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The frog is boiling. Now what? People want action on climate [1]

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Date: 2022-07-21

Get me out of here!

ICYMI, it is hot.

All the things climate scientists have been telling us for decades would happen… are happening. Hence the picture up top of this post.

The frog in the picture is from the apocryphal story claiming you can boil a frog if you heat the water he’s sitting in slowly enough so he doesn’t realize it’s getting to the boiling point. (In real life, frogs jump out when it gets too hot for them. Humans don’t do so well. Go figure.)

It’s a record-breaking hot summer here in the northern hemisphere. Airports are shutting down in the UK because of melting runways. Trains are being canceled or slowed because of buckling rails. Drought has wild fires taking off and threatening farming. People are dying from the heat. And so on.

The lead stories on nightly broadcast US news for July 20 were all about the record heat hitting the U.S. from coast to coast. People are seeing power bills climb as the need for AC becomes critical. Texas is running its power grid at max to meet demand, outstripping both New York and California in the kilowatts it’s producing to meet both residential and industrial demand. They risk damaging their grid because it’s not built to operate at those levels on a sustained basis — rather to maximize profits for utilities.

While people are concerned about high gas prices, power is critical.

The U.K. just approved a new reactor complex: 3.2 Gigawatts and 12 years to construct at a price of billions. More to come:

The Sizewell C plant is a key part of the UK government’s ambitious plans to start work on eight nuclear reactors by the end of the decade. Further projects are planned with the aim of building 24GW of nuclear generating capacity by 2050, when the country has to meet its legally binding net zero emissions target. The government set out the targets for new nuclear generating capacity in its energy security strategy, drawn up in April in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“...legally binding net zero emissions target.” What a concept!

French president Macron back in February announced France would also be building up its nuclear power infrastructure.

Emmanuel Macron has announced a “renaissance” for the French nuclear industry with a vast programme to build as many as 14 new reactors, arguing that it would help end the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and make France carbon neutral by 2050. ...Atomic energy provides about 70% of French electricity, and low-cost nuclear power has been a mainstay of the French economy since the 1970s, but recent attempts to build new-generation reactors to replace older models have become mired in cost overruns and delays.

Another reason for this investment is because many of the reactors currently in use are having serious maintenance issues and are aging. And there is another complication.

Although France is betting on nuclear power to meet climate goals, climate is not cutting them a break. Rising temperatures are limiting reactor power output because rivers used for cooling are running warmer than usual. To protect wild life, that limits how much heat the reactors can transfer to the rivers.

There’s a double bind.

The impact of Climate Change is hitting a little too hard to ignore. It’s already imposing huge financial costs on the world economy, not to mention the toll in lives and on nature. Going green is increasingly looking like a matter of survival. Even if carbon emissions magically dropped to zero overnight, the climate consequences already baked in are going to be manifesting for decades to come.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created real problems for world energy supplies, not least for Europe which had become dependent on Russian fossil fuels, and the world markets in general. Between sanctions and Russian cuts to supply, that has made going off fossil fuels a matter of international and economic security as well as survival.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better, IF it gets better, and there’s some question about that. See below.

Paul Krugman wrote the other day that [US] Climate Politics Are Worse Than You Think.

Texas is often hot, but not like this: Current forecasts have the temperature in Dallas hitting 109 degrees Tuesday, with highs in triple digits well into next week. Britain, on the other hand, used to have a well-deserved reputation as a cool, rainy island. But as I write, the temperature in London is projected to hit 102 degrees Tuesday. You have to be willfully blind — unfortunately, a fairly common ailment among politicians — not to see that global warming has stopped being a debatable threat that will catch up to us only years from now. It’s our current reality, and if climate scientists — whose warnings have been overwhelmingly vindicated — are right, it’s going to get much worse.

Why, you may ask?

It has long been painfully obvious that voters are reluctant to accept even small short-run costs in the interest of averting long-run disaster. This is depressing, but it’s a fact of life, one that no amount of haranguing seems likely to change. This is why I’ve long been skeptical of the position, widely held among economists, that a carbon tax — putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions — has to be the central plank of climate policy. It’s true that emission taxes are the Econ 101 solution to pollution, but realistically they just aren’t going to happen in America.

emphasis added

The problem is people are not good at thinking about long term consequences. Avoiding pain in the here and now trumps avoiding greater pain in the future.

Capitalism, especially the late stage variety now in effect is even worse at dealing with the future. Companies whose only imperative is increasing shareholder value have no interest in anything past the next quarter’s numbers and the stock price. The future can take care of itself; all that matters is maximizing revenue now now now. Public interest? The public be damned.

It’s also a matter of tribal identity. As Krugman notes in his conclusion:

The fact is that one of America’s two major political parties appears to be viscerally opposed to any policy that seems to serve the public good. Overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of such policies doesn’t help — if anything, it hurts, because the modern G.O.P. is hostile to science and scientists. And that hostility, rather than the personal quirks of one small-state senator [Joe Manchin], is the fundamental reason we appear set to do nothing while the planet burns.

The NY Times has an analysis that examines in detail just how determined the Republican Party is to block any action on climate: Delay as the New Denial: The Latest Republican Tactic to Block Climate Action.

WASHINGTON — One hundred million Americans from Arizona to Boston are under heat emergency warnings, and the drought in the West is nearing Dust Bowl proportions. Britain declared a climate emergency as temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of blistering Europe are ablaze. But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans were warning against rash action in response to the burning planet. “I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

Voting for the Republican Party is voting for a national suicide pact.

It’s Not Like We Lack for Answers — More like the Will to Act

Kevin Drum has been on the case for some time now. In a 2012 article in Democracy, he wrote about The Coming Resource Wars. He made some predictions about where we’d be in 2024 — here’s one:

Trend #4: The fact of climate change will become undeniable. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.

Drum’s take today:

I was only half right. The effects of climate change are becoming undeniable, but it hasn't made even a lick of difference. The Republican Party remains unanimously opposed to clean energy because they oppose anything that raises the possibility of corporate regulation. This is very unlikely to change by 2024.

He also had this prediction in 2012:

Six: Energy policy and national-security policy will become more and more intertwined and important. Constrained energy supplies combined with climate change will produce more frequent resource wars, many of which the United States will take sides in. Proxy fights with other major powers, along with American occupation of foreign countries that have newfound strategic value, may become a routine part of our future.

Not all of Drum’s 2012 predictions came to pass, but he wasn’t wrong about those. Considering that A) no one in 2012 could have predicted the 2016 election outcome and B) the arrival of the pandemic, he didn’t do too badly.

In January-February 2020 Drum wrote a big article for Mother Jones: We Need a Massive Climate War-Effort Now (Read the whole thing — and enjoy the illustrations.)

I’ll take a wild guess that you don’t need any convincing about the need for action on climate change. You know that since the start of the Industrial Revolution we’ve dumped more than 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and we’re adding about 10 billion more each year. You know that global temperatures have risen 1 degree Celsius over the past century and we’re on track for 2 degrees within another few decades. And you know what this means. It means more extreme weather. More hurricanes. More droughts. More flooding. More wildfires. More heat-related deaths. There will be more infectious disease as insects move ever farther north. The Northwest Passage will be open for much of the year. Sea levels will rise by several feet as the ice shelves of Greenland and the Antarctic melt, producing bigger storm swells and more intense flooding in low-lying areas around the world.

And here’s where the nitty meets the gritty:

Let’s be clear about something: We’re not talking about voluntary personal cutbacks. If you decide to bicycle more or eat less meat, great—every little bit helps. But no one who’s serious about climate change believes that personal decisions like this have more than a slight effect on the gigatons of carbon we’ve emitted and the shortsighted policies we’ve enacted. Framing the problem this way—a solution of individual lifestyle choices—is mostly just a red herring that allows corporations and conservatives to avoid the real issue. The real issue is this: Only large-scale government action can significantly reduce carbon emissions. But this doesn’t let any of us off the hook. Our personal cutbacks might not matter much, but what does matter is whether we’re willing to support large-scale actions—­things like carbon taxes or fracking bans—that will force all of us to reduce our energy consumption. ...There are solutions to some of these problems—electrification obviously helps with transportation [See Solutionary Rail!!!], and better insulation helps with heating and cooling—but only to a point. One way or another, any government policy big enough to make a serious dent in climate change will also force people to make major lifestyle cutbacks or pay substantially higher taxes—or both. How many of us are willing to do that? It turns out we have a pretty good idea. In 2018, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago fielded a national poll on climate change. Only 71 percent of respondents agreed it was happening, and of those, more than 80 percent said the federal government should do something about it. Then the pollsters presented a scenario in which a monthly tax would be added to your electric bill to combat climate change. If the tax was $1, only 57 percent supported it. If the tax was $10, that plummeted to 28 percent. Those aren’t typos. Only about half of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to fight climate change. Only about a quarter are willing to pay $10 per month.

emphasis added

We want to have our climate cake, but we want to eat it too, and it ain’t happening.

President Biden is under pressure to take some kind of climate action now that Senator Joe Manchin along with every single Senate Republican has killed any action on climate from Congress. The problem is, what Biden can do by presidential order is limited, and he has yet to declare an actual climate emergency. The result so far is half-measures and mixed messages.

Kevin Drum Has A list of Things To Try

Drum’s 2020 article is even more useful now that people (non-Republicans at least) are ready to start discussing what we really need to do — even if they’re not ready to pay for it yet:

Let’s start with the good news. About three-quarters of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels for power, and we already have the technology to make a big dent in that. Solar power is now price-competitive with the most efficient natural gas plants and is likely to get even cheaper in the near future. In 2019, Los Angeles signed a deal to provide 400 megawatts of solar power at a price under 4 cents per kilowatt-hour—including battery storage to keep that power available day and night. That’s just a start—it will provide only about 7 percent of electricity needed in Los Angeles—but for the first time it’s fully competitive with the current wholesale price of fossil fuel electricity in Southern California. Wind power—especially offshore wind—is equally promising. This means that a broad-based effort to build solar and wind infrastructure, along with a commitment to replace much of the world’s fossil fuel use with electricity, would go pretty far toward reducing global carbon emissions. How far? Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2050, wind and solar can satisfy 80 percent of electricity demand in most advanced countries. But due to inadequate infrastructure in some cases and lack of wind and sun in others, not all countries can meet this goal, which means that even with favorable government policies and big commitments to clean energy, the growth of wind and solar will probably provide only about half of the world’s demand for electricity by midcentury. “Importantly,” the Bloomberg analysts caution, “major progress in de-carbonization will also be required in other segments of the world’s economy to address climate change.”

Drum notes that no one is going to want to limit their energy consumption or the quality of their lifestyle, so we have to look at options to make up the shortfall described above. He goes through a detailed analysis of how little we are actually spending compared to the big efforts of the past. If we approached this with the same level of commitment we devoted to winning World War II, it would make a huge difference.

We devoted 30 percent of our economy to fight WWII—1,000 times what we spend on green tech. We need the kind of spending that wins wars. And make no mistake, this is a war against time and physics.

Drum looks at assorted options, their advantages and trade-offs.

Renewable Energy

Nuclear Power

Energy Storage

Land Use

Carbon Capture

Concrete

Adaptation

Biofuels

Less Meat, Mostly Plants

Fusion Energy

Geoengineering

It’s worth looking at this because it’s a comprehensive approach, a quick reference guide to each of these options, and because we can’t afford to neglect any chances. As he concluded in 2020:

The history of science is littered with accidental discoveries. Many of us are alive today only because Alexander Fleming accidentally left open a petri dish containing a staph bacteria and discovered penicillin. This is why an R&D program for clean energy needs to be huge and wide-ranging. We simply don’t know which discoveries are most likely to pan out, and climate change is dire enough that we can’t afford to close off any possibilities.

So where is Kevin Drum looking in 2022? GeoEngineering, the least favorite option.

At the time I wrote about all this two years ago, my conclusion was that we needed massive funding of R&D in hopes of finding a miracle technology that would fix our climate problem. Even then I acknowledged that this was a long shot, but at least it was better than nothing. But the truth is that I always believed it was a real long shot. When you combine the slim possibility of getting the needed funding with the slim possibility of someone inventing a breakthrough, the odds of success are very small. I'd put it at 10%. Maybe 5%. This leaves us with only one possible solution: geoengineering. This has pros and cons. The main upside is that the most likely version of geoengineering involves seeding the stratosphere with sulfur aerosols. This blocks sunlight and reduces the temperature, in the same way that eruptions of sulfur from large volcanoes do this on a temporary basis (usually a year or two). We pretty much know it would work, and we also know that it's cheap. Current estimates suggest $10 billion per year, but even if that's off by a factor of ten, it's still chicken feed. The downside is that everyone hates it. Scientists hate it because it's potentially dangerous—and we have no idea how dangerous. Conservatives hate it because it would force them to acknowledge climate change as an actual problem. And liberals hate it because they believe it would reduce support for more conventional solutions (solar and wind buildouts, better insulation, etc.).

So, to recap what Drum has concluded, there are a lot of things we could be doing, we must do something, and we are running out of time to do anything. It’s a long shot given the financial and political hurdles to do any of it, not to mention the scientific unknowns. The Russian energy part of the equation is really amplifying the urgency to act.

It’s not looking great.

But it’s the best shot we’ve got. As Drum says:

Needless to say, we should continue pushing solar and wind and nuclear and anything else that will reduce our carbon emissions. Maybe it will work! But even if it doesn't, it will make a big difference. And one thing's for sure: if we end up bombing the stratosphere with sulfur, the less the better. If conventional methods get us 50% of the way to carbon neutrality, that means 50% less sulfur to close the rest of the gap. These solutions don't conflict, they complement each other.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/21/2111588/-The-frog-is-boiling-Now-what-People-want-action-on-climate-but-not-if-it-will-cost-them-anything

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