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Thacker Pass: The Sagebrush Rebellion We Need

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Protecting “a desert in the mountains”

Though I’ve hiked all over the west, I’ve never been to Nevada’s northwest corner. On the map it’s a broad, empty strip from I-80 to the Oregon line. For hundreds of miles, it is in fact wild country — and far from empty, biologically, ecologically.

The encampment. All Thacker Pass photos are from  www.protectthackerpass.org, used by permission.

In January, a pair of activists, Will Falk and Max Wilbert, pitched a tent in one of the loveliest valleys of the region, seeking to rally resistance to a proposed lithium mine on public land. The place where they’ve established their protest camp is called Thacker Pass.

Lithium is a metal, and its physical and chemical properties make it versatile enough to be baked into lubricants, ceramics and other useful stuff, including batteries. Lithium-ion batteries, invented in the late 1970s and prized for their energy density and rechargeability, are integral to two pillars of the Green New Deal: electric vehicles and power storage.

Falk and Wilbert, camped out in midwinter cold, enduring what is no doubt some small privation, are asking that we recognize the ecological and environmental cost of the so-called sustainable economy, at the center of which is the mining of lithium. We need to understand why they are taking a stand at Thacker Pass.

Here’s how they describe where they are right now:

Thacker Pass is a physical feature in Humboldt County, Nevada, part of the McDermott Caldera approximately 60 miles northwest of Winnemucca. It was formed 16 or more million years ago, is traditional and unceded territory of the Paiute Nation, and is United States Bureau of Land Management public land.

Now it is also the proposed site for a massive lithium mine that would destroy the area and valuable habitat for the creatures who live there.

A Less Than Green New Deal?

Climate campaigners have decreed that the world’s cars and trucks must switch to electricity — an imperative that was boosted by General Motors’ recent announcement that it intends to sell only electrics after 2035. Climate hawks say biodiesel can’t be done at scale and hydrogen vehicles are years from commercial use, and they’re right, not when American households and businesses own 275 million cars and trucks and drive them over 3 trillion miles each year — making “ground transportation” the country’s biggest source of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions.

Key to the green idea for transportation is to make wind and solar power so plentiful that the electric grid will no longer need generators running on fossil fuels. Electric vehicle battery re-charging — and driving — will then be emission-free and climate-pure.

Of course, a renewables-based grid is subject to fluctuating output from the wind farms and solar arrays. That’s where lithium’s other GND connection comes in: powering massive rechargeable battery stacks that can feed electricity into the grid for hours at a time, continuously stabilizing electricity supply.

Already, giant assemblages of lithium-ion batteries are sprouting up in California, where renewable energy has penetrated furthest, enabling utilities in the state to close some turbines burning fracked methane.

The Green New Deal, the anointed framework for perpetuating industrial civilization as we know it while creating jobs and a “just transition” from the fossil-fuel economy, is clearly better than our carbon-based catastrophic course. It also depends on massive amounts of lithium.

I figure that electrifying all U.S. cars and trucks in two decades, as envisioned in GND scenarios, will demand the continuous lithium output of three to five Thacker Pass mines. (See sidebar.)

Powering “utility-side” grid-smoothing batteries will require still more. How much, I do not know. An extensive literature search turned up not a single statement of the quantity of lithium needed per gigawatt-hour, say, of electricity storage — an indication, perhaps, of the alienation of Green New Dealers and energy scenario-spinners alike from the physical implications of their intentions.

Lithium = Devastation

One reason for Falk and Wilbert’s stand is obvious: the lithium mine at Thacker Pass will destroy an entire sagebrush ecosystem. Mind you, what’s planned at Thacker Pass isn’t just an epic-sized mine. There will also be an enormous complex to extract lithium from the mined ore for its conversion into a non-volatile carbonate form to be made into batteries.

Because lithium’s concentration in ore at Thacker Pass runs as low as two-tenths of one percent, producing one ton of the stuff for use by society entails strip mining and processing as much as 500 tons of earth. Over a single year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium at the site could mean digging up as much as 20 to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount of earth dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states.

Removing the lithium from the ore is done with the industrial economy’s dissolver of choice, the notoriously corrosive and toxic sulfuric acid. The developer, Canada-based, China-backed Lithium Americas Corp., plans to acidify molten sulfur on site, trucking in the stuff from oil refineries. Hauling the material will require 75 tractor-trailer loads a day, according to Falk and Wilbert — every one of them running on fossil fuels.

Unsurprisingly, the processing equipment is budgeted at a dozen times more than the mine itself, in Lithium Americas’ “pre-feasibility study” (pdf, p. 228 of 266), with the whole enterprise topping out at more than a billion dollars. You don’t spend that much money on apparatus to move, crush, leach and acidify earth without scarring and contaminating large swaths of it.

Thus, the “Protect Thacker Pass” banner. There’s a lot to protect. On the encampment’s web site, Falk and Wilbert describe Thacker Pass as “a stunningly biodiverse, wild, expansive, and beautiful desert in the mountains.” In mid-winter, they attest that the land practically vibrates with stars and stillness.

The pair’s real aim at Thacker Pass is to question a Green New Deal that is dependent on large-scale resource extraction and industrial manufacture. Which means questioning not just society’s but the environmental movement’s acquiescence to consumerism and material growth.

Where is it written, they ask, that Americans must own 275 million vehicles? Where is it written that we can’t halve that number, to Western European levels, with denser suburbs and Euro-quality transit along with broad cultural changes substituting place and proximity for pointless travel, thus slashing the “need” to replace all those cars and trucks with electric vehicles built from mined lithium? As for grid storage, rate incentives that harmonize electricity usage with its real-time availability could partially supplant batteries. Smaller homes and less air-conditioning of buildings could also trim power demand, period.

Tightening the Regulatory Screws Would Help

Would it also make a difference if the pollution discharges permitted at Thacker Pass and at other lithium mines were cut ten-fold? I believe so. This wouldn’t just reduce ecological degradation in the immediate areas. The cost to comply with those regs would boost the price of lithium carbonate. The responses to the higher price — ranging from lighter vehicles that can get by with smaller battery packs to potentially more-efficient (hence, less-resource-intensive) energy storage media — would cut demand.

GM’s Hummer EV: bullshit on our streets, bullshit in our wild lands.

The U.S. has already witnessed just such a chain of events: with coal-fired power plants. To satisfy regulatory mandates to cut new plants’ soot emissions and acid gases roughly ten-fold, utilities were forced in the 1970s and 1980s to spend billions for scrubbers, precipitators and the like, driving up prices of new coal-fired plants — a progression I documented at the time. Coupled with even more meteoric cost escalation at nuclear power plants, the result was spiraling electric rates that helped spark the revolution in energy efficiency that has all but extinguished growth in electricity demand in the United States.

There, in a nutshell, is the logic behind carbon taxing: to raise prices of fossil fuels in accordance with their true costs, thus spurring reductions in their use. Lithium, no less than coal, oil and methane, should be forced to adhere to the same dynamic. If electric vehicles and carbon-free grids are rendered more expensive for awhile, so be it.

Industrial civilization is still destroying ecosystems, laying waste to biodiversity, ramping up its plunder of forests, consuming more metals than ever, depleting ocean life at ever-increasing rates…and on and on… One antidote is for prices to speak the truth about underlying costs.

Nevertheless, even my regulatory-based scenario has a weak link: global commerce. Make it cost more to mine lithium in the USA, and global capital will alight elsewhere. Lithium Americas already operates a mine in Argentina, and the mineral is widely distributed around the world.

To evade the Whac-a-mole trap, the fight that Falk and Wilbert are mounting in Nevada has to be waged as well in Argentina, Australia and especially Chile, the world’s biggest current provider. It’s a tall order.

First, though, they have to stop the mine where they’re camped, at Thacker Pass. That’s a tall order too. That lithium is a midwife to a low-carbon economy makes it less ugly than coal and less evil than oil. But all the same, it’s a force that is industrializing the entire planet, to Earth’s and our detriment and, possibly, demise.

A True Sagebrush Rebellion

Reporting in 2015 on deadbeat cattle rancher Cliven Bundy’s armed standoff over federal grazing fees, journalist Christopher Ketcham wrote in Harper’s that the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion — the Western resistance to federal authority over public lands and water — has always been centered in Nevada. That rebellion proffered the noxious idea that public lands should be maximally exploited for private gain.

The rebellion of Falk and Wilbert, situated in the same sagebrush wilderness, seeks the opposite: “A world in which we prioritize the health of future generations. A world in which we live in harmony with the natural world, rather than relying on extraction. A world in which blowing up a mountain for lithium is just as unacceptable as blowing up a mountain for coal.”

For information on donating, supporting, communicating or coming to Thacker Pass and joining the lithium mine blockade, click here.

Feb. 8 addendum: My post today for Streetsblog NYC, Beware the EV Congestion Boomerang, explains how exempting electric vehicles from New York City’s congestion pricing program will lead to increases in air and climate pollution.

Curbing drilling on federal lands won’t do much for climate

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Half of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel extraction on federal lands are from coal mined in Wyoming. And the quantity is falling steadily as fewer tons of coal are burned in U.S. power plants.

This suggests that the provisions in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis last week to “pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters pending completion of a comprehensive review” won’t put much of a dent in U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Carbon dioxide emissions in 2014 from burning fossil fuels extracted from federal lands. Chart copied from USGS report cited in text. Figures are million metric tons of CO2.

That didn’t stop leading U.S. newspapers from giving the policy announcement an enthusiastic spin. The Washington Post proclaimed that the possible ban “will deliver on one of Biden’s boldest climate campaign pledges,” while the New York Times said it “will effectively launch his agenda to combat climate change.” Both papers claimed that “Fossil fuel leasing on federal and tribal land accounts for nearly a quarter of the country’s annual carbon output” (Post) or, equivalently, “The burning of fossil fuels extracted on public lands and waters accounted for almost a quarter of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2005 and 2014.” (Times)

That “nearly a quarter” figure is out of date, however. More importantly, it’s Wyoming-skewed. Let’s look at the 2018 U.S. Geological Survey report to which the Times story linked.

Of the 1,279 million tonnes of CO2 emitted in 2014 from fossil fuels mined or drilled on federal lands (a figure provided elsewhere in the USGS report, which only goes to 2014), fully 57 percent originated with coal mined from Wyoming, largely from the state’s Powder River Basin.

Coal mining isn’t mentioned in Biden’s Jan. 27 executive order, save for brief promises to devise new policies on royalties, worker retraining, and community transition, probably owing to two reasons: most coal-fired power plants lock in their fuel supply with long-term contracts to ensure that coal quality matches up with plant equipment; and coal burning to make electricity is in free fall — it shrank nearly by half from its 2005 peak to 2019 — reducing the urgency of curbing supplies.

Wyoming’s coal production hasn’t fallen quite as fast, according to data compiled by the state’s Geological Survey: by 41 percent from its 2008 peak and 29 percent from the 2014 base that USGS drew upon for its calculations. Nevertheless, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that in 2019 federal lands’ share of U.S. CO2 from fossil fuels dipped below 20 percent, with Wyoming coal still accounting for nearly half (48 percent) of those emissions.

Calculations: A 29% drop during 2014-2019 from WY’s 728 million tonnes of CO2 equates to 211 million fewer tonnes. Other things equal, the 1,279 million tonnes of emissions from federal lands in 2014 would have shrunk to 1,068 million tonnes in 2019, which is 83.5% of the figure relied on by the Times and the Post. Multiplying that percent by USGS’s 23% figure of federal lands’ share of all fossil fuel CO2 in 2014 yields 19.2%. As for Wyoming, its prorated 2019 emissions figure of 517 million tonnes (728 less 211) would be 48% of the reduced 2019 total of 1,068 million tonnes.

Of course, some U.S. oil and gas supply does originate in federal lands. The USGS pie-chart associates 19 percent of U.S. 2014 fossil fuel CO2 emissions with offshore gulf wells, while the American Petroleum Institute estimates that 22 percent of U.S. oil production and 12 percent of natural gas production currently takes place on federal land and water, as reported by the Post. Yet at least in the short term and, likely, far longer, plugging up new supplies in federally owned waters would simply divert production to other onshore areas or overseas. Demand it, and they will supply.

Since our founding in 2007, we at Carbon Tax Center have stressed repeatedly — as in our 2016 post, “Keep It In The Ground” Needs a Carbon Tax — that fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions are fundamentally a product of demand, not supply.

This perspective has lost currency of late in the rush to cast the work to save Earth’s climate as a Manichean struggle between the world’s people and the global oil industry — and to absolve individuals of any responsibility in consumption patterns and decisions. But it’s no less true for being out of fashion.

And the policy tool of internalizing climate damage costs in the prices of fossil fuels by taxing carbon emissions is no less essential than before. Indeed, it’s more vital than ever.

Meanwhile, how can Pres. Biden and the Democratic Congress move to forestall economic and social suffering from Wyoming’s contracting coal industry? We touted one solution in 2016, harvesting the state’s enormous wind resources to replace “coal by wire” with “wind by wire.” The new administration could also site a federal green-jobs program in Gillette, WY, the heart of the Powder River coal basin, to produce windmill blades or electric postal vehicles or mass transit railcars. The particular choice isn’t critical. Let the just transition begin now.

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.

Renewables Conundrum: Wind and Solar’s Rapid Growth Isn’t Decarbonizing Fast Enough

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Encouraging reports keep emerging about growth prospects for renewable energy. The International Energy Agency’s November report, Renewables 2020: Analysis and forecast to 2025, projects that by 2025 electricity from renewable sources will surpass that from coal, the world’s biggest and dirtiest power source. Also last month, Max Roser, writing in Our World in Data, became the latest journalist to report that in most parts of the world, new wind and solar generating stations can make electricity more cheaply than new plants powered by fossil fuels.

The common driver behind both developments is renewable technologies’ impressive learning curves. Each doubling of cumulative installed capacity has brought a constant price decline, which Roser pegs at about 20% (see chart). The upshot, say Roser and others, is that large investments into scaling up renewable technologies will pay off with still cheaper prices, driving a “virtuous cycle” of ever-cheaper wind and solar power.

Fossil fuel power had its own learning curve, mostly from ever-larger generators, but these petered out a half-century ago. In the competition between carbon-based and carbon-free power, it seems the latter’s price advantage will only grow. This should ensure that the world’s new power supply comes mostly from zero-carbon sources — even without carbon taxes or other carbon-pricing measures.

These reports generated lots of enthusiasm. The British NGO Carbon Brief headlined its story on the IEA report, Wind and solar capacity will overtake both gas and coal globally by 2024. On Twitter, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman touted Roser’s cost curves as evidence of a “technological miracle” portending that “heading off catastrophic climate change now looks vastly easier than we could have imagined.”

Growth in renewables clearly is cause for optimism. But does it herald rapid decarbonization by itself, without aggressive complementary policies? Let’s consider.

First, the IEA prediction that wind and solar capacity will overtake that of gas and coal by 2024 doesn’t equate to these sources overtaking those fuel’s electricity production by then. Wind and solar generators have lower maximum capacity factors than the coal and gas power plants they are intended to replace. This puts the ascendancy of wind and solar over coal and gas in terms of electricity generated — the metric that matters for cutting CO2 — further off in the future.

Second, IEA’s renewables category included hydropower, which in 2019 generated twice as much electricity as solar and wind combined. (Current energy data in this post are for 2019 and are drawn from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, 2020.) But hydro isn’t going to grow much. The most productive sites have already been developed, and opposition is fierce in any case. Going forward, the heavy lifting for renewables must be done primarily by solar and wind.

Unfortunately, the evidence is strong that renewables’ exponential growth phase has ended. This shouldn’t be surprising. As I discussed in my June 9 and July 2 posts, nothing, whether it be technologies or bacterial colonies, grows exponentially — increasing by a given percentage each year — indefinitely. The one notable exception, and the iconic one, has been the steady doubling of the number of transistors on a computer chip, although, as engineering and technology blogger John Loeffler explains, even that exponential growth rate has begun slowing.

For both solar and wind electricity output, what was exponential growth has now entered the linear phase — increasing by a given absolute amount per year. My earlier posts make this clear at the global level. Since the U.S. is further along in developing renewables than most other countries, their contributions to energy supply here probably represent an upside of their global potential. And linear trends in both solar and wind electricity production now seem well-established for the U.S., as the chart at right shows.

Still, it’s fair to ask why, given the steady percentage drop in prices of solar modules noted by Roser, IEA, Naam and others, solar electricity production (for example) is no longer growing exponentially. There are two main reasons.

First, even with the downward pressure of the learning curve, the drop in the price of modules must level off, due to sheer arithmetic: as costs fall, the same percentage drop in costs translates to ever-smaller numerical drops.

Look again at the cost data from the “Our World in Data” chart at the top of this post, this time plotted on an arithmetic scale.

See how the declines in the cost of solar modules level off over time. World installed solar PV capacity currently stands at about 600,000 MW, with a price at the margin of about $0.36 per watt. Using Roser’s relationship of costs declining by 20% with each doubling of capacity, today’s costs are about $0.20 per watt less than five years ago, when world installed capacity stood at around 200,000 MW. If world solar capacity keeps growing at the historical rate, reaching 3,500,000 MW in 2050, its cost will have dropped only another $0.20 per watt — a decline of less than a penny per year.

The second and perhaps more important factor is that the cost of solar modules no longer dominates the total cost of PV installations. Solar projects require inverters, trackers, cabling and mounting, as well as labor and often land. Actually bringing each job to fruition also entails permitting, along with insurance and other business and contractual steps. While small-scale solar installations present somewhat different “balance-of-system” cost scenarios than utility-scale installations, the same general dynamics are at play in both.

Few if any of these balance-of-system costs follow steep learning curves. True, business arrangements have evolved toward greater efficiency as solar has expanded from its initial seat-of-the-pants basis. (This is true for wind power as well.) But these cost economies are finite and modest.

The result is that the total costs of new solar and wind energy facilities are levelling off, as shown in the charts below from lazard.com.

Source: Lazard.com, “Levelized Cost of Energy and Levelized Cost of Storage – 2020,” posted Oct. 19, 2020.

Moreover, these individual-facility costs do not include the costs to accommodate the variable nature of solar and wind power production, such as electricity storage (more on this below). Nor do today’s solar price reports or quotes include safe disposal of the panels once their useful life (of 25 years of so) is over.

Still, could renewables’ ostensible price parity (or superiority) versus fossil electricity augur a return to exponential growth for annual wind and solar additions?

Such a change would be shocking. Current growth trends are so robustly linear, and prospective declines in costs of new wind and solar projects are so gradual, that a shift back to exponential growth seems unlikely, at least under current market conditions.

Even the “monster wind turbines” that the New York Times said in a New Year’s Day headline were “upending the [green-power] industry” are more an extension of increases in turbine scale that have continually cut wind-power costs, rather than the harbinger of a dramatic price breakthrough that could accelerate renewables’ growth rate.

In addition to new policies that would favor renewables, two technological developments could change this picture.

One would be a breakthrough in electricity storage technology. A recent study by Jessika Trancik’s group at MIT estimates that dropping storage costs to approximately $150/kWh would allow variable sources such as wind and solar to fulfill all but 5 percent of electricity requirements — not quite a carbon-free grid, but almost. That would entail a roughly five-fold reduction from current costs, a development that energy blogger David Roberts believes may be closer than we think.

The other change would be increases in energy efficiency sufficient to allow the growth in renewables to slash fossil fuel combustion rather than simply cut down on its growth, even as the world replaces with carbon-free electric power the carbon-based liquid fuels that today power transportation and most space heating and process heat. Unless those energy requirements are reduced significantly, replacing them with electric power — as decarbonization requires — will vastly increase the quantity of electricity needed to power our economy.

Let’s assume that major conversions to electricity will be accomplished. How much will electricity demand grow? Projections vary (the uncertainties are wide), but it is likely that without extensive cuts in consumption, electrification sufficient to eliminate U.S. fossil fuel combustion will at least double electricity demand.

For example, Princeton University’s new, ambitious Net-Zero America modeling effort has concluded that all-electric scenarios eliminating U.S. carbon emissions by 2050 will require between a doubling and quadrupling of nationwide electricity generation. (See p. 75 of the linked report.)

This daunting increase range is broadly consistent with global projections by the U.S. NGO Resources for the Future, in its Global Energy Outlook, as well as estimates made with the En-ROADS simulation tool discussed in my July post. On a far smaller scale, it is also in harmony with the projection developed for my home state of New Jersey’s 2019 Energy Master Plan, that fully electrifying transportation and buildings sectors in that state will more than double electricity requirements by 2050.

If in fact U.S. electricity usage more than doubles by 2050, our total electric output then will reach 8,800 TWh. Yet wind and solar, growing at their current linear rate, are on track to provide the U.S. only about 1,550 TWh, or just 18% of that total, as our final chart indicates. Without concerted effort to change the current trajectory, most of the remaining electricity will come from combustion of fossil fuels.

The time left to phase out carbon fuels and avoid the worst effects of climate change is dwindling fast. Growth in solar and wind isn’t close to accomplishing that. Denying this borders on magical thinking. And bad magic at that, since it could undermine efforts to enact a powerful and potentially progressive tool to support U.S. decarbonization: a transparent and robustly rising price on carbon.

Ed. Note: The paragraph about “monster-size” wind turbines was added several days after this post went up.

Dogmatism on Carbon Pricing Mustn’t Derail Climate Progress

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Note: A new (March 2021) CTC page, Carbon Pricing and Environmental Justice, summarizes this post and its Sept. 2020 predecessor, Environmental Justice, Borne Aloft by Carbon Pricing, and embeds them in a larger narrative about the environmental justice movement’s increasing turn against carbon pricing.

Mary Nichols’ candidacy to lead the US Environmental Protection Agency is over. Not so, the need to grapple with the profound mistrust of carbon pricing felt by many advocates for environmental justice.

Nichols, long-time California clean-air chief, was considered “a lock” to head the EPA, according to the New York Times, until 70 environmental justice and allied groups sent a strongly worded letter, excerpted at left, to the Biden-Harris transition team opposing her nomination. The new administration’s selection of North Carolina environmental quality secretary Michael Regan for the position was announced last week.

Excerpt from 70 groups’ Dec. 2 letter. Bold is from original, red is CTC’s emphasis. The link is to the Cushing analysis discussed in this post. Additional text criticizing cap-and-trade isn’t shown here.

Signatories (download the letter here, pdf) included national organizations Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch and Oil Change International, along with dozens of California groups and the umbrella California Environmental Justice Alliance.

A principal charge in the letter, and the one singled out by the Times and in other media accounts, was a claim that the carbon cap-and-trade program overseen by Nichols and the California Air Resources Board “perpetrates environmental racism [by] increas[ing] pollution hotspots for communities of color in California.”

That charge may be seen as a culmination of the deep suspicion with which many environmental justice advocates regard pollution taxes or cap-and-trade schemes (the two are often termed “market measures”) intended to cut carbon emissions.

I did my own grappling with this matter in a lengthy post here in September. I noted inter alia that “many activists recoil from carbon pricing’s implicit acquiescence to capitalist means of exchange that [appear to] commodify pollution” — language similar to the EJ letter’s charge that “market mechanisms … commodify the source of the climate crisis.”

Ironically, those who, like me, train an economic lens on the climate crisis regard the failure to price carbon emissions as a source of the climate crisis. And not just economists but the entire environmental community is united in demanding elimination of fossil fuel subsidies. Yet the ability to dump carbon pollution into the atmosphere for free is the biggest subsidy of all, and carbon taxes (or “charges”) uniquely diminish that subsidy.

Nevertheless, the sharper irony, addressed here, is that the cap-and-trade program that is being vilified for perpetrating environmental inequities appears in practice to be diminishing them.

Environmental Inequity and Pollution Hotspots

As recently as a decade ago, ground-level concentrations of deadly carbon “co-pollutants” — toxic particles and gaseous oxides — issued from industrial smokestacks in California were three to four times higher in disadvantaged communities than in more affluent and predominantly white locales. That result was derived in an analysis published earlier this year by two U-C Santa Barbara economists, ratifying what environmental justice campaigners from these communities have always understood.

Truncated version of table from my Sept. 28 post. EJ Gap is difference in ambient air pollution between CA-codified “disadvantaged” zip codes and other locales. Blue column shows narrowing of gap.

Compounding this long-standing health assault, an early cap-and-trade program meant to curb smog in California (called Reclaim) was riven with escape clauses that, it is said, emboldened increases in pollution dumping onto minority communities from an enormous oil refinery — the state’s second largest — in Richmond, near San Francisco. The conviction was soon born that pricing of pollution, whether auctioned to polluters as tradeable emission permits (cap-and-trade) or charged directly (via pollution taxes), could never mitigate pollution inequities afflicting historically-burdened communities of color.

This belief grew and intensified across California, fueled by intersecting political and social currents and by research suggesting that a newer, more ambitious and less porous statewide carbon cap-and-trade program legislated in 2006 and put in place in 2013 by the California Air Resources Board was likewise concentrating emissions in minority communities. (A 2019 paper, California Climate Policies Serving Climate Justice, by Univ. of San Francisco Law Professor Alice Kaswan, is a useful guide to the state’s many laws addressing carbon emissions and environmental injustice.)

Must carbon pricing worsen hotspots?

The specter of “hotspots” is paramount in the Dec. 2 EJ letter and prominent in environmental justice expressions on pollution pricing. Yet the idea that polluters respond to charging for pollution by perpetuating or, worse, exacerbating toxic emissions in poor communities runs counter to almost everything we know (or believe we know) about how polluting enterprises actually operate.

A carbon tax, by its nature, exacts a cost for every missed opportunity to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon pricing makes every means — and there are literally billions at hand — of reducing carbon emissions more profitable, which is why devotees of carbon taxes find them so enticing.

The price incentive, we believe, gives individuals and especially companies new cost-effective means to pare their use of carbon fuels. (The same is true for carbon cap-and-trade programs, although there the cost is paid, somewhat indirectly, via the polluting company’s purchase of emission permits, and the price signal is found in the carbon-permit market.) Accordingly, a company that deliberately perpetuated toxic hot spots in disadvantaged communities would weaken its bottom line.

Consider an oil company that operates 10 refineries — 5 in minority communities, 5 in white locales. Under a carbon price, every new piece of equipment or procedure that reduces carbon emissions at any of the 10 reduces the company’s carbon tax tab (or its cap-and-trade expenses).

All 10 refineries will almost certainly undergo some change to lower their emissions. Logistical considerations or racial favoritism might conceivably lead the company to concentrate more of its reduction effort at its 5 white sites. But it strains credulity to posit that the minority sites will take on more emissions on account of the carbon price.

The reason? Carbon pricing is a unitary policy that applies equally to all emissions. Charging for emissions creates opportunities to cut emissions everywhere, simultaneously. The choice presented to headquarters isn’t to pit potential reductions from Refineries 1-5 against reductions from Refineries 6-10, but to max out on the new cost-cutting opportunities that the carbon price presents at Refineries 1 through 10 .

This schematic suggests that even community-neutral pricing policies — ones that lower total emissions without regard to where — will benefit disadvantaged communities in health terms. That is true even if the relative bias of disproportionate burdens on those communities isn’t specifically targeted, whether in the pricing design or in the use of the carbon-pricing revenues.

Keep in mind that the refineries or other large emitters that are most cost-effective to upgrade or downsize because of the carbon price will be those with the oldest, most-polluting equipment. To the extent that these are in poorer communities — a syndrome that the environmental justice movement has documented for decades — the emission reductions will be concentrated there as well.

Graphic from my Sept. 28 post illustrates the narrowing in California’s “EJ” gap due to the state’s cap-and-trade program.

There is also the mathematical fact that equal percentage reductions across the board will bring the greatest absolute emission reductions where the baseline emissions are highest. If polluters are spewing 200 tons of pollution on your community but only 100 tons on mine, a 25% reduction everywhere will cut emissions in your back yard by 50 tons, vs. 25 tons in mine.

For the inequitable historic differential in pollution exposures to widen, there would have to be grossly lesser emission percentage reductions in minority areas. In the example above, the decrease in emissions in those areas would have to be held to just 25% while emissions elsewhere fell 50% or more.

A few such examples can probably be found in California, among the 300-plus emitters large enough to be covered by the state’s carbon cap-and-trade program. But so long as the overall cap is tightened each year while “offsets” and other loopholes are kept to a minimum, any increases will be far outweighed by reductions in other low-income communities of color.

A Startling Finding about California’s Carbon Cap-and-Trade Program

In early August, I learned of a new academic paper that, in its elegance and reach, appeared capable of singlehandedly untethering carbon pricing from the charge of environmental injustice. The paper is the one mentioned up front that found that just a decade ago, as a baseline, California’s disadvantaged communities suffered from far larger concentrations of carbon “co-pollutants” from industrial smokestacks, compared to whiter and more prosperous locales.

The person who collegially notified me of the paper was Lara Cushing, an epidemiologist (MA) and energy policy specialist (PhD). It was Prof. Cushing’s team whose research was cited in the letter to the Biden-Harris team charging that California’s carbon cap-and-trade program “perpetrates environmental racism.”

During the rest of August and most of September I pored over the academic paper, which was titled, “Do Environmental Markets Cause Environmental Injustice? Evidence from California’s Carbon Market.” I corresponded with its authors, members of U-C Santa Barbara’s economics department: PhD candidate Danae Hernandez-Cortes and Associate Prof. Kyle C. Meng. Their paper was complex and bursting with implications, and I wanted to be certain I understood it fully before writing it up. I circulated a draft story to a few environment-oriented outlets for publication or a news exclusive, eventually posting it myself to the Carbon Tax Center website on Sept. 28 as Environmental Justice, Borne Aloft by Carbon Pricing.

Hernandez-Cortes and Meng’s key finding, I explained, was this: From 2012 to 2017, the pollution disparity between disadvantaged and other communities in California fell an estimated 30 percent for particulates, 21 percent for nitrogen oxides and 24 percent for sulfur oxides. Moreover, the 21-30 percent drops in the state’s “EJ gap,” as they termed the disparity, was not merely concurrent with the cap-and-trade program, which CARB put into effect in 2013; it was “due to the policy” itself, according to the authors.

This finding differed diametrically from the conclusions of Prof. Cushing and her colleagues, and I was obliged to explain why. The account from my post is shown in the sidebar and summarized below:

Snipped from my Sept. 25 CTC post, “Environmental Justice, Borne Aloft by Carbon Pricing.”

  1. To weed out macroeconomic and other extraneous factors and discern the cap-and-trade program’s specific effects on its “covered” facilities, Hernandez-Cortes and Meng included a comparison group of unregulated California emitters.
  2. Hernandez-Cortes and Meng traced the atmospheric paths taken by the pollutants once they left the smokestacks, via modeling, rather than assuming they landed in narrow bands nearby.
  3. Hernandez-Cortes and Meng based their before-and-after calculations on each facility’s actual emissions — a richer and more accurate approach than the earlier work’s up-or-down formulation.

Reactions to the Hernandez-Cortes – Meng Findings

My post highlighting the Hernandez-Cortes – Meng findings drew little comment (none from the environmental justice campaigners to whom I reached out) and very little press. The paper’s two mentions in the green press — in an October article in Grist, Cap and Trade-Offs, and in a November story in Yes! magazine, Can California’s Cap and Trade Actually Address Environmental Justice? — were cursory and largely dismissive.

For example, the Yes! article said that the 20% to 30% narrowing of the EJ gap applied only “in the areas where facilities were covered by the program,” whereas Hernandez-Cortes and Meng actually calculated the reductions across all of California’s 1,712 populated zip codes. The Grist story obfuscated Hernandez-Cortes and Meng’s statistically significant modeling of smokestack dispersions as reflecting only “a spread of outcomes of various likelihoods” — whatever that means.

One could almost intuit a wish to cling to the Cushing team’s negative conclusion about cap-and-trade’s outcomes, and thus to downplay Hernandez-Cortes and Meng’s ingenious analysis that had apparently upended it.

Finally, in late November, a substantive critique of the Hernandez-Cortes – Meng analysis appeared. It was posted by Danny Cullenward, a lecturer and affiliate fellow at Stanford Law School, and Katie Valenzuela, who formerly was policy and political director for the California Environmental Justice Alliance and co-chair of California’s AB 32 Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (AB 32 is the state’s 2006 umbrella climate law).

Yet the Cullenward-Valenzuela criticisms of Hernandez-Cortes – Meng appear to point to imperfections, not fatal flaws.

To wit: Hernandez-Cortes and Meng employed zip codes and not finer-grained census codes to compare EJ neighborhoods with other locales. Hernandez-Cortes – Meng drew smokestack data from the state’s 35 different regional air districts that, they say, “use 35 different methods for data collection.” Hernandez-Cortes and Meng didn’t adjust for possible confounding effects from California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a companion climate measure that took effect during the period covered in their cap-and-trade analysis.

Notably, however, neither Cullenward-Valenzuela nor anyone else writing from an environmental justice perspective criticized the Cushing team’s analysis — the one bolstering the belief that the cap-and-trade program has deepened environmental inequities — for these same failings, let alone its more consequential shortcomings I enumerated in the preceding section. Nor did Cullenward and Valenzuela attempt to quantify how much, if at all, remedying the asserted shortcomings in the Hernandez-Cortes and Meng paper would weaken their findings.

Perhaps the weightiest criticism of Hernandez-Cortes – Meng from Cullenward and Valenzuela is their last, under the heading, “The question is not cap-and-trade versus nothing”:

If California had chosen a path of more prescriptive, direct emissions reductions … we would likely be seeing far more emissions reductions … and far more improvements for environmental justice communities than we’re seeing under the cap-and-trade program today. To say [the cap-and-trade program is] better than nothing ignores the fact that adopting a weak cap-and-trade program has led to prolonged and higher emissions in environmental justice communities than if California had adopted a stringent carbon pricing policy or relied instead on non-market mechanisms that would have been targeted at the pollution reductions our communities need.

That claim may well be true. It certainly resonates with me, an advocate since the late 1980s of straight-up carbon taxing rather than oblique and often loophole-plagued cap-and-trade approaches. But that’s not the question that Hernandez-Cortes and Meng tackled in their study, which was: On a statewide basis, has California’s cap-and-trade program widened or narrowed environmental inequities? 

Though California EJ advocates insist that the cap-and-trade program has widened environmental inequities, no one has effectively rebutted the evidence marshaled by Hernandez-Cortes and Meng that it has actually narrowed them.

Possible Trouble Ahead

The scant attention accorded the Hernandez-Cortes – Meng paper has largely sidelined its meticulous and virtuosic treatment of the impact of California’s cap-and-trade program on environmental inequities. A result has been to let stand the accusation that the program’s sponsoring agency, the California Air Resources Board, has “perpetrated environmental racism.”

Chevron Refinery, Richmond, CA. Photo: Scott Hess

My concern here is not that that charge helped block CARB’s Mary Nichols from heading EPA, but with the possibility that its uncritical acceptance may impact national environmental and climate policies going forward.

The idea that carbon pricing cannot serve environmental justice may have been justified by systemic oppression, and it dovetails nicely with certain critiques of capitalism as being a willing handmaiden of inequity. But in its largest empirical test to date in the United States, that proposition has been shown highly questionable. Now, judging by its impact on Nichols, it threatens to block carbon pricing measures from consideration by the incoming Biden administration.

Getting meaningful climate legislation through a divided Congress will be difficult under any circumstances. The temptation will now be strong to jettison measures that might be opposed by advocates for racial justice and others on the left. Another New York Times story this month, this one showcasing president-elect Biden’s choices of Janet Yellen and Brian Deese for Treasury secretary and National Economic Council director, noted that carbon pricing “is fiercely opposed by both conservatives and some liberal groups.”

Carbon pricing, whether rendered through tradeable emission permits or straight up via carbon taxes, faces hurdles galore. Saddling it with unfounded criticisms, notwithstanding their deep wellsprings, appears more likely to compound environmental injustice rather than help overcome it.

The G.O.P. senators to target for a carbon tax

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Addendum two years on, to note today’s NY Times story, 12 Republican Senators Who Crossed Party Lines (print edition), with its dozen tales of G.O.P. independence and a modicum of political bravery in bucking Republican party-line homophobia to vote for the Respect for Marriage Act, which Pres. Biden signed on Dec. 13. The dozen were these nine: Capito (WV), Collins (ME), Ernst (IA), Lummis (WY), Murkowski (AS), Romney (UT), Tillis (NC), Sullivan (AS) and Young (IN); plus three who are retiring: Blunt (MO), Burr (NC), and Portman (OH). The nine still in the Senate should be top of mind for carbon tax advocates looking for bipartisan Senate support. — C.K., Dec. 14, 2022.

As I was writing this post, I saw on Twitter that not a single sitting Republican U.S. senator accepted an invitation to appear on Meet the Press today. Though that could mean many things, the refusal of the entire G.O.P. senate conference to be interviewed by the pre-eminent Sunday mainstream media talk show bodes poorly for productive policy and political dialogue going forward.

What makes Republican intransigence especially disheartening is that even if the Democrats manage to defy the odds and capture both seats in Georgia’s Jan. 5 U.S. Senate elections, giving them a one-vote majority by virtue of the vice-presidential tie-breaker, they may still need Republican votes to pass impactful climate legislation in the next Congress.

Those votes could offset a possible No vote by one of the Democrats’ own: Joe Manchin, a legislator best known for a 2010 campaign video in which he fired a bullet through a handbill promoting the Democrats’ carbon cap-and-trade  bill “because it’s bad for West Virginia.” The Mountaineer State is famously coal-dependent and pro-Trump. Only 30 percent of voters there chose Biden on Nov. 3, his lowest share in any state except Wyoming. And Manchin is up for re-election in 2022.

Like it or not, her state’s climate-energy-electoral profile and her own relative centrism make Maine’s Susan Collins the most likely Republican senator to consider meaningful climate measures such as a carbon tax. Photo courtesy Susan Collins for Senator.

Sen. Manchin may not be the only Democratic senator turning his back on climate legislation when Congress convenes in January. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema began her political career with the Green Party but has since tacked right. Her senatorial voting record last year was even more conservative than Manchin’s, according to GovTrack’s “Ideology Score.” Since she’s not up for re-election till 2024, she could decide that she would have time to recoup from a pro-climate vote.

Georgia aside, then, any climate bill worthy of the name may need Republican votes to clear the Senate. Is there any prospect of getting even a single G.O.P. senator to vote for, say, a revenue-neutral carbon tax like fee-and-dividend — a measure that wouldn’t expand government and thus might be considered “on brand” with traditional Republican principles, as we noted in a post here the day after the election?

Hard experience with the Republican conference over the past dozen years would suggest no. On the other hand, inexorably rising climate concern and the growing call for climate action point to at least a possibility that a few G.O.P. senators might see it in their interest to stand down Mitch McConnell and defect from his party’s deflect-and-deny strategy.

CTC’s ranking system for senatorial climate-openness

We’ve ranked the 52 Republican incumbent and incoming senators (that’s this month’s 50 G.O.P. winners plus Georgia’s Perdue and Loeffler) by their openness to climate legislation. We made six indices — two pegged to each state’s fossil fuel dependence, two reflecting its sensitivity to climate chaos, and two denoting senators’ individual insularity from pro-fossil-fuels political pressure. We developed 1-to-5 scales for all six criteria and scored the senators on each. The maximum possible score was 30, and the lowest was 5.

And the highest scorer is Susan Collins, whose upset victory on Nov. 3 will vault her to a fifth term. Our ranking system gives her 27 points: 5 (the maximum) for Maine’s low coal dependence and high use of renewables, for its independence from fossil fuel extraction and carbon-intensive Big Agriculture, for the state’s high (among states with Republican senators) vote share for Joe Biden, and for what we call distance from the far right (Collins’ 2019 GovTrack score was the most liberal among G.O.P. senators; plus a score of 3 for Maine’s climate vulnerability; and a 4 for what we term freedom from re-election worries — Collins has six years before her re-election comes ’round again. Although she’s 68, that’s not much more than the Republican senatorial average age of 63, giving Collins a relatively low “lame-duck likelihood” based on age-related retirement.

At the bottom of our scale, with scores of 10, are a couple of senators from primo American fossil fuel sacrifice zones: Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and John Barrasso of Wyoming. Both states place below-average in climate vulnerability, low in climate concern, high in coal burning and energy extraction generally, and frustratingly mediocre in deploying wind and solar. Moreover, both senators sport far-right voting records and are just in their 50s, making them good bets to stand for re-election when their terms end in 2024. (We won’t belabor the fact that ND and WY rank 47th and 50th in population, and that their combined population, just 1.34 million, is less than half of one percent of the total U.S. population of 330 million.)

Collins’ 27 score leads her conference by far, suggesting that carbon-tax and other pro-climate advocates should be targeting her heavily. If her state’s Democratic tilt, independence from coal and fuel extraction and Big Ag and relatively high deployment of renewables, along with her relative centrist leaning and six-year window before facing the voters again, won’t incline her toward supporting climate legislation, it’s hard to picture any other Republican senator going that way.

These six are next:

♦ Richard Burr (NC), 22 score, on account of NC’s high climate vulnerability (think Outer Banks), relatively high Biden vote and relative independence from fuel extraction and Big Ag, as well as Burr’s own distance from the extreme right. On the down side, he’s up for re-election in 2022.

CTC’s seven leading scorers. Follow link at end of post to download Excel file with all 52 senators and the underlying raw data.

♦ Lindsey Graham (SC), 21, due to the state’s low economic dependence on fuel extraction and Big Ag, his relative distance from the far right, and the fact that his seat is secure till 2026.

♦ Charles Grassley (IA), 21. Advocates who subscribe to Vox columnist Dave Roberts’ thesis that a robust renewables sector must precede climate legislation should target Grassley on account of his state’s huge wind industry (the country’s largest, percentage-wise). Plus, at age 87, his 2022 re-election campaign will probably be his last.

♦ Tom Tillis (NC), 21 — yep, the guy who just withstood a strong challenge from Democrat Cal Cunningham. Tillis’s profile is similar to that of fellow North Carolinian Richard Burr, with greater insulation from political opposition but a more right-wing voting record, according to GovTrack.

♦ Pat Roberts (KS), 20. Fresh off re-election, the 84-year-old Roberts should be immune to electoral pressure. His other big plus is Kansas’ vibrant wind sector, second only to that of Iowa in percentage terms.

♦ Rick Scott (FL), 20. The Sunshine state’s stark vulnerability to sea-level rise, along with its relatively high Biden vote share (48%) and its lack of fossil fuel production, give it high relative potential. (Fellow FL Senator Marco Rubio  scored less, 18, due to his pending 2022 re-election campaign.) Sadly, Florida’s failure to live up to its nickname where energy production is concerned holds back both senators’ likelihood of going pro-climate.

Notably absent from the top ranks is Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who earlier this year defied both President Trump and Leader McConnell by voting to convict the president of impeachment — the lone Republican to do so. Romney scored just 15, slightly below the sample average of 16. Utah ranks high in fuel extraction, and the state’s electricity sector is almost twice as coal-dependent as the average for other Republican senators — factors probably reflected in Romney’s outspoken support for the state’s oil, gas and coal industries. Further hurting Romney’s score was Utah’s low Biden share, 38%. The same dynamics along with a pending 2022 re-election campaign resulted in a middling 18 score for another ostensible Republican maverick, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.m, despite her state’s extreme vulnerability to climate damage.

You may have noticed that our rankings omit personal political preferences. Who knows, perhaps Romney’s courage on impeachment could signal willingness to break with McConnell on climate. Similarly, as we wrapped this post we got word that Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, who like Romney received an undistinguished 15 score, has volunteered to co-lead the U.S. delegation to the next U.N. COP (Coalition of the Parties) global climate meeting in Glasgow next November. Clearly, our rankings are far from all-inclusive, but hopefully they can be useful as a screening tool.

The major takeaway here is that in addition to working to elect Georgia Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate, climate campaigners need to start focusing their resources to move Republican senators to act on climate in the new Congress.

Link to the CTC rankings spreadsheet: http://www.komanoff.net/fossil/GOP_Senators_Ranked.xlsx.

This post was updated on Nov. 16 to include a sentence about Senator Murkowski.

 

Why I Called Out My “Green” Mayor’s SUV Habit

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I set off a media firestorm in New York City last week.

It was Friday morning, the day after Trump repudiated the Paris Climate Agreement, and Mayor Bill de Blasio was using his weekly “ask the mayor” turn on the popular Brian Lehrer radio show (NPR) to tell New Yorkers “We’re going to step up our game” to address climate change. I called in and the screener put me through as “Charles from Manhattan.” Here’s what I said:

Mayor de Blasio, you spoke eloquently a moment ago about stepping up our game in light of Trump’s withdrawal from Paris. How about you stepping up your game, leading by example, getting out of your SUV armada, and if you need to go to the Park Slope “Y” five days a week, rather than a gym near you, why don’t you take mass transit? Or even once in awhile ride a bike, like the vast majority of your fellow New Yorkers, so you will know how we are suffering under a transit system — yes governed by the governor, not by the mayor — but you need to lead by example.

My on-air scolding of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio last week set off a media firestorm. But his SUV habit reveals deeper failings.

I finished with this:

One of the reasons we are in this climate crisis is because the average person sees elites not playing by the rules that elites seek to impose on everyone else. And you’re not going to be able to lead when you’re sitting in your SUV being chauffeured every day, twelve miles from Gracie Mansion to Park Slope just so that you can ride an exercise bike.

Then it was Mayor de Blasio’s turn. He defended his climate record and called my criticism “cheap symbolism,” as reported by Politico (abridged slightly here):

Charles, I understand the emotional appeal of what you’re saying but I’m just not going to take the bait, my friend.

I have instructed folks in my government to turn our fleet into electric cars. We are moving to renewables, we are retrofitting our buildings, that’s the real leadership — it’s not whether I go to the gym.

Whether I go to the gym does not affect the policies that affect millions of people. I’m going to keep going to the gym. I’m proud to say we have a hybrid. It’s a good car, it’s very fuel efficient. I use the subway when it makes sense to use the subway, and I do stay in touch with what people are going through and I knew it for years and years, because for many years I never had any car.

So it’s easy for you to say that, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with how we change the world. We change the world with policies that affect people and the policies of this city are going to lead to addressing climate change in a much more aggressive way than it’s ever been addressed in the history of New York City.

But again, the issue is not cheap symbolism here. The issue is, are we gonna take action. That’s really the motherlode of addressing emissions in this city. It comes from buildings. We’re going to be very very aggressive about that.

That was that, or so I thought. What I soon learned was that the City Hall media bullpen was going nuts. One of the reporters put my voice together with my first name, and the papers started calling for quotes. By nightfall, their stories were up, with front-page headlines in the Daily News and the NY Post branding the mayor a “green hypocrite” and even the staid New York Times putting my exchange with the mayor at the top of its Metro section.

I told The Times that collapsing transit was “the fundamental climate issue and the fundamental sustainability issue for the city and state.” (Link is above pic.)

I was able to go deeper in those interviews. My most-teachable moment came on Saturday. The NY Post was doing a follow-up and I said that transit riders “need a voice and we don’t have one,” when neither the mayor nor the governor rides a subway or bus.

There are levels galore, here. Let’s unpack them.

First, when we quantify the direct carbon consequence from the mayor’s mini-fleet of SUV’s from home to gym, we see it’s really small: just 24 pounds of CO2 per trip, which monetizes to a mere half-a-dollar’s worth of climate damage.

(Burning one gallon of gasoline releases 19.57 lb of CO2, we’ll call it 20 lb. Let’s assume two SUV’s, each averaging 20 mpg, though actual mileage is probably less. They’re going 12 miles, so we get 2 (vehicles) x 20 lb/gal x 1/20 gal/mile x 12 miles, which yields 24 pounds of CO2. In 2015 Pres. Obama directed federal agencies to use a “social cost of carbon” of $37 per ton of CO2, in 2007 dollars; that equates to $44/ton in 2017 dollars, which is just 2.2 cents per lb of CO2. So the mayor’s 24 lb per trip is imposing a direct climate cost of 53 cents (24 lb x 2.2 cents/lb).)

It’s true that the official U.S. cost of carbon (since rescinded by Trump) is a low-balled estimate, but even quadrupling it raises the direct climate cost of the mayor’s tailpipe CO2 to just two bucks — befitting the fact that global CO2 is the end-product of billions of actions that are individually insignificant but collectively fraught.

A second level of costs arises from the spatial impacts from driving in a dense city. These are experienced most acutely as traffic congestion and its attendant time cost. And here I mean not mayoral time lost to traffic (since de Blasio gets to read and talk by phone while being ferried to the gym) but the time his auto trip effectively takes from others on the roads, by virtue of occupying space and slowing them down.

As long-time subscribers to this blog may know, I’ve done a lot of analysis of traffic congestion costs in New York City, even to the point of quantifying the time costs from a single additional trip in or near the city’s Manhattan core. This analysis is embedded in the kaleidoscopic spreadsheet I maintain to model “congestion pricing” for New York (download here, Excel required; go to Delays and Delay-Costs tabs) but more conveniently summarized in Time Thieves, an article I wrote a half-dozen years ago with then-Princeton student Will Fisher.

The takeaway for our purposes is that a single mile driven by just one vehicle during ordinary congested conditions in or near Manhattan slows down other vehicles by a combined 8 or 9 minutes (think of it as hundreds of vehicles delayed by a few seconds each). Factoring that by the 24 miles in the mayor’s ride to the gym (12 miles by 2 vehicles), the cars, trucks, cabs and buses in the mayor’s “traffic field” are absorbing an aggregate slowdown of 3 to 4 hours. By any reasonable estimate of the average value of time of those vehicle users, the aggregate cost of the time taken from them by each mayoral ride from his residence to his gym is easily in excess of a hundred dollars.

I told fellow New Yorkers via the NY Post that vulnerable mass transit undermines our city’s sustainability.

That’s two orders of magnitude greater than the direct carbon cost per trip — indicative of the fact that traffic congestion manifests as an inefficiency problem far more than as a climate problem, at least directly. It also demonstrates that the mayor’s (or any other New York car user’s) promise to switch to an electric vehicles won’t put a dent in the societal costs of driving in a congested metropolis.

Yet even those several hours of extra congestion dissolve into insignificance in a city of 8.5 million people and 2 million registered vehicles. The crux of the matter — which I tried to telegraph in my radio remarks but didn’t really nail until that second NY Post interview the next day — is found in this syllogism:

  • New York City is inherently green by virtue of its urban density. This idea was most lucidly distilled by the writer David Owen in his 2009 book, Green Metropolis. Density both facilitates and enforces shorter trips, non-automobile travel, and compact and contiguous living and working spaces, all of which translate directly into smaller carbon footprints.
  • What makes this density possible is our mass transit (subway) system. But it is deterioriating from insufficient investment in equipment and maintenance. (The local press corps is all over this; see for example these vivid stories last month by The Times’ Emma Fitzsimmons, 1 and 2.)
  • Politicians are ignoring this crisis. Neither NY State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the state-chartered Metropolitan Transportation Authority, nor Mayor de Blasio, who has a voice in running the MTA along with a bully pulpit to call out problems and demand solutions, has stepped up to take responsibility. Neither of them ever rides a subway or bus, except in a photo-op.

It’s safe to say that Mayor de Blasio isn’t steeped in this logical chain connecting density, transit and leadership. For evidence, look no further than the end of his radio rejoinder to my harangue, in which he called the city’s building stock the “motherlode” of emissions and, thus, his climate focus. While it’s true that heating and powering the city’s offices and apartments generates a good deal more CO2 than fueling our cars and trucks, that’s because extensive and efficient mass transit keeps down automobile use. Take that away — as the governor and mayor are effectively doing by turning their backs as the subways fall apart — and transportation emissions will surely rise.

But the stakes are higher still. Low-CO2 NYC can’t grow or even maintain its current population without reliable and humane transit. Businesses and families won’t suffer a city dependent on undependable transit and will locate in less inherently-green cities or suburbs instead. And while in theory leaders could care enough about transit to make it work even if they never stepped onto a train or bus, ours have shown no inclination to do so in their combined decade in office (6.5 for Gov. Cuomo, 3.5 for Mayor de Blasio).

Maybe the only way the situation gets turned around is if each of them is stuck on a jammed, sweltering, subway … or is forced to wait on a packed platform as the minutes tick and the tension mounts. And not just once, but again and again.

That, in a nutshell, is why I called up and berated the mayor. As I told The Times, I’d been pondering it for weeks. The combination of Trump’s craven Paris announcement and the mayor’s wrapping himself in the mantle of climate savior gave me an opening and also pushed me over the edge.

I’ll close with a bit of irony inspired by Nicole Gelinas, the trenchant urban affairs analyst at the Manhattan Institute and New York Post columnist. In her Monday column, Bill de Blasio is a climate change hypocrite, she noted:

People will use less carbon — eventually — not because they’re nice, but because it will be more expensive. The world’s governments could achieve this effect more quickly through a carbon tax. Why not get it over with now? Because it’s too hard, politically and practically, to change people’s behavior by making them pay the full purported cost of carbon — that is, asking you to pay for next decade’s hurricane with your gas purchase today. (emphasis added)

Yes and no. Enacting a carbon tax is hard, but not necessarily impossible. But in this case, as we’ve seen, even a stiff carbon tax wouldn’t impel de Blasio to switch to subway from SUV; and that’s probably true even if he were paying for the ride from his own pocket.

What’s needed are new social norms that will make my radio complaint so ordinary that it’s not news; and unnecessary besides, because the idea of being chauffeured 12 miles to a gym would be nearly extinct. That is where a carbon tax would help.

Weekend Reading: Our Top 10 Posts from 2016

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We put up 42 blog posts last year, an average of one every nine days. Half-a-dozen addressed the Washington state carbon-tax initiative, I-732, explaining why we backed it strongly. Ten pertained to the elections, with four on Trump, three on GOP denialism, and three on the Democratic candidates’ carbon tax stances.

Several of our posts used our carbon-tax model to quantify impacts of different carbon taxes and contrast those that would make a big dent in emissions (like Sen. Sanders’) and those that wouldn’t (ExxonMobil’s). Other posts ranged from soda taxes (a possible political template for pollution taxes) to climate science, from China (where emissions appear to be peaking) to Wyoming (still in the thrall of coal, while renewables languish).

Collectively, they got lots of eyeballs. Below we’ve collected screenshots from the ten most popular, in reverse chronological order. Links in titles will take you to the full posts. For the really curious, our directory of 2016 posts (and 2015, 2014, 2013 …) is here.

 

Dec. 13: The Good News: A clean electricity boom is why the Clean Power Plan is way ahead of schedule

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Dec. 6: “Keep It In The Ground” Needs a Carbon Tax

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Nov. 10: After The Trump Win

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Oct.28: Fighting in the Trenches Doesn’t Excuse Ignorance on Carbon Taxes

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Sept 13: Carbon Tax Can Be a Remedy for Toxic Hot Spots

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July 7: Carbon Tax Works: CTC’s New Carbon Tax Model

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June 2: How Donald Trump Profited From Clean Air Rules

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April 16: What the Sanders-Clinton Clash over a Carbon Tax Says about Democrats and Climate Change

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March 9: China Emissions Will Peak Soon (If They Haven’t Already): New Study

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Jan. 21: Just How Scary Is 2015’s Temperature Record? We Count the Ways

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Want more posts like these? Sign up on CTC’s home page to receive notices of new posts. And please support our work: click here. Many thanks.

Harvard Economist Charts Escape From Kyoto

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[T]he quantity-based Kyoto-type approach [to UN climate negotiations] has pretty much broken down, leaving the world with a highly non-optimal patchwork of sporadic regional volunteerism that does not address centrally how to correct the critical externality of global warming.  — Harvard economist Martin Weitzman.

Which is simpler: negotiating one price, or 190 emissions caps?

The Kyoto Protocol is broken. What can replace it? Professor Weitzman, considered one of the world’s most influential economists, proposes a game change: Instead of squabbling over the quantity of fossil fuels each nation may burn, negotiate a single carbon price all can adhere to.

Weitzman is best known for modelling the economics of catastrophic climate change. In a ground-breaking 2009 paper, he demonstrated that conventional cost-benefit analysis under-weights the risk of catastrophic scenarios. In two new papers, he scrutinizes the Kyoto Protocol’s quantity-based structure through the lens of game theory. He calls Kyoto’s attempt to set and divvy up a global emissions cap “the ultimate… top-down worldwide treaty.” That’s not a compliment. Observing that Kyoto hasn’t come close to its goal of “an internationally harmonized binding system of emissions caps,” Weitzman shows why: the Kyoto framework induces each nation to game the system by attempting to maximize the efforts required of others while minimizing its own.

Weitzman lays out three criteria for an effective global emissions reduction system:

1. It should induce cost-effective emissions reductions.

2. It should allow negotiators to focus on negotiating one central and highly salient parameter.

3. It should align negotiators’ incentives toward internalizing climate costs.

On the first criterion, Weitzman points out that while a carbon tax is more easily administered and more transparent than a cap-and-trade system, a carbon cap or a tax can both achieve cost-effective emissions reductions.

On the second, Weitzman builds on Nobel-laureate Thomas Schelling’s pioneering game theory analysis establishing the importance of a clear focal point in negotiations. Kyoto’s quantity-based approach assigning different binding emissions quotas to each nation has no focal point. In contrast, a price-based negotiation offers a single focal point for all parties.

And building on the seminal work of Ronald Coase, Weitzman stresses the importance of minimizing transactions costs. Coase showed that parties that might otherwise negotiate an agreement can be deterred by the high costs of getting to yes. Weitzman points out that any quantity-based structure such as Kyoto necessarily multiplies transaction costs: “It is easier to negotiate one price than n quantities — especially when the one price can be interpreted as ‘fair’ in terms of equality of effort,” he writes.

The bulk of Weitzman’s analysis focuses on his third and most important criterion: the need to negotiate a structure that counteracts parties’ national self-interests and aligns their incentives toward reducing emissions. [Read more…]

Next to Nothing for Climate in Obama Plan

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The Environmental Protection Agency will unveil a draft proposal on Monday to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, according to people briefed on the plan. The proposed rule amounts to one of the strongest actions ever taken by the United States government to fight climate change. (emphasis added)

That’s this morning’s breaking news on President Obama’s climate action plan, from NY Times national energy-climate correspondent Coral Davenport. Yet peel back the numbers and the plan turns out to be precious little.

Relative to 2030 emissions projected from current trends, the drop in that year’s U.S. CO2 emissions sought by the President is a painfully modest 355 million tonnes (metric tons). That equates to just 7% of total actual emissions from all sources last year (5313 million tonnes).

White House’s 2030 CO2 Reduction Target: Just 7 Percent.

To be sure, the business-as-usual (no action) trajectory producing that 355 million tonne figure is mine, not the administration’s. (At the time I wrote this the White House hadn’t translated its percentage target into metric tons of CO2.)

I derive it below, and it’s subject to argument. What’s not debatable is that power plants are the low-hanging fruit in cutting CO2. That’s because electricity-sector emissions can be cut relatively easily not just via the demand side (through energy efficiency and conservation) but also on the supply side (by converting from coal to gas, and from coal and gas to renewables). Indeed, as of last year, demand and supply steps by industry, household and government had already wrought a 15% reduction in U.S. power plant emissions from the president’s 2005 base year (a drop of 361 million tonnes from 2414 million). By calling for only a second round of 15% cuts (355 million tonnes) from 2014 to 2030, the Obama plan in effect takes twice as long (16 years) to cut as much carbon pollution as the country just did (in 8 years, from 2005 to 2013).

Here’s another way to see how undersized a CO2 cut 355 million tonnes is: in a different political universe, one in which a carbon tax could be made the economic engine for cutting CO2, that same reduction (355 million tonnes) could be effectuated through almost the tiniest carbon tax imaginable: a carbon pollution fee starting in 2015 at $2.15 per ton of CO2 and rising by $2.15/ton each year to reach $34.40 by 2030, and applied only to the electricity sector (i.e., ignoring the other 61% of U.S. CO2 that comes from cars, trucks, planes, refineries, factories, heating, mining, etc., as the Obama plan does). Equivalently, an economy-wide carbon tax of just a buck and a quarter per ton of CO2 (rising by the same $1.25 each year so it reaches an even $20 in 2030) would also do the CO2-cutting job of the Obama plan. (These tax rates are derivable with my newly updated carbon tax, which you can download here.)

So when the NY Times calls the Obama plan one of the strongest U.S. government actions ever taken on climate, that’s a sign of how low the bar has been set by our country’s history of inaction.

What to do? Two things.

First, lean on the environmental lobby to stop caving to the White House. We need prominent advocates like NRDC and EDF to insist on more. Yes, it can be difficult to talk tough to the President when even halting steps like today’s are viciously attacked by the dirty-energy lobby. But heaping praise on a policy to cut emissions just 7% over 16 years doesn’t square with treating global warming like the planetary emergency it is.

Second, get behind a carbon tax — a real one, like the $12.50/tonneCO2 tax (starting at that rate and rising annually at the same rate) that Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) is readying for introduction this week. Our modeling indicates that in its tenth year, the McDermott carbon tax (which equates to $11.34 per conventional “short” ton of CO2), would reduce U.S. CO2 emissions by a third from 2005 levels, and by nearly 30% from future emissions without the tax. (By 2030, the reductions would be 41% from 2005 and 37% from business-as-usual.) The local chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby is an excellent vehicle for political action for this or other robust carbon taxes.

Like you, we know full well that a measure like McDermott’s can’t and won’t make it through this Congress, and perhaps the next, even though it could be folded into comprehensive tax reform, spurring economic growth by shifting tax burdens off work and investment and onto climate pollution. But seven percent won’t do. A robust carbon tax like McDermott’s is more essential than ever.

Electricity-sector CO2 emissions in 2030 under “business-as-usual”: These depend on two parameters — electricity sales (which determine) generation; and the CO2 “content” of an average kWh generated. I estimated future electricity sales using AEO (that’s the US Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook) forecasts of GDP growth and electricity rates, which I processed through assumed elasticities of 0.5 for income and (negative) 0.7 for price. For CO2 content, I assumed an annual decline in CO2/kWh of 1.0%, which is half of the average 2.0% “decarbonization” rate experienced in 2005-2013. As noted or implied above, U.S. electricity-sector emissions were 2414 million tonnes of CO2 in 2005 and 2053 million in 2013. A 30% cut in the former figure (the President’s goal) is 724 million tonnes, implying a 2030 target of 2414 less 724, or 1690 million tonnes. My modeling implies business-as-usual year-2030 emissions of 2045 million tonnes (coincidentally, almost identical to actual 2013 emissions). Reducing that to 1690 million tonnes requires a relative cut of 355 million tonnes, which is just 6.7% of actual year-2013 total U.S. emissions of 5313 million tonnes. For sources, more details and all calculations, see the Electricity “tab” of my carbon tax spreadsheet model.