6 ms·

US support for environmental policies fading as political gap remains huge

18 points by samizdis 4y ago

samizdis 4y ago
Pew Research Center report cited in article: Americans Divided Over Direction of Biden’s Climate Change Policies [1], published July 14. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/07/14/americans-divided-over-direction-of-bidens-climate-change-policies/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/07/14/americans-div... EDIT to add: Brief Axios article on Pew report focuses on response differences (among Republicans) by age: A GOP generation gap on climate change [2] [2] https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gop-climage-change-generation-gap-poll https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gop-climage-change-generati...
LatteLazy 4y ago
There is really no point in moderate policies, the west either needs to go hard and force others to follow or admit defeat and move to mitigation efforts instead. The time when we could solve this with 1% of GDP is past...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Immaterial at this point. The economics of clean energy are improving rapidly enough you can ignore the politics of it. https://electrek.co/2022/07/14/renewables-cheaper-than-coal/ https://electrek.co/2022/07/14/renewables-cheaper-than-coal/ https://twitter.com/flacamera/status/1547190457444311041 https://twitter.com/flacamera/status/1547190457444311041 > Investments in renewables continue to pay huge dividends in 2022, as highlighted by IRENA’s costs data. In non-OECD countries, the 109 GW of renewable energy additions in 2021 that cost less than the cheapest new fossil fuel-fired option will reduce costs by at least USD $5.7 billion annually for the next 25-30 years. > High coal and fossil gas prices in 2021 and 2022 will also profoundly deteriorate the competitiveness of fossil fuels and make solar and wind even more attractive. With an unprecedented surge in European fossil gas prices, for example, new fossil gas generation in Europe will increasingly become uneconomic over its lifetime, increasing the risk of stranded assets. https://www.fastcompany.com/90758168/3-charts-that-explain-the-uss-new-records-in-renewable-energy-generation https://www.fastcompany.com/90758168/3-charts-that-explain-t... > To make a swift transition to a cleaner grid, the United States needs to set records for renewable electricity generation pretty much every single quarter. So far in 2022, the numbers are encouraging. > From January to March, renewable energy power plants generated 242,956 gigawatt hours (GWh), which was 23.5% of U.S. electricity generation; both records—an increase from 19.5% in the first quarter of 2021, and 20.8% in the full year. The growth was thanks in part to more than 80 new wind and solar plants that went online during the quarter. The figures are from the Energy Information Administration. EDIT: @ ZeroGravitas: “The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  the economics of clean energy (as they are mostly presented in media) only work when there is sufficient dispatchable (typically dirty) power available. After a certain tipping point the grid is no longer stable if you provide only non-dispatchable generation on a MW-for-MW basis. In order to avoid this catastrophe you need one of two things - you need a multiplier on your clean power generation and investments in transmission to support it, or you need storage sufficient to make a non-dispatchable source dispatchable (and of course transmission to support that, but not quite so much). Otherwise, the physics simply don't work. The trend does not extrapolate. It all breaks! Renewable energy is absolutely essential, but the path we are going down of simply building new renewable generation, performing a linear regression on that line, and assuming that it can keep going until the grid is 100% renewable is a big flashing red warning light to anyone who understands the physics. If you want to support renewable generation, support storage!!! Build batteries, build pumped storage hydro, build transmission. The generation is the easy part! Without planning and policy, the economics of the issue will not solve it on their own, we will end up with a mess of an unreliable power grid until such time that the incentives no longer support building new renewables and we will have the worst of both worlds.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    The cost of firm renewables is approaching a point where they are cheaper than fossil fuels. Firm renewables are dispatchabale because they're battery backed. Refer to the NextEra slide graphic in my comment below [1]. Maybe you need some natural gas or transmission in there to meet extreme shortfalls, but this is baked into the costs. There's roughly 430GW of storage currently in US ISO interconnect queues wrt to your comment about supporting storage [2]. If the grid is unreliable, funds will be spent on storage to make it reliable, because the alternatives are uneconomical (Hawaii's Oahu island is replacing its last coal fired plant in the next 60 days with Tesla Megapacks for grid services, for example [3]). The demand for this is fairly evident [4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31926560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31926560 [2] https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-storage-in-us-interconnection-queues-alongside-nearly-1tw-of-renewables/ https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st... [3] https://electrek.co/2022/06/27/tesla-megapacks-replace-hawaii-last-remaining-coal-plant/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/27/tesla-megapacks-replace-hawai... [4] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-demand/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-demand/
rayiner 4y ago
This sort of polling exaggerates differences because it asks binary questions. That just gets people to give the answer that matches their political identity. When you ask people to put a dollar value on that feeling, however, you get a different picture: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-higher-electric-bills-combat-climate-change https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-... If you ask people would they pay $1/month to combat climate change, most say yes. That’s probably your Dem/GOP split. But if you increase that to $20/month, then 68% of people won’t pay it, versus 30% who will. Only 15% will pay $75/month. When the question is, in substance, “do you value climate change as a serious threat that you are personally willing to sacrifice to avoid,” the partisan gap narrows dramatically. The vast majority of people don’t put a dollar value on climate change that reflects the scientific consensus about its threat.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Why would higher electricity bills be required for climate change? https://carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-gen-below-2c-and-regulatory-risk-for-us-coal-power-owners/ https://carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-gen-be... > phasing out unprofitable coal could save $10 billion per year and reduce household electricity bills by up to 10% by 2021
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The point isn't whether climate mitigation will cost people on their bills; it's that you can reframe the question around a moderate amount of money --- less than people will spend for a medium coffee from Dunkin Donuts 3 times a week, say --- and watch support drop precipitously. That's suggestive of how people prioritize climate change among other issues.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      If you want that kind of info, you just ask the question. Once you specify who is going to get the money and for what, you're building in a lot of assumptions.
betwixthewires 4y ago
> A large number of people now think they've experienced the reality of climate change. Over 40 percent say they've experienced extreme weather and/or extended heat waves, while 30 percent say their region has gone through drought and another 20 percent cite major wildfires. In all these cases, 80 percent of those who said they had experienced these problems suspect that climate change has contributed to them (as, in many cases, it has). Emphasis mine. This to me is a subtle admission that most people who think they've experienced the effects of climate change have in fact not experienced them, or at least, not in the ways they think. Otherwise it wouldn't simply be in many cases, but in every case or at least, in the vast majority of cases. But still, it implies that this is a good thing. The data about the direction of the country appears to me to speak particularly about energy policy. The effect of climate change related regulation that is most prominent in people's lives is the price of fuel at the pump. Of course people think we are going in the wrong direction, their lives are getting significantly harder. And perhaps they're right, we all know that climate change policy is about balancing the needs of a population with it's impact on the environment with an eye to a good resolution, and perhaps the current cost of fuel is emblematic of a bit too aggressive approach. One issue I take with a lot of these articles is the conflation of environmental policies with the subset of specifically climate change directed policies. I doubt most Americans are happy with the current set of regulations on chemical pollution in waterways and want more stringent restrictions. Most people would probably agree that logging woodland should be rotated. Most Americans wildly support environmental policies and regulations, but significantly less support the current policies aimed at fighting climate change.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Not to put too fine point on it, BS. In most cases where people are experiencing effects, we still can't definitively say yet that this particular or that particular one is definitively traceable to global climate disruption. But we know with certainty that, in aggregate, they are. This term "climate change" that they still use is a problem. It is neutral, but we know that it is an imminent, looming catastrophe that, if we do not mobilize an overwhelming response, will engulf us and could well end with civilization collapsing and billions starving. The exact mechanism of collapse is of course hard to predict. Will it be via ocean ecosystem collapse as dissolved CO2 increases, pH falls, and shells cannot be grown, eliminating much of the world's access to protein? We already see effects. Will it be via widespread crop failure from drought and flooding leading to mass migration of refugees? We see that, too. Or from heavily populated areas becoming literally fatal to be outdoors in, on certain days of the year? We see clear trends toward it. Will it be sea level rise flooding places millions live, who must then move? Sea level rise is quite unevenly distributed. Will it be when ocean currents change routes, causing huge changes to local climate well beyond average global change? Two things are certain: (1) people will not stay put and die, and (2) the places they would need to move to or through already have people, in many cases also threatened. Historically, mass movement has resulted in the ascent of fascist-like government, something already well along in the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and Russia, and threatening India, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US. Rise of fascistic government is always followed by escalating war, leading by steps big and small toward global thermonuclear war. With or without nuclear holocaust, the international balance of forces grows unstable, and collapse comes more and more easily. We have seen big impacts from tiny supply chain hiccups already. None of the individual steps are certain or inevitable, and the future is certain to deliver many surprises, but the direction is clear. How far down the path does it seem smart to go?
Proven 4y ago

18 points by samizdis 4y ago

Pew Research Center report cited in article: Americans Divided Over Direction of Biden’s Climate Change Policies [1], published July 14. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/07/14/americans-divided-over-direction-of-bidens-climate-change-policies/ https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/07/14/americans-div... EDIT to add: Brief Axios article on Pew report focuses on response differences (among Republicans) by age: A GOP generation gap on climate change [2] [2] https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gop-climage-change-generation-gap-poll https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gop-climage-change-generati...

LatteLazy 4y ago

There is really no point in moderate policies, the west either needs to go hard and force others to follow or admit defeat and move to mitigation efforts instead. The time when we could solve this with 1% of GDP is past...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Immaterial at this point. The economics of clean energy are improving rapidly enough you can ignore the politics of it. https://electrek.co/2022/07/14/renewables-cheaper-than-coal/ https://electrek.co/2022/07/14/renewables-cheaper-than-coal/ https://twitter.com/flacamera/status/1547190457444311041 https://twitter.com/flacamera/status/1547190457444311041 > Investments in renewables continue to pay huge dividends in 2022, as highlighted by IRENA’s costs data. In non-OECD countries, the 109 GW of renewable energy additions in 2021 that cost less than the cheapest new fossil fuel-fired option will reduce costs by at least USD $5.7 billion annually for the next 25-30 years. > High coal and fossil gas prices in 2021 and 2022 will also profoundly deteriorate the competitiveness of fossil fuels and make solar and wind even more attractive. With an unprecedented surge in European fossil gas prices, for example, new fossil gas generation in Europe will increasingly become uneconomic over its lifetime, increasing the risk of stranded assets. https://www.fastcompany.com/90758168/3-charts-that-explain-the-uss-new-records-in-renewable-energy-generation https://www.fastcompany.com/90758168/3-charts-that-explain-t... > To make a swift transition to a cleaner grid, the United States needs to set records for renewable electricity generation pretty much every single quarter. So far in 2022, the numbers are encouraging. > From January to March, renewable energy power plants generated 242,956 gigawatt hours (GWh), which was 23.5% of U.S. electricity generation; both records—an increase from 19.5% in the first quarter of 2021, and 20.8% in the full year. The growth was thanks in part to more than 80 new wind and solar plants that went online during the quarter. The figures are from the Energy Information Administration. EDIT: @ ZeroGravitas: “The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”

idiotsecant 4y ago
the economics of clean energy (as they are mostly presented in media) only work when there is sufficient dispatchable (typically dirty) power available. After a certain tipping point the grid is no longer stable if you provide only non-dispatchable generation on a MW-for-MW basis. In order to avoid this catastrophe you need one of two things - you need a multiplier on your clean power generation and investments in transmission to support it, or you need storage sufficient to make a non-dispatchable source dispatchable (and of course transmission to support that, but not quite so much). Otherwise, the physics simply don't work. The trend does not extrapolate. It all breaks! Renewable energy is absolutely essential, but the path we are going down of simply building new renewable generation, performing a linear regression on that line, and assuming that it can keep going until the grid is 100% renewable is a big flashing red warning light to anyone who understands the physics. If you want to support renewable generation, support storage!!! Build batteries, build pumped storage hydro, build transmission. The generation is the easy part! Without planning and policy, the economics of the issue will not solve it on their own, we will end up with a mess of an unreliable power grid until such time that the incentives no longer support building new renewables and we will have the worst of both worlds.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  The cost of firm renewables is approaching a point where they are cheaper than fossil fuels. Firm renewables are dispatchabale because they're battery backed. Refer to the NextEra slide graphic in my comment below [1]. Maybe you need some natural gas or transmission in there to meet extreme shortfalls, but this is baked into the costs. There's roughly 430GW of storage currently in US ISO interconnect queues wrt to your comment about supporting storage [2]. If the grid is unreliable, funds will be spent on storage to make it reliable, because the alternatives are uneconomical (Hawaii's Oahu island is replacing its last coal fired plant in the next 60 days with Tesla Megapacks for grid services, for example [3]). The demand for this is fairly evident [4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31926560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31926560 [2] https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-storage-in-us-interconnection-queues-alongside-nearly-1tw-of-renewables/ https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st... [3] https://electrek.co/2022/06/27/tesla-megapacks-replace-hawaii-last-remaining-coal-plant/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/27/tesla-megapacks-replace-hawai... [4] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-demand/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-demand/

rayiner 4y ago

This sort of polling exaggerates differences because it asks binary questions. That just gets people to give the answer that matches their political identity. When you ask people to put a dollar value on that feeling, however, you get a different picture: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-higher-electric-bills-combat-climate-change https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-... If you ask people would they pay $1/month to combat climate change, most say yes. That’s probably your Dem/GOP split. But if you increase that to $20/month, then 68% of people won’t pay it, versus 30% who will. Only 15% will pay $75/month. When the question is, in substance, “do you value climate change as a serious threat that you are personally willing to sacrifice to avoid,” the partisan gap narrows dramatically. The vast majority of people don’t put a dollar value on climate change that reflects the scientific consensus about its threat.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Why would higher electricity bills be required for climate change? https://carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-gen-below-2c-and-regulatory-risk-for-us-coal-power-owners/ https://carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-gen-be... > phasing out unprofitable coal could save $10 billion per year and reduce household electricity bills by up to 10% by 2021
- tptacek 4y ago
  The point isn't whether climate mitigation will cost people on their bills; it's that you can reframe the question around a moderate amount of money --- less than people will spend for a medium coffee from Dunkin Donuts 3 times a week, say --- and watch support drop precipitously. That's suggestive of how people prioritize climate change among other issues.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    If you want that kind of info, you just ask the question. Once you specify who is going to get the money and for what, you're building in a lot of assumptions.

betwixthewires 4y ago

> A large number of people now think they've experienced the reality of climate change. Over 40 percent say they've experienced extreme weather and/or extended heat waves, while 30 percent say their region has gone through drought and another 20 percent cite major wildfires. In all these cases, 80 percent of those who said they had experienced these problems suspect that climate change has contributed to them (as, in many cases, it has). Emphasis mine. This to me is a subtle admission that most people who think they've experienced the effects of climate change have in fact not experienced them, or at least, not in the ways they think. Otherwise it wouldn't simply be in many cases, but in every case or at least, in the vast majority of cases. But still, it implies that this is a good thing. The data about the direction of the country appears to me to speak particularly about energy policy. The effect of climate change related regulation that is most prominent in people's lives is the price of fuel at the pump. Of course people think we are going in the wrong direction, their lives are getting significantly harder. And perhaps they're right, we all know that climate change policy is about balancing the needs of a population with it's impact on the environment with an eye to a good resolution, and perhaps the current cost of fuel is emblematic of a bit too aggressive approach. One issue I take with a lot of these articles is the conflation of environmental policies with the subset of specifically climate change directed policies. I doubt most Americans are happy with the current set of regulations on chemical pollution in waterways and want more stringent restrictions. Most people would probably agree that logging woodland should be rotated. Most Americans wildly support environmental policies and regulations, but significantly less support the current policies aimed at fighting climate change.

ncmncm 4y ago
Not to put too fine point on it, BS. In most cases where people are experiencing effects, we still can't definitively say yet that this particular or that particular one is definitively traceable to global climate disruption. But we know with certainty that, in aggregate, they are. This term "climate change" that they still use is a problem. It is neutral, but we know that it is an imminent, looming catastrophe that, if we do not mobilize an overwhelming response, will engulf us and could well end with civilization collapsing and billions starving. The exact mechanism of collapse is of course hard to predict. Will it be via ocean ecosystem collapse as dissolved CO2 increases, pH falls, and shells cannot be grown, eliminating much of the world's access to protein? We already see effects. Will it be via widespread crop failure from drought and flooding leading to mass migration of refugees? We see that, too. Or from heavily populated areas becoming literally fatal to be outdoors in, on certain days of the year? We see clear trends toward it. Will it be sea level rise flooding places millions live, who must then move? Sea level rise is quite unevenly distributed. Will it be when ocean currents change routes, causing huge changes to local climate well beyond average global change? Two things are certain: (1) people will not stay put and die, and (2) the places they would need to move to or through already have people, in many cases also threatened. Historically, mass movement has resulted in the ascent of fascist-like government, something already well along in the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and Russia, and threatening India, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US. Rise of fascistic government is always followed by escalating war, leading by steps big and small toward global thermonuclear war. With or without nuclear holocaust, the international balance of forces grows unstable, and collapse comes more and more easily. We have seen big impacts from tiny supply chain hiccups already. None of the individual steps are certain or inevitable, and the future is certain to deliver many surprises, but the direction is clear. How far down the path does it seem smart to go?

Proven 4y ago