissipations.

‘It’s classic right-wing “the freedom of Ford to make whatever cars it wants to sell you is a basic freedom for you and me.”’

Yes, this is why I say it’s a stupid complaint. If the government forces Ford to do something, Ford as an organization has been coerced. One can believe that without also believing that corporations are people or that they have the rights of individuals. You’re having a reaction to a word which is perfectly useful to the purpose.

That aside, I want to pursue what works, within reasonable bounds, and not be constrained to only those things which comport with the Party Central Comittee’s orthodoxy. Maybe it would be better to dictate to car companies, but I’d say there’s no political will to do very much of that, so incentives and penalties it will have to be,

Certainly these issues cannot be resolved by life-style changes alone, but we should not push that argument too far. Our consumption habits in the developed world should not get a pass just because there are agents with a bigger role and responsibility. Few individuals have control over anything but their own consumption habits, after all, and ignoring this aspect of the problem is unnecessarily limiting, and can even be used as cover to defend consumption habits which are unduly burdensome on the environment.

For example: meat consumption in the developed world. Anyone familiar with the data knows that meat production is responsible for a sizable part of the emissions equation. This is an area where individuals can clearly work to cut down their footprint, without interfering with macro level solutions in energy production, transit, etc. In this regard, the situation Val highlights – which looks to me like sound science being overwhelmed by the influence of an industrial lobby – is very worrisome. This pattern is not at all unique, and we should be concerned about the ways that entrenched industries are driven to muddy the waters when it comes to basic human health.

Just as vested interests are content with the masses giving up on macro level solutions out of pessimism, there are also vested interests happy to promulgate the notion that there is nothing to be done on the individual level. This is a convenient lie for some, and not something we should endorse. In a late capitalist society such as ours, our consumption habits can be one of the most powerful tools we posses to communicate our desires for change. This is certainly a consequence of our political disempowerment – they are powerful in a relative sense only – but there is also a way in which action at the individual level constitutes a certain political sensibility which can be usefully applied to larger scale action.

I know that I should just drop this, but — no, large organizations really aren’t coerced in the same sense as individuals are coerced. Of course you can use the same word to describe both: English has lots of words with more the one meaning or with closely related meanings. But this is a case in which it’s really rather important to distinguish between the two meanings.

If someone can’t buy a gasoline powered car, and they want to and they have the money or other medium of exchange needed, they might not be able to for two kinds of reasons — either they are coerced not to buy the car, or the car company is coerced not to make the car. There is a huge amount of sleight of hand propaganda that goes into making these two situations indistinguishable, so that it appears that the same amount of coercion is coming out in the wash either way. If you really think that I’m just picking on word choice, you’re wrong.

“There’s no political will to do very much of that”: wrong. Car companies are, for instance, even under the current regime in America, coerced to manufacture fleets that meet certain MPG standards. That’s one of the only things that managed to get through the political process here recently. So people are in fact much more willing to have large companies coerced to manufacture differently than they are willing to have themselves coerced to buy differently.

I have definitely lost your thread. Do you mean that “waste heat” from renewables must cause global warming?

It’s really apparent to me, reading these comments, that most people here are coming at this much more from a perspective of political than climatological expertise. And I’m not a climate scientist, but having spent a good amount of time digging into the professional/semi-professional side of this research, I think most of you are far too optimistic.

It’s widely understood within the scientific community that the IPCC’s continued claims of a path to 2C is a “best case scenario” if not outright wishful thinking, and that even 2C may very likely prove unsafe, with runaway feedback mechanisms (amplifications) that send temperatures far higher. The vast majority of new data about e.g. climate sensitivity, Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet vulnerability, the actual speed of arctic ice melting, a worrying amount of methane pouring into the atmosphere from the arctic, a slowdown in environmental uptake of CO2, etc have been almost universally more negative than had been hoped. We’re nowhere near feeling the full effects of 400ppm (which will take decades at least), and if we shut off all coal plants today, the earth would warm dramatically within a few years due to the removal of the short-lived aerosol negative forcing. We already have “baked-in” far more warming than we’re currently experiencing.

It’s important perhaps for the public to stress that the actions we take now can still improve the eventual outcome, but going into this with rose-colored glasses is not likely to serve you well, minus our invention of a way to efficiently suck billions of tons of CO2 back out of the atmosphere.

We need to make not gradual but drastic cuts, not in 10 years but immediately, to have any chance of avoiding 3C or more of warming, and most scientists agree 3C has a high probability of being unstable. Realistically, the way this is playing out is: changes will be made, but it is too little, too late, and as the climate swings more wildly out of control within 10 or 20 years, some sort of dramatic attempt to geoengineer a fix will become unavoidable, with uncertain results.

Best case scenario is a zillion gigawatts of cheap fusion and/or solar lets us to atmospheric carbon capture and storage. Business as usual scenario is end of human civilization as we know it and the extinction of nearly all life on earth.

“It’s widely understood within the scientific community that the IPCC’s continued claims of a path to 2C is a “best case scenario” if not outright wishful thinking”

So when we’re trying to convince right-wingers that the science really is well founded, we describe the IPCC reports as the consensus of the best knowledge that we have. But at other times it’s suddenly not the consensus? So much so that “it’s widely understood within the scientific community” that it’s not? Or is this a criticism of the economic / political “path to 2C” rather than the science itself?

Rich Pulchalsky #91: “…IPCC reports as the consensus of the best knowledge that we have. But at other times it’s suddenly not the consensus? So much so that it’s widely understood within the scientific community that it’s not?”

I don’t know how widely understood, but it’s fairly well known to those following the science that a number of indicators have taken an unpredicted turn for the worst since the AR5.

I don’t understand what you mean. The IPCC reports are the syntheses by the climatology community. The IPCC is not some entity that sits around in continuous judgement of the consensus, making up-to-date “continued claims”. There is only the last document it produced, which is already 2 years old. All the researchers have gone back out to do more research.

themgt,

“We need to make not gradual but drastic cuts, not in 10 years but immediately, to have any chance of avoiding 3C or more of warming, and most scientists agree 3C has a high probability of being unstable. Realistically, the way this is playing out is: changes will be made, but it is too little, too late, ”

This is why I always say we need a wartime mobilization approach and make long lists of all the things needing to be done. It is very difficult to convince people though.

Getting back to the relative merits of optimism and pessimism – I think the case for generalising about either is overblown. Some people find courage in a bright outlook, others in a dark. Trader Joe invested in his solar panels out of optimism, but I know people who have put one in for the satisfaction of spitting in the eye of the coal companies. And both are worth it – someone with an investment in a clean future is likely to be a more committed political proponent than one who is not.

Heroes defy the storm – and everyone likes to be a hero.

I’m not really sure what “continued claims” meant, but producing ARs is not all that IPCC does. For that matter AR5 was finalized in 2014, or, if you prefer, the Synthesis Report for AR5 was “launched” in 2015. I do know that I don’t particularly like the idea of non-climate-scientists talking down the IPCC. No scientific document is holy writ, and every one can be contradicted by later observations, but you can’t simultaneously tell people that it’s the most trustworthy summary we have and that it’s widely understood by scientists to involve wishful thinking.

You’re blurring two things together. One of them is how we would need CCS to meet the 2C goal. But, yes, people reading this thread knew that, it’s in the original post if nothing else:

There’s a strong case that we should do better than 450 ppm, with a common ‘safe’ figure being 350 ppm. Since we passed that level some time ago, that requires a long period of negative net emissions, which cannot easily be achieved with current technology.

The second bit is about “the feedback loop of amplifications”. And here’s where you’re presenting science as if it’s for-sure when it really isn’t. By blurring these two together, you’re making it sound as if something that we all know is just as certain as something that we really don’t know.

I’m really not confusing two things. I agree the feedback loops are a current unknown, but evidence is accumulating and it does not look good. Second, Quiggin specifically states ‘These commitments are consistent with the IPCC’s estimate of the cuts required to stabilise greenhouse at 450 ppm, giving a good (66 per cent or higher) chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.’ – and what I am trying to show you is that in fact that scenario would require far more drastic action than anything that is being considered, and that action would be required to start immediately, if not years ago.

I am just not seeing it. Major infrastructure projects would need to be shuttered, abandoning trillions in capital. Just in my little town, the energy company announced a month ago it’d be spending nearly a billion dollars to replace an aging coal plant with a larger plant with natural gas + a solar garnish, to be completed by 2020. These are the types of improvements we’re seeing today, in infrastructure yet to be built that’s barely an improvement on the status quo, when we’d need to be seeing zero new fossil fuel plants and a global mobilization to pour money into a drastic energy shift. We’re seeing tar sands expansion, BLM approving more coal leases, fracking, cheap Saudi oil, approval for drilling the melting arctic, etc. None of this is possibly compatible with a 2C future.

In another thread I linked to a one degree of warming war plan by Paul gilding and jorgen randers. This is supposed to start in 2018, so we have 2 1/2 years. As it is the centenary of WWI people should just bring up the need for a wartime mobilization approach to climate change whenever talk of WW1 is brought up.

Paul Gilding also has a blog

“Anyone who “gets” the urgency of the climate issue and the scale of economic transformation it necessitates, is bewildered by those who don’t. How can so many otherwise intelligent and logical people – such as company executives, politicians and investment managers – not see the obvious urgency or the equally obvious economic risk? It is so illogical it can only be seen as denial.

This is not climate denial but an example of “implicatory denial”, the rather bizarre ability of humans to accept a risk but then stop processing the implications, just because those implications are so overwhelming. It is well covered in a study by Kari Marie Norgaard, described in her book “Living in Denial”.

Studying history, particularly WWII, while writing my book The Great Disruption led me to accept this type of denial as largely inevitable. As I wrote there, it is exactly because the implications are so great, that the denial is so strong. And because the implications get more dramatic and costly every year, the longer we delay the stronger implicatory denial becomes!

It is now so late in the process that the implications of ending denial are truly mind-boggling. For a start to have even an 80% chance (clearly too low) of limiting warming to the agreed 2 degree target (clearly too high) requires us to eliminate fossil fuels – one of the world’s largest and most powerful industries – and replace it in less than a few decades. This scale of change has enormous social and economic implications in any time scale but to do so within decades is without precedent outside war – not to mention terrifying for the owners and managers of such businesses (and so denial inducing)!

But it being mind-boggling and without precedent unfortunately doesn’t change the facts. This is what is necessary and so it must be done. That’s why I called that chapter “When The Dam of Denial Breaks” – because with the pressure constantly building, at some point it becomes so great the dam bursts.

If you think that’s wrong, you have to accept the alternative – that as the food supply collapses, extreme weather accelerates and military conflict over water scarcity, refugee flow and famine erupts, we will idly stand by and observe it getting steadily worse without response. That idea is so absurd it can be ignored, and that’s why the dam of denial breaking is inevitable. But when?

….

So will these 6 drivers be enough? Will the economic impacts of collapsing fossil fuels and collapsing cities force the invisible hand of the market to do what governments have failed to do? Not by itself, but it could tip a system that is primed and ready. Changing systems requires many interconnected parts to shift. That’s why in my writing and speaking I try to summarise such complex inter-related drivers – to help us see the whole and recognise emerging patterns.

…

Given all these indicators, I think there are enough cracks in the dam of denial to argue it is about to break. That does not mean the problem is fixed. But it would mean we stop this absurd game of implicatory denial and get to work on driving and managing the massive economic transformation that starts when denial ends.

When we try to understand and forecast change, we tend to look for big symbolic events – the global political deal, the massive economic crash or the extreme weather event that destroys a city. The reality is that change, especially system change, is just messy. It’s chaotic, confusing and often hard to see when you’re in the middle of it. But many are smelling a big shift, like the International Business Editor of the UK’s conservative broadsheet The Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard who summed it up well: “These historic turning points are hard to call when you are living through them but much of today’s fossil fuel industry has a distinct whiff of the 19th Century canals, a pre-modern relic in a world that is moving on very fast.”

This will be the year it moves a whole lot faster.”

http://paulgilding.com/2015/02/23/the-year-the-dam-of-denial-breaks-ready-for-the-flood/

maidhc: “That’s exactly what Enron did in California and they found out they could extract $12 billion from the economy that way.”

Well, Enron indeed no longer owns those assets, and hopefully the lesson has been learned. There are limits to optimism, and as I mentioned upthread the question of whether it’s possible for U.S. policymakers to learn anything in any permanent sense is approaching one of those limits. But for now the deregulatory scheme that let Enron do this is gone. And what stopped it was exactly this difference between the neoliberal ideology of “all assets must be owned by business” and the reality that if electric grids don’t stay on, they get nationalized.

Omega Centauri: “There are two things that have made the official IPCC reports too conservative.”

OK. I’ve been involved in global climate change activism since 1995 — at least, that’s when I can remember doing the first concrete thing about it — and I remember the long and exhausting fight to get IPCC reports accepted as authoritative. I don’t think it’s a good idea to casually undermine that. It’s pretty important to be clear about exactly what one is disagreeing with. The bit about CCS and the likelihood of whether it’s going to happen *does not contradict anything in AR5* as far as I know. The bit about “even 2C may very likely prove unsafe, with runaway feedback mechanisms (amplifications) that send temperatures far higher” has phrases in it like “may very likely” that sound like they are trying to contradict the science in AR5, since — as Omega Centauri mentions — I’m not aware that there’s a consensus among climate scientists that there’s a runaway feedback mechanism of any kind rather than a potentially increased estimate of climate sensitivity.

I am still firmly in the alarmist camp, and I think we still have a terrible problem. But I like to argue both sides of every issue, because you can’t learn to think otherwise, as many commenters at Crooked Timber consistently illustrate.

One’s own successes at prediction should not give one complacency about the course of the future, and god knows I hate to boast :-) but I have been following the climate-change issues since around 1983, and for the last 6 years in comments here, I have pointed-out a number of various things to both sides on this issue, and by golly, they are all becoming true:

1. the evidence of extremes would start manifesting in weather events sooner than many in the IPCC predicted, (and thus refuting denialists);

2. the political winds would begin to shift sooner than people thought, (and thus refuting dour alarmists);

3. that the anti-science crusade is a huge publicity stunt to sway minds and it eventually can’t work, (–in fact, the total effort only budged the opinion polls by around a temporary 10%–), but it depended upon the response of a real, complicated social cognitive bias which still exists and will remain active, and which manipulates “uncertainty” as an excuse, and which MUST be understood, because it does not respond to scientific evidence (a comment which continues to baffle some alarmists and of course sails over the heads of denialists, who now wish to be called “skeptics”, as if anybody is going to buy that unconscious strategy of denialism either, please go see a shrink);

4. any economists’ contention that the costs of mitigation exceeded the costs of business as usual is and always was just ridiculous nonsense, though promulgated far and wide (refuting all denialists and most alarmists);

5. cap-and-trade and carbon taxes would introduce more hidden “policy capture” by the vested interests, and the addition of political complexity would become unacceptable to the public; they will prefer command-and-control, it’s simpler — and anyway, cap-and-trade or carbon taxes will not be very effective as solitary policies (all of this, refuting alarmists and denialists in various combinations);

6. renewable energy technology was going to get a lot better and become economically competitive very quickly (refuting both denialists and alarmists);

7. and getting carbon back OUT of the atmosphere (not just CCS) is going to be a necessity, and thus a major technological focus.

I will tell you another one which OUGHT to be obvious, by now: we are as warm now as in the Medieval Warming Period — but that led to the Little Ice Age! Why? Unclear.* But if this happens again, it may dampen the warming reality for a decade or two, and thus dampen the political will for another 50 years to deal with a very dangerous situation that should be dealt with immediately. Because warming will be back after that, perhaps with a more terrible vengeance. The point here is, the alarmists should be ready for this turn of events, and you are NOT ready! Why not? The way you are arguing it now, you will lose all credibility if an episode of cooling begins. So please adjust your arguments. (*I think I’ve got a very good theory about how warming turns to cooling, and I’m watching events carefully.)

Another point which ought to alarm everyone. Mass-extinction events are few in number, but we have entered the 6th one already, due to non-climate reasons (briefly, 50% of wilderness area is gone + the remaining fragments suffer continued losses through altered wildlife population dynamics, and if you lose enough populations, then you’ve lost a species). But it is quite possible that there have been very many, perhaps dozens, of “nearly-mass extinction” events for climate reasons, because they might be so short that they do not show up in the fossil record, due to quick repopulation by the species stragglers emerging from refuges, after the episode is over. But such an occurrence would be devastating to present civilization. Fossil records mostly don’t have that fine continuity, and where they do, sometimes there are clear little gaps — such as missing pollen counts — which are puzzling. Don’t expect the denialists to understand the possible drastic implications of this, right away if ever.

On the methodology, as I tried to point out on another comments thread regarding science vs. religion, if you can’t argue both sides of every issue better, than your opponent, and you do not continue to practice this perhaps in fear of questioning your own presuppositions, then you are going to lose the argument. This is basic.

And stop pushing your own “ideology” whether capitalist, communist, scientist, or religionist. This is juvenile and boring.

Considering the amount of big-money denialism which still persists, and the fact that most people are still not in the mood for a reduced-energy lifestyle (nor does physics require it), the thing to do is to stop the insistence that the world must turn around immediately, and the only thing which will work is a blanket transformation which must occur tomorrow. Because while it may be true, most people won’t listen right now, and so other events must happen first. Try to realize which way the winds might blow, try to help the conversation instead of demanding your viewpoint, and be ready for anything.

Some things that might be useful at this moment? Promote the Pope’s encyclical (but you won’t, because ohmigod you’ll be tainted by religiousism!), talk seriously about consumer boycotts (even if it is remote talk, nothing makes bottom-liners more nervous!), continue to push the the political conservatives to the wall if they refuse to think clearly because it’s also lots of fun to tease knuckleheads and they surely deserve it, and… put SOLAR PANELS on your roof!

Why? because that does far more than your piddly little bit, it pressures the “market signals” to expand production and to further innovation, encourages politicians to get on board, etc., among other complex responses. If you are going to claim that the climate system is complex, why do you maintain that consumer responses are not? Think, much?

Theories about how MWP-like warming turns to Little-Ice-Age-like cooling should be published in the peer reviewed climatological literature if they are substantive. Without that publication, well…

If we’re doing critiques about minor points, then I’ll mention that the word “alarmist” sucks in this context. Both the optimists and the pessimists discussed in this thread believe that anthropogenic climate change is a critically important problem: the only difference is in our estimated likelihood of doing something about it and in the judgement of what intermediate steps are best for the purpose of getting something to be done. So both are “alarmists”. But it’s a horrible word because public perception is important. The people who accept science about global climate change don’t need a special word to define them: they are the norm. The norm to which various crazy people are compared never needs a distinguishing word to define it. Denialists need a distinguishing word because they are cranks.

Lee @ 111
Bravo, thoughtful and very well written.

The dialogue could use a few more pieces that lay out (as you do) – here’s what we said would happen, and look what did happen…that’s why when we say this next thing will happen or needs to happen, we aren’t just making shit up of serving an agenda.

No doubt there are tons of articles already like this – but to reach average non-scientifics (like me) they need to be on “stupid” sites like CNN and USA Today, stuff that gets streamed into peoples Facebook where they see it every day even when they don’t want to. I’ve been to RealClimate and some of the others, they are excellent and well done, but most people aren’t gonna go there before the fact – it would be like going to Web MD before you’re sick just to browse.

Cranky Observer @ 82

“Presumably that reasoning also applies when a purely rational capitalist organization rejects a given technology. For example, when Wall Street – assumed in freshwater analysis to be the canonical example of pure rational capitalism allocating resources – chooses not to fund nuclear fission power plants for 20 years, you will accept that judgement and not attempt to deflect blame to other actors in the political economy or force the gub’mint to subsidize that technology. Right?”

You misunderstand me. I would be happy to force capital to do what is necessary, but I don’t see the political will for that to happen. And, I think there are no ‘purely rational capitalist organizations’ – that’s an oxymoron.

Layman: “I would amend this to change “…even under the current regime…” to “…only under the current regime…” Which is to say, even with the government most amenable to the cause, little dictation to capital seems likely.”

You might say that, but it wouldn’t be true. CAFE standards started in the U.S. in 1975, so car manufacturers have been coerced to manufacture fleets that meet MPG standards under all regimes since then. The 2007 amendment was actually signed by Bush.

Lee Arnold: “Why? because that does far more than your piddly little bit, it pressures the “market signals” to expand production and to further innovation, encourages politicians to get on board, etc., among other complex responses. If you are going to claim that the climate system is complex, why do you maintain that consumer responses are not? Think, much?”

If you just put a solar panel on your roof and neglected what signals it sends, and other complex responses, then you’re just doing a minor but positive act and everything is fine. But if you’re taking signals an complex responses into account, then it’s not so straightforward as you are presenting it.

Some of the signals that you’re sending, to both markets and politicians, are bad signals. First of all, to politicians you’re sending the signal “You can buy me off with the same volunteerist nonsense that helps to derail all American mass movements!” To markets you’re sending the signal “Don’t invest in large-scale-site solar power generation — what we want is equipment for individual projects for middle-class people who own houses.” Maybe the individual projects add up to a lot. But is that something that the market really should be deciding? Of course the technology for one can largely be applied to the other, so you aren’t doing too badly there.

And what are some of the complex responses? Think about opportunity cost. Most people have a pretty strictly limited amount of energy and time and resources for projects that are not directly job-related, child-raising-related, and so on. There might be some kind of mildly positive influence from the solar panels. What was the opportunity cost of telling people to put up the solar panels — given that it’s a major activity to do so? Well, given how sparsely attended most local energy planning meetings and so on are attended, if the person had taken the energy / time / whatever that went into shopping for and doing paperwork for the solar panels and put that into going to meetings, I’d wildly guesstimate that maybe they could have had 1000 times more influence on GHG emissions. Basically, if they could say something that has a 1% effect on plans for a community of 10,000 people, they’ve done more than a lifetime worth of scrimping and saving and buying little individual solar panels right there.

RP @ 109: I’m not aware that there’s a consensus among climate scientists that there’s a runaway feedback mechanism of any kind rather than a potentially increased estimate of climate sensitivity.

One of the difficulties that these discussions present is that we have to bat back and forth loaded metaphors. “runaway” is certainly one of those. I am not sure that “climate sensitivity” improves understanding though.

The primary effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere on heat retention is fairly minor — doubling CO2 concentration from the pre-Industrial Revolution baseline of ~280 ppm might, by itself, produce a global average temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius. It is because climate is a complex, chaotic system with feedback from other processes that anyone thinks the actual and realized increase will be larger, and could be much larger. What that actual realized equilibrium temperature might be a hundred or three hundred years from now is hard to predict, beyond estimating that it will be more than 1 degree. And, that the difference between the 1 degree due directly and primarily to the additional CO2 and the actual result — say, it turns out to be a climate equilibrium 4 degrees warmer, global average — will be driven by processes mostly not under human control. Granted “runaway” is not a good word for that, but “sensitivity” does not communicate it well either, imho.

Another issue is that the transition from here to the terminal equilibrium “there” 300 years hence is unlikely to be a straight and narrow path. That the climate will settle down to a new equilibrium eventually seems to be a part of the scientific consensus. No one thinks that any “runaway” transitional process would runaway indefinitely. But, in the meantime, the climate will be de-stabilized. Again, the state of the climate will leave any predictable and stable relation with the actual amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or the rate of addition — humans will lose control. I don’t think anyone has a single definite idea about what climate instability looks like. “Extreme” extreme weather events, maybe? Droughts. Floods. Coldwaves. Heatwaves. I am not sure about how abstract talk of “climate sensitivity” helps popular understanding anymore than lurid talk of “runaway” climate change.

RP @ 122: We’re running out of time to just keep trying harder.

I think we ran out of time for some kinds of trying.

I think “we” are adapting. By crude neoliberal grinding down of consumption for the moment.

I think Lee has the right basic idea: more shocks to the system are coming, and then it will time to try something else. If we have thought of something else before then.

Frankly when I see the word “runaway” used by anyone who isn’t a climate scientist that’s a leading indicator that they probably don’t understand what’s going on.

“There is a widespread view [within the scientific community] that a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” – Kevin Anderson

If you’re agreeing that it’s incompatible with human civilization and likely unstable, does the specific word used really merit this much debate?

I think that reducing energy use is a relatively quick to implement change for much of the developed world, at least there’s plenty of easy jobs still not done in that area, in the USA. I don’t think reductions in energy use alone are sufficient to stay under 450 ppm CO2, and after a certain point switching energy sources produces more benefits from the effort applied than further consumption reductions. There is reason to think that about 40% of typical American household energy use (not just electricity) can be eliminated just by careful house design and construction, to limit the need for artificial heating and cooling. Smaller gains are possible with efficiency upgrades to the existing housing stock. That’s significant and it should be done. It’s not nearly enough.

According to the IPCC, the median integrated warming potential of 1 kilowatt hour of coal-generated electricity is 40% greater than the same electricity supplied by combined cycle natural gas generators, 17 times greater than utility scale photovoltaics, 20 times greater than rooftop PV, 68 times greater than utility scale wind. If people are currently getting electricity from coal, to reduce warming potential by equivalent measures they can either eliminate at least 94% of electricity use, switch to natural gas electricity and simultaneously eliminate at least 92% of electricity use, or switch to non-fossil electricity sources and give up 0% of electricity use. Unless there’s a global collapse of complex societies, and “how should we power machines?” becomes an obsolete question, emissions reductions are going to come more from switching energy sources than from reducing energy consumption.

Coal is by far the largest source of Chinese energy. Right now China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. You can’t reasonably expect China to consume 94% less energy. That would put their per capita energy consumption somewhere between Yemen and Angola, with all the upheaval and misery that implies. But China is trying to replace coal with cleaner energy sources, and is making progress, much to the chagrin of Australian coal exporters.

Val: “It’s not as if there are a whole lot of researchers out there (at least that I know of) researching the question ‘are people who put solar panels on their roof making the impact of climate change worse?’ – because why would anyone?”

You advocate for community solar and you haven’t thought about this? Then perhaps you should start. I’m not saying that putting solar panels on your roof “makes climate change worse” because it really depends on the local situation. But of course any money that middle-class people spend on solar power for themselves is not available to be pooled into buying solar power for everyone. If you spend $10,000 on solar panels for your roof, then there is a potential community solar project somewhere that has $10,000 less in funding. Or, really, it’s probably not getting built — low income people sure can’t pay for it without middle class people paying for part of it.

Most countries cover everyone with essentially the same medical plan, or a base level of support plan, because they’ve decided that medical care should be available to everyone. And therefore they socialize the costs over everyone. Renewable power, if it’s really going to replace fossil, similarly has to be available to everyone. That’s not really compatible with wealthier people having their own system and not helping to support the universal system.

But maybe it’s OK if you’re buying the panels because as an activist you’re going over and above your general share, and you’d be willing to both pay for your panels and support conversation of the base power system. In that case you have to look pretty carefully at that phrase Lee Arnold used, “market signals”. People are used to the idea that early adopters of something pave the way for making that something so cheap that later on everyone gets one, because that’s how consumer electronics have worked. But that’s not always true. Sometimes it signals that it’s a luxury item and that no, everyone is not ever going to get one without some kind of concerted political action.

You’re assuming that there are no economies of scale from having a larger panel array on a better site, with perfect orientation of the panels to the sun and lesser per-panel installation costs from putting in a big batch of them at once. You’re also assuming that when you inevitably get the tax bill for decommissioning the coal plants and building the big solar ones — because we all are agreed that has to happen, and people are going to pay for renewable power for poor people one way or another even if the long term costs are negative — that you won’t complain that you already spent your money on solar power and why are you buying it for other people now.

In the U.S., you’re probably better off just buying the solar panels for your roof. It’s how we do things here — we don’t do it otherwise even for things like medicine, so…. and the way our system works means that solar power panels on houses take peak time-of-day profits away from privatized fossil power generation companies in a complex fashion that I don’t really want to go into. But it’s clearly not a universal, simple thing that is good everywhere.

= = = Rich Puchalsky 06.27.15 at 12:57 am
You’re assuming that there are no economies of scale from having a larger panel array on a better site, with perfect orientation of the panels to the sun and lesser per-panel installation costs from putting in a big batch of them at once. = = =

I love big technology myself; sometimes think I should have lived in the 1880s (although we’ve discussed the downsides to that here too). I’ve worked at large power plants and I’m roughly familiar with both the economics and the culture. So you might assume I would be support the arguments for large centralized facilities. But you do assume that there are no downsides to marginal-cost-optimizing size. Downsides such as vulnerability to accident (tornado hits large Apple solar farm vs. tornado hits large neighborhood with 10,000 individual panels units). Loss of redundancy. Concentration of economic risk.

And in general, loss of resiliency. The FERC and the regional ISOs are pushing hard to have the interconnections east of the Rockies operate as one gigantic grid with SCADA inputs and outputs centralized in one equally gigantic model, full-load transfer capacity among formerly semi-autonomous regions, and ever-larger long-term planning zones which result in planning models supporting larger central generating nodes. No thought is given to ecological diversity in the push for more integration and lower marginal cost. I greatly fear that as a result we will some day (within 20 years) experience a continent-wide loss of system stability leading to blackout (if lucky) or system damage that will not be as easy to recover from as the 2003 FirstEnergy event.

Layman: “Ah, so when you say my $10,000 isn’t available for a community effort, what you mean is that some tiny undefined fraction of that $10,000, equivalent to the ‘economies of scale’ of a larger effor, is lost, not the entire $10,000?”

No, I was bringing that up because you said that the two investments would generate the same electricity. But of course that wasn’t even the major point. The major point is that if you imagine that every middle class person builds their own personal solar power plant, no community solar power plants get built because poorer people don’t have the income to invest. It’s like building a gated community. You can say that each $10,000 buys $10,000 of housing, so what’s the difference? But at the end all of the people who could afford spots in the gated community have one and all the poorer people are left outside, because there’s no cost sharing. (Well, really, there is — like most things in the U.S. having to do with housing, subsidies for middle class solar panels probably are mildly regressive, so the poorer people are sharing their money with you.)

Layman: “I am assuming that, but being the principle here – the person we’re talking about – it’s a damned easy assumption for me to make.”

Too bad it’s not a good assumption for people to make about other people when they are considering whether this is good policy or not. I mean, yes I know that everything has to relentlessly be personalized into a question of whether the individual is a morally good person or not as evidenced by their personal life — part of that Puritan thing BW was writing about: Val has added an intriguing extra fitness element so we can see how that’s going — but come on. Earlier in this very thread you were writing about how people wouldn’t want to pay for this out of taxes, preferring “incentives” that guided their personal spending. What’s going to happen when the upper-middle class has happily responded to those incentives by buying solar panels for their houses? Are they all going to be happy to pay again?

Cranky Observer: “So you might assume I would be support the arguments for large centralized facilities. But you do assume that there are no downsides to marginal-cost-optimizing size.”

Yes, I understand that. I’m not saying that we should have, say, as many solar power plants as we had nuclear power plants, and just switch them out one for the other.
If someone wants to argue pros and cons of centralization vs decentralization, fine. But people are going to have to actually start thinking about these things a bit more than I thought that people were.

Rich I get the feeling you don’t fully understand how solar electicity and community solar actually works. Existing solar arrays could be linked in to a community solar system, they are not either/or.

Also, it isn’t an individualistic ‘fitness’ element I’m talking about, and I wonder if the reason you think it is, is because you just don’t understand these ideas either? Your translation of my ideas is just so far away from the truth that I don’t even know where to start. Is it because you’re American and you haven’t been exposed to anything beyond individualistic models of health?

Seriously, you don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of public health. You criticise others for not talking communally, but you don’t even appear to understand the social model of health. You translate everything into individual terms, either because all you want is to win arguments, or because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Anyway Rich I don’t want to just turn this into a fight, but this thing of yours of treating everyone who disagrees with you as a neoliberal – to put it mildly it’s not helpful and at its worst it just derails discussion and makes it impossible for people to get anywhere.

I think it’s important to try to achieve understanding in this area, but it’s really hard to do that if there is someone involved in the discussion who persistently misrepresents what others are saying.

I agree with Plume who notes that we need to get rid of capitalism to solve climate change.

This is necessary but not sufficient.

Market socialism and cooperatives can also become economically competitive and growth-seeking which now flows into wages, savings and public funds.

The point about capitalism is that it is structurally predetermined to maximise profits irrespective of other concerns and has crisis tendencies which impose (via ramifications) an obligation to utilise the cheapest form of economic growth path.

This is a complex area, but the bottom line is that the logic of capitalism cannot coexist with the logic of sustainability. This breaks out in many forms – one of which is rampant exploitation of fossil fuels.

geo,

“Unlike Val, I found Rich’s argument @121 quite compelling. Large-scale problems sometimes don’t have small-scale solutions. Individual adoption of solar panels is a bit like not eating beef or raising one’s own food. Each may be a good thing to do in itself, but the problems of renewable energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and pesticide pollution can only be effectively addressed at the policy level.”

I read quite a lot about this for my course, and disagree. Some time ago I did think that it was primarily government action that was necessary — this had the side effect that it makes action seem more hopeless as government are not making appropriate policy at the moment. But my reading and also my observations of community efforts have led to me changing my mind.

I think that individuals and community groups and local government are ahead of State and Federal government at the moment. This is something I hear all the time in talks and discussions. Also I think I have read something you wrote about the problems with Robert Moses — we also study Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs to look at the backlash to comprehensive planning in the 70s and 80s.

I think individual and community actions now are how we can lower ghg emissions ASAP as the governments policies are not strong enough.

Also I think the more that individuals and the community do now the more that community capacity and knowledge is increased, which should hopefully lead to the community having a greater ability to collaborate on local transformations of the environment and behaviour with technical experts and elected representatives and policy makers etc.

Bruce Wilder #120: “I don’t know whether I still think there’s some possibility of a fortuitous crisis, of a dramatic set of events — perhaps climate events — that free people to align differently…”

You made me wonder again whether the resolution of PRIOR problems, helps to free people to deal with the next thing.

The US Supremos just upheld Obamacare, and ruled gay marriage to be the law of the land. The President just demonstrated in a church eulogy what most of us already knew: that Christianity is not only really good, it’s very tuneful.

On the same day, maybe they don’t quite know it yet, the GOP just entered the last alley of their cul de sac, where they now must scavenge the dustbins and dumpsters for more dog-whistles. Why? Because, they NEVER sing “Amazing Grace”! But there may not be enough racist and greedy dog whistles in the whole wide world to fool enough voters to give the GOP the White House in 2016 (and the GOP is already likely to lose the Senate for math reasons — the same reason they picked it up in 2014 will now reverse).

And THAT means that in 2017 (a year after the US election), a provision which is already in Obamacare raises the question of a public-option or single-payer. Vermont analysts recently concluded that its state is too small for the necessary risk pool to do that, so it will become a multiple-state question, or a national question, and it will be on the front burner. California is sure to look at joining in, despite the best attempts of the private insurers to buy-off the legislators. If it goes through, premiums may drop 10-20% and all the lefties who don’t understand how policy works to effect future transformations, may see another of their issues resolved…

Why stop there? Let’s keep going!

As Tony Scalia advised, in his otherwise ridiculous dissent: “Ask the nearest hippie.”

YES! exactly the method that we should encourage! the psychedelic relics ROCK!

Rich @ 150
You can stop replying to me if you like Rich, but that doesn’t mean you understand, as your comment on solar again shows. I’ve actually got solar panels. They feed into the grid at times when I’m not using all the power they generate, and I’m perfectly well aware of that. Households sometimes use more than their panels are generating, sometimes less, but that’s got nothing to do with whether local networked systems could work or not.

Ive written about community solar in a blog post last year http://fairgreenplanet.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/community-solar-update.html.
I haven’t updated it, but i know these projects face a lot of regulatory problems. However in theory if local systems can be set up, then individual household panels could feed into them. The issues become storage ( which the new Tesla batteries might help with) or alternative power sources (which could be wind for example).

in theory, large scale grids could operate in a way that facilitates take up of renewables. But here in Australia, they generally haven’t, partly because our systems are privatised or corporatised to act like private operators. However there are still advantages to local systems even if they did.

I’m not an expert on electricity systems by any means, but at least I have some idea what I’m talking about. What alarms me about you is that you sound knowledgeable and people are impressed by that, but I think you are just confusing the issue.

Eco-villages are using some of these solutions already.

RP @ 139

Frankly, I think this response of yours is a bit of a dodge. First you say that spending $10k on solar denies $10k for a community solar solution. When I point out that, in fact, it doesn’t – it essentially replaces $10k worth of conventional power generation needed for that community – you don’t say ‘yes, that’s right’, you say ‘oh something is lost in economies of scale’.

When I point out that this response is a bit churlish, since very little is lost, you quibble that you were only responding to my claim to point out something is lost, when in fact the point at issue is your claim that the whole damned $10k is lost.

Similarly, You tell me that I will object to paying more later because I’ve paid for solar now, and I tell you I won’t object, and all you can say is ‘oh, I bet other people will!’ Other people will object whether they’ve bought solar or not, won’t they?

Now, you say your complaint is not the rooftop solar, it’s the missing $10k spent by middle class people on themselves instead of on electricity for the poor. So, you don’t object to rooftop solar systems at all. You object to orthodonture, college educations, European vacations, new (electric) cars, bathroom remodels, plumbing repairs – anything a middle-class family might spend $10k or more on instead of buying renewable power for poor people.

Take a deep breath, realize you’ve made a stupid claim, and move on, please.

Sorry, sent the wrong link in my above post @ 154 – here’s the correct one http://treealerts.org/region/europe/2014/06/uk-germany-beat-solar-records-as-community-power-projects-multiply/

A rough calculation suggests that if every US middle class (or upper) household installed rooftop solar, we could retire something like half the coal-fired plants in the country. Of course, not every middle class family has a roof to install solar on – apartments, poor exposure, etc – but combined with measures like covering schools (the schools down the street are covered with panels) and other public buildings, as well as private buildings like warehouses and strip malls, it’s a big damned deal! Selfish bastards.

“Nope. I’m specifically talking about what happens when something that’s supposed to be a universal public good gets privately paid for.”

What you are specifically doing is making claims which are false, and then refusing to acknowledge that they’re false. I can’t see how that’s going to help you change minds, assuming that’s what you’re trying to do…

Rich your “neutral” story appears to be sponsored by Shell!

We’ve had loads of those battles in Australia, they really aren’t proving what you think they’re proving. Big energy providers think their profits are threatened and instead of adapting they’re trying to put pressure on governments. Here, it’s possibly correct that some early adopters of solar are subsidised by the community at large, since they got really good deals under the early incentive schemes – although there is still an argument to be made – but people like me who bought panels a little later, sell our power to the energy companies for 6-8 cents a KWh, and they on sell it for 22c or more, crying all the way to the bank.

For someone who disapproves of neoliberalism, you do keep some strange company – energy companies and Shell!

The other thing energy companies have been allowed to do here – especially in Victoria where electricity has been privatised – is increase the amount they charge for ‘service to the property’ (poles, wires, etc) – as opposed to energy usage. That’s a real killer for low income groups, because no matter how little you actually use, you’ll still get charged your service fee, which is the bulk of the bill for low energy users.

Now there’s an argument.

Anyways, I think that this whole subthread does kind of favor Bruce Wilder’s view of things. “We need to panic now because people don’t understand the scale of what needs to be done” is looking a bit more convincing.

Electricity flows where it flows until it reaches a constraint – generally a transformer or sub-transmission line limitation, or a flow control device such as a capacitor/inductor bank or phase angle regulating transformer. Back in 1900 before electric analog computers were practical electrical system planners used water tables to model power flows. Modern day electrical distribution system engineers are deeply conservative but they are not stupid [1]: if they receive information that their region of responsibility is experiencing a high percentage of solar installations with tw0-way inverters such as Layman’s system (e.g. Denver metropolitan area) they will start scheduling transformers and transmission lines for redesign and upgrade to avoid voltage problems and complaints from customers that their inverters are being turned off (via SCADA command) too often.

IMHO the real issue with wind and solar is baseload and replacement coverage, which is driving some – although certainly not all – of the issues Val reports at 1:47. Yes, assume arguendo that the evil electricity providers are trying to strangle distributed renewables. But then please specify exactly what you expect to happen in Denver when it is nighttime, the temperature is 40 below zero, and the wind dies. Do you want electricity provided? Through what system? How is that backup system paid for? Are you willing to sacrifice Boulder Canyon to a pumped storage hydro plant?

[1] contrary to a very common premise in these CT discussion.

Cranky Observer: “IMHO the real issue with wind and solar is baseload and replacement coverage”

I just had to pursue the shiny cat toy of community systems without middle-class participation (except through philanthropy) so I didn’t mention baseload. But I thought that that was a lot of the reason why the large-scale grid had to be built out, whether the power sources themselves are more distributed or less — so that power can be shipped from one part of a continent to another.

Here’s something I don’t understand, though. Why Boulder Canyon? Can’t you just dig a sufficiently large underground cavity, fill it with stagnant water, and use pumped storage by just pumping the water up to the top? It sounds like a big engineering project, and you do need what’s effectively a hydropower power plant in the middle, but simply digging a big hole shouldn’t be too much of one, I’d think.

Cranky Observer,

“IMHO the real issue with wind and solar is baseload and replacement coverage, which is driving some – although certainly not all – of the issues Val reports”

The modern European thinking is that the replacement of baseline is with variable and flexible energy loads. Variable is solar PV and wind, flexible is things like bio-gas turbines to complement the variable.

Val is right about Germany. As part of a group project one of the team looked into Germany’s model and the community energy projects were popular and facilitated an embrace of renewable energy technology, but when German policy moved away to bigger commercial projects there was much more consternation and a loss of community support.

Layman: “The motivation is declining profits for energy companies, driven by two factors: Rooftop solar reduces demand, and regulations constrain profits on excess energy fed back into the grid from rooftop systems. ”

You left out one of the factors that I already mentioned in the last paragraph of #135: they don’t just reduce overall demand, they reduce peak load time demand during the hottest hours of the day, when the utilities (generally) get to charge a special peak rate for their power. Therefore, individually owned rooftop solar does displace (generally) natural gas peaking plants.

As I wrote above, you were the one who was explaining to me how the public was never going to stand for taxes, but only for incentives. And you’d really like to bring this all back to the preferred method of individual virtue analysis: I must be criticizing your individual spending, and I must be saying that you’re a monster if you don’t spend your money on the poor. But when it comes to, once again, medical spending, presumably you understand why people wanted single payer. Or maybe not?

Layman: “Instead, they’re trying to kill rooftop solar, both by attacking the economics through surcharges and / or elimination or reduction of net meter credits; and by attacking rooftop solar customers as parasites stealing from everyone else. And, apparently, they’ve found an ally in you!

Of course, I think power generation should be a public good; but it is not now, and I see little prospect that the utilities will be nationalized in the foreseeable future, so I don’t see that as a solution we can rely on.”

And apparently the neoliberals have found an ally in you!

We can continue with “Whose argument is most superficially similar to some bad entity’s argument?” if you like. Or maybe we can acknowledge that there are genuine disagreements about what the best path is to decarbonization, including disagreements about what scale efforts have to occur on to be effective.

“Are you happy to acknowledge that it’s silly to claim that $10k spent on rooftop solar is $10k stolen from electricity for the poor?”

What I wrote is that large-scale public systems can’t work unless the middle class is part of them. You don’t seem to like the example of medicine, so how about Social Security?

When government forced automobiles to be sold with catalytic converters to reduce air pollution, it significantly improved urban air quality in the USA. But of course it only changed what was bought among people who could afford new cars in the first place. It didn’t make transportation more affordable for the poor. It didn’t replace privately owned cars with communal transportation solutions. You might even say the effect was mildly regressive, a “flat tax” effect that made all cars slightly more expensive without making the poor any less poor. Maybe the effect wasn’t even mildly regressive, given that poor people are more likely to live in areas where automobile pollution is concentrated; the health benefits may well be worth more than the increased cost of automobile purchase. In any case I’m not going to say that mandating emissions controls instead of building light rail systems was a distraction from the problem of cleaning up urban air.

I believe that collective action is necessary to switch energy systems. I see the increasing penetration of rooftop solar as an effect of collective action. Without incentives from legislatures, regulations to standardize solar power connections to the grid, and collective pressure from concerned citizens and their elected representatives against obstructionist electric utilities, rooftop solar would not be going anywhere. It would be about like it was 20 years ago, seen on the occasional wealthy person’s off-grid home or survivalist’s off-grid shack. That would be a strictly individual measure with no observable effects on the rest of the energy system, but it’s not 20 years ago any more.

About 25% of homes in South Australia now have rooftop solar. Alinta is sending 780 megawatts of coal capacity into early retirement because of the simultaneous spread of energy efficiency measures and rooftop solar. Layman correctly identifies efficiency measures or energy-thrifting behavior changes as the same in terms of “stealing” from the consumption that utilities thought they were assured. The grid sees distributed generation as demand reduction. Net metering will not work at high solar penetration levels — the grid system is not really a virtual battery — but special service fees for solar-using households are a reactionary response. Solar households need to be encouraged to temporally align energy consumption with their own energy production, so as to not overtax the grid and not waste what’s being generated from rooftops.

Rooftop solar isn’t just for businesses and financially secure households. In California, New York, New Jersey, India, and probably many other places, there have been a lot of rooftop solar projects installed on municipal office buildings, train stations, firehouses, public schools, airports, and sewage treatment plants. In California at least it already leads to long term cost savings when water districts or schools can replace some consumption from the grid with solar. The time to financial breakeven is still several years, but we can be reasonably assured that schools and sewers will be around a lot longer than that.

What do you do when it’s cold, dark, and windless in Denver? Add long distance transmission links to get power from regions where all the energy sources haven’t simultaneously stopped. The continental US is never becalmed all at once. Add some local electricity storage to at least make it through the night to another dawn. Run the already-built natural gas plants on occasion. It will still be a massive reduction to emissions if natural gas plants are operated only seasonally, in winter, when the wind stops. Renewable obstructionists have a bad habit of treating gas backup as an “extra” cost when in fact in most cases it’s a sunk cost: the fossil electricity system came first, the renewable system is nibbling away at its customers’ consumption, but you can’t assign costs from the past to renewable systems being built now and in the future.

Omega Centauri: “What a way to encourage others to take the same or similar steps!”

I can’t help it if I say “You can’t replace fossil fuels for everyone unless the middle class has to use the same system as everyone else” and people read this as “You should spend all your money on the poor”. This is supposed to be a blog where we discuss, I don’t know, very slightly complicated things? Can we expect that people have already studied why “Let’s means test Social Security” always meant “Let’s destroy Social Security”?

As Matt writes @ #179, you can say “Yay for the pioneers who first did this” if you want to — I’d say “Yay for the people who convinced the legislatures” insofar as they have been convinced — but we’re not in those days anymore. Once you get up to the penetration levels that we’re starting to see, volunteerism isn’t doing it — volunteerism is the same negligible fraction of a percent that it always was. We’re now really talking about people who are responding to incentives: i.e. it is cheaper for them to do it this way because of government policies. Do we ever get to talk about whether those incentives are well designed, or does it have to be “Yay for the pioneers” forevermore?

Actually Rich, in this comment thread, I think you are the most realistic commenter.

There are always opportunities for pioneers, its just that PV no longer counts in most states (we still have a few stick-in-the-mud states like Wisconsin, where I would call someone putting up PV a pioneer). In most other places, adding PV is not longer seen as a radical activity, promoting a yet to be mainstream but desirable technology, but if you are buying a Tesla Powerwall, you deserve to be called one. Maybe even if you buy an EV or a plugin?

I tend to agree: Rich presents a realistic viewpoint.

My google skills are evidently not what they used to be, as I wanted to glean some trends on the rate of electric outages in the U.S., which I believe is still rising as disinvestment proceeds apace. Maybe someone else can do better. It seems like it might be a significant indicator.

There’s been a lot of talk about the smart grid. As Cranky Observer notes, the architecture as realized may be more monolithic than smart. That doesn’t really address Rich’s point about how infrastructure interacts with the distribution of economic power and income.

If we are facing global resource limits realistically, it seems to me that we need an infrastructure that enables the whole population to access resources, jobs, etc., while still constraining resource use. Overall, that means more concentrated residential settlement patterns, more railroads and water transport, very few airports, very little long-distance auto and truck.

When optimism relies on wonder tech and shades of “where’s my flying car?” I’m not sure who it is helping.

Even if solar power is “cheaper” than fossil fuels, if we are to avoid triggering massive climate change, we somehow have to create that solar electric infrastructure while nevertheless rapidly reducing our use of fossil fuels and also not completely crashing the world economy that feeds us from day to day. I don’t think that’s possible without some major energy conservation efforts, as well as a major re-architecting of transportation and land-use patterns.

I get that a lot of people are emotionally and otherwise invested in the suburban model of driving to better homes, better schools, better jobs, (maybe driving away from scary racial minorities). The hostility of Dictatorial Daddy Republican Governors to infrastructure projects that feature rail in recent election cycles is notable.

An alternative way to respond to the challenge of climate change and global resource limits is build a smaller economy for fewer people and throw the rest overboard. Just keep disinvesting from the legacy Fordist economy, and funnelling the proceeds into a downsized economy that works well enough for maybe ten or twenty percent, and screw the rest. If you are in the blessed ten percent, you can feel great about the electric car Elon Musk delivers for you and how close to zero emissions you are.

Shiny tech gadgets and happy talk about the sharing economy can form a symbiosis with disgust with partisan politics, and hand-wringing over increasing “inequality”.

I think for most people, trying to have a meaningful career, a not too unaffordable house, and at least a tolerable safe environment to raise kids, means they have little choice but to accept the subburban lifestyle.

Honestly, I’m really not trying to make this personal or anything—and I’m committed to being childless, not for any environmental reasons, just don’t want ’em, so really, what do I know—but still, I don’t really get this. At all. Why can’t one live in a nice-sized apartment and have a meaningful job in a city?

“Honestly, I’m really not trying to make this personal or anything—and I’m committed to being childless, not for any environmental reasons, just don’t want ’em, so really, what do I know—but still, I don’t really get this. At all. Why can’t one live in a nice-sized apartment and have a meaningful job in a city?”

One can, but all can’t. The employers aren’t all located in the city; the ones that are aren’t all located in cities where public transportation is up to the job; the ones that are create living costs – housing, goods and services – which put them out of reach of many families, and don’t have enough jobs for everyone anyway.

It may help for some people to understand the extent of the transport problem, and how ‘walk or use public transport’ is not a very realistic near-term solution to the problem of cars; and also to understand the extent to which the poor rely on cars as well.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002666-how-lower-income-citizens-commute

OC @ 186 If we had well motivated populations, -or real leaders who accepted the urgency, we could probably make it with only current tech. But we have to proceed starting with the public attitudes we have, not those we wish we had. And those attitudes are such that selling people on what they perceive as a lifestyle downgrade simply isn’t going to sell.

As Rich has said, neoliberalism all over and again: there is no alternative.

I think it is what is happening. It just not anything to be optimistic about. And, whether Val ever realises it or not, the politics of personal virtue feeds it.

Lee A. Arnold @ 149

Pretty off-topic, but I thought it mildly interesting that the New York Times had an article this morning, in which Republican analysts took the position that it would be Republicans in 2016, who would be freed by the resolution of long-standing social and cultural issues in 2015.

“As Left Wins Culture Battles, G.O.P. Gains Opportunity to Pivot for 2016”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/us/politics/as-left-wins-culture-battles-gop-gains-opportunity-to-pivot-for-2016.html?_r=0

Even the liberal New York Times!

That article is bad and its author should feel bad for serving as a Republican mouthpiece.

Let me add that does not change that the speed of price decrease in pv/battery storage is by far highest among electricty generation linked technologies which promises nice things to come.

Layman @ 196: neither of you point to any action one could take to change the status quo.

The neoliberal argument that any change desirable on its merits is politically “impractical” is circular. The challenge, “what’s your alternative!?”, is projection.

I get that people want to believe that political change of the necessary kind(s) are easier than they are.

Politics that responds to mass interests has to be more than a menu, printed by corporate sponsors.

This thread has degenerated into Alice in Wonderland world, as Layman says.

I’m a left wing green political activist, I have been for many years. Yet somehow in this thread, because as well as being involved in activism, I have also made changes in my own life to reduce my carbon emissions, I’ve become a baddy who is actually making carbon emissions worse. It’s beyond laughable.

One of the problems here is that I think (some) Americans use the term ‘neoliberal’ differently than we do here. Here it generally means people who believe in the primacy of the market and the privatisation of services, things to which I am adamantly opposed. I am not quite sure what people like Bruce Wilder and Rich Pulansky mean by it.

Here is a link to the Lancet commission on Health and Climate Change http://press.thelancet.com/Climate2Commission.pdf.

I’d urge everyone to read the whole report if you haven’t already, but here’s a very brief summary of their key recommendations to government (in the lead up to the meeting on the next international agreement):

Invest in climate change and public health research

Scale up financing for climate resilient health systems

Ensure rapid phase out of coal from the global energy mix

Encourage transition to healthy cities including energy efficient building stock, ease of active transport (ie walking, biking, public transport) and access to green spaces

Price carbon

Rapidly expand access to renewable energy in low and middle income countries

Support quantification of the population health benefits associated with mitigation

Support collaboration between health and other departments

Agree and implement an international agreement on transition to low carbon economy worldwide

Layman@196: neither of you point to any action one could take to change the status quo … Now what?

It’s a fair question, Rich and Bruce. Granted that only changes at the policy level can make a significant and timely difference, what should individual citizens do? One reason Ralph Nader is America’s most useful citizen is that, in addition to describing our innumerable political problems, he consistently offers sensible strategic advice. See, for example, among his recent books, Seventeen Solutions, Unstoppable, and the misleadingly titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us.

And further to geo’s question Rich and Bruce, could you please stop with the nonsensical ‘anyone who makes changes in their own life can’t be doing anything about policy solutions’. It’s nonsensical and in my case both untrue and personally insulting.

So can ask you, in decency and fairness, to stop it?

Layman: “and no suggestion of what they ought to be doing instead”

“Think about opportunity cost. Most people have a pretty strictly limited amount of energy and time and resources for projects that are not directly job-related, child-raising-related, and so on. There might be some kind of mildly positive influence from the solar panels. What was the opportunity cost of telling people to put up the solar panels — given that it’s a major activity to do so? Well, given how sparsely attended most local energy planning meetings and so on are attended, if the person had taken the energy / time / whatever that went into shopping for and doing paperwork for the solar panels and put that into going to meetings, I’d wildly guesstimate that maybe they could have had 1000 times more influence on GHG emissions. Basically, if they could say something that has a 1% effect on plans for a community of 10,000 people, they’ve done more than a lifetime worth of scrimping and saving and buying little individual solar panels right there.”

Lee Arnold retorted that meetings are boring and that they don’t provide capital improvements when you sell your house. These things are true.

“Well, given how sparsely attended most local energy planning meetings and so on are attended, if the person had taken the energy / time / whatever that went into shopping for and doing paperwork for the solar panels and put that into going to meetings, I’d wildly guesstimate that maybe they could have had 1000 times more influence on GHG emissions. ”

I don’t think this is particularly compelling, for several reasons: First, if the established political leaders are disinclined to listen to you, the things you say to them at meetings are unlikely to change that (isn’t that the impediment to rapid action we’re talking about?); second, you’re not actually suggesting a course of action, just suggesting that everyone go to meetings and guess which course of action to suggest (I’m sure I’d get it wrong since you told me everything I’ve done is wrong); and third, you pulled the prospective result from your ass, with the likely quality result one usually gets from that.

Thanks for the link to your site. I’m enjoying it, and agree with a good deal of what you have to say. But, again, I don’t really see an action plan…

Layman: “First, if the established political leaders are disinclined to listen to you, the things you say to them at meetings are unlikely to change that”

Well, I can clarify that part of it. I’m assuming that no one who hangs around reading CT comment threads can successfully lobby a Congressperson. You can pay membership dues to one of the larger environmental groups, who will in turn hire people to go to DC and lobby Congresspeople for you (and generally fail). But not everything is decided at that level. Coal plants, for instance, are particularly vulnerable right now, and if you look into who has influence on them, there’s often a network of state and regional legislators and regulators. It’s conceivable that just paying attention to this process would let you see a pressure point and clue other people into it. If you could … well, let’s see. You said you were in Arizona, right?

Here we go. You have Unisource. Note that Unisource is responsible for 0.17% of all U.S. GHG emissions from all sources — including residential, industrial, agricultural, vehicular, and so on. Note further that 91% of Unisource’s emissions are from one plant, Springerville Generating Station.

The industry is proud of Springerviille Generating Station. Do you think that one person writing letters to various people who have some control over their plant could cause them try to reinforce that public pride by, I don’t know, doing something to reduce its emissions by 1%? That’s well within the bounds of possible efficiency improvements of various kinds.

Let’s say that you did that. OK, the U.S. has approx. 300 million people and let’s divide U.S. emission among them evenly, so we have 0.17% x .91 x .01 * 300 million = 4,641. You just did the same emissions reductions as 4,641 would have done if they had heroically eliminated all of their direct and indirect GHG emissions.

But maybe you failed. Oh well. Would one hundredth of the people who tried the same thing as you have succeeded? Then they get to average their efforts out, assuming that the only difference was that some were lucky and some weren’t. 46 people each.

I haven’t even gotten into actual coordinated political efforts yet. But enough math.

Chris Warren @216,

I’m not sure how any intelligent adult could possibly still think we can do what we need to do with capitalism in place. It boggles the mind. Aside from its massive power to crush change, it’s simply not set up for it. Capitalism is inherently in conflict with pretty much everything required to fight ecological destruction, rampant pollution and climate change. It’s simply not in the capitalist’s best interest to produce radically less, make their products last longer, prevent them from going obsolete, prevent them from needing a myriad of add-ons and so on. It’s simply not in virtually any industry’s best interest to produce fewer goods and services, or to spend the money, time and energy needed to make them toxin, carcinogen or pollution-free. And nine times out of ten, they benefit from the continuation of disease, chronic ill-health and so on, so they’re not going to invent and send to market actual cures — because that would kill their cash cows.

How on earth does an economic system that makes marginal profits in the realm of 3% to 20% tops — with exceptions for individual companies, mergers, financial transactions, etc. etc. — get by with ramping down overall production and consumption? Capitalists make their fortunes on volume, on franchising out that volume, on multiplying the franchising out of that volume and so on. Grow or die. It can not survive radical cuts, and those radical cuts are needed if we’re to survive.

Unfortunately those places are hard to come by.

I completely agree that such places are hard to come by. I don’t live in such a place myself, right now! I just don’t see how moving to the suburbs is supposed to be a solution. Similar goes for Layman @189: I live in a small town right now, and I moved here solely for a job, but I still live in an apartment in (the so-called) “downtown”.

More generally, I do think—and please correct me if I’m wrong—that people in this country are vaguely obsessed with living in a house—roughly, a dwelling that shares no walls with any other dwelling. And, well, (a) at one level, I just don’t get that at all, and (b) I think it’s potentially problematic, in more ways than (merely) the environmental.

js and bianca steele,

Not everyone can live in the inner city. There are a number of sustainability and public health and social issues with the model of suburban development, but since we often have guest lectures who are planners in these areas or call people working in the area to find out things that are not in reports online – I can tell you that the planners have been trying to make changes, like having more footpaths and bicycles for active transport and connectivity.

In some suburbs it is quite sad that there are not footpaths or bike paths for kids to go to school. Another woman at uni said she had seen work looking at how children’s art reflects this lack of opportunity to walk or ride, as they draw pictures of the outdoors with window frames as they mostly look at the outdoors from inside residences or cars.

One planning response is to try to develop more in the inner and middle suburbs on brownfield etc. sites. Another planning response is retrofitting suburbia.

The big regional city near me has just been doing a very innovative integrated transport and land use plan, working with the community, businesses, and technical experts at the same time, and being very transparent about the planning process. I met a young mum at one of the community forums, and she said that being involved in the community forums had inspired her to start an urban planning course.

This is a TED talk by the author of a book called Retrofitting Suburbia

http://youtu.be/J_uTsrxfYWQ

A 2 bedroom apartment in urban Seattle or San Francisco would cost more to rent than my mortgage on a detached house in a town in eastern Washington. I don’t know how to fix that. When cities were too polluted/criminal/black for affluent white people, they had lousy underfunded infrastructure. Now that cities are attractive again, they’re too expensive for people without high steady incomes or old rent control agreements.

I have a yard, after a fashion, but I don’t need it. There just weren’t any homes on the market that came without one. I remember my father attending to two odious (to me) chores almost every weekend: lawn care and car repair/maintenance. No thank you. I live in high desert. I’m not going to try to make the ground look like I live in England. Let the sagebrush and wild flowers take it. I’d rather bike everywhere than ever spend another weekend troubleshooting a transmission problem.

Oh, I hear them all the time. But I guess they don’t annoy me—just remind me of my childhood, more like. But then, I didn’t grow up in this country.

I think this about “politically problematic decisions” goes to some of the debate here.

When I advocate, as I publicly do, that we in Australia should stop building new roads and invest only in new public transport, I know that policy position would have implications for people, especially those who live in the outer suburbs and those who just like their cars. So I also try to point to the individual and population health and wellbeing benefits of reduced car use.

That doesn’t mean I’m a neoliberal who thinks the answer to climate change is just in individual choices. It means I’m trying to see the issue from other people’s viewpoint. I couldn’t care less myself, I live in the inner suburbs and don’t even own a car, but I realise not everyone’s in that position, so I also try to look at it from their viewpoint. You have to understand things before you can change them.

(I realise that Rich, and possibly Bruce, are probably standing there with their eyes shut and their fingers in their ears saying Nah Nah I can’t hear you, but thought the point was still worth making)

It’s called sleep deprivation and they get over it.

Val: “That’s what you are obviously doing to me. I’ve asked you politely to stop and you are ignoring me. If you continue, I will report you to the moderators. I’m over this shit.”

OK, I’ll respond, since you want me to so badly: no, I’m not going to stop conversing about what I want to converse about. No, I don’t have to agree with you about anything in particular. And while there have been a lot of vindictive people who’ve threatened to report me for something or other, non-response to blog comments is a new one, and I’d be interested to see how that works out.

Rich Puchalsky,

Val said she wanted you to stop unfairly criticising her comments, not that she wanted another response from you. I agree with her that you and others have badly misconstrued her comments, either accidentally or on purpose to be argumentative.

Most of the literature I have read does support the idea that both individual and collective/structural responses are needed for climate change and other sustainability issues.

At the moment the necessary collective/structural responses are some way off, so what individuals and communities choose to do right now is important as it is the main way of addressing these issues as the governments are quite backwards.

Rich
As ZM said, and as I asked you, I want you to stop mischaracterising my position. I am doing a PhD on public health, environment and equity (social justice), and this year I am teaching in a postgraduate unit on climate change and health. Whether you get this or not, I am telling you that I find it a serious insult for you to mischaracterise me as a neoliberal who thinks individual action is the only response to climate change. It’s a stupid position and one THAT I DO NOT HOLD.

I can’t make it any clearer Rich. Get over yourself and stop saying shit like that.

Rich Puchalsky,

“Within 15 years, we have time to replace one kind of power plant with another: we don’t have time to do overwhelming cultural changes and rebuild all infrastructure so that people can actually live this kind of lifestyle.”

Yes we do have time, we just need a wartime mobilisation style approach like I am always saying.

In wartime they had rationing so it is quite easy to reduce consumption by introducing rationing, than you have national service for young people to carry out work and since there are so many refugees in the world we can ask them if they would like to be resettled for a period of doing national service too, to fund all this the government can sell special bonds like the peace bonds, if the bonds are over subscribed the government then gives the localities that oversubscribe to the bond drive a nice new building or a monument with a plaque to record how the town was so generous, this is what we have on one of our nice buildings in town.

With this you could achieve a lot in

Val: “Whether you get this or not, I am telling you that I find it a serious insult for you to mischaracterise me as a neoliberal who thinks individual action is the only response to climate change. It’s a stupid position and one THAT I DO NOT HOLD.”

Let’s see, I wonder what I wrote in this very thread the last time you accused me of this “you treat people as neoliberals” bit?

At any rate, I was responding to people, like Layman and Trader Joe, who really are embedded in a neoliberal system. The question of whether they are *personally* neoliberals is a) not true, as far as I can tell: they’re probably left-liberals, b) beside the point, since they are stuck in a society that’s going to respond in a certain way no matter what their own philosophy is, c) would be kind of extremely rare, since part of the genius of neoliberalism is that hardly anyone thinks of themselves as a neoliberal, it’s just “inevitable”, d) part of the same personalization of virtue that I’ve been talking about.

So I really don’t care whether you are insulted or not by something that I didn’t say about you. I do think that your whole approach is misguided and counterproductive, but I don’t expect you to pay attention to what anyone else writes well enough to figure out that I was also criticizing Bruce Wilder’s idea of overall energy use reduction for being misguided and counterproductive in the same way. If you do find it insulting that I disagree with you about this kind of thing, then I also don’t care.

Now, I don’t really like to converse with people who threaten to report me to someone over nonsense like this, so I don’t plan on conversing with you again. Please don’t keep asking me to do things I’m not going to do.

ZM: “Yes we do have time, we just need a wartime mobilisation style approach like I am always saying.”

“Wartime mobilization” does have the virtue of being a large-scale communal response to a problem, but it has certain difficulties in this context. One of them is that it’s extremely difficult to get people to do wartime mobilization without a war. Another one is that if people are concerned about centralization, I can’t think of anything worse than a wartime mobilization plan. The mechanics behind “it is quite easy to reduce consumption by introducing rationing” may not sound very sinister in an Australian context: I don’t know.

If anyone really wants to see what I think about this in slightly more developed form, I have a blog post called Infrastructuralism. It features an argument with John Quiggin. It was written in 2011, and (sadly) I think that the Australian reaction to the carbon tax introduced in 2012 and repealed in 2014 supports my analysis.

Val,

Don’t worry about Rich Puchalsky. He’s not given to ever admitting he said something offensive or ridiculous. He just digs in deeper. Anyone who equates general comments here, directed at no one, with the despicable acts of the bigots at Westboro Baptist has major problems discerning reality.

ZM: “Rationing happened in wartime and no one said it was sinister — it was a sensible way to deal with limitations.”

Well, as I wrote above, in the Australian context this might not sound bad. In the American context, the last time we had rationing we also had ethnic internment camps, basically because the power was there to do it and that’s how we think.

But let’s assume that this wouldn’t happen. Here’s the basic objection that I have to a “war mobilization” idea — it requires, for it to happen, a level of public support that if you could get it would do the job without going as far as actual war mobilization. But the problem is (currently) that that level of public support is unavailable. As I wrote above, presumably if you could get people to reduce consumption by the amount needed it would be even easier to get them to change who they vote for? But we can’t even get them to change who they vote for.

You wrote: “I am somewhat dubious of your idea that people who are adverse to changing their own behaviour to be more conservative in their use of energy and materials are actually more likely to vote for a government to force them to alter their behavior.” But I agree that it’s unlikely. If we can’t even get them to vote for change, we can’t get them to radically change their behavior.

And from my point of view, merely voting would be good enough without the war mobilization. All that a country like the U.S. really has to do is change the built infrastructure provided by about 200 large organizations. If you can get the political power to force change against elite interests in the first place, it’s a lot easier to get 200 organizations to change than to get our whole culture to change.

If your concept of ‘anarchism’ includes the tenets that class doesn’t exist, Marx is worthless, organised labour is the enemy, capitalism and the state must be maintained and violence (apart from state violence) is never permissible, that might just make sense.

Rich Puchalsky,

“Here’s the basic objection that I have to a “war mobilization” idea — it requires, for it to happen, a level of public support that if you could get it would do the job without going as far as actual war mobilization. But the problem is (currently) that that level of public support is unavailable.
…
And from my point of view, merely voting would be good enough without the war mobilization. All that a country like the U.S. really has to do is change the built infrastructure provided by about 200 large organizations.”

We do not know what the level of public support is for a wartime mobilisation style response, as no one has explained the idea to the Australia and then taken polls to see what the opinions are. If people were aware of the strategy they might think it is a good idea.

I thoroughly disagree with your ideas of what needs to change. More things need to change than just the energy sector. I have written long lists of things many times before and it is late so I am not going to do so right now.

But there are lots of things that need to change, which is why a wartime mobilisation style strategy is the best response.

But there should be room for input by individuals, community groups, and local and state government. Hopefully if you start making a good plan for this in the USA you can avoid ethnic interment camps.

Layman: “No, the anarchist solution, the only one that can work – that doesn’t steal from the poor, or run afoul of Wrong Thinking – is to…write letters to utility companies.”

No, I said above that I was giving only solutions that had a chance of working within neoliberalism, because of the 15 years thing. I also said that the solutions that I was providing would do a whole lot more than putting solar panels on your roof if someone was demanding to know what they could individually do, but that they were still inadequate, and that no one really had a good plan for how to solve this problem.

I do notice, though, that the first time I mentioned anything that even approached political activity, you rejected it.

“I do notice, though, that the first time I mentioned anything that even approached political activity, you rejected it.”

I’m forced to admit that you’re a talented man. Not only can you see what is in the hearts and minds of your interlocutors, you can tell from a distance the extent of their political activity! With such powers, my optimism is engaged! Surely Anarchman will save us!

Layman: “And now, the USSC rules that the EPA cannot require power plants to spend money curtailing dangerous emissions from coal-fired plants. […] To whom should I write?”

What do you think is going to be the result of this decision? Regulation gets sent back to the states. What do you think that environmentalists across the country are now kind of cursing and getting ready to do? Intervene with state regulators and state legislatures. What do you think I recommended in the first place? Trying to individually intervene at the Federal level? Let’s see: no.

:-)

And now, the USSC rules that the EPA cannot require power plants to spend money curtailing dangerous emissions from coal-fired plants.

That’s not an accurate reading of the decision. What the Court said is that the EPA must do a cost-benefit analysis of its regulation in order for that regulation to qualify as “reasonable.” Nevermind that the word “cost” doesn’t appear anywhere in the law authorizing the EPA regulations; textualism is only good for denying equality to sexual minorities or blowing up attempts at expanding health care. Still, this is far less catastrophic than your summary of it.

Jerry Vinokurov: “What the Court said is that the EPA must do a cost-benefit analysis of its regulation in order for that regulation to qualify as “reasonable.” ”

And there’s another area in which anyone capable of reading a CT thread could intervene, insofar as these analyses are done widely. I once waded into a cost-benefit analysis that had once been widely quoted about the high costs of regulation and, by tracing the assumptions in it all the way back to where they came from — a process that did involve making phone calls to people in DC — showed that a regulation that had been quoted as having a ridiculous cost per cancer case prevented had actually been based on preventing non-cancer effects. These analyses are often rotten and are not disproved simply because no one has the patience to keep grinding away at them.

‘thread derails’

ZM: I went to a talk earlier this week for the launch of a report The Longest Conflict on how the defence forces should be preparing to respond to climate change. The speakers thought the momentum for action on climate change was returning to levels last seen in 2007 before the GFC, but it is about carrying that momentum forward for more action now.

The former chief of the Australia Defence Force Chris Barrie spoke. He said when he was chief some people working in defence strategy were concerned about climate change, but they were outliers at the time. But since he retired he has become concerned about climate change posing a more significant risk than he realised when he was chief. He was also concerned about the high numbers of people who are likely to be displaced by climate change, as this could impact on the stability of our region.

ZM: I wanted to go to that talk as well but was unable to make it. I’ve been sniffing around the interwebs but I can’t find any videos or proceedings of Barrie’s presentation/talk – would you have any ideas?

My own research has a large component of military theory on exactly this topic – just what elements of strategic or tactical thinking might be applicable to the overall resilience of cities to a range of challenges, inlcuding climate change)

floopmeister,

Oh that’s interesting, I didn’t realise that was your research area. I saw a military expert talk in late 2013 at the launch of Australia At Four Degrees of Global Warming and she was saying there are some people in the defence realm who are advocating for a turn to “human security” rather than national security.

They film most important public lectures. Usually it takes a couple of weeks for the video to go through the production process and get put up online. Often if you were an attendee you get an email about the video or as its climate change related it would probably get a notice in the MSSI newsletter.

From my notes the talk was given by Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti the UK government’s former climate and energy security envoy. Then there was a panel with Neil Morisetti, Chris Barrie , and Rob Sturrock who is one of the authors of the report.

Neil Morisetti and Chris Barrie also gave interviews on Lateline that night.

I asked a question about how could the defence forces work with communities in responding to climate change, like we have the army reserve. Chris Barrie said national service was a good idea. he also said there is a need for more town hall sort of meetings. I know Kate Auty the former Sustainability Commissioner of Victoria has been trying to do that where she lives in I think Gippsland.

If I get notified about a video being available maybe I could email the link to John Quiggin’s UQ email if you emailed him with your email address and he could forward it to you?

Pursuant to my comments at #111 and #114 (particularly on the point that adjustment of rhetoric about climate change is advisable), Nature Climate Change published a paper yesterday showing that warming N. Atlantic Ocean may lead to a cooler Europe:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150629123428.htm

What I object to is the idea that this is forced upon people who are very comfortably upper middle class (at least).

I think it depends somewhat on the city. See Cory Doctorow on London (and various comments on Daniel Davies thread I got banned from)
http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html

“OK, so the idea is that distributed solar gets cheaper and cheaper until everyone has their own house? But wait. Houses aren’t getting cheaper. Does everyone own a house?”

If one wants to know whether distributed solar has been getting cheaper and cheaper, one can simply look at the costs of distributed solar over time. The cost of houses seems irrelevant to the conversation…

“Let’s talk about the Tesla Powerwall for a minute. A new advance, new pioneers, etc. What is one major effect of these kinds of batteries? Each suburban house becomes even more its own little fortress. Now, instead of selling power to the grid during the day and buying it back at night, middle-class homeowners have less and less use for the grid at all. Who is going to pay for the grid? Well any new fees must be an evil plot by Shell, because all the virtuous people don’t use the grid.”

Isn’t this just a way of saying that making a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions using rooftop solar will force changes to power company business models and may have unexpected economic costs or costs shifts to reconcile? What can we do about climate change that won’t have those effects? Wouldn’t building community-level solar generation produce those same effects? Wouldn’t forcing power companies to shut down coal plants and build large-scale solar also create costs and cost shifts to reconcile?

Layman: “This is just dishonesty. No one except you made that claim.”

Wait a minute. Helen was telling me that first only middle class people had PCs, then they got cheap. First mobile phones were for the middle class only, then they got cheap and poor people could have them. Helen invited me to complete the analogy with distributed solar power first being for middle class people’s roofs, and then… then, I guess, on all of the property that poor people own.

What could this have meant? I’m puzzled. Please explain it to me.

“Let’s talk about the Tesla Powerwall for a minute. A new advance, new pioneers, etc. What is one major effect of these kinds of batteries? Each suburban house becomes even more its own little fortress.”

Isn’t that a feature? Power generators are already being forced to abandon inefficient capacity and in many markets are already wailing about how they will pay for the transition and how much rate and time they need to accomplish it….seems like if they are able to make this transition by building – say, two replacement facilities (of whatever kind) instead of three because a bunch of ‘fortresses’ are supplying a lot of their own needs that becomes a) quicker and b) cheaper for those will rely on the grid.

The grid will always be with us – industry at a minimum needs it and if there’s to be a migration to electric or hyrbid vehicles it will be needed…the migration will undoubtedly create some dislocations but I think its a little aggressive to conclude that only the poor are getting shafted when a rich guy puts solar on his fortress. The rich guy is undoubtedly going to get to pay too…its just a matter of how (and if he can dodge it).

Layman: “Point to the part where Helen says the everyone has PCs, everyone has mobile phones, or that everyone will have rooftop solar. I’ll wait.”

OK, so lets correct this to say that in fact, unlike PCs or cell phones, no poor people can have distributed solar. Maybe some philanthropists can take up a collection for “community” panels here and there. But it does get cheaper and cheaper for middle class people. Does that sound right?

‘OK, so lets correct this to say that in fact, unlike PCs or cell phones, no poor people can have distributed solar. Maybe some philanthropists can take up a collection for “community” panels here and there. But it does get cheaper and cheaper for middle class people. Does that sound right?’

Many poor people can’t have PCs, either, which doesn’t mean PCs aren’t cheap and broadly adopted; or that you robbed a poor person when you bought yours. Many poor people can’t have cell phones, for that matter.

Helen’s point was pretty clearly that distributed solar is getting cheaper and can be more broadly adopted – like other technology – and it’s clearly true. ‘Broadly adopted’ doesn’t mean ‘ubiquitous’.

“Then we’re agreed that this is a middle class only technology, and that poor people are never going to get it.”

On the contrary – it seems far more likely to me that distributed solar will deliver electricity to poor people who don’t have it, than will conventional power plants / grids; at least globally, where many poor people and countries lack basic infrastructure. This is already the case with mobile technology and you can see it beginning with solar at the community level.

That aside, ‘distributed solar’ isn’t necessarily synonymous with ‘homeowner rooftop solar’. One is a technology approach, and the other is an application. Can distributed solar – at the community level – serve the poor? Sure, why not?

“We’re New Dealers making Social Security. Hey, let’s make a retirement vehicle that only middle class people can use!”

I think the problem here is that you think rooftop solar – or subsidies for it – are crowding out other potential solutions. But what are those other solutions, that were on the table, which were discarded in favor of tax incentives for rooftop solar? What is the alternative now, that I forego if I buy rooftop solar, or an electric car? What is the evidence that spending on rooftop solar eliminates other possibilities?

No one else is offering me any way to use my middle-class fortune to help. You certainly aren’t, especially if you think the best use of my money is to buy postage stamps.

The median home price in San Francisco topped $1.3 million.

Here’s a heat map of real estate prices in the broader SF area. Ask yourself why middle class people choose the suburbs.

http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/San_Francisco-heat_map/

Oh, but there are plenty of poor sections they can buy in, and do a good deed by making the neighborhood better!

The TED Talk I embedded about retrofitting suburbia shows designers are thinking about how to make suburbia more sustainable and also more pleasant.

Also inner city dwellers are not necessarily more sustainable as a lot depends on consumption not just travel.

So, we cannot do anything, because people need to try on shoes?

OK, so we build grad student seminar projects and no one accuses us of being unvirtuous.

I’m still not following.

This looks like a good plan – Peru to provide solar to two million of its poorest households

http://planetsave.com/2013/07/15/peru-to-power-2-million-of-its-poorest-by-solar-energy/

“Apparently, I am the only one left, who cares about making a lick of sense.”

Thus far, like Rich, you seem to be long on criticism and short on recommendations for action. I’m not optimistic, either.

Interesting link, Val. Whether it is a good plan, qua plan, would be impossible to judge from the brief article. It is generous in spirit, of course, to provide resources to the poor. That’s not the same as organizing a workable system, which can be maintained and made to work to the benefit of a community. Whether it will have any positive impact on carbon emissions is even more difficult to assess from afar.

Collective action is hard. Systems and plans are hard.

Layman: “I think the problem here is that you think rooftop solar – or subsidies for it – are crowding out other potential solutions. But what are those other solutions, that were on the table, which were discarded in favor of tax incentives for rooftop solar? What is the alternative now, that I forego if I buy rooftop solar, or an electric car? What is the evidence that spending on rooftop solar eliminates other possibilities?”

I’ll try to get you through this step by step. Let’s imagine that 10,000 middle class people each buy a rooftop solar installation for $10K each. You then have 10,000 households with solar panels on them. Alternatively, each of those people could pay $10K each to build a single $100 million large scale solar plant. You then have a single large scale solar plant sitting in a big patch of land somewhere.

Now, there are a whole lot of things I’m going to put off talking about because we have to go one step at a time. I’m not yet talking about the fact that the single $100 million plant produces a good deal more electricity than the 10,000 households, although this is true. I’m not yet talking about the fact that the $10K each that each middle class person each put in relied on subsidies, and those subsidies effectively have to come from somewhere — although that is also true. I’m not even going to talk about how investment in larger scale projects did get undercut by investment in equipment for residential rooftop solar — remember Solyndra? — although that is arguably true. Let’s just assume that we bought the same exact amount of power with our total money either way.

So let’s assume that everything works as it’s supposed to and we get greater and greater middle class response. Let’s say that our model community has 10,000 middle class people in it, and they all buy rooftop solar. OK, so now we have 10,000 households with solar panels, batteries too. Those houses have minimal dependence on the grid. Local government has put up panels on their buildings too. I seem to remember someone in this thread saying we could get rid of half the coal plants this way, with 100% penetration. Now how do we get rid of the other half of the coal plants? There are no more residential roofs left in the community, and the middle class has already bought all the power that it thinks it needs.

Well now we go out and we buy a large scale solar power plant sitting out in a big patch of land somewhere. We have to. We don’t particularly know how to build one, because the main investment has gone into rooftop solar. All of the middle class money has been invested into personal power sources for the middle class, that increase the value of middle class houses, so I guess we’re going to have to fund it off of poor people somehow? No, that’s not going to work. Middle class people tend to vote. I guess they’re going to be happy to do this?

Now, people can rush in and say “What if the big patch of land is critical farmland or wildlife habitat? What if the only sites nearby are owned by indigenous people? What if the sites are far away and we get transmission losses?” And so on. And fine, we can talk about that, but then we also have to talk about efficiencies of scale and site advantages and the cost of incentives and all the other things that I said we wouldn’t talk about yet. It comes down to that this is a complex situation, the best solution will vary from place to place, and that really the only universal that we know is that it’s *not* a simple “just do it” everywhere.

And by the way, even in the U.S. there were and are ways to send your electric bill to companies who were supposed to build new renewable power sources with part of it, even if there is no community solar project nearby. It hasn’t been rooftop solar or nothing for a long time.

Rich @ 305

You should first know that I understand your argument, as far as it goes.I just think you’re leaving a few things out:

– Where is the program where I can pool my $10k with like-minded neighbors (9,999 of them), for the purposes of building a $100 million large-scale power plant?
– Who bought the land, and where is it? Will we have to divert some of our funding to that purpose?
– Will APS let us use their grid to distribute the power to our neighborhood? Or to anyone’s neighborhood, if we are motivated by altruism and don’t care who gets the power?
– Presumably some legislation will be required to make this happen. What’s the plan to get it passed, either nationally or locally here in Arizona?

Of course, I understand that we could require APS to replace some capacity, and build new capacity, using renewables. But you know what? We did do that – the same law that created incentives for rooftop solar also required power companies to fill some demand with renewables. Do you know what APS did? They decided to meet that requirement at least in part by paying homeowners to install rooftop solar with net metering, reducing demand and feeding excess production into the grid.

See Cory Doctorow on London

… and he’s going to LA ?! That’s just hilarious.

“Where is the program where I can pool my $10k with like-minded neighbors (9,999 of them), for the purposes of building a $100 million large-scale power plant?”

Federal government in the U.S. has the buying green power program, available for half the people in the U.S. State governments can also do this, as can cooperatives and businesses. For instance, near where I live there’s a business that just develops community sites one after another and gets families to sign up to be powered by them. Why aren’t there more of these things? Maybe because most people were so eager to sign up to put panels on their roofs.

“Who bought the land, and where is it? Will we have to divert some of our funding to that purpose?”

Every city is surrounded by land of much less value (for tax purposes). Sure, that’s a cost, but if you’re going to talk about it as an extra cost than I’m going to have talk about all those other things we weren’t going to talk about.

“Will APS let us use their grid to distribute the power to our neighborhood? Or to anyone’s neighborhood, if we are motivated by altruism and don’t care who gets the power?”

Um… yes? Individual sources don’t really deliver power to individual sinks anyways. As long as we have a grid, what really happens is that the large-scale source feeds into the grid and gets credited for that.

“share _your_ confidence” If you’re not a CD fan, read the Observer piece he links instead.

Another problem with Rich’s argument is the confusion of two different questions:
Is our system of private property, including the ownership of solar panels and homes, a good idea (particularly in terms of equity/social justice)?
Is roof top solar a good way of generating electricity?

They’re both legitimate questions but when you confuse them, the whole argument ends up being confused.

In my case, for example, the rooftop is common property of all the apartment owners in the block (owners’ corporation), the solar panels are mine, and the electricity generated goes to me first and if I’m not using all of it, it goes (via the grid) to neighbouring households (for which, as I say, they pay the electricity retailer about 22c per kW and the electricity retailer pays me 8c).

So the issues of ownership are complex, but basically I’m generating quite cheap electricity, for which I have paid about 75% of the capital costs (I think as I remember the subsidy worked out to about 25%), and though the primary benefits go to me, some of them could go to my neighbours (some of whom are on low incomes) except that the retailer is making what I believe to be an excessive profit.

So Rich’s criticism of solar panel owners as individuals isn’t quite as justified as he seems to think. The benefits of cheap power could be shared communally, except capitalism imposes a profit taking step between me generating the cheap power and my low income neighbours getting some benefits.

I should add that I think Val and Trader Joe are to be commended for installing rooftop solar. And that Rich is right that you can make a difference just by doing the boring but inexpensive work of showing up for municipal meetings. These approaches are not really in opposition! Last year I went to a local meeting hosted by our public utility district asking for public input about a community scale pilot solar project. I showed up and spoke in favor of it. And we got it built! It’s only a few hundred kilowatts, but it has been over-subscribed by people wanting some solar power. Chances look good that we will get more and larger programs later due to the community embrace of this first project. These “solar garden” type projects tend to produce more electricity per dollar than household rooftop projects, but they don’t need long distance transmission. They are also a good match for our desert region because peak electricity demands come from air conditioning on hot summer days and it cools off rapidly at night. Shaving the peak demand from cooling means building up less rarely-used transmission capacity and burning less natural gas in peaker plants.

BW: “It probably won’t even amount to anything much on net, without systemic support, because of the Jevons effect.”

The Jevons effect is one of the primary reasons why I think that anything but governmental command-and-control is doomed. Anything left to the market or to market-like mechanisms or volunteerism or small-scale efforts is going to find out about this the hard way. (Yes, I know that certain people just can’t believe that I’d say this if I’m an anarchist. When the system changes, our solutions can change: until then we have 15 years to make this happen.) There has to be actual mandated replacement of the thing that you’re trying to get rid of, and while it’s easy to imagine how to do this under some other system, we have to do it under a system in which basically only governments can do it.

BW: “collectively, we are apparently waiting for some kind of dramatic evidence to accumulate in the way of extreme weather or climate events, (like the California drought?), to motivate the evolution of collective consciousness and collective political action.”

I’m not optimistic about this. As my stupid poem mentions, I spent a good amount of time around the turn of the century helping to research ads about extreme weather events to try to “motivate the evolution of collective consciousness” etc. In 2005, we lost a whole city to weather disaster, and the result was simply more racism about black people supposedly looting things. It’s really difficult to shock people into a new cultural frame rather than just having them turn to an old one.

Matt @ 317
That sounds great. Good on you! (And all who sail with you)

I don’t think we should be overly optimistic, but things like that are good news.

Matt: “These approaches are not really in opposition!”

Well…

They are not in opposition *for any one person who can do both*. It is certainly true that some people can both go to meetings and buy solar panels, and obviously there is nothing intrinsic to either activity that keeps a person from doing both of them.

They are in opposition if someone asks you “What’s the best thing I can do about global warming?” As seen above, you can try to give more than one answer, but you risk inducing answer fatigue. (“You could buy solar panels, but you could also go to meetings, and if you already have solar panels you could buy larger panels, and have you considered riding a bicycle?” gets the response Trader Joe provides above). If someone is going to let you give one answer, then “buy solar panels” is most often the wrong answer.

They are also in opposition if a person has limited time, money, or energy. Opportunity cost is real. It doesn’t help anyone else who you are advising to say that you are a super-energetic person who can do everything, unless they also are. Most people are not.

Val @320: you and Rich … don’t know everything [and] you aren’t intellectually or morally superior to everyone else

I wish to respectfully register my disagreement.

geo @325 — I’m confused, or missing an ironic twist.

If you disagree that that’s how Rich and Bruce are presenting themselves, I’m with you.

If it’s not that, can you clarify?

Matt: “The last time I reviewed the peer reviewed literature, admittedly a couple of years ago, installing rooftop solar power was anti-correlated with neglect of other ways to reduce electricity consumption.”

I wasn’t thinking of this version of the effect, although perhaps we might get more of it when solar panels truly do become standard in middle-class housing and so on and you haven’t had to think about it. For the developing world, though, higher efficiency is a prerequisite for putting in all those big new coal plants. And I really don’t understand Jevons that well, but it seems to me that you can get a form of it that influences political tipping points — for instance, the far higher MPG that you can get with hybrids might delay the transition to complete electrics because “look how high MPG you can get with a hybrid”, and meanwhile we’re still using gas instead of converting away from it entirely. In that sense the higher efficiency of use of gasoline in hybrids might end up causing us to burn a whole lot more gas communally than if hybrids had never existed.

geo @ 325
This is Bruce @ 316
When people are being all optimistic, they tend to put too much idealized faith in concepts like “renewable” energy that can never be as pure in execution as in anticipation and imagination; people need to accept that we are none of us innocent. (That is another aspect of the politics of personal virtue that I find irritating: the vaunting self-regard of people with limited self-awareness. I struggle to keep that irritation out of my comments, with limited success so far.)

As one person who has been criticised by name by both Rich and Bruce on this thread, apart from being hurt and angry, I honestly do not get the point of what they’re saying. The things they are saying people should do are things I’m doing. So what is the attack about?

And I really don’t understand Jevons that well, but it seems to me that you can get a form of it that influences political tipping points — for instance, the far higher MPG that you can get with hybrids might delay the transition to complete electrics because “look how high MPG you can get with a hybrid”, and meanwhile we’re still using gas instead of converting away from it entirely. In that sense the higher efficiency of use of gasoline in hybrids might end up causing us to burn a whole lot more gas communally than if hybrids had never existed.

I think that Jevons is a useful narrative to explain times when improving efficiency of using a resource has caused people to increase use of that resource. I don’t think it is useful for predicting how changes in efficiency will change future behaviors. There are too many counterexamples and exceptions.

There’s an interesting case study in major vs. marginal changes in energy use, how they are achieved or not-achieved.

As first enacted in 1990, California’s zero emissions vehicle regulation required that two percent of vehicles for sale in California in 1998 and ten percent of vehicles for sale in California in 2003 be zero emission vehicles, such as hydrogen fuel cell and battery electric vehicles. The automakers managed to progressively water the standard down over the years, claiming technological infeasibility, so eventually they were not forced to produce any true zero emissions vehicles. Instead they got a complex “credits” system that saw most credits come from marginally more efficient vehicles still using internal combustion engines alone. And meanwhile the Prius, Leaf, and a slew of other partially and purely electrified vehicles made the earlier “There is No Alternative to liquid fuels” argument look very suspect indeed; there was no big breakthrough in batteries or electric motors in the last 15 years.

I don’t really see this as a marginally improved technology impeding adoption of a step change, though. Pure ICE vehicle efficiency continues to increase but purely and partially electrified vehicle sales are increasing faster year-over-year than sales of vehicles that use combustion only. I see the California case as representing organized industry that managed to beat back and undermine an initially progressive, ambitious, but achievable regulatory goal. Gasoline efficiency didn’t impede the electric car. Gasoline efficiency was the small sweetener offered to California’s regulators after the automakers got to dictate terms of surrender. This episode brings us back to the earlier point — which I endorse — that choosing what’s on the individual’s menu is more crucial than making an individual selection from the menu. After CARB’s acquiescence a million individually eco-conscious Californians could not hope to make up for the abandoned effort to regulate a handful of large manufacturers.

Val, I think it is possible to read the comments of Bruce Wilder and Rich Puchalsky as devoid of personal attacks towards anyone. I guess you don’t see it that way, but personally (and selfishly) I am much more interested in reading your contributions (personal and intellectual) about solar energy (and climate change in general) than in who is criticizing who and why.

At any rate, I have been glad to read this thread, as I find the interlocking of politics, science, technology and economy involved in climate change very interesting indeed.

Lynne,
Rich already explicitly said so (with quotations) in his comment 239. Since then, I don’t think he has interacted with Val. I should say that I find Rich’s take on the issues (i.e that individual patterns of behavior are largely irrelevant and that collective, state-managed action are the most likely outcome) to be the most persuasive but I don’t know much about the topic so I’m very interested in learning more about alternative position (that’s why I’m glad that Val and ZM, among many others, contributed and why I wish they would keep doing so)

Just for the record, for Lynne and Z and anyone else interested, what Rich and Bruce were saying about me up thread, apparently on the basis that I have solar panels and had talked about the health co- benefits of climate change mitigation, was:
– that I am a neoliberal who believes consumer choice is the appropriate answer to climate change
– that I claim some sort of special moral virtue on the basis of that.

I object to that because it’s a ridiculous position and the complete opposite of what I stand for. I’m also probably a bit sensitive because I’m shortly about to start teaching in a postgrad climate and health course, and I feel like these guys are trashing my reputation.

In fairness, Rich has grudgingly admitted that I may not be a complete neoliberal, while also saying that he is not going to talk to me anymore. Bruce habt acknowledged anything.

As ZM said up thread, it’s not clear whether they genuinely misunderstood me, or whether they were misrepresenting me for the sake of argument. Either way I think they should admit they were wrong. Basically it’s about treating others with respect.

I’ve criticized others online and got things wrong, but when you’ve got things wrong, and someone asks you to correct it, you should do so.

What part sexism plays in this I won’t speculate, but I will draw people’s attention to the fact that research shows societies with higher representation of women in public life have lower emissions. It’s important that women be able to participate in these debates.

Since I came to the thread late I probably shouldn’t have stuck my oar in. Unsurprisingly (in a thread this long) it’s more complicated than I realized. Peace.

Rental properties are also often not single family, and so have less and less prospect of having the roof area to support their residents as they get taller. And I don’t know about Australia, but in America most rentals have the landlord charge the tenants for utilities, so there really isn’t a motive for the property owner to do an up-front investment to reduce those costs. At any rate, the analysis of two different systems based on property ownership holds, unlike the situation for PCs or cell phones.

I could mention that the idea that falling prices for small scale solar must be due to pioneer early adopters is itself kind of questionable. The greatest fall in prices is due to a large investment in capacity by China, which a) is in large part for domestic development and industrial policy, b) has more to do with governmental policies like Germany’s increasing demand than to do with any kind of individual choice by early adopters, even in the aggregate.

Z @ 337
I should say that I find Rich’s take on the issues (i.e that individual patterns of behavior are largely irrelevant and that collective, state-managed action are the most likely outcome) to be the most persuasive but I don’t know much about the topic so I’m very interested in learning more about alternative position (that’s why I’m glad that Val and ZM, among many others, contributed and why I wish they would keep doing so)

Anyway sorry to be bit rambling but it is nice to be asked about one’s views. I would like to ask any of my perhaps more hostile interlocutors, please feel free to argue with any of this, but please don’t misrepresent me and try to make me out as a fool or a neoliberal. Women who express themselves in public really do often get hostile reactions and I think CT commenters should be really self-reflective about how far they really disagree with what I’m saying, or whether they might be at least a little influenced by unconscious sexism.

Oh, groan……. ;-)

Lynne–“TINA” as in “there is no alternative”. I suppose a sort of code for a refusal to acknowledge the possibility or even actual (subcultural) existence of other social arrangements.

bianca steele @88: If that’s directed at me, I obviously misspoke so horribly that I should take back everything I said. I am not trying to start any movement; if one accidentally—impossibly—started around me, I have no doubt that I would leave it in minus one seconds.

(And frankly, I realize that this is an mildly idiotic thing to say on a comment thread, but I do realize that what I’ve been saying probably doesn’t make a ton of sense, largely because I just don’t have much time to engage or craft comments these days. And with that, I’ll stop.)

Well I’ve just trawled through this whole long thread trying to work out what the hell happened here, and I think I have finally worked out what Rich and Bruce don’t like about me. They think I am making claims of “moral virtue”.

That seems to be the basic underlying problem – not that I am a neoliberal exactly, but that I make claims of “moral virtue”, and making claims of moral virtue in their minds is associated with neoliberalism and advocating individual solutions and just being generally annoying.

So maybe I can clear this up a bit by explaining that when I talk about my own ‘life-style’, it’s not about showing how virtuous I am, it’s more like a research project. I am doing a research project of course, and this is like a continuation of it – exploring how much it is possible to live a sustainable life in a contemporary urban setting. I mean I also like it, but it is an interesting project.

Anyway that probably makes no difference to Bruce and Rich and I am sure they will still find it deeply annoying because it’s not ‘serious’ discussion about abstractions (I think Bianca was spot on about that and I do think this is at least in part a gender issue), but at least I think I understand what was going on here. I still think they owe me an apology, but who cares, let them feel morally virtuous about how they don’t talk about their moral virtue.

I know I have to let this go (and probably no-one will ever read this anyway!) but in the interests of accuracy and fairness, I have checked back and Rich did criticise both Layman and Trader Joe on several occasions for “moral virtue”, so it’s not just a gender issue.

(Still extremely annoying though – if you can’t have solar panels without people on left wing blogs calling you both a neoliberal and a goody goody – in glorified language – it seems a bit harsh)

js.,

Sure, sorry, the social movement thing wasn’t directed to you, exactly. And Boston or Philadelphia aren’t the same as Cleveland or a smaller city like Worcester, though a lot probably depends on whether you call Cambridge and Newton are suburbs, or whether they’re part of the city. What Lynne is talking about would be called suburb by a lot of people. Brooklyn would too. Whether people in those places can get an espresso in five minutes’ walk, I don’t know. I do firmly believe that in Mass., everyone’s within five minutes walk of a coffee and a donut, no matter where they live.

Layman: “I’m not sure why a discussion about whether distributed solar can be part of the solution should hinge on the perception that proponents are motivated by feelings of moral superiority; or indeed where the perception comes from in the first place. ”

All right, let’s do this:

EYEROLLER: A short comedy in three acts

Act I:

FIRST PERSON: “I put solar panels on my roof. That cost a lot! Why are people always scolding people for not doing more? They should encourage them instead.”

EYEROLLER: “Micro-decisions about personal consumption or production will have no real effect, even en masse. The only purpose in talking about them is to give people something useless to do so that they can feel like they’re doing something.”

SECOND PERSON: “Of course you should tell people to put solar panels on roofs. That pressures the “market signals” to expand production and to further innovation, encourages politicians to get on board, etc., among other complex responses.”

EYEROLLER: “OK.. If we’re going to talk about complex responses and signals, let’s talk about what other signals the act of putting solar panels on your roof sends. It says that you’re interested in volunteerism, not collective action: it tells the market that you want middle-class equipment, not large-scale equipment.”

THIRD PERSON: “What? That’s unworthy. How could you say that putting up solar panels makes things worse?”

EYEROLLER: “Well, it might, and anyways if people invest in personal middle class solutions, they’re not going to want to also invest in community solutions.”

FORUTH PERSON: “Wait. Did you just say that I should have spent my money on the poor rather than putting solar panels up?”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)

Act II

EYEROLLER: “We’re stuck inside a neoliberal system within which all messages get turned into messages about personal consumption and personal virtue based on consumption, even if they weren’t intended that way. It becomes impossible to say anything about incentive structures without this being interpreted as whether personal decisions are good or bad, or anything about whether putting solar panels up or not is really a good idea overall without this being interpreted as a personal attack on people who put up solar panels.”

FIFTH PERSON: “You described reducing overall energy use as a kind of Puritanism, but we need to reduce overall energy use so what’s wrong with using Puritanism to do that? It mobilizes certain limbic system anchors for collective social behaviors you need, like the appeal of common sacrifice as a form of civic action and the kind of righteousness you need for altruistic punishment of deviants.”

(EYEROLLER looks disconcerted.)

EYEROLLER: “Puritanism and its focus on individual virtue is part of this, yes. Are you sure that’s a good idea? Once you start mobilizing limbic system anchors for righteousness to punish deviants, it’s pretty difficult to control –”

THIRD PERSON: “Are you saying I’m a goody-goody? I want you to apologize.”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)

Act III

EYEROLLER: “One more time. You can reach a kind of limiting case in which certain messages become literally unintelligible. Even if someone starts out thinking that they are doing public health work, how is the public going to interpret that? The public is going to see it as another opportunity for personal status competition–”

THIRD PERSON: “Are you trying to trash my reputation?”

EYEROLLER: “– everything comes back to a discussion of personal virtue and who has it, personal decisions and whether those are moral decisions –”

SECOND PERSON: “So you’re saying that people who put up solar panels are just motivated by feelings of moral superiority?”

EYEROLLER: “– and any kind of system critique can only be heard as personal critique — ”

THIRD PERSON: “I have an orientation to public health in my work, and certainly that would never turn into just sanctioning people who didn’t agree with the program! Now talk about this how I want you to or I’ll tell the moderators on you.”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes, but has a muscle spasm part way through, eyes pointing in different directions.)

EYEROLLER (in Captain Kirk tones): “FACE… FROZEN! Can’t stop … rolling eyes! CAN’T! STOP! ROLLING! EYES!”

I do think the observation AL quotes is fair. There are a small number of subdebates (the personal virtue of the person being questioned is one) that things often gravitate into–if they’re not doing it now, in this discussion, the discussion currently being had is probably being influenced by its having happened in the recent past. The question is “Why? What is it about us that this keeps happening, to all of us?”

“Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

Dick Cheney
April 30, 2001

I rather liked the 1970 novel by Robertson Davies, Fifth Business, and so feel oddly honored by being accorded a walk-on part as FIFTH PERSON.

I think RP, in pursuit of poetry, may be missing his true calling as a playwright.

I haven’t this thread in its entirety and no amount of money or other inducements could persuade me to, but the parts I have skimmed leave me scratching my head. It seems to me there’s one team of people saying ‘installing solar panels in your home is a positive thing to do but we won’t be able to stop climate change without much more radical action’ and another saying the same. Maybe the prize can be awarded to whoever yells loud enough? Apologies if that’s unfair, and hope you’re all having fun anyway

AcademicLurker @ 358

I think you are right that idioms of particularly American politics overlay some of the earlier discussion. I do think RP comes at his view from a self-conscious stepping out of the paralysis of partisan divisions, and some of the hostility in the responses is attributable to the reflexes of tribal division.

Sometimes, the peculiar form that the paralysis of American tribal partisan division takes attracts the amateur anthropologists, like Professor Quiggin, who never tires of anti-science as an explanation. Even Americans have to wonder at the insanity built into the political non-response to gun violence or weirdnesses like the birther “controversy”. And, anything concerning energy does follow some of the blue/red, urban/ex-urban faultlines.

On other issues, though, you don’t have to look very far to see “extreme”. What’s been going on with Greece is extreme, and variations on the theme of virtue politics figure in the deep confusion, as Greeks wonder why their aspirations to be part of the Euro have led to catastrophe, and the Institutions and the Germans lecture them on how they have no one to blame but themselves.

Unless Rich really is saying that installing solar panels is a bad thing to do, in which case I take it back (I think that’s crazy fwiw).

geo@361:

Possible inferences include: Cheney will soon be coming out against austerity; anti-austerity is a right-wing talking point and progressives should abandon it; logic belongs to both parties and I should listen to Republicans more. Or: anyone finding a moral in this comment will be shot. (Don’t get excited, that’s not a threat.)

But I contradict myself, and I contain multitudes, because I really do feel anger toward fossil fuel executives and I have written to my alma mater encouraging them to join the coal divestment movement. I want investing in coal to take on the social stigma of investing in tobacco and I want coal consumption to fall like US smoking rates have. My anger over this issue hasn’t made me one bit more eager to inflict misery on debtors/the poor/minorities though. So maybe I’m not trusting other people enough when I fear that they’ll just bash the nearest weak target once they’re angered and mobilized about climate change.

Matt

I contradict myself, too — the only way to have even a reasonable chance of winning any argument is to take two or more sides. ;-)

RP took the position that neoliberal oligarchy can and will act to mitigate and adapt to climate change. I tend to agree, with the qualification that I’m unlikely to like the result. Like you, I fear that the neoliberal approach will feature throwing large parts of the global population overboard, so to speak, exacerbating economic inequalities within what ever bounds are set by the need to maintain core system stability to keep the globalized elite skiing at Davos.

Solidarity has clearly failed to keep enough of the relevant elite feeling a dependence on the masses or a moral responsibility for them. The Plan B built into the human psyche is altruistic punishment — the bob mcmanus option: kill them, and take their back our stuff. It rarely works out well for the generation that tries it, or their children.

The same set of technological advances in data processing that have been pushing remarkable advances in energy efficiency have been pushing remarkable advances in surveillance and social repression. So there’s that.

the bob mcmanus option: kill them, and take their back our stuff.

Well, it is usually and pointedly “Burn shit down and take their stuff,” thank you very much, even if I sometimes mutter darkly about guillotines.

The hydra regrows its heads, and so my program almost always involves the destruction or diminution of [private] Capital, and there are thousands of ways to accomplish that, from a stroke of a pen to the expansion of the common. Increasing the minimum wage without controlling prices or profits, and most transfer programs, and adding rooftop solar to private homes…none of these accomplish the important goal. Of course, most mainstream economics is about increasing Wealth/Capital.

There are a lot of other facets to my phrasing, and I do sometimes wonder why moderates and liberals are so quick to turn destruction of commodities into destruction of persons.

Always nice to have an excuse for some Phil Ochs:

The personal virtue angle shows up in odd ways sometimes. It’s not unusual to see on certain blogs commenters apparently dedicated to sandbagging mitigation policies — by which I seem to have to specify, perhaps fruitlessly, that I mean nobody in this thread — who will note unasked that they drive a Prius or whatever, like some bid for legitimacy. I’ve also seen people apparently insist that there can’t be a problem because they drive and are good people who mean well.

afeman: “who will note unasked that they drive a Prius or whatever, like some bid for legitimacy. ”

The ultimate expression of the personal virtue trope, in this area, was the denialist treatment of Al Gore. It was all “Al Gore rides helicopters” — “Al Gore lives in a big mansion with lots of lights” — “Al Gore flies on jet planes a lot when he goes to international meetings trying to use his prestige as a nearly-President of the U.S. to do something about this problem.”

I’ve been thinking a bit about what AcademicLurker wrote at #358 about a possible difference between a U.S. and a non-U.S. context. I’m aware that cultures vary, and maybe there’s some culture within which all of this is both necessary and the best way to a local solution: in which everyone buying a solar panel or getting on a bike is a kind of rite of social solidarity which is the only thing that lets everyone commit to having the government close down the coal plants and build some solar ones. It most assuredly is not that within the U.S.

Within the U.S., I’d guess that the three main influences are a kind of unholy trinity:

* neoliberalism: that subset of it that says that your moral worth is defined by how you consume things. For instance, Greece is supposed to deserve austerity because they didn’t spend their money well.

* Puritanism: the elect show that they are the elect by being both wealthy and self-restrained. Solar panels both cost a good deal *and* show the renunciation of excessive waste.

* tribal partisanship: buying solar panels is a marker that you are a good liberal.

None of these build social solidarity in a broad sense. #3 actively helps to identify denialism as being a good tribal marker for conservatives. #2 feeds classism: poor people can’t afford to compete in terms of slow food or whatever, and this is part of the bogus libertarian appeal towards excess e.g. concern about whether the government is going to regulate the size of cheap soft drink cups. #1 feeds directly into sub themes like green merchandising, but much more importantly it reinforces the basic setup by which our whole society accepts elite domination.

In short: social status competition. Any individual buyer of solar panels may have done so for the best, most altruistic reasons in the world (or for purely pragmatic reasons like “my house isn’t connected to the grid”). That doesn’t matter. At a larger scale, the whole phenomenon of individually owned solar panels isn’t getting us in the U.S. much closer to the goal any more, since the goal involves making this not a matter of social status competition.

It’s easy to understand why the Rich Puchalskys of the world aren’t getting the results they want. If in their analysis:

– anyone who buys solar panels does so to demonstrate their credentials as an elitist, and
– no one does so out of belief in the efficacy of the exercise, and
– in the rare case when someone does do so for that reason, they’ll be believed to be sending elitist signals anyway

one wonders where they expect to find allies.

As for me, if I really wanted to advertise my virtue, I’d work harder at it. I’d probably start by launching a blog site, where I chronicle my virtuous tilting at windmills for all to see. Maybe even share my poetry!

Layman: “As for me, if I really wanted to advertise my virtue, I’d work harder at it. I’d probably start by launching a blog site, where I chronicle my virtuous tilting at windmills for all to see. Maybe even share my poetry!”

So your apology at #356 was completely fake and unfelt — merely a matter of saving face publicly rather than arising out of any real reject for such jerk moves as “Anarchman”? I thought so.

If you want to equate publishing poetry that I write with consumption, you certainly can.

Well, that’s the real value of sincerity, I guess. It’s like a reboot button.

Apparently my comment @ #383 has been defined as “crowing about my virtue”. Look, I can’t really roll my eyes any more: I already sustained near-permanent metaphorical injury. I think that it’s time to accept that socially dominant frames really just can’t be navigated around and go on.

Look at this information on solar

Sunny weather and a recent surge in solar panel installations means that solar power could provide a record 15% of the UK’s electricity on Friday afternoon
With a 36% annual growth rate, the solar photovoltaic industry is mushrooming so fast at the moment that some analysts expect that half the current global total will be being installed every year by 2020.

The cumulative market at that point would be around 700GW, roughly equivalent to the size of all the electrical generating capacity in Europe today, if the predictions by Greentechmedia prove correct.

I don’t know how much of that is rooftop

Domestic housing was apparently the largest subsector of UK rooftop solar in 2014 but the government strategy now is encouraging larger buildings, businesses etc
http://www.chadbourne.com/uk_rooftop_solar_june2014_projectfinance/

course it’s a neoliberal government but they do seem to be making progress

The proportion of renewable energy production actually doesn’t matter at all to the climate. The only real thing that matters is the amount of C02, CH4, aerosols, etc that are emitted.

So the Jevons-ish argument would be, without a top-down carbon tax, personal/institutional choices to shift from dirty to clean energy could result in all the carbon still being burned while total energy use increases.

Kiwanda: “It is not at all clear “what is necessary”, a clear description of which would be welcome.”

Having governments decide to build renewable energy plants and close down fossil fuel plants. Having governments tell automakers to put electric motors in cars and stop putting in fossil fuel powered motors. Both in theory available with simple democratic majorities.

“I don’t understand how the Jevons paradox applies here: increasing the *proportion* of renewable electricity production implies what counter-intuitive negative result?”

Fossil fuel doesn’t go through price spike, keeps getting burnt until all gone.

But of course that couldn’t happen because everything is determined by the individual motivations of people who put up solar panels, and the only way Jevons could work is if they personally wasted electricity.

themgt: “The proportion of renewable energy production actually doesn’t matter at all to the climate. The only real thing that matters is the amount of C02, CH4, aerosols, etc that are emitted.”

Well, yes and no, but mainly no. If the proportion of renewables goes to 100%, then the emitted carbon, the “only real thing”, is negligible. And that proportion is increasing exponentially, since wind and solar are now often the cheapest options for new production.

Rich Puchalsky: “Having governments decide to build renewable energy plants and close down fossil fuel plants. Having governments tell automakers to put electric motors in cars and stop putting in fossil fuel powered motors. Both in theory available with simple democratic majorities.”

A large fraction (I think a majority) of new power production is renewables. Many automakers offer all-electric or plugin-hybrid cars, there are substantial government-offered incentives for buying them, and the enabling technologies are improving in cost and performance quite rapidly. So “what is necessary” is happening, if more slowly than we’d like, and aided by individual, concrete actions as well as government interventions and private investment.

In light of this, it’s hard to see why demanding “Great Leap Forward”-style solutions that will never happen is a useful exercise. It’s tempting to pontificate at length on the motivations, emotional maturity, and personal habits of people who make such demands, but no.

engels: “And I suppose it wouldn’t matter whether that happened after 10 years, 100 years or 1000 years”

Um, just to be painfully clear: you’re being sarcastic, right?

Kiwanda,

“So “what is necessary” is happening, if more slowly than we’d like, and aided by individual, concrete actions as well as government interventions and private investment.

In light of this, it’s hard to see why demanding “Great Leap Forward”-style solutions that will never happen is a useful exercise. ”

I favour a wartime mobilization approach, as I can’t see the needed changes happening quickly enough with a business as usual approach, and I also think that the changes in agriculture relating to climate change and other changes needed due to some of the other sustainability issues we are facing would leave the economy vulnerable to recessions and crises without some strategic scaffolding by governments.

On the other hand I think there needs be roles for individuals and communities in mobilization as there are a number of problems with top down bureaucratic measures and as I’m studying urban planning I think you need communities to collaborate on the physical changes in the places they live, or there would just be a backlash.

When I asked how the military (who are good at strategy and implementation) could liase with communities in Australia in a climate change related mobilization, former defense chief Chris Barrie said national service could be an option.

i also don’t see the problem of involving conceptions of virtue in discussion, virtue ethics are a well known sort of philosophical thinking, so even if it doesn’t fit for how some people think, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good for others. For addressing climate change it is unlikely that everyone in the world will change to espousing the exact same value/ethical systems, so you’re really seeking overlap rather than the exact sameness.

“whose untended consequence” Unintended spellchecker error.

I haven’t even bothered talking about the implicit colonialism in a lot of this, because people are already flipping out about the supposed challenge to their all-important individual virtue. Matt upthread wrote about what Bangladesh is going to do about its electricity needs. How do you think their decision is going to be affected if people in other countries do a crash program of voluntary renewables but don’t actually shut down their coal mining industries? All that newly cheap coal has to be sold somewhere.

“Maybe a little but I would genuinely like to how Rich’s ‘fossil fuels are finite and they’re still going to get burnt’ slamdunk is supposed to work”

It’s in the poetry.

It is flatly impossible to get the U.S. to do what needs to be done without appealing to this frame, I guess, so let’s go with it:

“Conservatives believe in individual freedom, in choice, in competition,” [Barry Goldwater Jr.] said. “We believe all of those things allow people to live a better life—to be able to choose what they want to do and not have a monopoly, or in the case of government, big government, telling them how to live their life. So it’s a very natural place for a conservative to be. I think as time goes buy you’ll see more and more Republicans vocalize this.”

Virtue ethics it is. Clearly, since the U.S. is not going to be able to progress in replacing its power while conservatives block everything, the best switch is to rebrand solar as part of what every upstanding conservative wants for their single-famliy house. The virtuecrats can agree with them that the real enemies are those weird collectivists, poor people can be made to buy solar power with they own damned money, and everyone will be smug and happy.

Matt upthread wrote about what Bangladesh is going to do about its electricity needs. How do you think their decision is going to be affected if people in other countries do a crash program of voluntary renewables but don’t actually shut down their coal mining industries? All that newly cheap coal has to be sold somewhere.

As John Quiggin pointed out in the OP, the big Adani coal mine here is looking shaky, and two recent closures of smaller mines have been announced in South Australia and Victoria.

I do firmly believe that in Mass., everyone’s within five minutes walk of a coffee and a donut, no matter where they live.

How well I know it! (My adolescence was spent in Lowell—which probably explains my lifelong love Dunkin’ Donuts donuts, tho not their coffee, definitely not their coffee.)