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Alex Trembath Profile picture
Alex Trembath
@atrembath
Deputy Director @TheBTI. Ecomodernist. Promethean Hamiltonian Schumpeterian meliorist.
Sep 21, 2022 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
This tweet does a great job capturing an extremely widespread theory of change on the part of climate activists and science communicators. It also contains a cascade of false premises, broken logic, and unrealistic expectations.

Thread: Losses from climate change have yet to outpace gains from economic growth and reduced vulnerability from improving infrastructure.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Aug 12, 2022 • 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.
Aug 6, 2022 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
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.
Mar 5, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
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
Mar 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
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
Dec 8, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Dec 8, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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…
Dec 7, 2021 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Dec 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
"Then came Sri Lanka’s sudden, and disastrous, turn toward organic farming.”

via @MujMash and @AWipulasena

nytimes.com/2021/12/07/wor… @MujMash @AWipulasena "Fertilizer should never have been allowed in agriculture. I think it’s time to ban it. It’s a weapon of mass destruction.”

- @drvandanashiva

🤬

newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…
Sep 22, 2021 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
A few things on water in California.

1. As most of us know, California water consumption is overwhelmingly dominated by agriculture. sfchronicle.com/local/article/…
Apr 21, 2021 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
Five points on nuclear power plant economics in the US.

🧵 1. Megaproject cost increases. Nuclear power plants are massive industrial projects that have seen costs rise in the US over time in much the same way bridges and railway systems have.
Jun 10, 2020 • 13 tweets • 17 min read
A little thread on clean energy deployment policy…

1/n In 2008, @TheBTI published “Fast, Clean, and Cheap,” which made the case for big public spending on clean energy technology at a time when climate change was still considered mostly a regulatory problem.

thebreakthrough.org/articles/fast-… 2/n
Jul 11, 2019 • 12 tweets • 12 min read
The @MLiebreich was very good, but again, it’s weird to see it suggested here that this work isn’t happening. @MLiebreich Historical Construction Costs of Global Nuclear Power Reactors (2016)

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Jun 14, 2019 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I got a lot of pushback to this tweet, mostly taking the form “why not both?”

And I gotta say I find that really unsatisfying and unhelpful. If you want to address or solve a problem, you need a useful and accurate problem definition.

Saying “climate change is a result of everything” is not completely inaccurate, but it is extremely unhelpful.
Feb 11, 2019 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
A few more thoughts on this @ramez thread that lit Energy Twitter up over the weekend. 1/ @ramez It’s true that Germany’s Energiewende played a key role in the recent drop in solar/wind prices, and to that end, the enormous costs of that program have far broader global benefits than many of its critics acknowledge. 2/
Feb 19, 2018 • 24 tweets • 12 min read
I wasn't kidding.

#blackpanther /1 I like good movies, comic book movies, and mass-market cultural touchstones. So obviously I was gonna like #BlackPanther

/2