Blog Post: There is no 'O' in Climate Change

Blog Post - There is no 'O' in Climate Change

Greetings,

Welcome to my first output of 2024. It is getting out a little later than I anticipated. Between recovery from COP, the Holidays, and then a little bit of Covid, all sorts of things have slipped a bit.

As usual, I am hoping that you can't overcome your curiosity as to what my headline means and will take a read of "There is no 'O' in Climate Change".

But before that there is alway the section with a few things that caught my eye. I have packed in a few more than usual to make up for getting this out a bit late.

Hope you enjoy.

Dan

PS - Given that it is a new year, I thought I would present a "new me". Hope you like the photo change!

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Links to Past Posts:

It was an Instagram COP - And I am Finally OK with That

How to Talk About Climate With Your Crazy Uncle at Thanksgiving

Monty Python and Climate Change

What You Need to Know About NIMBYism

H mm..So How Much Did My Heat Pump Really Cost?

What it Means to Be a Climate Voter

The Climate Conundrum of Air Conditioning

Predictions Made About Utilities Made 10 Years Ago - How Did They Hold up?

My Vote For The Most Under-Appreciated Impact of Climate Change

10 Things I Should Have Written About

So I Went to the COP - Here Are My Top 10 Takeaways.

Efficiency and Clean Energy - Faster vs More

Efficiency & Clean Energy - More vs. Faster

It's Time For A Climate Vote - On the Record

Good COP, Bad COP .....Thoughts Before Glasgow

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

What I Should Have Written About

The Serenity of Being a Climate Voter

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Some Things That Caught My Eye ...

That Chevron Thing I Talked About …

Several months ago, I called out a case to come before the Supreme Court that many, including me, think is massively important in terms of energy and climate policy.

The Court will be examining the Chevron Doctrine as it is known, which gives federal agencies deference (to their acknowledged expertise in the development of rules and regulations that implement a law. The challenge brought before the Court argues that only Congress has the authority to know what the law says/meant and act accordingly.

As I said earlier, it is hard to impossible to argue that Congress has the time, resources, or scientific and technical expertise to implement environmental and energy laws.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/us/politics/supreme-court-fisherman-chevron.html

The Quiet Sound of the Energy Transition in Texas

I would submit Texas as being the most multi-faceted State in the country, and that is certainly true when it comes to energy. The politics of the state continue to accuse solar and wind of not being reliable in adverse weather even though the investigation of that showed it was the gas plants that ran into problems.

Meanwhile the energy transition continues to quietly chug along, and putting aside the rhetoric, this article shows Texas has really responded in a timely manner to what happened in Hurricane Uri. It shows how it has been adding storage, demand response, solar, and wind as well as taking other resiliency measures.

Also notable in the piece is calling out the fact that, for the overall grid in Texas (i.e. ERCOT), the peak hour of the day is now between 7 and 8 a.m. – not in the afternoon.

https://wapo.st/3U0NS4v

EV Trouble in the Land of Car Rentals

I am high on EVs but must admit that I was a bit surprised when I learned last year how bullish the car rental industry was being on them.

In 2022, Hertz announced plans to buy 175,000 EVs from General Motors, on top of EV purchases from Tesla and Polestar. That put the company ahead of rental car competitors like Enterprise and Avis in the race to build an EV fleet. At the time, Hertz said EVs are a moneymaker because they hold their value better than gasoline-powered cars and cost less to maintain.

But things have quickly changed. Hertz has announced it is “thinning” its fleet by removing 20,000 EVs and replacing them with gasoline vehicles. The company is citing lower than expected demand and higher than expected repair costs.

There are a lot of headlines and stories about the changing market for EVs. But repair costs being higher? I am wondering what they expected those would be? I have not seen any details from Hertz on why they are also citing repairs.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/hertz-to-sell-20000-evs-and-replace-with-gas-vehicles/?utm_source=SFMC&utm_medium=email&utm_content=MED_UN_NA_EML_UN_UN_DailyDriver_Friday&hashed_email=a2340ca54b306358664c00f342f0e025a2bb393eb72c9f9373d9fbaf3b58f913&dtm_em=a2340ca54b306358664c00f342f0e025a2bb393eb72c9f9373d9fbaf3b58f913

The Norway Paradox

You have probably seen somewhere note of the high uptake rate in Norway for EVs. It is the highest per capita anywhere. In 2021 Renewable sources of electricity amounted to 98.9 % of the national electricity production, where 7.5 % of the electricity produced came from wind power, which is growing rapidly offshore.

But then there is the other side of the Norway coin.

Between 40 and 50 new oil and gas wells are expected to be completed, up from 34 last year, the country announced last week.

One aspect to note is that Norway has become Europe’s top supplier of natural gas as it has replacied Russian flows that were cut following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. But it remains that, together with the United States, it is taking great strides to reduce emissions yet at the same time increasing production of fossil fuels.

https://www.sodir.no/en/

Bonus Tip: A series on Netflix called “Occupied” depicts a fictional near future where, due to catastrophic environmental events, Norway's Prime Minister has stopped the country's oil and gas production. It doesn’t turn out like they planned. (I am avoiding early spoilers). I highly recommend it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4192998/

Investors in Oil & Gas Companies Flying Blind to This Risk?

In a new Report, the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme finds that both investors and policymakers may not be paying sufficient attention to the risks of legal risk of fossil fuel investments. Noting that the number of cases before courts worldwide is at 2500 and rising,

The Oxford group says is a relatively new field and is mostly focused on physical risk to companies, and investors and regulators who do not account for the possibility of large payouts from climate litigation, he said, “will continue to fly blind in their treatment of climate risk."

Using a social cost of carbon metric set at $185 per ton, the Report estimates that Chevron, for example, could be liable for up to $8.5 trillion alone in climate costs. Between 1990 and 2019, the company’s profits were $291 billion.

The report identified five ways to calculate climate-related legal risks, including social cost metrics and market-impact analysis.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj0598

A Big Battery Filled with Hydrogen

Most people don’t use the term “battery” to mean any type of storage technology other than the one in their car and flashlight. But the era of long duration energy storage is here and so there are all sorts of battery technologies and deployments.

This article describes the massive hydrogen storage project being developed in Utah, and is a good real-world depiction of some of the challenges in developing hydrogen as a major resource – including the challenges that come with using energy to make hydrogen and using the hydrogen to make energy again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/climate/green-hydrogen-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.N00.rJTi.ezJRk2Dmbr-o&smid=url-share

A (Partial) Answer to a Common NIMBY Complaint?

One of the most often-heard concerns made about solar and wind farms is the negative impact they have on nearby real estate prices.

A recent study published by U.S. DOE found that homes within a mile of announced wind farm projects experience a roughly 11 percent drop in value, compared to homes 3 to 5 miles away. But those prices rebound 3 to 5 years after the turbines are operational, researchers wrote, noting a growing body of work where "the majority of studies find insignificant effects of wind turbines on home values."

The study covered 34 states, 428 wind projects and nearly half a million property transactions within 5 miles of wind projects from 2005 to 2020. It only focused on urban counties defined as populations of more than 250,000.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421523004226

Climate Deniers have Morphed into Something Else?

I gave up trying to educate climate deniers some time ago. It was not worth it and instead have focused on trying to answer questions from those who want to know more about climate change. And according to polling data, the number of outright deniers has decreased while the other answer categories have moved upward on the concern scale.

But a new report from a group that monitors social media shows that there is something else going on with respect to denialism. It shows that those who don’t want to do anything about climate change are finding that it is tougher to deny it outright given the data and what everyone is seeing happen in real time. They are shifting to trying to discredit the solutions. They are saying that things will cost too much, don’t work, aren’t reliable, and even coming up with bizarre claims about health and other adverse side effects of things like solar and wind.

I think these types of attacks may be more problematic than outright denialism. Denialism is more of a yes-no toggle switch. But peddling misinformation and myths about the solutions that need to be deployed as soon as possible may be more of a disaggregated challenge.

https://grist.org/accountability/youtube-climate-denial-solutions-misinformation/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily

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There is no ‘O’ in Climate Change

There is one word that I have frequently and widely used in my work in the energy sector throughout my career. It is a word that describes what sometimes happens intuitively and almost reflexively, although not always. It is a word that should almost always be an objective in decision making and policymaking,

Optimization.

Here’s the formal definition according to Miriam-Webster: an act, process, or methodology of making something (such as a decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible. But it is the short, informal definition that source offers that I think is more applicable to policymaking: the act or process of making something as good as it can be. And therein lies the problem.

In my time designing, marketing, and managing energy efficiency programs, the word optimization was a natural for trying to explain the difference between efficiency and energy conservation. The latter was simply using less. The former meant doing things different to get the same benefit while using less energy. Efficiency was an attempt at optimizing the combination of energy use and some other objective like heating comfort.

As my work moved squarely into the policy arena, with demand response, DER, and grid modernization being the main pond I was swimming in, optimization became the obvious concept to help explain what those things meant. By introducing smart, connected technologies into the electricity system, everyone from a homeowner to a grid operator could begin to have lots of information and controls with which to make the best decision at any moment or other interval of time desired. They had an increased ability to optimize.

But optimization cannot be an objective that exists in a vacuum. You must optimize for one or more things. Otherwise, optimization can have too many “masters” and possibly create a non-solvable algorithm. In my example of energy efficiency above, the optimization was for energy use and personal comfort. It did not include optimizing for environmental factors. It may or may not have included optimizing for payback period.

When it comes to policy making, optimization can take on some strange shapes and forms.

Sometimes policymakers sincerely and explicitly try to achieve an optimal policy that serves many masters, e.g. the economy, jobs, low-income needs, etc. They try to avoid cross-subsidies, and regressive taxation.

But then there is the legendary sausage-making aspect of policymaking.

In my opinion, that kind of sausage is made two ways. The first is when things that are totally unrelated to one another end up in the same bill that is passed. This normally happens in what are called “must-pass” bills and often represent a policymaker’s price for a “yea” vote. But because they are unrelated to the main part of the Bill, they do not create a sub-optimization of the main focus of the Bill.

As I turn to the other type, maybe some of you can see where I am headed?

The other type of sausage making is when things of a related matter get included in the same Bill, with each trying to serve a different master.

That seems to be what is happening with climate policy, especially at the federal level. We are hamstringing climate policy by trying to make that policy serve other masters.

Take for example the EV tax incentive provisions of the IRA. The objective (as with any incentive) was to accelerate the adoption of EV, whose electricity will get cleaner and cleaner every year as the grid gets cleaner.

But policymakers also wanted to achieve other objectives with the EV incentives. They wanted to create U.S. jobs and establish a bigger base of EV and battery manufacturing. These are important objectives, don’t get me wrong, but are they in the same league as climate change and the timetable it is on?

Take EVs. As we enter 2024 fewer EVs are eligible for the tax incentives than there were in 2023 because of the domestic content requirements of the IRA. I understand that such a policy in the long run should work out and that the policy will create more U.S. jobs, more of a manufacturing base, and lead to a total vehicle conversion to EVs and therefore less emissions. But when, and over what time period? What exactly is the short run and long run when it comes to stemming emissions?

It seems the IRA EV policy is an example of where climate change and emission reductions were not really optimized for. It seems that it, as with most climate policy, is not optimizing for time, which we are in precious short supply of when it comes to our climate emergency.

Here is another example but with State Policy.

The State of California has dramatically reduced incentives to homeowners for rooftop solar. Among the reasons were good one from a policymaking standpoint, such as reducing cross-subsidies from lower income homeowners to higher income ones.

But sales of rooftop solar installations in California have reportedly dropped as much as 85% in some months of 2023 from a year earlier. Some in the solar industry project that installations in California will drop more than 40 percent this year and continue to decline through 2028.

It is of the utmost importance that massive amounts of emissions be reduced as soon as possible. That is not just my opinion. It is the finding of the IEA, the UNFCCC, and countless other bodies. So, it matters WHEN the emissions reductions happen. Because when a ton of CO2 goes into the atmosphere on the day you are reading this, it is going to be there for a long, long time. I know that carbon capture and carbon extraction are coming, but not on the timeline that matches with the need for reductions.

The EV tax provisions and the change in California are highly visible examples of the challenge in climate policymaking, but there are other less obvious ones. Take basic regulatory and administrative processes to implement a climate law. These should be accelerated, even if on a one-time basis, because of the climate timetable, to get the actual reductions to occur faster. As I wrote about last year in my “Faster” essay, if the standard process is to take 12 months to write the rules and structure for a grant program, we should try hard to see if we can do it in 6 months.

We must do things faster. We cannot simply do good things and even things in large magnitudes. They must be done faster and in magnitudes that lead to large amounts of emissions being reduced ASAP.

If to get a lot of immediate emissions reductions we need to optimize only for climate, and not for some other admirable policy objectives, then we should seriously consider that. As I wrote in my essay on “Being a Climate Voter”, we can get around to most issues a bit later. We can’t get around to addressing the climate situation “later”.

In saying all of this, I am not being naïve. I know how policy is made. I have been there. I have made it myself. I know the kind of horse-trading and other less savory things that go on.

But we have to at least change our thinking in making policy that either directly or indirectly addresses climate. We have to think about how in the policymaking things can be included to not just create emissions reductions but to create near-term reductions. In turn, any related policy provisions which hamper the speed of emissions reductions should be avoided.

If we try to serve all masters in climate policy, the climate sub-optimization that results will end up not serving any of them.

Climate is different. And we need to act like it.

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If you were forwarded this email, click the button below to sign up to receive these Blog Posts.

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Links to Past Posts:

It was an Instagram COP - And I am Finally OK with That

How to Talk About Climate With Your Crazy Uncle at Thanksgiving

Monty Python and Climate Change

What You Need to Know About NIMBYism

H mm..So How Much Did My Heat Pump Really Cost?