The Wrongheaded Rhetoric on Climate Change
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View Membership BenefitsClimate change is a problem we need to solve. But the discussion of the problem and its solution has become so bogged down in unquestioned and unquestionable conventional wisdoms, exaggerations, and third rails that the way things are going it will never be solved. Celebrated venture capitalist John Doerr’s new book, “Speed and Scale,” offers a solution, in a way. But it is itself so mired in the swamp of the terms of the discussion that its proposed solutions will go unnoticed and have little impact.
I was immediately drawn to read and review the book when I read the description at amazon.com. It says, “Venture capitalist John Doerr reveals a sweeping – and actionable – plan to conquer humanity’s greatest challenge, climate change.”
Note “actionable” in italics.
This is what drew my attention to the book. I thought it meant that it offered not just calls for pledges, targets, goals, or disclosures; these are the ways most so-called climate change “action” is framed. (It’s gotten to the point where “doing more” to alleviate climate change actually means “promising more,” not doing more.) But I thought the blurb for the book meant it would call for specific actions, not just promises and ambitions.
I’m afraid, though, that the book is not enough of a departure from the extant framework.
Same old, same old
The book has several problems.
It presents the climate change challenge in the usual apocalyptic, all-or-nothing terms.
It muddies the waters by introducing, but not discussing seriously a tangential – and complicated – issue: “accelerating our path to net zero depends on our commitment to equity and justice. We cannot do the first without the second.”
While saying quite clearly, and refreshingly, “lists of goals are not plans” – it does in fact conflate goals with plans.
Finally, it soft-pedals its solutions, in some ways misstating them – you can tell it’s taking pains to skirt the key third rail of the debate – and it presents too many diverse solutions without adequately distinguishing the most salient from the less important. This results in a “plan” that resembles a scatter-shot rather than a structured, well-organized plan of action.
I’ll take up these problems one by one.
It presents the climate change problem in the usual apocalyptic, all-or-nothing terms
Doerr says, “At our current pace, we will blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the Earth’s preindustrial mean temperatures – the threshold, scientists say, for severe planetary damage.”
He then adds:
“Unless we course correct with urgent speed and at massive scale, we’ll be staring at a doomsday scenario.”
This is standard climate-emergency speak. If we cross the warming threshold – which is identified as either 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit – there will be catastrophe. And it’s often said the “science” tells us this – which it does not. The science does not predict a specific tipping-point or threshold.
What kind of planetary doomsday scenario includes this Doerr statement: “In a warming world, huge tracts of uninhabitable Siberian tundra might become farmable …”?
To make it clear that this is not meant to identify a climate change silver lining, but a Russia “problem,” he adds, “… or at least more exploitable for the drilling of oil and gas – a potential windfall for Putin’s inner-circle oligarchs.”
This is so he can refer to Russia as a rogue actor: “How might this rogue actor be induced to change?”
Russia is a rogue actor, presumably, because its prospects, given climate change, don’t fall in line with the “catastrophe” script.
Climate change may indeed be a catastrophe for much or most of the world. Temperatures at the predicted level have occurred on earth before, but they have never, at least in hundreds of thousands or millions of years, risen nearly so fast. Ocean levels, waterways, atmospheric energies, will be disrupted. Ecosystems will have to migrate fast or wither away. Humans will have to move, potentially creating a refugee crisis greater than any we have yet seen.
But the apocalyptic, all-or-nothing framing is adopted not to conduct a rational discussion about what the dangers are and what the solutions may be. It is deployed to beat people and corporations over the head into action – or at least into pledging their intention to act.
This is not an honest effort to conduct a discourse about what, exactly, the dangers are from climate change, and what solutions we should think about and plan to implement. But it is the standard way that climate activists frame the discussion. Unfortunately, Doerr does not depart from this framing in his book. (Bill Gates did manage to do it in his – in my opinion better – book.)
It muddies the waters by bringing in a complicated tangential issue
For some reason, Doerr feels it necessary to say, without explaining why he said it, “I am an affluent white man, born in St. Louis, Missouri, from a generation whose negligence helped create this problem in the first place.” Presumably this is to apologize for his wealth, a sentiment that may be worth expressing, but I don’t see how it belongs in this book.
And as I mentioned above, he says, “accelerating our path to net zero depends on our commitment to equity and justice. We cannot do the first without the second.”
I don’t frankly know what he means by saying that accelerating our path to net zero depends on our commitment to equity and justice – and he doesn’t explain. I take this to be little more than the performative bow to equity and justice that has become obligatory in some circles.
But if I take the statement at face value it may make an important point – though that point does not necessarily accelerate our path to net zero. (To clarify, “net zero” emissions implies that greenhouse gas emissions stop completely or that greenhouse gases need to be sucked out of the atmosphere to offset those remaining.)
To take an example, consider the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France. Virtually all proposed climate change solutions include a tax on greenhouse gas emissions (or a cap-and-trade system, which is functionally equivalent to a tax).
In France such a tax was implemented on gasoline. But a mistake was made. The poorest people were not compensated to relieve them of the tax’s – for them – last-straw extra burden. The result was massive and often violent protests. The tax had to be withdrawn.
When planning a tax on emissions, policymakers must find a way to mitigate the negative impact on the poorest people. It is not easy to design a carbon tax so that it does not impose an undue burden on people who find it difficult to afford.
But there is another aspect to the “equity and justice” admonition. People in many poorer, more populous countries such as India and Indonesia want to have their lives improved by increased availability of reliable electricity. The easiest and least costly way to provide this at present is with coal.
One may think that these people are too short-sighted. Improving their lives in the short term by taking the easy path of coal may make them worse off in the long term because of the eventual climate change it causes. But it is what they want to do. It’s not just because of the avarice of the fossil fuel companies – as Greta Thunberg believes – it’s also because of the “greed” of ordinary people for a better life in the near future.
Thus, considerations of “equity and justice” may serve as a decelerator on the path to net zero, not an accelerator. If we are to consider these people’s desire for a better life, it may be necessary not to accelerate away from the use of fossil fuels too fast.
It does in fact conflate goals with plans
Doerr adopts a management approach involving what he calls OKRs, or objectives and key results. Each chapter or section includes a table in which the associated key results (KRs) are stated.
For example, it says, “Speed & Scale’s top-line OKR is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 – and to get halfway there by 2030.”
This is of course a target, not a plan of action. And most of the OKRs are similarly stated and highlighted in featured tables. They are targets to reach – not concrete plans for how to reach them.
I don’t understand why Doerr makes such a big deal of these KRs. They add little, and detract from the book’s pledge to provide plans, not lists of goals.
Again, the book falls in line with current practice in the COP-process dominated climate change solutions field – so-called actions really consist only of stating goals.1
It soft-pedals its solutions, taking pains to skirt the key third rail of the debate
I can’t tell for sure what Doerr thinks the solution is because it’s hard to tell from the text. He covers lots of individual solutions, from the central problem of emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, to the problem of emissions of methane from agriculture and farm animals, and so on.
The presentation of some of the solutions makes them sound very difficult to achieve, to say the least. One suspects Doerr does not believe those are going to work.
For example, consider extraction of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by engineering means. (Extraction by biological means – such as planting trees and changing the methods of agriculture – is feasible but limited.) He says, “If we’re counting on engineered solutions to remove half of the 10 billion tons of leftover carbon emissions [after other solutions have reduced emissions to a low level], current technology offers cold comfort. We’d need an expanse of solar panels as large as the state of Florida.” He further says, “To pump that much CO2 underground would be the equivalent of running the entire oil industry in reverse.” And, “We’ll also need to find a place to store all that CO2, which is really hard.”
I don’t think he believes carbon capture and storage is viable. At least not yet – breakthroughs over the next 10 to 30 years are always possible. He also believes (as does Bill Gates) that battery capacities are not going up enough or costs down enough.
What can fill the gaps? There’s a surprisingly short section on nuclear fission energy in which Bill Gates has a say, in an inset. That section includes this comment about nuclear energy: “Getting to net zero will be exceedingly difficult without it.”
Those words go by quickly, but they should give the reader pause. It’s a strong statement; renewables can’t do it alone.
When I came to this, I thought maybe Doerr has played a trick on the Green New Dealers. Green New Dealers shun fossil fuels passionately, but they also shun nuclear energy. They speak of climate change in the same apocalyptic terms that Doerr has adopted, as well as of equity and justice.
Perhaps Doerr adopted their language to establish that he is one of them, so he can ease them into considering nuclear energy.
If that’s what he intended, it’s subtle. He also adheres to the conventional wisdoms and third-rail avoidance that is obligatory when it comes to nuclear energy. For example, when he speaks of improving nuclear energy, he speaks of increasing its safety, even though nuclear energy has shown itself to be already by far the safest energy source (with the possible exceptions of wind and solar).
And he has also said, “When issues arise, governments rightfully layer on more regulation in service of safety, making an expensive operation even more so.”
In other words, excessive regulation in the service of increased nuclear safety is one of the reasons it has gotten so much more expensive. And yet so as not to violate the conventional wisdom, he is obliged to say that they “rightfully” do this, in obeisance to the obsessive – and mistaken – notion that nuclear energy is not safe enough.
A brief Croatian island sojourn
Two years ago, my wife and I went on a hiking and walking trip in Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania. (Best, surprisingly, was Albania.)
We spent a couple of days on two small Croatian islands. One day we did a walk around a big lake and wound up having coffee at a tiny café. There was only one other couple there. I struck up a conversation.
The man turned out to be an English nuclear energy consultant. I discussed the state of nuclear energy with him.
He made an interesting and important observation. He said that over the past 40 years solar energy – wind and photovoltaic arrays – relentlessly focused on reducing costs. (I know this because I worked 40 years ago at what is now the U.S.’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.) But over the past 40 years nuclear energy relentlessly focused not on reducing costs but on improving safety. Each improvement in safety – making a safe technology even safer – increased costs. But reducing cost was not the objective.
Conclusion
The solution is staring us in the face.
Environmentalists used to shun nuclear energy because of safety concerns. But we have learned – in part through decades of research on radiation, in part from experience – that nuclear energy is safe. We often hear that nuclear energy is “prohibitively expensive.” If that is so then why was it not prohibitively expensive during its rapid build-up in France and the United States and Europe and other places during the 1980s and 1990s?
After that build-up, France got 75% of its energy from nuclear power, the US 20%, and Europe on average 33%.2
This is a feasible, zero-carbon-emitting technology. It is only unwarranted panic over safety concerns that brought it down – together with the overregulation occasioned by those safety concerns.
It is often said now that renewable energy is cheaper. But that’s a misconception. You can’t directly compare the levelized cost of energy from solar or wind to that of nuclear because solar and wind are intermittent while nuclear is available on demand. In fact, in combination, nuclear and renewables cost less than either of them separately. An MIT study that simulated minimum-cost zero-emission electricity generation resulted in about half the energy produced by nuclear and half by renewables.
But the nuclear energy industry needs to be revived. It has atrophied from the disuse that ultimately followed the twin, mutually reinforcing scares of Three Mile Island and the purely fictional movie, “The China Syndrome,” in 1979. And nuclear power needs to be redesigned to dovetail with the renewable energy technologies that are becoming low enough in cost for them to be bought for many applications – such as rooftops – for no other reason than low cost alone.
And because of the extremely high cost of very rare nuclear power tail events, such as Fukushima (but the cost is not in human lives), nuclear energy needs to be supported and backstopped by governments, because insurance companies will not insure it.
All of this agrees with what John Doerr says in his book. Although he doesn’t specify how it should be spent, he says that the U.S. energy R&D budget should be increased by a factor of five. Most of this should go toward reviving, redesigning, and supporting nuclear energy for the shorter- and middle-term run. Much of the rest should go toward nuclear fusion R&D, the best hope for the very long term.
Except for the progressive left, which, for some reason, as mentioned above, continues to shun nuclear energy (but perhaps can be persuaded), embrace of nuclear energy for the U.S. is unlikely to be a partisan issue. It might even be an occasion for cooperation on R&D with China, maybe even Russia, both of which are the current leaders in nuclear energy technology in the U.S.’s absence.
We need a national and global conversation that focuses not on the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables, but on the energy transition from fossil fuels to the happy combination of renewables and nuclear energy. We need to realize that we can touch that third rail.
Economist and mathematician Michael Edesess is adjunct associate professor and visiting faculty at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, managing partner and special advisor at M1K LLC, and a research associate of the Edhec-Risk Institute. In 2007, he authored a book about the investment services industry titled The Big Investment Lie, published by Berrett-Koehler. His new book, The Three Simple Rules of Investing, co-authored with Kwok L. Tsui, Carol Fabbri and George Peacock, was published by Berrett-Koehler in June 2014.
1COP stands for “Conference of the Parties,” the series of meetings on climate change launched by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. COP26, held recently in Glasgow, Scotland, was the 26th in that series of meetings.
2The percentages have declined somewhat in recent years.
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