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Alex Trembath Profile picture
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Aug 12 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Quiet climate policy lives.
The supposition is that the IRA is the Green New Deal by another name and that it is this sweeping, transformative legislation but look away from #ClimateTwitter for a second and you'll be compelled to agree how quiet it is.
To be clear, this is a feature, not a bug, of a quiet, investment- and technology-focused approach to climate policy.

Look how much can get done by, ahem, saying the quiet part out loud!

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More from @atrembath

Alex Trembath Profile picture
Aug 6
The impending passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the nearly $400 billion in projected spending on low-carbon technology and infrastructure, is the latest qualified triumph for technology- and innovation-focused climate policy we @TheBTI have long advocated.
Post-Inconvenient Truth, when liberals first became enthusiastic about climate policy, clean energy was exorbitantly expensive and the focus was on regulations and prices to make fossil energy more expensive.
.@TheBTI was founded largely to confront the folly of this approach.

Seriously addressing climate change requires getting CO2 near zero ASAP while enabling modern energy access around the world.

Making gasoline a bit more expensive in rich countries wasn't going to cut it.
Read 23 tweets
Alex Trembath Profile picture
Mar 5
The argument against cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in climate economics is a trail of nonsense culminating in a scientistic power grab.

Thread:
There are a couple claims within the argument.

1. Long-tail climate risks overwhelms any mitigation cost
2. Optimal climate action reasons backwards from a deadline (eg 2C) instead of using CBA to determine optimal decarb pathways
3. The future is unknowable so CBA is futile
These are not compatible with each other! (1) is perfectly consistent w/ (heavily discounted) CBA. (2) and (3) are mutually exclusive: if the future is unknowable, how would we know 2C (or 1.5C or whatever) is the optimal outcome?
Read 14 tweets
Alex Trembath Profile picture
Mar 4
Climate scientists who are annoyed that economists don’t take climate science seriously should make at least a casual attempt to understand economics.

rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
Here, @AndrewDessler declares that "Cost-benefit analyses certainly make sense for some problems, but the climate crisis is not one of them.” He then immediately declares that solving climate change requires a kind of cost-benefit analysis. Image
@AndrewDessler Later, @AndrewDessler shows how climate policy can and does pass the cost-benefit test, in an op-ed making the case that cost-benefit analyses are a tool of climate deniers. Image
Read 6 tweets
Alex Trembath Profile picture
Dec 8, 2021
This is almost right.

German anti-nuclear politics actually long predate Merkel. The 'energiewende' was not in its origins a climate plan but a vision of a society reorganized around small-scale renewable technologies.

To this day, despite skyrocketing electricity costs in Germany, wind and solar remain popular and nuclear remains unpopular.
Unlike France, which has had to throttle its plans transition away from nuclear in the wake of successive energy price spikes, Germans appear committed to more expensive, non-nuclear domestic energy system.
Read 6 tweets
Alex Trembath Profile picture
Dec 8, 2021
It's hard not to see the similarities between San Francisco's parklet regulations (60 pages of restrictions??)...

...and the clusterfuck at FDA/NIH and the White House over vaccine dosage scheduling, testing, and therapeutic COVID treatments, as @mattyglesias wrote about today...

slowboring.com/p/our-public-h…
...and dispiriting trends in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's attempts to reform its own reactor licensing regime, as @TedNordhaus wrote about last month.

thebreakthrough.org/blog/can-nrc-r…
Read 6 tweets
Alex Trembath Profile picture
Dec 7, 2021
It's underappreciated that aggregate global carbon emissions are now dominated by the global middle class, not the wealthy (in this case, those making over ~$12k/year).

HT @Peters_Glen
There's a presumption in Western climate politics that climate change is the fault of beef-eating, frequent-flying hedonists in the United States and Europe.

And of course higher-consumption lifestyles do entail higher carbon emissions.
But the bulk of the carbon emissions come increasingly from middle-income countries and middle-class lifestyles, simply because a) there are many more people in those categories and b) even a mid-consumptive lifestyle entails significant carbon emissions.
Read 10 tweets

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