Looooong Thread
1. @jamesonmcb recent post on Green New Deal and the case for public power has been delightfully disorienting for a lot of folks, especially those who don't know @thebti history that well.
1. @jamesonmcb recent post on Green New Deal and the case for public power has been delightfully disorienting for a lot of folks, especially those who don't know @thebti history that well.
2. GND and public power are progressive Left thing. Belief that climate change won't be solved until clean energy is cheaper, w/o subsidies, taxes, or regs, than dirty is a Right thing. For that matter, so are nuclear energy, GMO's, and intensive agriculture. So what gives?
3. But wait... pretty much every place that has ever built a nuclear power plant has done so through a centralized, vertically integrated power sector, usually state-controlled (in other words, public power). So is that Right or Left?
4. Meanwhile, the climate Left, when not prattling on about neoliberalism and ending capitalism, advocates carbon taxes, subsidies for private wind, solar, EV firms, capacity markets, etc. Most object to nuclear on economic grounds (the MARKET has spoken). Again, Right or Left?
5. Many folks are treating GND as if it were a bold new idea. But @TheBTI got its start advocating for what we called the "New Apollo Project." A ten year $300 billion public investment to address climate change while creating millions of jobs in the clean energy economy.
6. "The Death of Environmentalism" made many provocative arguments. But at bottom, it was advertorial for Apollo Project. And it worked as advertised. By 2008, creating jobs through investing in the clean energy economy was THE Dem climate agenda. Kinda the economic agenda too
7. @BarackObama green stimulus investments pumped $200 billion into renewables, efficiency, and transportation and succeeded politically where cap and trade failed. The huge progress that wind, solar, and EV have made since can in large part be traced back to those investments.
8. In hindsight, limiting investments to RE was mistake. And as I noted after Trump election, so was promising millions of jobs. But basic principle, that more direct investments in tech would bring faster adoption and better politics has held up well. thebreakthrough.org/articles/what-…
9. My nuclear conversion experience actually derives directly from this argument, not vice versa. After the book Break Through came out, lots of push back that energy efficiency, not clean energy technology, was key to tackling climate change (seems so quaint now!)
10. So around 2008/9, we started looking, with @JesseJenkins, at economies that had achieved historically high rates of decarbonization and whether they had done so by reducing E/GDP or C/E.
11. We found some evidence for both. But places that did so through E/GDP had either been through some sort of economic calamity or had deindustrialized. Places that had done so through C/E, by contrast had done so through direct public deployment of clean energy technology.
12. We weren't publicly pro-nuclear at the time and the big AHA moment for me initially was the role that publicly controlled, centrally planned electricity systems had played. But the more I looked at it, the more I kept coming back to nuclear.
13. At time, we were also arguing clean tech cost too much, especially for poor countries. Pricing and regulatory strategies would fail because energy was the lifeblood of modern economies. Nations would not tolerate imposition of policies that substantially raised energy costs.
14. This, as anyone who has followed serial failure of pricing policies to sustain politically and hence drive much decarbonization has held up well. But experiences in France and Sweden were different. France had the lowest carbon grid in Europe and the lowest electricity prices
15. Whatever standard economic theory had to say about it, centralized publicly controlled and financed grids, utilizing low cost, long term public finance to invest in long lived low carbon infrastructure resulted in low cost, low carbon grids.
16. This swims against not only standard economic wisdom but also long term trends in many parts of world, not least US, toward economic liberalization. That is rub. Climate is wicked bcs nobody willing to let social, political, or scientific authority tell them what to do.
17. My view is that centrally planned, publicly controlled energy and transportation systems can probably get a lot further toward low carbon low cost energy using existing technology than liberalized energy economies. Bcs timescale and expectations for ROI are totally different
18. If, on the other hand, we are committed to economic liberalization for any number of reasons, clean tech needs to get cheaper and better much faster to decarbonize. Market discount rates vs public discount rates just radically change the economics.
19. Of course, almost no one uses the concept of discounting consistently. If you believe that the FUTURE OF THE WORLD depends on what we do right now, then you ought to be arguing to nationalize every grid and transportation system in the world.
20. Start building nuclear plants and massive solar farms and dams, whatever, through public institutions, cost be damned. With 50 or 100 year bonds it all comes out in the wash.
21. By contrast, there is little evidence, in models or practice, that high carbon prices or subsidies can achieve rapid decarbonization with existing tech. You have to have a very disruptive tech. US shale is probably the best case of this in a liberalized energy market
22. Policy can help here, by putting finger on scale and supporting innovation. But brute force policy, whether pricing, regulatory, or subsidy won't do it. And under best circumstances, will proceed less rapidly and completely than all hands on deck public alternative.
23. As pragmatist, I'll happily take either path, as long as we are clear what we want. As I've argued elsewhere, the various temperature targets we've set are mostly arbitrary. All else equal, faster decarbonization will bring better outcomes than slower. foreignaffairs.com/articles/world…
24. But there are other values and other costs. And contradictions not limited to enviros. Nuke advocates love to argue that standardization solves all problems. But for existing, large LWR, that requires something close to nationalization, to build enough to get good at doing it
25. In end, as I wrote early this year, revealed preference suggests we're all lukewarmists. Nobody cares enough to actually call for nationalization or similar. So markets, innovation, and incremental decarb are probably where we are headed. FIN thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…
