In this series of blog posts I will discuss some of the assigned readings for the Sustainable Planning Seminar (Urban Planning/Geography/Landscape Architecture 446) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
This week’s readings were:
- Profitable Solutions for Oil, Climate, and Proliferation by Amory Lovins
- A selected chapter from Super Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner.
- A tax proposal from Thomas Piketty
- An article on Carbon Pricing from the NY Times
- An op-ed by Paul Krugman about resource exploitation.
- “Opportunity in climate change”
- Yaron Answers: Capitalism and the Environment
- A chapter from Natural Capitalism by Lovins, Lovins, and Hawkins.
- TED talk from David Keith about geoengineering.
The common thread among these readings was to identify potential, economically feasible, solutions to the climate (and resource) crisis. Broadly, they were:
- Carbon pricing (internalizing the cost of pollution) (Piketty, NY Times).
- Increase economic efficiency (Muda and “Profitable Solutions”).
- Invest in renewable energy because it “creates jobs.”
- Geoengineering to slow climate change (included in the economics portion because it is cheap relative to other solutions).
While discussing these solutions, it is critical to keep in mind your own priorities. Two of my priorities are actually solving the climate crisis and ensuring the solutions are equitable. As I describe below, some solutions (in particular 100% renewable energy) are wholly inconsistent with the priorities claimed by their advocates.
Now, let’s talk about each one in turn.
Carbon Pricing
Carbon pricing would be an okay solution if it were more aggressive and placed a higher value on the social cost of carbon. Unfortunately, these plans often pass the burden to consumers. If the cost of carbon is applied uniformly (i.e. equally), then the result is greater inequity. People that can afford to pay for a carbon tax can continue to live their lives with relative impunity. People with fewer resources to begin with will face further restrictions on their basic needs, like electricity. Piketty’s solution that would tax the global North rather than the global South is a good start but is still a blunt instrument because it doesn’t address inequality (and inequity) within highly developed countries.
Economic Efficiency
Essentially, reduce waste and bloat in large corporations. Lovins gave the example of a manufacturing company that invested in complex machines to accelerate and homogenize a relatively simple task. However, the complex machinery required more work to maintain than simpler machines that took longer to perform the task – thus greater inefficiency. This is a nice idea and makes for better business, but it doesn’t translate well to policy. (Rhetorically) How would you make sure that all businesses got rid of this kind of inefficiency “waste?” To me, this strategy falls in the same category as demand reduction efforts. It’s not a reliable solution.
Investing in Renewable Energy
I am 100\% for investing in clean energy sources, but not at the expense of the existing nuclear energy fleet. There were several inaccurate or misleading claims scattered throughout the readings and videos. First, “renewable energy creates jobs” from the “Finding opportunity” video. The experts this news program consulted claimed uncritically that renewable energy creates jobs and that people that work in fossil fuel industries can be retrained to work in clean energy jobs. What a load of s**t.
Solar and wind farms have a fraction of the employees that nuclear plants do (which
have more employees than fossil fuel plants). As with energy reliability, the
comparison to nuclear power is not even close.
If creating jobs is an actual policy goal then investing in solar and wind is clearly not the way to do achieve it. Allowing your nuclear plants to shut down prematurely (arguably anytime before their 80 years of life) is also clearly a mistake.
The opportunity for retraining and working in the renewable energy industry, if a worker manages to secure one of these scarce jobs, still doesn’t pay as well as working in a nuclear plant, which has the highest average pay among any source of generation.
You are lying to yourself if you think renewable energy investment will create these jobs. I can hear people saying “it creates jobs in other places in the supply chain.” Do you really think nuclear energy, the most sophisticated and complex mode of energy generation in the world, doesn’t have as many or more “supply chain” jobs as renewable energy? Stop kidding yourself.
My point is simply this: be honest about your priorities and goals. You can advocate for investment in solar and wind energy – I support that – but claiming “job creation” as a benefit is a farse.
The second claim leveled against nuclear power (in these readings) is the risk for nuclear weapons proliferation. Lovins suggests that relying on nuclear power is equivalent to choosing “nuclear holocaust” in the list of ways to perish. Of course I don’t want to die in a nuclear explosion nor in a variety of grotesque ways in the subsequent dystopia. Equating nuclear power and nuclear weapons is a false comparison.
Similarly, if you want to invest in solar and wind energy you cannot simultaneously be worried about excessive resource use and “waste.” Contrary to renewable energy, there is a plan for spent nuclear fuel – it’s currently stored in dry casks. I think dry cask storage is superior to geologic storage because it will be easier to access if we ever want to recycle the material. Recycling spent nuclear fuel is absolutely possible, France has been doing it for 40 years.
The calculations for the above plot are mine, if you don’t agree with some of my assumptions you can play around with the numbers yourself in this Google Colab Notebook
Geoengineering
I’m intrigued by some of the plans that don’t involve putting sulfates in the atmosphere (making clouds with sea water, perhaps?). My only issue is that the secondary effects of this strategy are unknown.
Notes:
- Muda is an interesting Japanese word for waste.
- The chapter argues for growing the economy by reducing bloat.
- “Profitable Solutions” conflates nuclear power with nuclear weapons proliferation. This is an utterly false comparison. The author states: “Micropower thus added four times the electricity and 11 times the capacity that nuclear power added globally in 2005.” Congratulations? Capacity does not equal generation.
- The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has an anti-nuclear bias that makes their assessments rather fraught.
- Microgrids can benefit from micro-nuclear reactors too! The technology is possible and will be deployed in the next 5 or so years.
- Levitt and Dubner essentially argue in favor of geoengineering to slow or reverse climate change.
- The opportunity in climate change video discusses the potential for job creation and retraining. According to these individuals investment in clean energy creates many new jobs and possibilities for retraining. This is completely false. If job creation was an actual policy goal, there would be more investment in nuclear power, not renewables like solar and wind [1].
- Not only do renewable energy sources require fewer jobs, they aren’t paid as well as jobs at nuclear plants [2].
- The Yaron Brook video was posted by the Ayn Rand Institute. Ayn Rand was an anti-semite and her individualist philosophy has been used to justify the idea that poor people are poor due to moral failings and successful people are successful because they are morally superior. The credibility of the Ayn Rand Institute is minimal, to me.
- Incredible. Yaron begins by asking “what environment,” followed by claims that technology has made the “human environment” healthier and cleaner that at any point in history. He failed to ask the other obvious question: for whom? These same arguments have been repeated elsewhere (e.g. by Alex Epstein in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) an they are not at all salient.
- I stopped watching, this guy is an absolute clown. Who supposedly owns the water? Does everyone have an equal ability to pursue damages (a potentially costly process)? What if I don’t agree with how “someone” (a private company, most likely) is using their “private” resources? Yaron doesn’t bother asking nor attempt to answer these questions. The privatization solution is tremendously inequitable.
References:
[1] Wall Street Journal
[2] Campaign for Green Nuclear Deal.
[3] Nuclear proliferation