Krazy Karbon

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Grounding Helicopter Luxury

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Extinction Rebellion takes on heliports in Manhattan during a week of climate action.

This post, written by renowned eco-journalist Christopher Ketcham and commissioned by and published in Truthdig on Sept. 15, describes an action I helped organize and participated in, two days earlier. We repost it here, with permission, because it highlights a rare climate protest that targets fossil fuel “demand” rather than supply. And not just ordinary fuel usage but an egregiously selfish and exclusive one: helicopter travel. 

“Helicopters are a pestilence to New Yorkers and a rotten pinnacle of an economic system that places decadent pleasure over planetary survival,” I declaimed in the XR press release. True externality pricing would shut down the vast majority of helicopter transportation. Absent, or alongside that, last week’s direct action was an attention-getting way of connecting the climate crisis to luxury emissions.

    — Charles Komanoff, Sept. 20, 2023.

* * * * * * * *

The Extinction Rebellionists mustered south of the heliport on the west side of Manhattan at around 2 p.m., just as the sun emerged following a flurry of rain. It was hot when the crowd of 40 people moved as one to stop the howling machines based at Blade Lounge West, a commercial heliport on 30th Street along the Hudson River Greenway. The outsized carbon footprint of those who used the heliport was “obscene,” said the organizers. The afternoon’s goal was to make as much trouble for its operations as possible.

One of the organizers of the action, a 75-year-old energy economist named Charles Komanoff, was prepared to be arrested. He told me he had been feeling unsteady that morning, jittery and fearful, as he handed me his rain slicker and water bottle and backpack to hold.

Months earlier, he had explained his reasons for wanting to shut down helicopter traffic in his native city. “New Yorkers hate helicopters,” Komanoff wrote in an email to Extinction Rebellionists:

Tourist helicopters, Hamptons helicopters…. They hate the noise, the fumes… the arrogance, the power to pollute, the power to act as lords. I hate them too, for those reasons, plus this: helicopters epitomize luxury carbon. They are the essence of the consumption that must disappear *now* if we aim to protect Earth and preserve climate.

Now, Komanoff and his fellow Rebellionists picketed at the vehicle entry to the Blade Lounge West, which is owned and operated by Blade Air Mobility, Inc. They unfurled a banner that said LIFE OR DEATH, and waved XR flags that whipped in the wind, and one pushed a stroller with three baby dolls in it, with a note that read, “Will we have enough food to eat? Can crops survive the heat?” They chanted Helicopters, private planes, your emissions are insane. (They are also profitable: Blade Air Mobility’s $61 million in revenue in 2023 was up 71% on the year.)

Komanoff and I had written an editorial together in 2022 about the absolute need to kill luxury emissions as the stuff of gluttony and entitlement. “‘Keep it in the ground’ protesters confine their blockades to energy supply infrastructure and studiously ignore the demand half of the equation,” we wrote. “This has been a shortcoming of the climate movement for too long, as it passes up one opportunity after another to rouse millions against the class that, even more than the corporations of Big Carbon, perpetuates the climate crisis: the world’s wealthy.”

The protest unfolded in the genteel way of these things. There were cyclists and joggers on the greenway, and tourists walking, and in the glint of the sun off the rippling water, many passersby stopped and asked what was happening.  Two elderly women wanted to participate.  One of the women, 72-year-old Mireille Haboucha, an Egyptian, told the protesters, “We agree with your action. This is what we all need to do.” The friend with whom she was strolling, Barbara Schroder, 75, told me, “We had never thought about luxury emissions, but it makes sense to stop it.”

I asked a 29-year-old lawyer named Dominique why she was there. It was her first climate action, and she asked that her last name not be used. “I’m morally obligated,” she told me.  In that feeling of obligation there was great anger. “There are 30 million people in Pakistan homeless because of floods that happened there a year ago. Thirty million that are homeless because people like the assholes we are seeing today need to take helicopters.”

Dominique was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation, in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a book about the Nuremberg Trials, that complacency seemed to be the main evil which allowed the Holocaust to happen — the world, and especially Germans, just not caring enough to stop the Nazis. “Part of the moral obligation for me is that we are on the brink of, are already in, mass climate genocide,” she told me. “I do not want to be the modern-day equivalent of a complacent 1930s German.”

The night before, at an XR body blockade training event in Brooklyn, a 56-year-old retired schoolteacher told me that, on her farm in Wallkill, in the Hudson Valley, the entire oat crop had failed. First there was drought, in April, then flooding in June.  That was one of many reasons she was at the heliport. She’d been arrested seven times since 2019 for similar actions.

The helicopter traffic did not cease, although the protesters succeeded in blockading the entrance to the parking lot. The CEO of Blade Air Mobility, Rob Wiesenthal, a dapper little man who makes $11.9 million a year, seemed shocked that his poor heliport had been targeted. The executive stood and watched the protesters with a look of despair on his face.  A chopper came blasting in, touching down with a monstrous flatus sound and carrying with it the stink of jet fuel.  Then another and another arrived, their disgorged passengers forced to cut through the crowd of flag wavers and shouters of chants to waiting mammoth SUV taxis that were blocking road traffic because they couldn’t enter the parking lot. (Climate action should involve stopping the SUVs, too, I thought to myself.)

I screamed a question to Wiesenthal over the racket. He smiled and said he had nothing to say to the media on the record. His employees were enraged.  One of them got in a scuffle with a press photographer on hand for the event, trying to grab his camera, cursing and threatening him.  A scowling heliport attendant named Anthony Smith told me, “I called my boys from uptown and they’re gonna take care of this real quick. You’ll see.”

The skies cleared fully, and the sun blazed down, and the protesters knitted their sweaty brows in the heat. Still they picketed and chanted and sang and hurled slogans. A National Guard helicopter, enormous and looking like a black metal buzzard, swooped in, bathing us in poisonous fumes. “Those your boys?” I asked Smith.  “Oh yeah,” he said.  But the black chopper touched the tarmac for less than a minute, then powered up again and was gone in a fury of rotor wash and noise. More helicopters came, Hueys from JFK Airport ($225 one way) and Newark International ($245) and the Hamptons ($1,025).

After an hour and a half, 40 or so officers from the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group arrived bristling with zip ties. Warnings were issued to cease blocking the way, and some of the protesters — the green and yellow teams, as they were called — stepped aside. The red team, which included Komanoff, a 75-year-old woman named Alice, a 60-year-old woman named Heidi, a third woman, Shoshana, and two young men — stood firm, for their intent was to be arrested in symbolic revolt. The cops turned them around, zip-tied their wrists and off they went in a cramped police van. The protesters dispersed. Wiesenthal breathed relief. His faithful employees bumped fists.

What was accomplished? Morale-boosting, the fostering of solidarity and sense of unity of purpose; the building of a community, ready for more action. When the six arrestees were released from the 7th Precinct, they were smiling and proud, and a group of fellow protesters was waiting for them at a nearby restaurant and filled the place with wild applause as they entered. My thought was this crowd needs to gather on a daily basis at West 30th Street. Pain should be felt over and over at Blade Lounge West until its operations become untenable, until Mr. Wiesenthal’s despair is permanent. It’s either that, or what some in the movement say is the next needed step: monkeywrench the choppers and destroy them on the tarmac.

A Bitcoin Mining Exposé Strengthens the Case for a Carbon Tax

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The Nation magazine this morning published my essay, A Bitcoin Mining Exposé Strengthens the Case for a Carbon Tax. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and add tables and graphics.

 — C.K., April 20, 2023

Clean electricity, the backbone of the Biden administration’s strategy for slashing carbon emissions, is becoming daunting to expand.

US wind farms, which last year generated more electricity than all hydropower and solar panels in the 50 states combined, often face years of contention. The entire mid-Atlantic offshore region, an area brimming with wind potential, could be proscribed by Pentagon fretting over interferences with aircraft deployment, Bloomberg News disclosed this week.

But if red tape for green power is a bother, why not get the benefits with none of the fuss? Send commando teams to the 34 large-scale Bitcoin mining sites in the United States that were identified in a New York Times front-page exposé this month. In synchrony, have them sever the facilities’ power cables, which combined demand some 3,900 megawatts of electricity—nearly as much as 3 million households combined.

In a flash, legions of electricity-gulping, combination-seeking computers in Texas, New York, and 13 other states would cease whirring. Like a power surge but in reverse, the fossil-fuel generators energizing so-called cryptocurrency mining—literally, trillions of combination-seeking calculations every second—would dial down. The corresponding drop in carbon emissions would be the same as if thousands of new industrial-size wind turbines could be instantly erected and connected to grids, supplanting electricity now furnished by burning coal and methane gas.

Data adapted from NY Times April 9, 2023 story. Link in text above. FF% is estimated percent of *incremental* power demand supplied from coal or methane gas.

Fanciful? Consider the numbers. The Times helpfully enumerated each Bitcoin mine’s fossil-fueled draw on state and regional power grids along with the associated carbon emissions. It took only a few further steps for me to translate those emissions into generic megawatts of clean power that would defray them. Using today’s customary 300-foot-tall, 3.6-megawatt wind machines as my standard, I calculated a staggering 3,700 turbines.

There you have it: The US Bitcoin industry is single-handedly neutering the entire climate benefit from nearly 10 percent of US wind energy. That’s more electricity than is generated with wind in any single state, save Texas and Iowa.

This raises two uncomfortable questions for the climate movement: Why isn’t it rallying against Bitcoin mines and other parasitic users of carbon fuels? And why isn’t it taking the obvious step of calling for a tax on carbon emissions to reduce those usages while simultaneously extracting revenues from them?

Second question first. Generating the electricity consumed by those 34 Bitcoin mines causes 16.4 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, according to the Times. If the United States had a $100 per ton carbon tax—the current price of carbon emission permits in the European Union’s cap-and-trade system—the carbon levies at the mine mouth and wellhead would be extracting $1.5 billion a year from the fossil fuel companies that power the Bitcoin operations, and depositing it into the Treasury.

To be sure, that money would only fund a mere 2.4 hours of federal spending a year—barely a single baseball game’s worth, under the new hurry-up-and-pitch rules. On the other hand, the tax moneys are twice what Fox News will pay Dominion Voting Systems under the settlement reached this week. And they’re recurring.

But it would not be extinguished. That’s where the climate movement comes in.

Had the tax been in place a decade ago, as I and others urged, the extra expense might have stopped some cyber-currency ventures from the git-go. But if it were put into place today, a robust carbon tax could at least impel Bitcoin miners to economize on electricity, charge more for transactions, or actually contract with greener power providers rather than merely pretending to, as the Times found.

Although no one can pinpoint precisely how a carbon tax would shrink Bitcoin mining’s carbon footprint, let alone any single sector’s, abundant empirical evidence suggests that total US carbon emissions would be around a third less with a triple-digit national carbon tax than without. Bitcoin would not be exempt.

The movement has targeted banks and pipelines for more than a decade, with not much to show in the way of lesser carbon emissions. Why isn’t it disrupting Bitcoin mining and other bloodsucking machines—helicopters, private jets, yachts, super-sized SUVs—that feed on fossil fuels and are predominantly playthings of plutocrats? Why isn’t it going all out to stop highway expansions and eliminate restrictive zoning that lock in energy waste for generations?

Yes, climate activists stopped Keystone XL. They won a ban on fracking in New York. They’re fighting to drive oil drilling out of Los Angeles. Valiant, heroic work. But these and other keep-it-in-the-ground victories are creating little climate benefit. Why? Because the same underlying demand, largely unaffected by those protests, is met by supplies from elsewhere.

The bank protests seem even less focused. Conoco doesn’t need financing from JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo to drill in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The only “bank” it requires is the collective fuel tanks of America’s 280 million motor vehicles, plus aircraft, off-road vehicles, and pleasure boats.

Marching on Citibank does send a message, and activating seniors who might otherwise sit at home posting about their grandkids is soul-stirring. But if divestment and bank-shaming were going to slow the assault on climate, we would have seen bigger results by now.

“If the world wants to limit warming,” Norwegian energy researcher Espen Erlingsen told the Times this month, “it will have to limit demand for oil and gas because [the] industry can deliver this kind of volume for many more decades.”

Amen. The climate movement’s strategy isn’t working. Trying to bottle up supply instead of throttling demand is whack-a-mole without end, chasing after but never stopping capitalism’s dynamism from erupting in crypto mining and 1,001 other climate-destroying products and technologies.

By itself, a carbon tax won’t cure that. But it would at least start to steer innovation and cultural norms away from endless new climate horrors.

Addendum: My concluding sentence — perhaps too subtle a literary reference — is elucidated in Brian A. Oard’s delightful Mindful Pleasures website. Please note that the ultimatum was uttered not by Sabbath but by his lover, Drenka. — C.K.

“Our action brought them back to earth.”

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The Intercept today published Christopher Ketcham’s and my essay, The Shutdown of “Luxury Emissions” Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments by Carbon Tax Center subscribers and readers. Let us know what you think.

    — C.K., December 13, 2022

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. The world must also rein in consumption.

By Christopher Ketcham & Charles Komanoff ▪ Photos and captions are copied from The Intercept.

SEVEN HUNDRED SELF-DESCRIBED “climate rebels” breached the chain-link fence surrounding Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s third-busiest hub for international passenger traffic, on November 5. With bolt cutters they opened holes in the fence and poured in, some of them on bicycles, and raced across the tarmac. Others laid ladders against the 9-foot-high fence and topped it on foot.

They had to move quickly before military police, tasked with securing the airport, saw what was happening. The rebels targeted 13 private jets parked or preparing for takeoff, at least two belonging to NetJets, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary that bills itself as the world’s largest jet company and sells fractional ownership shares in private business jets.

They swarmed each of the jets in groups of 20 or 30 or more and sat down before the looming machines, there to stay for the next six-and-a-half hours, unmoving, until at last police waded in and started hauling the rebels to jail. Some of the 413 arrests were violent. “There was fear and rage, for the state of the world and for my own future,” said one of those arrested.

Another 800 people gathered for a march and sit-in at the airport’s main plaza, and at least 30 activists blocked the road that serves as the supply route to Schiphol. Every single private jet at Schiphol ended up grounded that day, not merely the 13 that were surrounded.

“The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,” Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us. “Our action brought them back to earth. We wanted to show the extremeness and injustice related to this manner of transport.”

In other words: a perfectly tailored climate action. Not a highway sit-down ensnaring hapless motorists and keeping cars running, and emitting, longer. Not sit-ins at banks that broker investments in fossil fuels but don’t directly cause their combustion. And certainly not spattering soup on museum art, with its unsettling aura of sullying humanity’s heritage in order to save it.

No, the Schiphol action went for climate change’s jugular: self-indulgent carbon-spewing. It did so balletically, in the democratic and fuel-efficient motion of humans racing on foot or whirling about on bicycles. And ecologically: In the words of one participant, “We made sure that any planes could still land, because the last thing we wanted was for them to be unnecessarily flying for any longer than they already were.”

It was an action that bared the gluttony and entitlement of fossil fuel usage. “Keep it in the ground” protesters confine their blockades to energy supply infrastructure and studiously ignore the demand half of the equation. This has been a shortcoming of the climate movement for too long, as it passes up one opportunity after another to rouse millions against the class that, even more than the corporations of Big Carbon, perpetuates the climate crisis: the world’s wealthy.

Limits of Green Energy

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. Replacing fossil fuels with a planetary buildout of wind turbines and solar panels, while simultaneously making and plugging in a billion new electric furnaces and vehicles, looks straightforward in a spreadsheet. In truth, though, ramping up green energy alone won’t cut fossil fuel use quickly enough to meet the Paris warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Supplanting the world’s combustion-based energy infrastructure with an all-electric model will be too lumbering, too roundabout, and too full of its own drawbacks to fully bend the emissions curve in the brief time left.

The world must also rein in consumption. For reasons both symbolic and practical, the climate movement must strike not just at pipelines and mines, but also at obscene wealth.

The justification is unarguable. Large personal fortunes feed carbon consumption and make a mockery of programs to curb it. As well, the surplus wealth of the superrich is probably the lone source of capital that can finance the worldwide uptake of greener energy and also pay for adaptation where it’s most critical.

At the nexus of consumption and wealth sits luxury carbon. Which is why the Schiphol action was so strategic.

Consider that the world’s richest 10 percent account for 50 percent of fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions. Consider that climate reparations, for which the Global South won acknowledgment but little more at last month’s COP27 climate talks, can’t be funded at scale by tweaking wealthy countries’ hidebound taxation-as-usual. Consider that carbon emissions pricing, an indispensable policy tool for shrinking fossil fuel demand, can’t be made politically palatable in the U.S. — even with worthy “dividend” schemes — so long as middle- and working-class families must witness the superrich lording and polluting at will.

Prodigal Aviation

As the Schiphol rebels surely know, luxury carbon, like all manufactured desire, is a contagion, oozing inexorably from the sanctums of the few to become desires of the many. Few Americans, and even fewer Europeans, flew in airplanes in 1950. These days, half of U.S. residents fly each year, averaging half a dozen flights each, according to the industry’s annual “Air Travelers in America” reports. As commercial aviation grew safer and more affordable, feeding the increase, business and pleasure travel became normalized.

Today, “general” aviation — private jets, business jets, air tourism — is undergoing a similar liftoff as well-heeled flyers seek refuge, and a status boost, from the indignities of commercial service. And nowhere is private jetting’s carbon waste as blatant as it is in Europe, with its extensive rail network. Per passenger, private air travel is five to 14 times more carbon-polluting than commercial flights, and 50 times more than high-speed rail, according to the European NGO Transport & Environment.

In the Netherlands, 8 percent of the population takes 40 percent of flights. Worldwide, the difference is even more stark: One percent of the population is responsible for 50 percent of pollution due to aviation, making air travel a textbook example of how pollution by the rich leads to consequences and injustices for those who have not caused the climate crisis.

Naysayers will note that the tactic of occupying and disrupting airports has been tried before, as in the case of the Plane Stupid campaign of the 2000s and 2010s. Radicals in the climate movement such as Andreas Malm, who advocates property destruction of fossil infrastructure, point out that Plane Stupid was ineffective in bending the arc of emissions.

“What the Schiphol people needed to do is destroy the airplanes on the tarmac and then destroy the airplane manufacturers,” said an ecosaboteur named Stephen McRae, an acquaintance of one of the authors, who recently completed a six-year prison sentence for industrial sabotage. Although he no longer participates in such criminal acts of destruction, he has a point. The planes grounded on November 5 are already back in the air. That doesn’t diminish the value of what the Schiphol rebels did, however. Actions that disrupt carbon comfort without violence or hardship are morale-building, the material from which more actions and eventually mass movements are made.

Ripple Effect

A few days after the Schiphol revolt, climate activists under the banner of Scientists Rebellion disrupted operations at private airports in four U.S. states and a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times roundup.

While the Times attributed the rising militancy of scientists to “the increasing clarity of the science,” it was more likely propelled by the impulses that motivated protesters in the Netherlands: rage at a future “thrown away for the profits of a few,” in the words of one Schiphol rebel, and the palpable need “to stand there and know we actually were grounding private jets and … actively stopping this manner of pollution,” per another.

Along with their clarity in targeting the true fountainhead of climate disorder — sybaritic carbon profligacy — what stands out most about the Schiphol action is its organizational breadth and cohesion. On top of the 700 occupying the tarmac and the 800 marching and sitting-in at the main plaza were those “working throughout the day, and in the days and weeks beforehand, in a range of supporting roles,” as one organizer reported, describing legal and media teams, an arrestee support team, and a team of caterers. “The diversity of roles worked to our advantage: There are as many ways to engage with activism as there are people, everyone has their own way of contributing.”

Social solidarity on this scale helped buffer the cruelty of airport police who in some cases “ripped people from their groups and held [them] in painful positions even though they were cooperating,” reported one first-time protester who joined the action as a medic. “What started as a nervous morning ended with a fulfilling and accomplishing situation,” he said. “We did this.”

Bitcoin Mining is Gobbling Up New York’s Precious Renewable Energy

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(As published today in NYC-based Gotham Gazette. Footnotes appear at end. — C.K., May 13, 2022)

Like time in Steve Miller’s classic-rock song, New York’s decarbonization targets keep slipping into the future.

Highway widenings are spurring more driving. Suburban resistance to upzoning is locking in energy-demanding sprawl. Electricity from the state’s wind turbines shrank last year,1 even as climate advocates, relying on dodgy U.S. Energy Department modeling, overstate future carbon reductions from “electrifying everything.”2

Promising developments like offshore wind leasing and new transmission to carry hydroelectricity from Quebec barely compensate, if at all, for carbon emissions unleashed by closing the Indian Point nuclear plant. As I have pointed out elsewhere, shutting existing zero-carbon power sources means that new ones don’t actually cut emissions; at best, they keep us running in place, punching huge holes in pledges to achieve a carbon-free power grid by 2040.

To this dreary picture, add crypto mining — enormous networks of electron-eating computers running 24-7 so that digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum can maintain virtual “coins” or “tokens” in encrypted ledgers that bypass traditional third parties like banks.

From Buffalo and the Finger Lakes to the state’s northern tier, crypto entrepreneurs are building new generators or firing up retired ones to power their crypto mining operations. Other crypto sites draw on the grid.

Self-sourced or not, the requisite electricity ends up forcing additional burning of fossil fuels, as Sierra Club researchers documented in extensive comments this week to the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, pushing the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals further out of reach. To what end?

In Uber’s Footsteps

Enigmatic, opaque, futuristic — crypto-currency cries out for historical analogues. Here’s one: Uber.

Uber burst on the scene in the early 2010s not as a new form of transportation but a new kind of network enabling a reconfiguration of transportation. Its appeal was tailored around three promises: it would enhance traffic efficiency by eliminating cruising for fares; it would extend convenient for-hire vehicle service outside Manhattan; and it would end service refusals to people of color.

The packaging — sleek and app-enabled — augured a frictionless, digital future. With a few taps New Yorkers could summon a chariot.

The results were mixed. We now know that stockpiling of Ubers in Manhattan has wrought even more gridlock than taxi cruising. But Uber did broaden access to for-hire vehicles, even as it bled ridership from the MTA and, worse, rained economic ruin on the incumbent yellow-cab industry.

Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies come with their own glossy promises, though these are more chameleon-like. (Earlier this year New York Times columnist Paul Krugman disparaged them as “word salad.”) Among them, as Annie McDonough reported recently in City & State, is the prospect of liberation from ingrained discriminatory banking and lending by U.S. financial institutions.

“[Crypto backers] see the technology as an economic equalizer,” writes McDonough. “A tool not just for the rich to get richer, but for people who have been discriminated against by banking institutions or locked out of investment opportunities, including people of color and low-income communities.”

Really? In New York, and almost certainly anywhere else, unbanked households overwhelmingly lack the requisite credit history or liquid assets — bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards — to purchase cryptocurrency tokens. Moreover, scammers and grifters are finding crypto fertile territory for high-tech swindles, as New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo noted this month. An arguably safer and more effective way to root out credit segregation would be to speed Biden administration rulemaking to add teeth to the Community Reinvestment Act — the 1977 law intended to repair decades of redlining.

The emergence of crypto-front groups like the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain demonstrates the industry’s readiness to exploit deep-seated bitterness over legacy redlining. So does the participation in crypto lobbying of Bradley Tusk, the one-time Mike Bloomberg consigliere who a decade ago deftly deployed Black fury over persistent taxi discrimination to help Uber eradicate cabbies’ exclusive right to pick up street hails in Manhattan and subsequently helped fend off serious regulation of the app-ride industry for several crucial years.

Let’s Burn Up The Grid

There is no registry of electricity consumed by crypto mining in New York State. Worldwide, though, crypto burns through an estimated 91,000 gigawatt-hours (or, 91 billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity annually, according to a New York Times survey of crypto last September. Some 16% of that, or 15,000 GWh, is said to be consumed in the United States.

While New Yorkers are accustomed to thinking of our state as resource-poor, crypto miners are now exploiting half-a-dozen hydro power sites and formerly boarded-up fossil-fuel plants in northern and western New York. One industry source cited by City & State estimates that 13-14% of his company’s U.S. crypto mining takes place in our state. Extrapolating that share across the industry, crypto is annually consuming 2,000 GWh of electricity in New York State — a figure that could grow not just with increased transactions but with ever-more complex digital encryption.

Even holding at 2,000 GWh, that’s a lot of juice: more than the electricity generated last year from all the solar panels on residential buildings in the state, or more than what will come from the first 100 promised offshore wind turbines once that industry launches (see graph below). And, though crypto in New York consumes less electricity than all current solar or wind, that comparison is of no comfort, as those renewable sources need to be displacing fossil fuels (primarily fracked gas) from the state’s grid — which they can’t do if their output is effectively being consumed mining Bitcoin.

The operative word, “effectively,” encompasses two distinct but complementary dynamics. Grid dynamics dictate that any new locus of demand such as Bitcoin forces utilities to draw more heavily on fossil-fuel generators, because the non-carbon sources — nukes as well as renewables — already run as flat-out as they can. The climate dynamic is that from a statewide perspective, additional use of fossil-fuel generators negates the carbon-reduction benefits that wind and solar and nuclear would otherwise provide.

This perspective casts a harsh light on claims that a particular crypto installation is being renewably sourced. Connecting crypto to a refurbished hydro dam or solar or wind farm may sound green, but all those whirring hard drives are really siphoning off carbon-free electricity that now “won’t be available to power a home, a factory or an electric car,” as the Times’ 2021 story put it. (One hopes that the irony of crypto adherents miscounting green electrons doesn’t carry over to their currency bookkeeping.)

Carbon Tax vs. Crypto?

A stiff New York State carbon tax could slow and even reverse the rise of cryptocurrency here (likewise nationwide).

The rise in electricity prices would undermine whatever competitive advantage Bitcoin miners gain from locating in New York. Some miners would leave, new ones would stay away, and those who stay would endeavor to blunt the impact of the tax by upgrading their efficiency.

Not only that, crypto miners seeking zero-carbon generation increasingly would find themselves competing with non-crypto businesses seeking to contain their power costs. Other businesses, less power-intensive per dollar of revenue, would be in position to outbid the crypto companies.

The prospective flight to other jurisdictions could help build momentum to tax carbon emissions there as well, as more states and countries come to conclude that crypto jobs and revenues aren’t worth straining their grids, not to mention trashing their air-sheds and stealing their quiet.

This isn’t to hold out carbon taxing as a one-bullet crypto killer — we need many bullets for that, the bigger the better — but to illustrate its broad potential to stop frivolous (and in this case imbecilic) new uses of electricity before they can gain a foothold.

Why not regulate crypto away? That battle would consume years, tying down policy resources while emissions continued to spew. Worse, we have neither the time nor the ability to see around corners required to enact, piecemeal, restraints on each new locus of energy demand.

Even as energy-efficiencies continue to do wonders — total U.S. electricity use last year was just a few percent higher than in 20053 — underpriced electricity elicits new hellspawns of needless use that undo much of that progress.

Carbon taxes by themselves can’t solve everything that ails climate. But they could, for a change, get the solutions out in front of the problems.

***
Charles Komanoff, long-time New York policy analyst and environmental activist, directs the Carbon Tax Center. On Twitter @Komanoff.

1US Energy Information Administration, “Electric Power Monthly,” Table 1.14.B, “Utility Scale Facility Net Generation from Wind,” shows 4,522 GWh in New York State in 2020 and 4,387 GWh in 2021.
2To estimate future carbon reductions from the December 2021 New York City ban on gas heating and cooking in new buildings, the law’s proponents and the Dec. 15, 2021 New York Times story reporting on it both cited a Dec. 10, 2021 post, Stopping Gas Hookups in New Construction in NYC Would Cut Carbon and Costs, by the consultancy RMI. The RMI authors note that their calculations employed future electricity grid emission factors modeled by U.S. DOE’s National Renewable Energy Lab’s “Cambium” dataset. Examination of that dataset reveals, inter alia, that it assumes a non-existent five-fold increase in New York State on-shore wind-generated electricity from 2020 to 2022.
3Figures from US Energy Information Administration, “Electric Power Monthly,” Table 7.2a Electricity Net Generation: Total (All Sectors)” supplemented by Table 10.6 (“Electricity Net Generation from Distributed Solar”) indicate total U.S. electricity generation of 4,164,565 GWh in 2022 and 4,055,785 GWh in 2005. For those interested, the implied compound annual average growth rate over those 17 years is a minuscule 0.17 percent.

Correction: This post was amended on May 26 to reflect the fact that New York’s estimated 13-14% share of U.S. crypto mining applies to a single crypto company rather than industry-wide. The extrapolation to other companies is the author’s, not the source’s.

May 16 addendum: We strongly recommend How crypto made me fall in love with carbon pricing all over again, an April 27 essay by Frontier Group energy analyst Tony Dutzik covering the intersection of crypto mining, carbon pricing, energy demand and Jevons Paradox.

 

No such thing as Green Bitcoin

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Call me a neigh-sayer, but the pretty horses decorating yesterday’s NY Times story about Argo Blockchain, Inc.’s “Green Bitcoin” venture can’t hide the oxymoron that lies beneath: no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels Bitcoin miners build or buy to run their ravenous processors, crypto is fundamentally filthy.

Image from March 22 NYT front-page Business Section. The caption read, “Wind turbines next to Argo Blockchain’s new facility in Dickens County, Texas; the site would be fueled mostly by wind and solar energy.” Photo: Carter Johnston.

The reason is straightforward: all the new green energy we can capture from the air and the sun needs to serve a higher purpose: replacing fossil fuels. Wind farms and photovoltaic arrays stop the combustion that’s causing climate change only when they take the place of coal- and gas-fired power plants. If they’re hooked up to Bitcoin computers, they can’t substitute for anything. The net gain for climate is zero.

To be sure, it’s better to run Bitcoin machines with renewables than with fossil fuels. But even 100%-renewable Bitcoin isn’t climate-positive, since the land supporting the new green stuff powering the Bitcoin mining is perforce unavailable to aid the climate. At some point — a year from now, five years on, ten — some other entrepreneur, one focused on renewables rather than crypto-currency, could have built the same arrays and dedicated their output to the grid. That would actually push out fossil fuel generation and achieve the carbon cuts the climate needs.

If it helps, think of the difference between the engineer’s perspective and the climate economist’s. The engineer counts X many kilowatt-hours of wind and solar feeding Bitcoin computers that draw the same X kWh’s and calls it a wash: “carbon-neutral.” The climate economist sees those figures but also debits the Bitcoin operation for the opportunity cost of its computer banks whose voracity renders the green kWh’s unable to take the place of fossil-fuel kWh’s. The “wash” that the engineer touts is actually the persistence of coal- and gas-fired electricity generation that will keep spewing carbon.

What I call the climate economist’s perspective is something I’ve cultivated lately, since I started rethinking the climate consequences of the closure of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, in New York City’s far-north suburbs. In 2020, in a post I called Drones With Hacksaws, I equated shutting a large source of essentially carbon-free electricity such as Indian Point to unleashing a swarm of hacksaw-wielding drones to lay waste to a hypothetical giant offshore wind farm by lopping off its thousand or more turbine blades. The climate consequences of the two acts were, I argued, identical, since both involved doing away with steadily-functioning zero-carbon power sources whose operation obviated the need to run carbon-fuel-burning power plants.

This photo of the Argo Blockchain electrical distribution panels ran below the horses picture in the NYT story. Powering them takes lots of juice.

Applying this perspective to Argo Blockchain helps us see that from a climate perspective, its wind turbines (and promised solar arrays) add up to nada. The potential climate good from the company’s green power sources is squandered in powering an artificial and unnecessary service. From a climate standpoint, Argo’s wind and solar arrays at best break even, rather than provide a net benefit.

The Times story missed a lot of details: how much electricity Argo Blockchain’s Bitcoin mining facility outside Lubbock, in northwest Texas, will consume; how much of it will come from the row of wind turbines visible in the distance; how much of world Bitcoin “demand” the facility will satisfy. But it did include these helpful pointers:

Crypto mining does not involve any picks or shovels. Instead, the term refers to a verification and currency creation process that is essential to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Powerful computers race one another to process transactions, solving complex mathematical problems that require quintillions of numerical guesses a second. As a reward for this authentication service, miners receive new coins, providing a financial incentive to keep the computers running.

In Bitcoin’s early years, a crypto enthusiast could mine coins by running software on a laptop. But as digital assets have become more popular, the amount of power necessary to generate Bitcoin has soared. A single Bitcoin transaction now requires more than 2,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or enough energy to power the average American household for 73 days, researchers estimate.

Earlier this year, the New Yorker magazine writer David Owen used crypto mining as an object example in his Jan. 15 article, How The Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe. After citing a 2011 U.S. Energy Department (D.O.E.) study touting massive carbon reductions from federal regulations upgrading refrigeration efficiency, Owen trenchantly pointed out that “In 2011, the D.O.E.’s forecasters presumably didn’t anticipate that improvements in energy efficiency would make it increasingly economical to power and cool the server farms that mine and manage cryptocurrencies.”

Owen’s article, which is well worth reading for its narrative power and climate relevance as well as its iconoclasm, was his latest exposition of Jevon’s Paradox, the phenomenon by which increases in energy efficiency lower the price of “energy services” and thus lead to more use, undercutting the efficiency gain. The antidote, of course, is to ensure the energy services — cooling, travel, lighting, and so forth — don’t plunge in price by raising the price of energy provision, as I pointed out a decade ago in a post in Grist, If efficiency hasn’t cut energy use, then what?

We could do that, of course, with a carbon tax.

When it comes specifically to blunting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, there are three broad ways that carbon taxing could help.

Carbon taxing can at least nudge greenward the mix of power sources used by Bitcoin miners: less coal or gas firing, more wind and solar. That won’t make Bitcoin green, but it will lessen its climate-destructiveness.

Second, carbon taxing could cut into Bitcoin’s growth by increasing electricity distribution companies’ economic incentives to bid green power supplies away from cryptocurrency manufacturers, thus making Bitcoin mining cost more.

Last, carbon taxing could conceivably strengthen social-shaming of Bitcoin entrepreneurs and users by reframing crypto as a refuge for losers.

This notion, though admittedly speculative, would be the most enduring. There’s a range of consuming activities that need to be deemed off-limits on account of their unsustainability, destructiveness and uselessness: helicopter flights, driving giant SUV’s, monster-size homes. Crypto belongs on that list.

Still they persist: 2/3 of voters in poll want carbon tax

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Two-thirds of registered U.S. voters support making fossil fuel companies pay a carbon tax, according to December 2020 climate polling by the Yale Program on Climate Communications released last week and reported in a Friday New York Times story, Survey Finds Majority of Voters Support Initiatives to Fight Climate Change.

From the latest Yale Climate Communications opinion survey. Link to on-line version is in text above graphic. Link to full report is at the end of this post.

The 67 percent support level for a carbon tax is in line with responses to the same question in earlier Yale polling in Nov. 2019 (69%) and April 2020 (68%), and with complementary goals like “require electric utilities to go all-renewable by 2035” and “eliminate all U.S. carbon pollution by 2050.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s well short of the 82 percent approval for perennial favorites like expanding clean-energy research and giving consumers tax rebates for purchasing high-mileage cars and solar panels; taxes, even on pollution, don’t sell as well as research and giveaways. On the other hand, the 67 percent pro-carbon tax rating far exceeded “increasing federal subsidies for renewable energy” (55%) and “decreasing subsidies for the fossil fuel industry (49%).”

The Yale survey polled 1,036 American adults aged 18 and older, of whom 949 are registered, and was conducted December 3-16, 2020.

The persistence of support for taxing carbon emissions is notable in light of increased antipathy toward carbon pricing from the political left.

Last month, the environmental and climate justice movement, acting from its misplaced conviction that California’s carbon cap-and-trade program is exacerbating pollution hotspots in minority communities, blocked the prospective nomination of the state’s air resources chief to head U.S. EPA. (The movement’s criticisms of cap-and-trade also extend to carbon taxing, as we detailed in this September post.)

More broadly, influential commentators like former Vox blogger David Roberts, who now publishes a climate newsletter called Volts, and UC-Santa Barbara political scientist Leah Stokes last year pronounced carbon taxing passé.

“The politics of carbon pricing just don’t seem to be going anywhere,” Roberts wrote last summer in At last, a climate policy platform that can unite the left, an ambitious post that propounded a three-pronged “Standards-Investment-Justice progressive rubric for climate policy. “Carbon pricing has been dethroned,” Roberts proclaimed, practically exulting over the idea that economists were having to cede the steering wheel to progressive activists, organized labor and environmental justice advocates.

Stokes is at the vanguard of rising young academics who disdain carbon taxing. “Carbon pricing has dominated conversations around climate policy for decades, but it is ineffective,” she wrote last September in The Trouble With Carbon Pricing, a lengthy essay in Boston Review. “Only a bold approach that centers politics can meet the problem at its scale.”

We rebutted Stokes and her co-author Matto Mildenberger in October. So did Joseph Majkut, climate policy director at the Niskanen Center, in an elegant blog post that we summarized here. Nevertheless, attacks on carbon pricing as ineffectual or unachievable (or both) continue to mount.

The latest entry, Does carbon pricing reduce emissions?, was just posted yesterday. The short answer, as Cornell Prof. Bob Howarth suggested on Twitter, is that low carbon pricing won’t cut emissions nearly as much as robust pricing.

CTC’s carbon-tax model indicates that a steadily rising carbon tax that reaches triple digits (i.e., $100 per ton of CO2) within a half-dozen years would, a decade hence, be reducing U.S. CO2 pollution by around a third. Needless to say, that’s not what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had in mind recently when it added this deliberately non-specific language to its Position on Climate Change:

The Chamber supports a market-based approach to accelerate GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions reductions across the U.S. economy. We believe that durable climate policy must be made by Congress, and that it should encourage innovation and investment to ensure significant emissions reductions, while avoiding economic harm for businesses, consumers and disadvantaged communities. This policy should include well designed market mechanisms that are transparent and not distorted by overlapping regulations. U.S. climate policy should recognize the urgent need for action, while maintaining the national and international competitiveness of U.S. industry and ensuring consistency with free enterprise and free trade principles.

To be sure, the Yale survey question doesn’t specify a carbon tax amount, for good reasons. Even if that degree of detail were warranted, it seems impossible to fashion a question that could illuminate the level without biasing the outcome.

Consider these two possible survey questions:

  1. Do you support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax that could add nearly a dollar to the price of a gallon of gas?
  2. Do you support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax that would provide annual “dividends” of $1,800 for every U.S. resident 18 and older?

As you may have guessed, the carbon tax is the same in the two questions: $100 per ton of CO2. The framing, however, is quite different. We bet the second wording would poll 25 points higher than the first.

The Yale report, the latest in a series researched and written jointly with George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, has a wealth of polling results on nearly every conceivable aspect of climate change policy and politics. Such as this: About half of registered voters say the issue of global warming was important in determining their vote in 2020. (However, only 2% of voters ranked global warming as the single most important issue; for the rest it was “one of several important issues.”)

That’s on p. 33 of this intelligently conceived and artfully designed report, which you can download via this link.

Addendum, Jan. 21

Shortly after posting, we learned of a Jan. 12 report from Resources for the Future, The Climate Decade: Changing Attitudes on Three Continents (press release, here; full report, here), comparing 2019 vs. 2009 public opinion in Sweden, China, and the United States. Among the eight authors are the veteran RFF environmental economist Alan Krupnick and University of Gothenburg Professor of Environmental Economics Thomas Sterner.

From the Jan. 2021 RFF report, The Climate Decade: Changing Attitudes on Three Continents.

A big takeaway from the RFF report is an average “willingness to pay” to reduce CO2 emissions of $31 among U.S. respondents in 2019. Though that figure is less than the corresponding average in China and, especially, Sweden (see chart), it’s almost double the 2009 U.S. average of $18.

And while the $31 willingness to pay is far from the triple-digit carbon tax level CTC has been recommending for the past decade and longer, it almost certainly overstates the effective net cost of even a high carbon tax to U.S. consumers, on account of the ability of the carbon tax revenues to pay for social and economic benefits that would vastly lower the true net cost. Those benefits could be reduced payroll or income taxes (via a “tax swap”), lower economic and environmental costs from reduced use of fossil fuels, and/or direct payments to households via “carbon dividends.”

In short, a $31 per ton willingness by Americans to pay to reduce CO2 emissions actually signals support for high rates of carbon taxing.

Takeaways from America’s Diesel Pickup Pollution Disaster

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[A similar version of this post was published earlier today in Streetsblog.]

Combustion vehicles invite law-breaking. Petro-masculinity is deep-seated in American culture. But California, at least, has vanquished emissions tampering.

These are takeaways from the explosive New York Times story last week reporting that an estimated 550,000 U.S. diesel pickup trucks are being driven with compromised anti-pollution devices, making them super-emitters.

Takeaway #1: eliminating America’s petroleum-fueled vehicles is urgent business.

For decades, every gasoline or diesel powered sedan, SUV, pickup and motorcycle sold in the 50 states has come with emission-reducing filters, catalysts and control systems. And for just about every make and model there’s an aftermarket product that lets the owner weaken these systems or disable them altogether.

These nefarious products range from software patches called “tuners” that reprogram the software that calibrates engine functioning, to “straight pipes” that bypass exhaust gas controls and, as one purveyor puts it, “allow a car engine to flex its muscles and to make as much noise as it wants.” Purchasing and installing these devices isn’t rocket science, as evidenced by the fact that nearly 15 percent of “Class 2b and 3” diesel pickups on the road today — vehicles weighing 8,000 to 14,000 pounds — have missing or inactivated emission controls, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The result is massive excess per-vehicle emissions of on-road vehicles’ two most health-damaging pollutants: 30 to 300 times higher emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and 15 to 40 times more particulate matter, according to a five-year EPA research project uncovered last week by Times environmental reporter Coral Davenport. (Her sleuthing may have been aided by rising EPA staff resistance to Trump administration regulatory teardowns in anticipation of the pending presidential changeover.)

The rampant lawbreaking goes far beyond even those figures, since EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement examined only diesel pickups. According to Davenport, similar defeat devices, which let drivers accelerate more quickly and loudly, “almost certainly have been installed in millions of other vehicles.”

Final section of this post unpacks California’s success at containing emissions tampering.

California has proven that robust enforcement can drastically shrink the problem. But a more surefire way to plug this gaping leak in America’s tailpipe regulatory regime is to do away with tailpipes altogether by replacing combustion with electricity, which effectively substitutes hundreds of closely-monitored (and, increasingly, zero-carbon) power plants for millions of wrench-heads.

The danger of ‘aggro bros’

The second takeaway has to do with the veneration of torque and thrust that impels legions of our countrymen (yes, they’re mostly male) to sideline four decades of hard-won antipollution progress and remake their vehicles as 1980s-era gross emitters.

The charitable interpretation is that, save for a relative handful of “Rolling Coal” lunatics, these engine offenders may not fully grasp how baldly their aftermarket escapades are magnifying their vehicles’ emissions. However, a more compelling interpretation employs the lens of “petro-masculinity”; that’s Virginia Tech political-science professor Cara Daggett’s term for the “toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny” that she sees emerging in response to climate change.

“The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit,” Daggett wrote in her groundbreaking 2018 article, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” “Fossil fuels also contribute to making identities,” she mused, and “fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.” (My colleagues at Streetsblog USA also raised this issue earlier this year.)

A month ago, after that bizarro pre-election weekend when Trump thugs in bulked-up pickups bullied a Biden campaign bus off a Dallas freeway and wilded mid-span on New York’s Mario Cuomo (formerly Tappan Zee) Bridge, Earther columnist Brian Kahn summoned Daggett’s petro-masculinity:

Highways full of gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs are a distillation of so much of the past four years, and indeed the entire fight over climate action. Vehicles have become one of the status symbols that define where you fit in the culture war, whether it’s a big, strong truck, a hybrid Prius, or a bike. This weekend’s trucks clogging the highway and needlessly polluting are a big middle finger to climate activists and others trying to draw down emissions to protect their and future generations.

Perhaps when Trump is shown the door his fans will torch the factories making N-95 masks. That’ll show the libs!

Some good news from the Golden State

Takeaway #3 is — get ready — good news: California, the state that for the past half-century has defined effective environmental governance, has held vehicle emissions tampering to a minimum.

This story is not about "rolling coal," but the toxic masculinity behind it is a much broader problem in our country.

This story isn’t about “rolling coal,” but the toxic masculinity behind it has become an obstacle to climate progress.

State data breakdowns in the EPA report indicate that compromised diesel pickup pollution systems are only one-sixth as widespread in California as in the rest of the country: 27 per 1,000 pickups in the Golden State vs. 158 per 1,000 for the other 49 states. (The next best rate after California, New Jersey’s 91 tampered pickups per 1,000, is more than three times California’s rate.)

Expressed differently, if emissions tampering in California were as prevalent as in the rest of the U.S., the state would have 51,000 diesel pickup super-spreaders rather than the roughly 9,000 estimated by EPA. The effect would be stark: more asthma attacks, more worker and student sick days, more pulmonary hospitalizations, and more premature deaths across the nation’s most populous state.

What’s California’s secret sauce for preventing diesel tampering? It’s actually two sauces: an upstream part that bars every link in the aftermarket supply chain — manufacturers, distributors, dealers, installers, repair shops and vehicle owners — from selling or installing a long list of proscribed emissions tampering tuners and equipment. (This California Air Resources Board enforcement advisory has details.) And a downstream part that subjects Class 2b and 3 diesel trucks to annual Smog Checks that visually inspect the vehicle’s On Board Diagnostic emission control governor and also keep a lookout for possible aftermarket reprogramming or removal of exhaust components.

A CTC supporter received this notice from CARB last week after observing and reporting a gross emitter in West Sacramento.

Since 2012, the California Air Resources Board has enforced 53 cases, collecting $17.5 million in fines, almost entirely from businesses, according to an agency spokesperson I contacted for this story. It’s the same Golden State diligence I reported last year in “California Stars,” a report concluding that since the 1970s the state had surpassed the rest of the country by 25 percent in its uptake of energy efficiency, solar panels and wind turbines. And again this year, when two U-C Santa Barbara economists found that the state’s carbon cap-and-trade program was appreciably narrowing the “environmental justice gap” between rich white and poor Black and brown neighborhoods and communities, as I reported for the Carbon Tax Center.

CARB even maintains a hot line to report smoking vehicles. It cleans the air AND signifies state government’s commitment to hold motoring offenders accountable.

Law and culture are intertwined. Maybe by now there’s something baked into the state’s culture that bends stakeholders — even grease monkeys and aggro drivers — toward adherence with laws that protect lungs and produce blue skies.

Blame the NIMBYs *And* Exxon

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(A slightly shorter version of this post first appeared in Streetsblog NYC on Oct. 28.)

My neighborhood NIMBY’s (Not In My Back Yard-ers) are at it again, this time slapping down a bid by the Tribeca Whole Foods to install a cargo bike loading dock in front of their Tribeca store in lower Manhattan.

Delivery bicycles with trailers outside a Whole Foods in Brooklyn, NY. Manhattan stores need loading space in the street to avoid foot traffic and narrow sidewalks.

As Streetsblog reported last week, the executive committee of Manhattan Community Board 1 voted 6-4 to shelve the plan. So it’s back to the drawing board, meaning, at best, needless delay of a rare Mayor de Blasio-approved initiative to unclog our streets and reduce truck emissions by using human-powered delivery bikes, some with electric assist, for urban “last-mile” delivery. (For those of you possibly seduced into imagining Bill de Blasio is a climate mayor, think again.)

One board member said that giving up five free-parking spaces to accommodate the loading area would be “a travesty.” The vote, and the contentious and largely uninformed discussion preceding it, showed the folly of allowing unelected community boards veto power on innovations that could help move people and goods safely and sustainably. It also laid bare the hollowness of the “just blame Exxon” narrative that has taken hold of the climate movement.

Listen to the committee meeting and three objections emerge:

  • Reserving a patch of curb for cargo bikes is placard corruption redux (timecode 10:58).
  • Except when it’s a giveaway to the world’s richest person (10:35 and 22:15).
  • And, the kicker, Fresh Direct food-delivery trucks pollute (26:50).

Wait, what?

“Twenty-four hours a day,” one exec-committee member hyperbolically reminded the Zoom gathering, prior to casting his No vote, “Fresh Direct has a series of trucks parking [in Tribeca and] spewing diesel emissions… We’re doing the same thing now with Whole Foods.”

You read that right: in the mind of this self-proclaimed automobile and motorcycle aficionado, idling Fresh Direct trucks elsewhere in Tribeca are a reason to deep-six a competitor’s scheme to swap out polluting trucks with zero-emission cargo bicycles. (That logic brings to mind that old New York Times story about a proposed wind farm near Cooperstown in which some rando whined that seeing giant windmills near his house “would be like driving through oil derricks to get to your front door,” a story I mentioned in my long-form article on wind power back in 2006.)

From the same committee member: “The streets have gotten more dangerous because they have not been widened… There are so many uses that [NYC] DOT is trying to provide for: commercial, vehicular, buses, bike lanes, new pedestrian areas — they’re painted in such a way it looks like someone on psilocybin did the layout. It’s so confusing and dangerous with the various modalities interacting with each other and [cargo biking] is just one more… To me this whole concept is objectionable and it’s not because I necessarily drive more than anyone else, it’s just enough … enough input on our streets!” (It starts at 29:20.)

There it is: The streets are dangerous because government, seeking to advance traffic safety and efficiency, has made it trickier for me to wield my dangerous vehicle. And now you’re doing it again. Take your government hands off my government-subsidized driving and free parking!

The episode lays bare some discomfiting truths. For one, America’s extreme economic inequality not only gives plutocrats like Whole Foods and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos immense reach into our lives, it also provides a pretext to oppose any positive steps rich people might take, under the guise of progressivism. For another, placard abuse — illegal appropriation of curb space by police and other public employees’ private cars, a practice that is rampant in New York City, especially lower Manhattan — serves as a convenient cause to reject any measure to reconfigure curb space; so long as cops and other apparatchiks get free parking, “the community” deserves no less.

But here’s another disconcerting truth: we can’t simply deem Exxon and its fellow fossils solely responsible for the climate crisis if unelected NIMBY’s are able to delay, water down or block seemingly every path to actually cut carbon emissions.

Last week, in addition to the no vote at Manhattan Community Board 1, there was the district manager of Queens CB1 demanding that some Citi Bike docks in Astoria be relocated from the roadbed to the sidewalk, a change that cycling advocates rightly fear would impede traffic calming in the area. On this “livable-news,” urbanite site (Streetsblog), probably a tenth of all posts since its founding in 2006 have concerned pushback by NIMBY’s on Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West (bike lane), Manhattan’s 14th Street (bus lane) and other thoroughfares throughout the five boroughs that has forced “livable-streets” advocates to wage protracted battles for bike lanes, bus lanes and a citywide array of life-saving speed cameras. More broadly, scarcely a day goes by that somewhere in the 50 states, a carbon-busting wind farm, solar array, infill housing or transit project is turned aside or left off the drawing board altogether on account of obstruction from deep-pocketed, aggrieved Not-In-My-Back-Yard types.

Yes, Exxon’s political muscle and support of denialist think tanks have for decades helped enforce pro-carbon stasis. Ditto, the Koch Brothers’ “dark money,” as copiously documented by diligent reporters like Jane Mayer and Christopher Leonard. But the oil and gas industry only retains its power because demand for its products persists.

After Joe Biden pledged during the second and final presidential debate to “transition away from the oil industry,” Politico’s Tim Alberta tweeted (and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes retweeted) that “we’ve been transitioning from oil for 50 years.” Dream on. Until the pandemic, U.S. vehicle-miles traveled stayed high, SUV’s and pickups kept ballooning, and air travel grew steadily — trends reflected in the chart above.

Stopping NIMBY’s from holding up low-carbon alternatives isn’t the whole struggle, but it’s a big part. I’m told that a reconfigured cargo-bike resolution could come before Manhattan CB1 as early as next Thursday, Nov. 5. Unless I’m in the streets demonstrating for election integrity, I plan to attend.

Full disclosure: the writer owns Amazon stock, giving him a financial interest in Whole Foods.

Shoot Out The Lights?

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Years ago, my friend Vince built a house on a hillside in Vermont, a mile or so from the town where he grew up. The deck looked out on the valley and, at night, to a dark sky filled with stars. Then a couple from Montreal, weekenders, put up an A-frame in the valley, with an outdoor light that obliterated the darkness. When they drove back to the city on Sundays, the light stayed lit.

Vince had a choice: try to reason with the couple, or direct action. It was either-or, since talking with them would blow his cover. He chose direct action: One Monday evening he drove over with a ladder and unscrewed the bulb. Evidently the couple didn’t take the hint, since the light went back on the next weekend. The following Monday, Vince returned with a friend, who brought his shotgun. The light went off and stayed off.

From Feb. 5 Sunday NY Times, under heading "Waste of Energy" (see text for link)

From Feb 5 NY Times etiquette column, under heading ‘Waste of Energy.’

What brought this episode to mind was the letter in the Sunday NY Times’ etiquette column, Social Q’s, shown at left, about a glaring light in a homeowners’ association. The letter-writer bemoaned the waste of energy rather than the loss of dark sky. But chalk one up for Vince from Vermont; reasoning didn’t avail, leaving the letter-writer to suck it up and “buy drapes.”

A small, sad story. Of greater interest is what the columnist said — and neglected to say — in response, about energy, climate and the social compact.

The columnist rationalized the hedge fund manager’s waste of electricity by citing the advance of energy efficiency. New homes, indeed new everything, from appliances and computers to automobiles and aircraft, are required to be more energy-efficient — the result of a hard-won societal decision to build efficiencies into product design rather than leave them to an energy marketplace whose prices don’t fully reflect environmental costs. The point of energy standards is to bridge those marketplace gaps, not provide an excuse for unfettered waste.

And think about how much energy usage has to be eliminated to meet even the most basic climate targets. Running in place doesn’t pass muster when carbon emissions need to shrink 80 percent by 2050 if not much sooner. We’ve run out of room for backsliding.

Milky Way. Photo by Hans Braxmeier, via Pixabay.

Milky Way. Photo by Hans Braxmeier, via Pixabay.

I’ll bet the letter-writer gets that. To her, the waste of electricity probably goes beyond the btu’s and CO2. It’s a signifier of the neighbor’s heedlessness. Though he’s not legally required to have climate-consciousness, it’s frustrating that he apparently doesn’t. Making things worse, there’s no carbon tax. While a stiff carbon emissions charge might not change the neighbor’s behavior, our letter-writer might gain a measure of satisfaction from knowing that the neighbor’s heedlessness is adding to tax revenues.

The columnist’s reply also ratifies our asymmetrical social compact: it’s the neighbor’s prerogative to light up the night, and the letter-writer’s responsibility to deal with the damage. The same social compact lets helicopter users and jet-skiers destroy quiet enjoyment of the world for the rest of us. Go ahead and spew unwanted light, unwanted sound, unwanted greenhouse gases; we’ll put up with the damage.

The columnist didn’t suggest collective action. Shouldn’t the letter-writer talk to other neighbors and try to organize them? Okay, maybe that’s futile, or maybe she risks being labeled a crank or squandering social capital she might need for some bigger concern. And there are only so many hours in the day.

The moral: in energy and climate, as in anything, there are norms at play. As I pointed out years ago, in my post, No Magic Price Point for Kicking Carbon, so much energy use that we think is necessary or natural is actually socially determined. Cheap energy has engendered a culture of conspicuous usage and waste. A carbon tax could help dismantle that, and undo much of the ingrained consumption that gets under our skin.

Tillerson Carbon Tax Would Cost the Trump SoHo $250K a Year

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Trump is bling, and bling is fossil fuels: The Boeing 757-200. The limo’s. The helicopters.

And also, evidently, the buildings. Not just the marble, but the lights, the escalators, and the machinery: motors, fans, compressors to (over) cool and heat.

The spa in Trump SoHo, a hotel ranked in the top 1% in carbon emissions in its class. Photo from Luxury Travelers Guide.

The spa in Trump SoHo, a hotel ranked in the highest 1% in carbon emissions in its class. Photo from Luxury Travelers Guide.

We awoke this morning to find the Trump brand’s conspicuous energy consumption confirmed in spades, in EnergyWire. Thanks to their lead story, At blinged-out Trump hotels, ‘green’ isn’t part of the brand, we now know that out of nine Trump-branded properties in Manhattan that submitted energy use data under New York City’s energy benchmarking law, six were in the bottom 20 percent for energy efficiency, based on consumption per square foot.

Since those buildings are, ahem, huge, their outsize per-area energy usage puts their total fuel use and carbon emissions off the charts. To grasp how much, we zeroed in on one building, the Trump SoHo. According to the EnergyWire story, the combined hotel-condominium was in “the bottom [worst] 1 percent of properties of its type and size for energy intensity.”

We logged into NYC’s excellent Energy and Water Benchmarking Web site, navigated to Hotels and typed in the Trump SoHo address, 246 Spring Street. A bunch of graphs popped up, including the one at right, below, denoting CO2 emissions per square feet. From it, we were able to calculate that in 2014, the most recent year with available data, the fossil fuels burned to run the Trump SoHo emitted around 10,000 metric tons of CO2. (Calculations are at bottom.)

That’s a tough figure to put in perspective (okay, it’s within hailing distance of total carbon emissions for the entire country of Liechtenstein, which clocked in at 14,000 metric tons in 2013). So we converted it to dollars, using the carbon tax level that Trump’s Secretary of State-designate, Rex Tillerson, appeared to endorse on a handful of occasions during his tenure as ExxonMobil CEO: $25 per metric ton of CO2.

Histogram from City of New York energy benchmarking. We read the carbon figure from the x-axis.

Histogram from City of New York energy benchmarking for hotels. We used x-axis reading for Trump SoHo.

Ten thousand times 25 is 250,000, so at the (admittedly hypothetical) Tillerson rate, the Trump SoHo would be dunned around a quarter of a million dollars a year for its carbon emissions. (More precisely, the hotel’s electricity and energy providers would pay the tax and attempt to pass it through in higher charges.)

At the higher carbon tax levels that would make truly monumental dents in emissions, say, $100/ton, the annual charge would be a million bucks a year. That might get someone’s attention (and provoke an intervention by the energy managers from the Trump-branded 40 Wall Street skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, which improbably had an excellent (91) Energy Star score, according to EnergyWire).

But beyond poking fun — and it’s important to keep poking the new administration — the Trump properties’ energy profligacy matters a great deal for our planet. That’s because energy efficiency is critically important for reducing climate-damaging emissions.

For four decades and counting, visionaries like Amory Lovins and practitioners like the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy have documented (and fought to win supportive policies for) the capacity to provide more energy services (warmth, light) with fewer energy inputs. Last month, we published a Carbon Tax Center report identifying electric­ity savings that have caused electricity usage to flatten even as economic output increased, as the unheralded but key factor in the 25 percent cut in CO2 emissions from the U.S. electricity sector since 2005. (Shorter blog version here.)

There’s been a lot of debate about whether our 45th president can bring back coal. One way to stop that — and avert more fracking too — is to maintain and accelerate progress in U.S. energy efficiency, especially in buildings. In that endeavor, as in virtually every other, the right direction is full speed away from anything spelled T-R-U-M-P.

Note: As we were posting this article, we saw a post by the Energy and Policy Institute presenting strong evidence that ExxonMobil lobbied the Massachusetts state legislature to oppose two carbon tax bills, one of them revenue-neutral, during the 2016 session, i.e., when Tillerson was still CEO.

How we did our calculations: First, we ignored the label in the Greenhouse Gas Intensity graphic asserting that the “GHG intensity for this property (Trump SoHo) is 3,877.16.” If that figure is supposed to refer to kilograms of CO2 per square foot of floor space per year, as the x-axis suggests, it’s inflated by a factor of 150-200. Instead, we estimated a figure of 23 kgCO2/ft^2 from the last bar in the chart, which clearly refers to Trump SoHo, and multiplied it by the hotel’s square footage (reported in another graph on the same Web page; click the Go To Visualization button), which is 395,075, to obtain approximately 9,100 metric tons. As a check, we read an annual figure of 535,000 Btu per square foot from another chart, Weather-Normalized Energy Use Intensity, obtaining roughly 211,000 million Btu per year, to which we applied the CO2 emission factor for natural gas (most NYC on-site energy and much of its electricity is from natural gas) of 117 pounds per million Btu. The result, 24.7 million pounds, is approximately 11,000 metric tons.