Jesus, I've been quoting a 1 terawatt figure when arguing with people about how bad our interconnection queues are. It's at 2.6?! That's fucking brutal.
The market is rejecting fossil fuels. Solar is just way, way, way cheaper and wind is substantially comparable (wind at $32/MW-hour, compared to somewhere between $5-30/MW-hour for natural gas depending on the region) And in my opinion, wind still hasn't really hit its learning curve. I expect it's prices will have a plummet in my lifetime, as soon as places like northern Europe, New England, and the dust bowl states start seriously buying it.
If the grid operators were on their shit, we'd be shutting down natural gas plants in favor of renewables for purely economic reason, as already basically happened with coal for gas.
We aren't even talking about having to add new transmission routes. A lot of the upgrades needed are just smart sensors so that we can run lines closer to their real capacity rather than keeping them at enormous factors of safety in fear of very rare events. A lot of the upgrades needed are just reconductoring, which is only a small fraction the price of new routes. If the utility monopolies aren't stepping up to the plate, it's time to get a new contract.
Stupid shit from someone who hasn't followed any of the actual climate policy of the last few years.
Actual climate policy experts are basically unanimous that the IRA makes massive progress and buys desperately needed time. The 1.3 trillion in climate spending it represents is the most any governing body has ever done and it came from the goddamn USA somehow.
And more, by design if it exists long enough it will build constituency and become very sticky policy that will continue on a virtuous cycle. It doesn't get us all the way there but is the first real shot we've had in my lifetime.
Here we are, though. Actual, direct bothsides bullshit. Literally telling people not to bother voting. You signal clearly to the Democrats and any progressive groups that they shouldn't bother with climate because they can't win elections with it. They shouldn't even bother trying because literally doing nothing and spending none of the political capital would be exactly the same to you as any herculean effort. That hard won progress will be lost in the next cycle because it doesn't even exist if it's anything short of what, global socialist Revolution?
Fuck you so much seriously. You're every bit the uninformed voter that the maga people are.
It goes without saying that this absolutely will not pass constitutional muster.
You can categorically try to ban pornography but the second you try to ban it based on its content and not based on it being pornography you no longer have a leg to stand on.
I wish there were some way to have criminal consequences for deliberately passing unconstitutional laws. It definitely feels like it's some kind of sedition, violating your implicit or explicit oath of office so profoundly.
This is also related to the ultimate bullshit about any kind of carbon credits.
The only way it makes sense to sell a carbon credit, at least in a world paradigm (such as it is under Paris) where all nations need to get to zero, is to price those credits backwards from the last ton of CO2 you are going to remove. Because all the tons need to be removed. In the most honest, true, legitimate scenario, selling a credit is taking a loan out against yourself which will HAVE to be paid back eventually.
So the cost of a carbon credit, assuming it actually represents the thing it claims to represent (hint: they don't), should be as expensive as it is per ton of DAC, since DAC is certainly the most expensive way to mitigate emissions.
That means they should be going at something like $500/ton or more in developed nations. Plus the interest on the loan.
In poorer nations, it's possible that those last tons will be cheaper to remove by nature of their lower costs. Maybe that DAC facility built in Indonesia will have lower operational costs than the one you build in Norway. But in that case, selling the credits from Indonesia to Norway makes even LESS sense because now Indonesia is effectively going to have to pay for that last ton to be removed from Norway... where it's WAY more expensive.
If we are to actually believe that carbon credits are what they purport to be, they are usury. They are colonialism. I guess we should be glad they're just regular scams and not that, eh?
In the US? The IRA is a very good model. Hard to overstate what a good piece of legislation it is. Doesn't go far enough, but it makes some serious strides.
Promote electrification. Renewable energy generation is already cheaper than fossil fuel, so with minimal additional incentives the market is going to wipe out grid fossil energy production over time. Calibrate your incentives and penalties to make it happen as fast as possible -- we aren't there yet, but we've taken major strides.
You'll need to do a LOT of grid enhancement in the process. As more electrification occurs, you'll need better transmission of that electricity. A lot of the utilities have vastly miscalibrated incentive structures right now, which favor building major capital projects over doing repair and maintenance. Better regulation can fix this, though some of them are so incompetent and corrupt that they long-term probably just need to be nationalized (looking at you Central Maine Power/Versant). Re-conductoring is a good place to start for this because it's cheap and can increase current grid capacity by something like 2-3x. Large grids with a good mix of wind/solar and dynamic pricing should be largely resistant to any intermittency issues of renewables, by some energy storage sugar on top will take care of that.
Side note: the main thing pumping the breaks on more renewable energy generation facilities is not actually a lack of demand, it's interconnection queues.
Another prong is urbanization. You massively reduce emissions by reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Good urbanism reduces VMT, creates more financially sustainable towns, and also more pleasant, safe, and healthy environments for the average person to live in. Strong Towns has a lot to say about how you can start pushing for better urbanism right now. There's little more you can do for total emissions as an individual than helping your city avoid expensive and dehumanizing sprawl; show up to your MPC/city council meetings and advocate for good urban policy.
We can further cut back on emissions by reducing the reliance on interstate trucking for freight. Trains can (and should) be electrically-powered and are FAR cheaper for a society. Delivery "last miles" can be done by various EVs pretty easily. For the US, this pretty much requires nationalization of the right of way/track (and then, ideally, deregulation of the freight operators). That is, make the train network function a lot more like the current highway network. Bonus points: ~80% of microplastics in our water are just tire dust. Let's do less of that.
Industrial heat is another major pillar. Places like steel and concrete plants need to switch to heat batteries powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels. This tech is ancient and reliable, but still not at scale, but at least some promising pilots are already happening. And the minute any of them work at all, they'll take over fast. Because renewables + heat batteries ought to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than furnaces + fossil fuels once operating at scale. And the facilities will also be able to make use of aforementioned renewable intermittency to save even more money (e.g., charging their heat battles at nadir hours where energy prices go to near 0 or even negative).
We'll also need to do some stuff that is politically sketchier. Reducing certain kinds of consumption (industrial beef, fast fashion, tariff-loophole import goods, etc). But those are higher-hanging fruit and it's ok to procrastinate on them a bit if they're too politically difficult right now.
This is basically correct. FERC policies / interconnection queues are currently the biggest thing holding back additional renewable growth. Last I was looking there was something like a terawatt of solar projects waiting for interconnection nationwide. I'm not sure how much this effects California specifically but I believe it does.
The essential issue is that most utilities have a policy that's sort of first pass the post. The first major infrastructure project, including generation, which would render the grid over capacity needs to pay for those grid capacity upgrades in order to get their project permitted. Which a lot of these projects can't afford, so the queues just become really chaotic whenever someone loses that lottery draw. And the queues* can be absurdly long. Years not months. Many projects might not be able to afford those kind of delays.
Particularly painful for tribal entities. I know there were several major wind projects in the middle of the country that got fully funded and planned out and then killed by those queues.
The dumbest part is that a lot of these grids actually do have adequate capacity but the lack of proper monitoring equipment - which isn't even very expensive to install - that could trigger curtailment for those extremely rare over capacity events prevents using the grid at its real capacity.
There are some pretty deep issues with most utilities for why this happens. The short of it is that are huge misalignments of incentives in the public-private partnership contracts.
Solar in particular is so cheap that if the free market were truly allowed to build as much of it as it could bear it would probably wipe out most fossil generation. It's probably for the best that we don't allow that kind of crazy free for all for a lot of reasons, but it's notable that fossil electric generation is basically guaranteed to decline even if just for purely economic reasons going forward.
If you want to advocate for this policy look for if you have something like a Public Service Commission. This is one of those things like City Council or an MPC - if you have an elected PSC they probably don't actually hear a lot of constituent voices meaning if you reach out to them you will have an outsized voice.
Smart transmission technology and reconductoring are two examples of fairly cheap grid upgrades we aren't really making that could vastly increase short-term capacity. But the main thing we need immediately is permitting and other bureaucratic reform.
The idea that NPR is the fringe left is laughable.
They are right down the middle. They have a factual bias, and have a long history of bothsidsing issues just to appear "neutral". Thankfully, under Trump, they finally stopped doing it so badly (e.g., they ALWAYS refer to his stolen election claims as false & lies, without reservation).
NPR does host some actually-progressive content, but even then not much. Everyone who listens to radio/podcasts should add On The Media to their diet, for example. Super opinionated, but has a consistence stance and often helps you be critical of reporting.
This guy would have a heart attack if he ever listened to 5-4 or something like that with ACTUAL left bias.
The argument for drive-by-wire in personal automobiles is basically that it's safe enough for airplanes, so it should be safe enough for cars.
I mostly buy that. But there's a glaring omission in the reasoning.
In airplanes, there's a full incident investigation for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Even near misses. It's an industry that (mostly lol boeing) has a history of prioritizing safety. Even at its worst, the safety standards the airline industry and air transportation engineering are orders magnitude more strict than those of the automotive industry and road engineering.
In real terms, automobile incidents should be taken just as seriously. Even near misses should have reporting and analysis. Crashes should absolutely have full investigations. Nearly all automobile deaths are completely avoidable through better engineering of the road systems and cars, but there is mostly no serious culture of safety among automobiles. We chose carnage and have been so immured by it that we don't even think it's weird. We don't think it's weird that essentially everyone, at least in the US, knows someone who died or was seriously injured in a car accident.
So yeah, we should have drive-by-wire. But it should also include other aspects of that safety culture as part of the deal. "Black box" equivalents, for example, and the accompanying post-accident review process that comes with it. A process that focuses not on establishing liability, but preventing future incidents, because establishing liability is mostly a thought-killer when it comes to safety.
...of course, if we actually took road safety that seriously it'd be devastation to the entire car industrial complex. Because much of that industry is focused on design patterns that, in fact, cannot be done safely or sustainably.
More importantly, the counterfactual scenario went unmentioned: if his cattle were removed from the land and it was allowed to rewild, far more carbon would accumulate, both above and below ground, and this would not be counteracted by the farm’s emissions
That's not the counterfactual, though.
The ACTUAL counterfactual is that the demand for beef continues to skyrocket worldwide and that if we do not embrace regenerative agriculture practices, we must instead continue to endlessly fertilize soils and buy feedstocks to keep the beef growing. The actual counterfactual to having this guy pushing his farm towards more sustainable practice is that he'll continue to operate the farm with less sustainable practice. Or even more likely, become financially unsustainable and have to sell out to a larger industrial farm who will operate the land in the least sustainable way possible to extract the most quarterly profits possible because they don't give any damn about the long term.
And the ACTUAL counterfactual is that if western markets abandon beef production, there's plenty of farmers happy to raze the Amazon and other even-more-critical ecosystems to do it there instead. Because the demand will be there regardless.
It's utter fantasy to pretend that everyone is just going to wake up vegan tomorrow. It's not going to happen. This author clearly is arguing that we need to... I don't know, outlaw beef, I guess? Just ban it entirely? And then take all the farmland and convert it to protected wildlife habitats instead? Including a staff of rangers who will oversee and protect the land to make sure it stays healthy, safe, and sustainable? Because that's the only way the 'counterfactual' he made up makes one lick of sense.
It's a good strategy for environmentalists to take... if they want to ensure they lose elections and doom us all.
It is disingenuous to claim that regenerative agriculture practices can even hope to be a functional carbon sink. But they can hugely reduce the emissions and mitigate the other externalities of an incredibly polluting industry. And do it in a way that simultaneously increases animal welfare, reduces spread of disease, and increases profits progressively (because these practices are actually easier and more effective at smaller sizes rather than at huge industrial operations).
What word are you accusing me of redefining and what moderation am I suggesting?
The argument of this article can apply to literally all of agriculture, not just animal produce. It applies to fucking backyard tomatoes. Increasing sustainability and reducing emissions should be seen as a good thing. Even when you don't get directly to 0 from the beginning.
Starting with the lowest-hanging fruit isn't capitulation, it's progress. If your position is completely undoing all of a global capitalist system tomorrow or bust, you're getting bust and likely taking others with you.
You really, really need to read up more on the world of regenerative ag. It's not typically touted as being "zero emissions" or anything like that outside of this op-ed writer's strawman argument.
It's almost entirely sold as a way to avoid having to buy expensive feed and fertilizers through better land management. Do you really think the average farmer gives a fuck about the climate? They have bills to pay. They like that there's sustainability benefits to the practices, don't get me wrong, and and being able to advertise the better practices that went into producing the beef is part the pitch, but this is all about cost-savings and improving product quality almost entirely through thoughtful field rotation and reduced/eliminated tilling.
And it does work. Small farmers who have enough land and patience to adopt these practices can almost entirely eliminate their needs for buying fertilizers and feed. Which I'll remind you, outside of transportation, is the main source of carbon emissions for most farms. Methane from cellulose digestion is another battle that is being waged separately.
Moreover, the more farmers prove that it CAN be done in a financially sustainable way, the easier it becomes to get rid of the worse environmental practices, both on friendly soil and abroad.
Moving my reply to the comment that wasn't deleted...
Redefining the counterfactual scenario
Lord please give me the strength to not give this guy a Logic and Critical Thinking 101 lecture... Definitional retreat does not apply to what I said about the counterfactual because that was not an argument about what the term "counterfactual" means. It only applies when people argue about the definition of a word. He and I have the same definition of the word "counterfactual".
What you MEANT is that you DISAGREE with my assessment of the counterfactual scenario. But instead, you tried to make yourself seem very clever and logical and me very foolish and emotional by misappropriating a term.
Why ignore the case of less beef production out of hand
Why ignore the reality that annual beef demand is growing consistently every year? Especially in the global south, where the environmental effects of raising beef are in fact way worse.
I think you should just say what you actually want to say.
Here, I'll do my best to do it for you:
Beef production is an environmental disaster. These people working to mitigate the harms of that industry are mopping the decks of a sinking ship. If they really want to say they care about the environment, the only reasonable choice is shutting down their ranches and doing something else, because beef is just hopeless.
To which I'll respond in mostly the same way I have. That's nice and all, but beef demand is still growing. I'd rather farmers that do their best to mitigate harms raising the beef than the ones who only care about making the most short-term profit possible, damn sustainability. Keep going out there and preaching for veganism. I hope you succeed. Don't make enemies out of your allies along the way.
Please try not to engage in the straw man of the carbon free shit. We agree it's bullshit. There's no such thing as emission free ag at any level and particularly for beef.
You've got to acknowledge that transportation and production of and feed/fertilizer are major sources of emissions that are reduced, and potentially eliminated, by these practices. There's no point having a serious discussion if you refuse to do that.
I'm also really having eyebrows raised by your apparent claims that its not healthier for the animals to be pasture raised. I think you are in a serious minority in believing that.
The core point of regenerative ag is to not have to import outside fertilizers/feed. That you replace that with land management -- crop rotation, essentially, giving the land time to regrow on its own.
There's no free energy coming from the cows. It comes from the goddamn sun. If you don't load your pastures with monoculture grass stock and chew it to the dirt every season, you don't have to constantly plow and fertilize it to keep it grazeable.
Don't accuse me of being an industry shill, by the way. I am not from the rurals. I actually read up on this because soil health and soil science is fascinating and this is from where a lot of the research is coming.
And the transportation costs I referred to are costs transporting and producing those fertilizers -- and the supplemental feeds you need when you overextend the land and thus have to stop grazing on them during long stretches.
I'm not sure if this point is lost on you or if you're being obtuse, but you have dodged it again here even though I think I mentioned it pretty directly here.
There's little more damaging to a cow's health than living on concrete or in close indoor quarters. Than standing around in shit all day, breaking open their hooves on curbs, and all that crap.
Your argument here is that it may not work everywhere and is therefore bad... that's a bad argument.
Which can be abbreviated to: the term "carbon footprint" was invented by a BP marketing campaign.
Just as "reduce, reuse, recycle" and the halo of campaigns around it were a response to the earth day movement in which single use plastics almost got banned back in the 1970s. But the industry managed to transfer blame from themselves -- for intentionally making and marketing disposable trash products -- to the consumers for using those products as intended.
The petroleum and plastics industries are responsible for every spec of waste, pollution, and emissions they produce. Every spec of them. Individualization campaigns are just a way to get away with being the deadbeats they are.
“You have review boards, that’s fine, but it’s got to be done in ways where you have the Sheriff or Chief of Police appointing people,” the governor said. “It can’t be people that have an agenda.”
No satire could hope to come up with a more obvious hypocrite than reality.
The dumbest part is that these boards had no power to begin with. Their rulings were entirely unenforceable. Just a transparency tool. The sunshine state hates sunlight.
You can tell it is a free speech absolutist by the way it has been specifically commanded to never engage in certain kinds of speech that go against its political goals.
Constituency building is absolutely crucial to all of this and often underlooked. It's a virtuous cycle. If you build useful and good infrastructure, people will use it, and the more people who use it the more people who will vote for it and demand it. It's a big part of how car-centric urban design grew so fast and became so sticky in North America, and that same constituency-building is the best way to take streets back for people.
Seeing people on bikes makes people think about biking. Even without the bike paths, being out and about your city on a bike is doing your part to build just a little more constituency for it. On top of it being good for your wallet, the climate, and likely your health.
Now if only I could get the average local bike shop worker to stop being such a colossal gatekeeping prick about ebikes...
I know a lot of non-rich people who've been looking into various birthright citizenships lately. It's been a bit of a meme. Irish, Italian, etc. Especially among new adults.
My bet is that a lot of this trend is just caused by inadvertent awareness campaigns through modern social media. Especially for people from the US, the idea of having a non-US option appeals. Anyone who grew up here and has so much as watched a few videos about the difference in experience from living in a modern western european democracy will be green with envy. Healthcare, work/life balance, livable urban design... grass just seems way greener to anyone who was born post-9/11.
The ReAct stuff isn't new. For a more industrial example of this, check out CarbonCure. It's not yet economical, though once you include external factors like carbon credits or other tools that financially punish emissions / reward sequestration it theoretically can be. As the the tech scales up, there's every reason to think the cost of this kind of carbon-enriched concrete will at least be priced in the same league as traditional PCC.
The Solar Revolution Is Dying in Waiting Lines | A bloated backlog of renewable projects awaiting approval means a quick transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels will be anything but. (www.bloomberg.com)
Al Gore Thinks Trump Will Lose and Climate Activists Will Triumph (www.nytimes.com)
Kansas governor passes law requiring ID to view acts of 'homosexuality' online, vetos 2 anti-LGBTQ+ bills (www.advocate.com)
Why Republicans Are Defending Israel and Ignoring Ukraine (www.theatlantic.com)
Two key differences explain why one nation’s plight receives more sympathy than the other’s....
Taking CO2 out of the air would be an absurdly expensive way to fight climate change (www.theverge.com)
A major US state just achieved a critical milestone for nearly two weeks: 'It's wild that this isn't getting more news coverage' (www.thecooldown.com)
‘My hoo haa is gonna be out’: US Olympians slam Nike for skimpy women’s track kit (www.theguardian.com)
What is it with Nike and sexualized athletic uniforms these days (see MBA see-through pants)? Did PornHub invest without anyone noticing?
I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. (www.thefp.com)
Tesla stops cybertruck deliveries—accelerator pedal may be to blame (arstechnica.com)
Owners will have to wait until April 20 for deliveries to resume.
There’s no such thing as a benign beef farm – so beware the ‘eco-friendly’ new film straight out of a storybook | George Monbiot (www.theguardian.com)
the movie is titled: Six Inches of Soil
How to spot five of the fossil fuel industry’s biggest disinformation tactics (www.theguardian.com)
Amy Westervelt and Kyle Pope have covered climate disinformation for a combined 20-plus years – here’s their guide on how to decode it...
DeSantis signs controversial bill banning civilian boards from investigating police misconduct (www.sun-sentinel.com)
Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt (infosec.exchange)
EVs are booming but electric bikes are really cutting emissions (www.theguardian.com)
Rich Americans are getting second passports, citing risk of instability (www.cnbc.com)
UN Climate Chief: We Have ‘Two Years to Save the World’ From Climate Crisis - EcoWatch (www.ecowatch.com)
Making cement is very damaging for the climate. One solution is opening in California (apnews.com)