Learning from the debates

This past week, I examined Barack Obama's editorial in Science Magazine concerning his optimism about the future of renewable energy.  The White House has now changed hands.  As the Trump administration takes over, it is worth looking back at how Trump and his opponent Hillary Clinton addressed the issues of energy and global warming when they were asked about it in the debates.  In Trump’s case, it is useful to know what our President’s priorities are and what that means going forward.  In Clinton’s case, it is worth going back to see what she got right and what she got wrong, in order to understand what people who would challenge Trump need to know and say if they want to bring about the best possible energy future for this country and this planet.

Clinton, to her credit, introduced the subject of clean energy in the first debate during a general discourse on job creation.  She started talking about the United States’ potential role as a clean energy superpower, and then she mentioned Trump’s “Chinese hoax” quote regarding global warming.  Trump denied saying this, but the actual quote from Trump’s Twitter feed from November 6, 2012 says “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”  China remains the planet's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but they have also just built the largest solar energy farm in the world.  They certainly take the notion of being a clean energy superpower very seriously. 

Trump responded by bringing up a government investment in a solar energy company that turned out to be “a disaster.”  The company he is referring to is called Solyndra.  Solyndra received a half billion dollar grant from the US government to develop solar panels made from copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS.  This was part of President Obama’s “all of the above” approach to developing our energy infrastructure.  CIGS was seen as a potential alternative to silicon, which is the primary material used in solar panels.  Unfortunately for Solyndra, in the two years after receiving that grant, the price of silicon dropped by a factor of five.  Solyndra went bankrupt, but what needs to be said in no uncertain terms (and what should have been said by Clinton at the debate) is that the dramatic drop in the price of silicon was wonderful news for the solar industry as a whole, and it's a big reason why utility-scale solar is now fully cost-competitive with other sources of energy generation like coal and natural gas.

In the second debate, a private citizen asked an excellent question about energy policy.  Trump responded first, declaring our energy industry to be “under absolute siege” from the Obama Administration, and stating that the EPA was “killing these energy companies.”  The EPA did announce a Climate Action Plan in 2012; it went into effect in 2015, but its full implementation has been held up in court.  What has been the impact on the fossil fuels industry? Natural gas has seen a steady surge in production over the past decade that does not appear to have been affected by policy from Washington.  US oil production did peak in 2014, but it remains far higher than it was in 2010, and the United States is currently a net exporter of oil.  Coal production has been on a downward trend for close to a decade at this point.  While that trend does appear to have accelerated in the last two years, and the Climate Action Plan might have had an effect on it, it was instigated by the surge in natural gas production.  So some energy companies have been hurt in recent years, but that has actually had more to do with economics than politics.  And other energy companies have done quite well.

Trump also mentions “clean coal,” which involves adding a process in coal plants that removes carbon dioxide from the emissions.  Ironically, a state-of-the-art clean coal plant that also received support initially from the Obama Administration has, like Solyndra, to this point been a sunk cost for the government.  The difference is that Solyndra failed for reasons that were good for the solar industry as a whole, but making clean coal cost-effective has proven to be a difficult obstacle to overcome.  Coal, even without any additional burdens imposed for environmental reasons — burdens which, for the sake of the planet’s health, honestly need to be there — is struggling to compete economically with natural gas and now with renewables as well.  It’s important to be honest about that.

Trump’s answer gave Clinton plenty of opportunity to respond, but rather than going straight to the substance, she regrettably attacked Trump for using Chinese steel in his buildings.  She did mention that the United States is now energy independent, but given Trump’s emphasis on how policy was killing energy companies, she needed to be much more forceful on that point.  Clinton makes an interesting point about the Middle East controlling the price of oil.  I don't believe that's as true now as it was in the past, given the United States’ present state of energy independence.  However, the OPEC nations have until recently maintained production of oil at a high rate even as American production has surged, and that has helped to keep oil prices down. The OPEC nations agreed in November to lower production, though, and other oil producing countries including Russia agreed to follow suit in December.  The United States has yet to commit on this issue.  Given that Rex Tillerson, the Exxon executive who Trump nominated to be Secretary of State, has had a business relationship with Vladimir Putin in the past, it seems likely that we won't aggressively undercut Russia.  On the other hand, were Trump to go along with decreasing oil production, he’d have no way of deflecting responsibility for the ensuing spike in gas prices.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Clinton concludes her answer by again emphasizing America’s potential role as a clean energy superpower, while also warning against leaving people behind if they lose their jobs as the economy changes.  What she needed to do here, which Obama did in his editorial last week, was cite the US Department of Energy’s Energy and Employment Report.  Both the 2016 and 2017 editions indicate that the solar industry in America is currently employing more people than the coal industry, and Clinton really needed to hammer that point home.

So what do the pre-election debates say about the state of American energy post-inauguration?  For starters, it’s a given that Trump will undo restrictions and regulations on the fossil fuel industry as a whole.  The natural gas industry was doing just fine anyway, and barring a breakthrough in efficiency or storage technology that would unequivocally tilt the economic scales in favor of renewables, it will continue to do so.  A general rise in the price of oil might improve the profit margins in that industry, but Trump shouldn’t expect a bump in his approval ratings from that.  Coal is struggling for economic reasons and will continue to do so.  People who would tout renewables, and particularly solar energy, need to talk about what Solyndra's failure really meant, and trumpet the job creation that the surging industry is already providing.  Clinton allowed some of Trump’s inaccurate narratives to go unchecked, and failing to respond promptly and effectively to them turned out to be a luxury she couldn’t afford.

(For updates on new posts, please click the "Follow" button.)

The President's Parting Optimism

The most recent issue of Science Magazine includes an editorial from President Barack Obama entitled “The Irreversible Momentum of Clean Energy.”  In it, our still-current President expresses optimism that we will be able to change how we obtain our energy in ways that do not contribute ultimately to the warming of the planet. 

Obama cites four reasons why he believes the trend towards clean energy is irreversible. The first counteracts the prevailing narrative that you would need to sacrifice economic growth in order to  reduce carbon emissions.  Obama points out that carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector fell by 9.5% from 2008 to 2015, while the economy grew by more than 10%. It’s important to keep in mind that the ultimate reason for the decline in these omissions is the redirection of our energy production away from coal and towards natural gas.  The main driver behind the switch towards natural gas is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.  Fracking has a number of environmental issues associated with it, but the one most directly related to climate is the natural gas industry’s contribution to the increase in global methane emissions.  Methane is a greenhouse gas, stronger per unit mass then carbon dioxide is, so it's important to better quantify the cause of the increase in its emissions.  (This is an issue I will try to tackle in detail in a later blog entry.)  Regardless of how you feel about fracking (another issue I will try to address), it has shown that the way that this country and the world obtain energy can change, and change fairly quickly, if there's an incentive to do so.  The President goes on to talk about the costs that come with doing nothing about global warming, citing estimates that in the U. S. alone by the end of this century, combating the effects of global warming could cost between 340 and 690 billion dollars annually.  The report he cites is from the U. S. Office of Management and Budget; I haven't yet read the report and can’t comment on the specifics (perhaps another future blog entry?), but there’s no good reason to doubt that ignoring global warming will be very costly.  Obama then concludes this section by saying that the expenses that would be needed now to reduce the amount of global warming and bring about a clean energy economy will be small compared to preventing or repairing damages that global warming will cause if left unchecked. 

The second point Obama makes is that businesses, both with and without the support of the government, are starting to reduce their own emissions and carbon footprint.  On one hand, the Obama administration improved energy efficient standards for both automobiles and appliances.  But the President also points out that businesses are improving their energy efficiency for the simple reason that it saves money and allows them to spend that money in other areas, including the creation of new jobs.  Obama's third point concerns market forces in the power sector.  He points out that natural gas has gone from making up 21% of US electricity generation in 2008 to 33% today, and that the shift has come almost entirely at the expense of coal.  If the production of power from natural gas continues to be cheap relative to coal (as seems likely), I see no reason to think that demand for coal is going to increase in the coming years regardless of how the situation is portrayed by the incoming President.  Obama does address the issue of methane omissions, commenting that firms have an economic incentive to comply with standards his administration put in place.  I think he may be a little bit naïve about those standards being maintained, perhaps especially if the price of renewable energy continues to go down.  But that brings us to some very encouraging numbers for wind and solar, which Obama cites in the article.  Since 2008, wind power has dropped 41% in cost, rooftop solar has dropped 54%, and utility-scale solar has dropped 64%.  Obama doesn't mention a recent report from the financial advisory firm called Lazard’s that concluded that utility-scale solar power is now cheaper per unit energy produced, even without incentives, than either natural gas or coal.   (That important development will also get its own blog entry in the coming weeks.)  He does mention in concluding this section that a number of major American businesses, including Google and Walmart, have announced plans to get 100% of their power from renewable energy in the coming years.  Furthermore, plenty of states are going beyond federal initiatives to develop their clean power capacity.  So there is much momentum in the direction of renewable energy coming from the free market, regardless of what happens at the federal level.

Obama concludes his editorial by talking about momentum outside the United States to combat climate change by building up clean energy resources.  He notes that the most important aspect of the Paris agreement was that while previous attempts at climate agreements focused on the major industrialized nations of the world, in Paris over 110 countries agreed to do something.  He also acknowledges that the United States would abdicate its position to hold other countries responsible to their commitments should we back away from the Paris agreement.  While more reductions than have been presently agreed to need to be made across the board to keep global warming below 2°C (and hopefully below 1.5ºC), the Paris agreement puts the mechanisms in place to encourage the world's nations to continually update their commitments and encourage the development of further emission-reducing technologies.

Personally, I think the Paris agreement is a decent start that shows that the world is at least trying to get a handle on the problem of global warming.  The United States is in a position to be a leader in developing alternatives to fossil fuels and promoting clean sources of energy, and it's clear from the perspective of present-day economics that we walk away from that leadership position at a considerable amount of long-term economic and environmental peril.  While it would be nice if the federal government played an active role in developing and actively promoting clean, carbon-free energy over the next couple of years, solar and wind are in a position where they do not need the federal government’s help to survive and thrive, and I do believe that Obama's optimism in that regard is justified.  Whether the advance in clean energy happens quickly enough to prevent lasting harm to the planet, however, remains to be seen.

(For updates on new posts, please click the "Follow" button.)

Welcome to The Measure

What is The Measure?

The Measure is a (hopefully) weekly blog about issues relating not only to global warming and the science behind it, but also to the energy sector as well.  One of the things I've learned from teaching a course on energy and the environment is that you can't talk about global warming, especially with regard to what to do about it, without also talking about energy, the way we obtain it, and how the way we obtain it is changing.

Who am I?

I spent 16 years doing graduate and postdoctoral research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, one of the world’s leading centers of climate research.  My work focused on aerosols, which are an important but poorly understood piece in the global climate change puzzle.  Since I left GISS in 2012, I have been teaching at a number of colleges on Long Island.  I primarily teach physics, but I have also taught courses on climate, energy and the environment, and meteorology.

Why am I doing it?

I am starting this blog because I believe that discussing global warming in an informal setting is a useful way to raise awareness on this very important issue, and better awareness in general is a necessary first step to producing meaningful action.  A very good article from last fall talked about how the movement for action on global warming could learn a lesson from the marriage equality movement by making a priority out of communicating with open-minded people. Indeed, people’s opinions on marriage equality changed quite a bit over a relatively short period of time, in spite of the politics.  The analogy holds only to an extent, though, because global warming does not yet directly affect people the way marriage equality does (with some exceptions, most notably among residents of Miami Beach).  But I do think that global warming will affect a lot more people very directly in the years to come, and if we wait until then to act decisively it will be too late.  The urgency of the issue has been further punctuated by the results of the 2016 election; the incoming President, and many of the people he has chosen to serve in his Cabinet, do not believe and do not accept the basic science of global warming.  As there is no point in looking for leadership on this issue from them, it is that much more important to work from the ground level up in order to change things in a positive way.

What do I hope to achieve?

I would like not only to raise awareness on issues concerning global warming and the energy sector, but also to start a dialogue.  This dialogue will start with my Facebook friends and people who know me, but all are welcome.  In a perfect world, the political statements made on this blog would be limited.  I realize that's not realistic, however, when simply acknowledging the established science of global warming is taken as a political statement.  Democrats and Republicans should be arguing over how to best allocate resources to address the problem, instead of arguing over whether something that is in fact quite real and serious is, in fact, quite real and serious.  I welcome and encourage discussion and debate, and I hope to promote better understanding of this issue (at least within my small circle of friends and acquaintances).

What do I expect?

I would like polite and respectful discourse.  People are welcome to disagree with me or anybody else who comments on the site, but I would hope that people respect those with differing opinions.  I hope to make this blog something people can learn from and use to better organize their thoughts about this important issue.  Global warming is something that needs to be addressed with some degree of urgency, and while that's not going to happen at the top level any time soon, I believe it can happen at the grass roots if people inform themselves and then take decisive action.

(For updates on new posts, please click the "Follow" button.)