Climate Brush
2026 07 10
Is it time to get out the old (electric) brush cutter to clear away some climate change policy undergrowth? Admittedly this is not supposed to be systematic, much less comprehensive of even the last x days of Augean Stables content. Indeed, I dare to deal with these pieces because they are clearable, a messy back 40, not a dung heap. I cannot divert the Alpheus and Peneus.
Onward!
Roger Pielke comments at length and in detail on the Statistical Review of World Energy but his conclusion says it all
Carbon-free energy is growing. Decarbonization continues its long, slow, pre-policy downward trend. Global fossil fuel consumption continues to increase. The carbon intensity of energy has barely budged, drifting downward ever so slowly. The gap between the required rate of change to hit aggressive decarbonization targets and the observed rate in the real world widens every year.
If we are to achieve deep decarbonization this century, the lesson to take is that we should start thinking about some different options for how to get there. What we have been doing isn’t working.
Pielke builds his analysis around the identity
CO2 = CO2/E * E/$ * $
CO2 emitted equals the CO2 emitted per unit of energy used times the energy used per dollar of world GDP times GDP. This is not very good scaffolding because it is hard to translate into a policies => objective framework. For one thing “decarbonization” should not be the objective but something like maximum future income net of harm caused by CO2 accumulation and net of the cost of adapting to that accumulation[1]. Depending on the cost of CCS, there might well be continued use of fossil fuel and so no total decarbonization at all. For another increasing energy efficiency contributes to income maximization although it does not advance “decarbonization.” Finally, if “decarbonization” is the objective then de-growth reduces CO2 emissions quite well.
The formula rightly puts CO2 free energy at the center of climate change policy, but fails to take account of total energy use being an input to income. Reducing CO2/E Is key, but Pielke, having called CO2/E to center stage, gave the protagonist the anticlimactic line, “…isn’t working.”
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Roger Pielke also gleefully reports that Another Pillar of Climate Advocacy Collapses
This requires some explanation as it is mainly an inside baseball kind of issue. Back in the Paleo-Bush era, (2004) Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University argued in “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies” that humanity already possessed all the technology needed to solve the climate problem well into the 21st century.
The idea was that by starting then and consistently employing a series of specific existing technologies for 50 years, the concentration of CO2 could be stabilized and the level of use of fossil fuels held steady. Over time each technology would displace a growing amount of CO2 emission producing a stack of long thin triangles on a graph that the authors called “wedges.”
Many climate advocacy groups latched onto the wedges rhetoric for advancing their pet solutions, but as Pielke says and said then,
We didn’t [have them] then and we still don’t today.
Well, yes/no is almost never the right answer in economics. What would have been the cost of employing 2004 technologies to stabilize CO2 concentrations by 2054? What would it be with 2026 technologies? Pacala and Socolow did not say and the climate activist groups did not ask.
A bad rhetorical framework for policy advocacy, but did it really affect policy? Did it discourage research into zero-CO2 emitting technologies -- solar, nuclear, geothermal, CCS, wind? Did it even direct policy at discouraging CO2 emissions efficiently?
Either way, imagine Pielke’s schadenfreude when it was discovered that the original paper was promoted by British Petroleum, that a BP executive even suggested the “wedges” terminology! The paper’s authors were looking for ways to get around the Bush “do-nothing” attitude and BP was happy to support an approach with little immediate impact on oil and gas production. Pielke was pleased not just that he had been right in objecting to “wedges” but that being right, at the time, had earned him many critics.
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Katharine Hayhoe true to her profile (“fact-based, practical, and hopeful”) touts The Great Solar-Coal Flip.
The UK, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, turned off its last coal-fired power plant in 2024 and now gets nearly half its power from sun and wind. China, long seen as the poster child for coal, now installs more wind and solar power annually than the rest of the world combined, and is hitting its renewable energy targets well ahead of schedule.
Now, the U.S. is getting in on the solar race. There’s already more solar than coal on the Texas grid, and for the first time on record last month, solar generated more electricity than coal across the whole U.S.—12.8% versus 12.2%. This is a huge flip from just five years ago, when coal-generated power outweighed solar by a factor of three.[2]
All this is fact based, practical, and hopeful but for policy, “So what?” This kind of cheerleading for zero-CO2 technologies was critical back in the bad-old days of claiming that doing anything about climate change was too expensive. Does Hayhoe now get to the same conclusion because it is so inexpensive? Is getting the present Administration out of the way of zero-CO2 emissions ALL that is necessary? I don’t believe she believes that. But the silence is even a weaker bottom line than Pielke.
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The NYT reports that Democrats Change Their Tune
… some of the party’s leaders argue that they should stop trying to throttle oil and gas, which heat the planet when burned. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines.
This is good news, but as “news” it is off center.
Although the Biden administration (the Sanders-Warren administration, in effect) came in “talking” about throttling oil and gas, it did not do a lot until late when it quite unwisely “paused” LNG export projects. [See: Why Not LNG Exports] Both talk and action needed to change. Reducing the US supply of oil and gas will have little effect on CO2 emissions. What the US does not produce will be (largely) substituted by production elsewhere. Effective policy needs to focus on reducing US demand for fossil fuel combustion by deploying ever-less expensive substitute technologies, an approach that can be exported to the rest of the world (as Hayhoe points out). IRA could have been such a policy shift but it omitted the “less expensive” part, offering excessively large subsidies which can permit “more expensive” substitutes.
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David Wallace-Wells opines “We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.”
There are three big things to know, I think, about the astounding climatic anomaly that happened in Europe [in late June], with records shattered in half a dozen countries, more than a thousand people dying in a single week and roads melting and tram tracks buckling and bus drivers fainting and crashing in the historic heat.
1. The heat was anomalous. “In a stable preindustrial environment, according to one estimate, the region could expect such an event once every 26,000 years.”
But the environment has changed.
2. “A heat wave of this magnitude has grown more than 100 times as likely just since the landmark European heat wave of 2003.”
3. “Measured against a base line of rising global temperatures, the heat in Bordeaux, France, for instance, registered only its fifth-largest deviation over the past century.”
As an aside, note that although it may be reasonable to attribute the increase in likelihood of heat waves to the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, the data presented are NOT derived from a model linking the probability of this kind of event to CO2 accumulation. They come from simple averages and time series analysis. In other words, the headline got it right, “retrofit.” Whatever may be done to prevent further CO2 accumulation, adaption to the effects of already accumulated CO2 (that IS the most reasonable hypothesis for the change) is the topic of Wallace-Wells’s opinion piece, not mitigation of future accumulation.
And what better place (or worse) to start than the glee some US pundits express at slower take up of air-conditioning in Europe that in the US, supposedly driven by misguided public policy in discouraging it or “irrational” European preferences. Wallace-Wells and others have long lists of reasons why less use of AC has made sense in Europe, reasons ranging from construction materials (brick and mortar vs stud and drywall) to geography (the often cited Bordeaux is as far north as Bangor, ME.)
And even if Wallace-Wells does not draw any strong policy conclusions, I will.
a) Precisely because the estimates of the heat anomaly do not come from a proper model linking CO2 emissions to specific geophysical changes we are not well positioned to optimize investment adapting to the increase.
b) Adaption is costly and public investment as a share of GDP in the US at least (I don’t know about Europe) has decreased, so adaption woud have to fight for a expanding slice of a shrinking pie. This has fiscal (read, tax increase) implications.
c) The cost of adaption is part of the reason we should do cost effective mitigation of future CO2 emissions. Note “cost effective.” Mitigation that costs more than adaption (roof-top solar with net metering and no time-of-day metering is my favorite example) makes little sense.
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Matt Yglesias asks Should Data Centers Pay a Carbon Tax? No, although they might pay for their local externalities (if any) with something called a “carbon tax.” (The Manhattan entry fee in NYC was called a “congestion charge.” Wrong name but good policy. “A rose by any other name …”)
The “No” is also the opportunity to explain again that
a) “Carbon taxes” are not collected from the emitters of CO2 who ultimately pay it, but collected as an excise tax on the first sale of a fossil fuel into the economy in proportion to the carbon content.
b) Their level should be derived from the same CO2 emissions => geophysical changes models that investment in adaption should be derived from.
c) As the least costly way of reducing CO2 emissions, they are the most exportable to any country that in fact wishes to participate in reducing global CO2 emissions.
d) A CO2 content border adjustment fee prevents domestic consumers from offshoring their CO2 emissions to countries without carbon taxation and encourages said other countries to adopt carbon taxation.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Image: Rancher with brush cutter. [Chat gave me weed eater and I didn’t insist.]
[1] Yes, this elides the issue of how to value the dead weight loss of consumption today vs consumption of our supposedly much richer descendants. My personal view is that for this kind of comparison we do NOT discount future consumption because it is future at all. We might shade the relative value somewhat on account of future pc consumption being higher than ours, just as today we should tax people with high consumption at higher rates than those with lower consumption today.
[2] To get really nerdy comparing Kw capacity does not really compare CO2 emissions. It depends on when those Kw become KwH and at what time of day they are generated.
[Standard bleg: Although my style is know-it-all-ism, I know that I can be mistaken and am prone to overstate my points. Also, there is an amazing range of views and experiences among readers. Bring those to bear by commenting on these posts. Both other readers and I will benefit.]