Renewable Power in Africa

Prospects for growth in electricity access and in clean energy.

Africa is an enormous continent, notoriously larger than China, the US, and Europe combined. Its population is also large- as large as that of India, at about 1.4 billion people. This population is growing rapidly, while its social and economic systems are developing more slowly. But as we know, the main ingredient of an advanced economy is power, which as traditionally been drawn from fossil fuels. Advanced economies are in the painful and reluctant process of transitioning away from fossil fuels. We can do a lot to help Africa to leapfrog this history by front-loading renewable energy.

There was a recent paper about the hydropower prospects in Africa. It notes that there are many projects on the drawing board, with many undammed rivers on the continent. But as we have learned in the US, the implications of river damming are quite destructive and wide-spread. For example fish ladders simply do not work- not at the scale needed to keep fish populations (and fisheries) healthy. Then there are problems of siltation, water temperature, erratic flows, and population displacement. There is a movement in the US to remove dams wherever possible, to free ecosystems back to a functional state. 

"More than 300 hydropower plants, corresponding to an additional 100-GW power capacity, are under consideration across the continent."

The article made the basic point that, given the state of other renewable power sources, and the prospect of lower water levels and droughts due to climate change, that roughly half of the planned hydropower projects they know of are economically inviable, even putting aside environmental considerations. 

This leads to the question of what to do instead? Maybe the answer is microgrids. In the developed world, it is increasingly common for people to take control of their own electricity production through the use of solar power. But at a single house level, power inputs and consumption are both erratic and require a lot of storage capacity to furnish a reliable system. The typical system is highly reliant on the larger grid to manage this intermittency. Microgrids occupy a middle range between grid-scale power, which is subject to problems of centralized political and social development, and the individual house, where the expense of managing fully independent electrical supply is highest.

The current grid in Africa, colored for >66 kV (dark blue) and the rest light blue. Note the patchy regional distribution, with lots of underserved areas. The US has a much denser grid. 

A map that suggests likely locations for smaller microgrids in Africa.

These maps note that there are many underserved areas in Africa- some concentrated urban areas, and a great spread of rural areas. Electrification is well-advanced in South Africa and the heart of West Africa. But there are many rural areas that would be better served by microgrids of various scales. Microgrids can be altered over time and integrated into larger systems. Their production and storage capacities are both beneficial for larger grid stability and scalability. Africa is, naturally, positioned ideally for solar power, and the Sahara is a natural location for massive power installations, to serve both Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

A proposal to run a super-grid around much of Africa, to harness supplies from the Sahara, among other sources.

One of the main characteristics of renewable power is that it has high up-front costs. The fuel is free, and clean. But the mechanisms to capture and store it are expensive. Thus if we want to encourage a more rapid transition to sustainable power systems in Africa, we would help pay for the up front costs, sharing capital investment in the interests of everyone, both here and there. Africa is currently a big exporter of oil and gas. As other regions transition away from those fuels, it is imperative that this production not be redirected and propped up by further Western investment, but rather replaced with better energy sources.

• Advanced nuclear power is not going to cut it.
• The heat pump song.
• Treason, again.
• On silence and isolation.
• Housing prices should not always go up.
• Medicare disadvantage.

Eco-Economics

Adrienne Buller on greenwashing, high finance, and the failures of capitalism viz the environment, in "The Value of a Whale".

This is a very earnest book by what seems to be an environmental activist about the mistaken notion that capitalism gives a fig about climate change. Buller goes through the painstaking economic rationales by which economists attempt to value or really, discount the value of, future generations. And how poorly carbon taxes have performed. And how feckless corporations are about their climate pledges, carbon offsets, and general greenwashing. And how unlikely it is that "socially conscious" investing will change anything. It is a frustrated, head-banging exercise in deflating illusions of economic theory and corporate responsibility. Skimming through it is perhaps the best approach. Here is a sample quote from Buller's conclusion:

Given this entrenched perspective, it is unsurprising that resistance to the kinds of bold change we need to secure a habitable planetary future for all and a safe present for many tend to focus on what we stand to lose. Undeniably, available evidence suggests that 'addressing environmental breakdown may require direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in wealthier countries'. This is an uncomfortable idea to grapple with, but as philosopher Kate Soper writes: 'If we have cosmopolitan care for the well-being of the poor of the world, and a concern about the quality of life for future generations, then we have to campaign for a change of attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure, and self-realization in affluent communities.' There is a sense that this future is necessarily austerian, anti-progress, and defined by lack. Indeed, the same media study cited above found discussion of economies defined by the absence of growth to focus on bleakness and stagnation. Comparatively little attention is directed at what we stand to gain - but there is much to be gained. Understanding what requires us to ask what the existing system currently fails to provide, from universal access to health case and education, to basic material security, to free time. It certainly does not offer a secure planetary future, let alone one in which all life can thrive. And it does not offer genuine democracy, justice or freedom for most. Absent these, what purpose is 'the economy' meant to serve?

Unfortunately, the book is not very economically literate either, making its illusions something of a village of straw men. Who ever thought that Royal Dutch Shell was going to solve climate change? Who ever thought that a $5 dollar per ton tax on CO2 emissions was going to accomplish anything? And who ever thought that the only reason to address climate heating was to save ourselves a dollar in 2098? All these premises and ideas are absurd, hardly the stuff of serious economic or social analysis. 

But then, nothing about our approach to climate heating is serious. It is a psychodrama of capitalism in denial, composed of cossetted capitalist people in the five stages of grief over our glorious carbon-hogging culture. Trucks, guns, and drive-through hamburgers, please! Outright denial is only slowly ebbing away, as we sidle into the anger phase. The conservative Right, which mixes an apocalyptically destructive anti-conservative environmental attitude with a futile cultural conservatism, is angry now about everything. The idea that the environment itself is changing, and requires fundamental cultural and economic change, is an affront. The eco-conscious left is happy to peddle nostrums that nothing really has to change, if we just put up enough solar panels and fund enough green jobs. 

Objectively, given the heating we are already experiencing and the much worse heating that lies ahead, we are not facing up to this challenge. It is understandable to not want to face change, especially limits to our wealth, freedoms, and profligacy. But we shouldn't blame corporations for it. The capitalist system exists to reflect our desires and fulfill them. If we want to binge-watch horror TV, it gives us that. If we want to gamble in Las Vegas, it gives us that. If we want to drive all around the country, it makes that possible. Capitalism transmutes whatever resources are lying around (immigrant labor, publically funded research, buried minerals and carbon, etc.) to furnish things we want. We can't blame that system for fouling up the environment when we knew exactly what was going on and wanted those things it gave us, every step of the way.

No, there is another mechanism to address big problems like climate heating, and that is government. That is where we can express far-sighted desires. Not the desire for faster internet or more entertaining TV, but deep and far-reaching desires for a livable future world, filled with at least some of the animals that we grew up with, and maybe not filled with plastic. It is through our enlightened government that we make the rules that run the capitalist system. Which system is totally dependent on, and subservient to, our collective wisdom as expressed through government. 

So the problem is not that capitalism is maliciously ruining our climate, but that our government, representative as it is of our desires, has not fully faced up to the climate issue either. Because we, as a culture, are, despite the blaring warnings coming from the weather, and from scientists, don't want to hear it. There is also the problem that we have allowed the capitalists of our culture far too much say in the media and in government- a nexus that is fundamentally corrupt and distorts the proper hierarchy of powers we deserve as citizens.

The US games out in 2012 how various carbon taxes will affect emissions, given by electricity production. These are modest levels of taxation, and have modest effects. To actually address the climate crisis, a whole other magnitude of taxation and other tools need to be brought to bear. The actual trajectory came out to more renewables, no growth for nuclear power, and we are still burning coal.

Let me touch on just one topic from the book- carbon taxes. This is classic case of squeemish policy-making. While it is not always obvious that carbon pricing would be a more fair or effective approach than direct regulation of the most offensive industries and practices, it is obvious that putting a price on carbon emissions can be an effective policy tool for reducing overall emissions. The question is- how high should that price be to have the effect we want? Well, due to the universal economic consensus that carbon pricing would be a good thing, many jurisdictions have set up such pricing or capping schemes. But very few are effective, because, lo and behold, they did not want to actually have a strong effect. That is, they did not want to disrupt the current way of doing things, but only make themselves (and ourselves) feel good, with a slight inducement to moderate future change. Thus they typically exempt the most polluting industries outright, and set the caps high and the prices low, so as not to upset anyone. And then Adrienne Buller wonders why these schemes are so universally ineffective.

Carbon prices in California are currently around $30 per ton CO2, and this has, according to those studying the system, motivated one third of the state's overall carbon reductions over the current decade. That is not terrible, but clearly insufficient, even for a forward-thinking state, since we need to wring carbon out of our systems at a faster pace. Raising that price would be the most direct way for us as a society to do that. But do we want to? At that point, we need to look in the mirror and ask whether the point of our policies should be addressing climate heating in the most effective way possible, or to avoid pain and change to our current systems. Right now, we are on a sort of optimal trajectory to avoid most of the economic and social pain of truly addressing climate change, (by using gradualist and incremental policies), but at the cost of not getting there soon enough and thus incurring increasing levels of pain from climate heating itself- now, and in a future that is measured, not in years, but in centuries. 

The second big point to make about this book and similar discussions is that it largely frames the problem as an economic one for humanity. How much cost do we bear in 2100 and 2200, compared with the cost we are willing to pay today? Well, that really ignores a great deal, for there are other species on the planet than ourselves. And there are other values we have as humans, than economic ones. This means that any cost accounting that gets translated into a carbon price needs to be amplified several fold to truly address the vast array of harms we are foisting on the biosphere. Coral reefs are breaking down, tropical forests are losing their regenerative capability, and the arctic is rapidly turning temperate. These are huge changes and harms, which no accounting from an economic perspective "internalizes". 

So, we need to psychologically progress, skipping a few steps to the facing-it part of the process, which then will naturally lead us towards truly effective solutions to get to carbon neutrality rapidly. Will it cost a lot? Absolutely. Will we suffer imbalances and loss of comforts? Absolutely. But once America faces up to a problem, we tend to do a good job accepting those tradeoffs and figuring out how to get the results we want. 

• An earth systems perspective.
• I hope you are appreciating this free-range, hand-made, artisanal prose.
• Loneliness.
• Plastic is a thing too.
• Natural gas and the future of Europe.
• Maybe having cars parked everywhere isn't the best idea.
• Thoughts on the drug war.

On the Transition to Godhood

Kicking and screaming, humanity is being dragged into a god-like state.

We thought that harnessing electricity would make us gods. Or perhaps the steam engine, or the first rocket ship, or the atomic bomb. But each of those powerful technological leaps left us wanting- wanting more, and wanting to clean up the messes each one left behind. Next are biotechnology, gene editing, and robotics. What to do?

The fact is that we have powers that traditionally were only given to gods. Vast raw physical powers, the ability to fly, and the ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere, instantly, and to know practically anything at a touch. But the greatest of all is our power to derange the entire biosphere- destroying habitats, exterminating species, filling our geologic layer with plastic and radioactive debris, and changing the composition and physics of the atmosphere. 

We have not come to terms with all this power. Indeed half of our political system can't stand the thought of it, and lives in the fantasy that nothing has changed, humanity is not trashing its home, and we can live as profligately as we wish, if only we don't look out the window. Even more disturbingly, this demographic generally holds to a fantasy god- some bearded male archetype- who will either make magically sure that everything comes out OK, or alternately will bring on the end times in flames of wrath and salvation for the select, making any rational worry for the environment we actually live in absurd.

Judgement day is coming!

This, at a moment when we need to grow into our awesome responsibilities, is naturally disheartening. Growing up out of an infantile mind set, where our parents made everything OK, is hard. Adulthood takes courage. It takes strength to let go of fantasy comforts. But the powers of adulthood are truly god-like, especially in this age. We make and remake our environments, look deep into space, into the past and the future, know and learn prodigiously. We make new people. 

Is is clear, however, that we are not taking these powers seriously enough. Overpopulation is one example. We simply can not go on having all the children we want, taking no responsibility for the load they are putting and will put on our home, the biosphere. As nascent gods, we need to survey our domain holistically and responsibly, looking to its future. And right now, that future is rather bleak, beset by irresponsible actors resistant to their higher calling.

• What to do about all the lies?
• Another view of god.
• Don't drive everywhere.
• General breakdown.
• How did South Korea do so well? Rigorous contact tracing and quarantine enforcement.
• Greed in shorts.
• Direct air capture of CO2.

Mass Transit is Pleasant Travel

Let me count the ways.. I love mass transit.

Love to drive? Some people do. But do you love to drive in LA? The pleasure of driving goes down dramatically in congested conditions, where what was once a carefree sail down the freeway turns into a white-knuckled fight for free space, slowing to a frustrating crawl through a baking, exhaust-filled parking lot. Then there is the fear of accident and injury. Every day, the radio traffic report provides bland "injuryaccident" reports from the metro area. Driving has turned into a nightmare.

The US has not built significant infrastructure, particularly roads, for decades, and it shows in worsening traffic conditions. In parallel, housing prices go up, thanks to an unwillingness to zone for growth in housing as well as in traffic. Yet our population still goes up, despite the sclerosis in public policy. What can be done?

Entering BART trains is easy...

Some urban areas have an answer to the car, and it is mass transit, either by train or bus. The New York subway system ridership has gone up steadily, and is now at 5.7 million per day. The Bay area subway system, BART, has also experienced strong gains, to half a million riders per day. All this despite the growth of ride-share services which, while they may relieve the user of the task of driving, do nothing to resolve the uncertainty and unpleasantness of congestion on the roads.

I have recently switched to transit for a long cross-Bay Area trip, and it has been a revelation. Gone is the road rage and isolation, replaced by abundant people-watching and the ability to just look out the window, or rest (or work). The occasional stress of making a properly-timed bus or train is significantly less than the constant stress of preventing death or collision in a car. Granted, the seats are rarely very comfortable, and not everyone is friendly, or even sane. But on the whole, it is an easy call, especially since the direct costs are almost precisely the same, even before amortizing the cost of the car itself, not to mention those to the planet.

• Is Afghanistan a satrapy?
• Afghanistan: rural areas are important, Pakistan is still bad.
• Pakistan: "Who, us?"
• Science- broken, or not so bad? And do different fields have different standards and forms of corruption?
• Our media maelstrom.
• This just in: insecticides kill insects.
• Bullies and jerks.. why?
• Workers will still get the shaft.
• Russia is still there.
• How far will denialism go?
• Environmental graph of the week: California electricity grid during the eclipse. Overall peak demand is about 40,000 Megawatts, so solar generation provides roughly one quarter of peak demand in the state.

The California Electric grid, 08/212017, 5 PM (top), compared to the day before (bottom).

What if Coal Were All We Had?

What if there was no renewable energy, or sustainable options to keep advanced civilization afloat?

I was reading an article about coal country, and the tradeoffs, dreams and delusions surrounding it, when it struck me what a different position we would be in if coal was all we had. Our civilization floats on a miasma of oil, gas, and coal, with some nuclear and hydropower thrown in. Wind and solar are growing, but fossil fuels make up 80% of energy resources, and will for years to come, especially as India and China continue to commit to more coal-based power. For all the oil we guzzle in transportation, heating, chemicals, and other uses, we use more than twice as much coal, to the tune of roughly ten billion tons per year.

But what if we lived in an alternate world where we did not have fracked natural gas, or renewables, or even oil? What if coal were all we had? Our industrial development would be a different place, clearly. Though World War 2 demonstrated that one can make practically anything from coal that can be made from oil, the processes are quite a bit more difficult. We would have more trains and streetcars, and fewer automobiles. More importantly, though, we would be facing much different choices in global warming, and pollution generally.

We would be in a world more like Victorian England, and contemporary China, where coal pollution is choking. The irony is that installing scrubbers to take out the most noxious pollutants, not to mention sequestering the CO2, is very expensive, not only in financial terms, but in energy terms, wasting even more of the fuel that in this world would be so precious. Coal would still be a limited resource, with a time horizon of maybe 200 to 300 years in all. Foresightful planning would regard this as an extremely precious resource, if not substitute were available, ever.

So from both the foresight and the pollution standpoints, we would be forced to conserve energy- that would be the solution to such a noxious resource. We would be much farther along in taxing carbon/coal to reduce usage to amounts consistent with local human health and future global health, even if strip-mining it were cheap and its many local costs acceptable. Hopefully, natural beauty would not be a distant memory in such a world, if we made these decisions in time- a time much earlier than we have the luxury of doing today. Would the human population be as high as currently? Given that the poorest areas of the world typically have the highest population and population density, that is quite likely. We would just all be poorer, crimped by a resource base that would be dirtier and scarcer than the one we have today.

Thankfully, we have a much brighter future in reality. In the developed world, pollution is not an in-your-face threat to human existence, but rather an invisible, subtle menace that needs to be met with responsibility and foresight if we wish to preserve much of the natural world that we evolved in, and have known in our own lifetimes, intact.

• Notes on the moral conservative perspective.
• For-profit health insurance destroyed everything.
• And then corrupted everyone.
• Mainstreaming alt facts and alt media.
• I am inherently patriotic.
• And Russia is my best friend.
• Oh, no! A pot shortage!
• Wages are not a normal economic concept.
• A beautiful take on Harry Potter, from Japan.

Who Are the Real Wealth Creators?

Technologists, of course.

Of the various indignities of the campaign last year, the economic ignorance displayed and accepted was particularly galling. The Trump voters of the hinterlands, supposedly angry about their compromised economic position, elected a party and person whose avowed goal is to take more money from our public institutions, the poor, and the middle class, and give it to the rich. This after a near-decade of total intransigence by the same party against restarting an economy that was floored in the banking meltdown and has been limping since. It has taken a decade to get back to more or less normal conditions- time lost to economic growth in general and to countless individual traumas.

Who and what creates economic growth? Is it the "job creators"? Is it Goldman Sachs? Is it the 1%? That is a big question facing the nation, both politically and in straight economic policy. The new administration says yes, yes, yes, arguing that giving the rich hefty tax breaks, not to mention reducing regulations of all sorts in financial and environmental sectors, will help economic growth. Will it? Obviously we have been through all this before, under G. W. Bush and Reagan as well. And the answer is no, it does not increase economic growth. Money going to the rich is money that is, largely, invested in low-risk assets like bonds and real estate.

More generally, does the managerial class create wealth by their organizational prowess? Is Amazon better than Staples, which is better than Pat's Stationery store down the street? Organizational differences make only minor advances in overall wealth, and seem mostly to facilitate the redistribution of labor earnings to ever fewer and richer capitalists. As previously discussed, the power of capital is that it always wins, through good times and bad, in every negotiation, since versus labor, it is always taking less risk.

What Amazon has that Pat's establishment does not is, mostly, new technology. The internet came along and showed that everyone could be connected, instantly. How about using that connection to sell things on a nationwide scale, especially things that are easy to ship? Sears would have been the natural founder of this franchise, based in their nationwide catalog roots, but they had become too invested in their stores to pay attention. Capitalists only deploy the technology that exists. They do very little to generate new technology- that is left to academics and the government. It is technology that keeps revolutionizing our lives and raising our standards of living- our collective wealth. And when it comes to distributing new technology, sometimes the market does a worse job than the government, such as with roads. We could have much better internet infrastructure if it were managed in the public interest as a utility.

Where would the "job creators" be without their cell phones? Where would they be without databases and spreadsheets? Where would they be without electricity? They would doubtless be riding herd over an estate of serfs. They would be just as wealth-creating in relative terms, but all in a much poorer society. The dark ages were dark not because entrepreneurs had lost their will to manage others, but because technological, scholarly, and governing instututional development ground to a halt with the dissipation of the Western Roman Empire. It took centuries of slow, accreting technological progress to make cities as large as they were in Roman times, and make societies as wealthy. By that point, the process took on a life of its own in the West as an ideology of Enlightenment and material and moral progress took hold, maintaining support for learning and innovation which reached unimaginable heights in the twentieth century.

Looking back, we can rue that the fuel of all this transformative progress and wealth creation has been buried reduced carbon, which as our waste product, CO2, is now befouling the biosphere. Our collective wealth has also begotten a vast and completely unsustainable increase in human population, whose many appetites are destroying much else of the biosphere. These are the problems of prosperity, and are, if we are morally responsible, now foremost in our public and private intentions and actions to transition to a sustainable as well as prosperous future.

• Who needs clean water?
• Who will sue on behalf of the public interest?
• Free? We are not free. We are under the feudal thumb of corporations. "Likewise, the origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist’s for the worker’s control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman’s choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his relative preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice."
• Trump is the weakling.

Peak food

Our food supply floats on an ocean of petroleum, whose peak is now.

Peak oil has become part of the common parlance: the time when global production of oil reaches an all-time peak, followed by inexorable decline. Whether that peak is now or a few years away, rising demand will outstrip supply and dramatically increase prices as soon as the economic system gets back to normal. An analysis of the oil price spikes of 2008 indicates that while some of the rise was due to speculation in a classic bubble, most was due to real supply-demand dynamics, (reflecting low demand elasticity), which will re-assert themselves soon enough.

The price spikes in oil encouraged the diversion of food (corn) to fuel (ethanol) in the US. This contributed to a spike in food prices around the world which caused quite a few political problems. Another connection between fuel and food is that modern agriculture is heavily fuel-intensive, using (in the case of corn) about 140 gallons of (fossil) fuel per acre. To put this in perspective, that is enough to drive a 25 mpg car from coast to coast in the US. One estimate puts fuels used in agriculture at three calories for every food calorie consumed, amounting in the US to ten percent of fuel use. Rising fuel scarcity and cost will increase costs of fertilizer, machinery, processing, and ultimately, food. Poor countries will be most susceptible, especially when the green revolution, which is strongly fossil fuel-based, meets high fuel prices in competition with wealthier users.

Food systems also face other limitations such as amounts of arable land and water. A great deal of irrigation water is pumped from aquifers that are rapidly depleting, and in some cases from fossil aquifers that will never be replenished. Climate change derived from the fossil fuels already consumed is altering the availability of arable land, reducing areas in the tropics where higher heat can cause outright desertification or make some crops impossible to grow, and re-scheduling major agricultural rivers that are fed by glaciers. At the same time, climate change may expand arable areas in northerly locations like Siberia. Erosion and desertification are reducing arable land all over the world, since the current monoculture practices, however conservatively practiced, draw down soil resources instead of building them up.

Another critical element is population. All of nature follows the biological imperative of over-reproduction, spending all immediately available resources on the next generation, which is in turn left to gather what resources it can from the environment. In our case, we have found ways to borrow spectacular amounts of resources from our surroundings that will never be there to support future generations. This certainly applies to fossil fuels, but also to other minerals and to ecological services from the oceans, air, forests, and soils that are being depleted with little thought for the long term. Over the last few centuries we have gotten used to exponential growth in population, which even with the rosiest possible assumptions is unsustainable.

One could conclude that our "developed" way of life is an elaborate ponzi scheme- a lonely peak in earth's human population history, never to be repeated and foretelling harsh conditions on the declining side. Will such harsh conditions be required to restrict human population? Sadly, one has to say that the answer seems to be yes. There is little evidence that human societies are sufficiently conscious of truly long-term sustainability issues to be able to tear themselves away from our well-programmed biological imperatives. Certainly the Pope has no compunction urging continued fertility even in the poorest and most ecologically devastated precincts of his flock. It is only the modern development (and female empowerment) process that values quality over quantity in human reproduction, but at the same time it is the very process that eats us out of house and home in other ways.

Can technology make up the shortfall in resources, especially in energy, as well as mitigate the fallout of ecological devastation? That is not yet clear. Economists tend to be perennial optimists, assuming that, given the right incentives, our rich technological culture will create replacement commodities, in this case literally out of thin air. But just how extreme will those incentives have to get? Will they degrade our ability to live in developed ways? Will they prompt wars for food, water, and fuel? If the green revolution that has been so dependent on leveraging fossil fuels stalls, will poor countries face demographic catastrophe?

Right now the most daunting challenge will be resisting the temptation to double-down on this grand ponzi scheme, mortgaging yet more future resources and biosphere health by fleeing to even dirtier and climate-killing fossil fuels such as tar-sands, oil shales, and coal. That is the ultimate collective question- whether we can rise above what looks in bare economic terms to be an almost inexorable tragedy of the commons by collectively safeguarding earth's environment for those (perhaps fewer) humans and other inhabitants who succeed us.

Incidental links:

• Black sun takes a rosier view of the technological possibilities
• While others are more alarmist
• Liberals have their own angle on the taking-to-the-hills movement
• Easter Island offers a classic cautionary tale
• More data on peak oil
• And in completely other news, corruption continues apace

Is Obama green?

After all the promises, will an Obama administration make progress on green issues?

Now that the long nightmare is over and Barack Obama is measuring the White House drapes (and ordering up a presidential dog house), it is time to ponder what the future will hold under his administration (For an intriguing framework to evaluate the election, see here). For those of us who view climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability as the defining issue of our time, we have to ask- what is in store?

Although John McCain stated his understanding of climate change and support of measures to mitigate it, it became clearer as the campaign progressed just how shallow that commitment was. When gas prices went up, he suggested a gas tax holiday. Not only would this have been ineffective in reducing gas prices, given a supply-constricted market, (effectively transferring money from the government to the oil industry), but insofar as it reduced gas prices at all, it would have been counterproductive to the central policy problem: reducing fossil fuel use.

The need to reduce fossil fuel use came up in the campaign in the guise of energy independence from foreign sources of oil and gas. In the absence of an actual debate on climate change and sustainability issues, that was welcome enough, but did not provide a direct contrast. The gas tax episode, McCain's choice of the retrograde Sarah Palin, the fact that his campaign was run by a bevy of lobbyists and former Bushies, its championing of off-shore drilling (remember "Drill, baby, drill!"?), its wildly opportunistic tenor as it drew into the station, and of course the fact that his administration would be staffed by Republicans and lobbyists, all indicated that a McCain administration might easily have been as environmentally paleolithic as the previous one, hard as that is to imagine.

The one decent policy that McCain pushed was permitting new nuclear power plants. Distasteful as they are from mining, proliferation, and waste perspectives, nuclear plants are carbon-neutral, and would provide temporary breathing room (!) while truly sustainable technologies travel down the price per unit energy curve. It is also conceivable that future forms of nuclear power may be highly efficient and proliferation-resistant. However, it is also quite possible that barring government subsidies (including the phenomenally expensive waste repository yet to be built), nuclear power is currently no cheaper than renewable power, so while nuclear might be part of a carbon-neutral mix and benefit from continuing research, it should compete on the level in a system where carbon emissions and other forms of pollution are properly priced.

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The Obama campaign had a distinctly more climate-friendly set of policy proposals. It stressed tax credits for renewable energy research, including plugin hybrids, higher taxes for oil companies, and several mandates- for renewable electricity production, higher vehicle fuel efficiency and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. It also proposed higher long-term goals for carbon emission reductions than did the Mc Cain campaign. These are all good policies, but they do not really bite the bullet, which must be to realign the incentives of the entire energy market in line with long-term sustainability to actually achieve those far-off goals.

Simply put, pollution, needs to be priced into the energy economy, raising the prices of fossil fuels in proportion to how dirty they are in all dimensions, including CO2 emission. The problem with renewable energy is not that there aren't enough government programs supporting research and development, but that its market prospects are unfavorable and uncertain, compared with oil and especially with coal. The oil market, though heading towards the crisis of peak oil (as is natural gas), is at the moment still at the mercy of Saudi Arabia, which can turn the spigot on at will and strangle the economics of high auto efficiency here in the US. In the absence of comprehensive pollution pricing, it would be minimally beneficial to set a floor price for oil at $100/barrel in the US (with the difference collected as tariffs by the government, if necessary), so that market participants have a consistent expectation of future prices around which to invest in conservation and alternative supplies.

Coal is even more abundant and cheap- the coal industry is able to externalize the costs of mind-boggling pollution from mining, landscape denudation, carbon emissions, mercury emissions, particulate emissions, etc., etc. Renewable power can never compete with coal, which is a virtually free source of energy, unless coal's external costs are priced in. The EPA has started to price / regulate a
few aspects of coal pollution, such as sulfur dioxide, particulate, and mercury emissions, but we have long way to go before coal's full impacts are accounted for (here in the US, let alone in China!).

Obama has consistently supported "clean coal", truly a black mark on his record and on his campaign. The only way to make coal clean from an emissions perspective (forgetting about its extraction impacts) would be to collect all emitted gasses, remove the witches brew of pollutants, and sequester all the CO2 elsewhere, such as underground. While sequestration is a matter of current research (large pilot plants have been promised, but none are working), my view is that this will never be a viable technology. CO2 takes a great deal of energy to isolate and pump back into the ground (40% extra required). Only a few types of geologic formations are amenable to this kind of sequestration. No one has any idea how well the idea will scale to the vast amounts of CO2 we would need to sequester. And to top it off, accidents could be truly catastrophic. If a CO2 field became uncapped or leaky, the heavier-than-air CO2 would be a deadly cloud, much like those naturally released from lakes in Africa, which killed 1,746 people in just one rural incident. CO2 sequestration (and "clean coal" generally), thus appears to be a high tech fake-out designed to give succor to a phenomenally dirty industry. (Another example is the hydrogen economy, especially the hydrogen-powered car, but that is a topic
for another day!).

Obama also promoted a "$1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate". Thankfully, this was not an energy voucher system that would counter the conservation incentives of high fuel prices, but was a broad per capita or per household payment simply labeled with an energy banner. So this ends up being neutral as far as sustainability issues go, and little was heard about it later in the campaign.

Lastly, Obama has time and again sworn that regular people's taxes will not go up ... not by one cent. This kind of read-my-lips pledge is dangerous, especially when the federal debt needs to be pared down and when the carbon trading, or pollution pricing, or whatever means chosen to fulfill the proposed mandates of carbon emissions reduction and energy independence will doubtless be construed as new taxes by the average person, not to mention the opposing party. There is no way we can do what needs to be done in reducing greenhouse gas emissions simply with tax credits, federal research, and encouragement. We also can not rely on fossil fuels becoming scarce enough (by way of peak oil, let alone shortages of coal) to create the price incentives that will be needed, within the short time frame that we have to forestall increasingly serious climate effects. Even now, Canada is busily tapping its vast tar sand deposits, using precious natural gas and water in one of the most wasteful fossil fuel extraction enterprises imaginable, but which is economical in the current energy pricing system.

Obama's record is one of legislative compromise and accommodation. That kind of leadership alone is not going to cut it to address climate change at the requisite scale, which goes against the short term interest of every single moneyed interest group, and indeed every single American. The lesson that Obama gave us in his campaign is that political change takes people power. He can only act with a political wind at his back, in the form of wide-spread support, developed through painstaking debate, education, and inspiration. So our role as citizens is to keep this issue on the front burner. And to continue to educate each other about the facts of the matter- to push for long term thinking over short term laizzes-faire, and to reinforce the moral imperative to forestall this ultimate tragedy of the commons.

Ideally, Obama would devote some of his time and energy to the green agenda, educating Americans to the seriousness of climate change and biosphere protection generally, its long-term implications, and the sacrifices needed to meet them. But the campaign spent little time on the topic, understandably enough (Al Gore was treated as a somewhat mad uncle). Thus it is not clear that the mandate of the new administration extends to the farther reaches of the public attention span, which is where environmental sustainability languishes. It was very promising that in his victory speech, Obama touched on "a planet in peril" as the second of his pending superhero tasks. Hopefully he will expand on that theme at the inauguration and thereafter. Endangered organisms great and small have no political voice- it is up to us to care about them and care for them.