When Other Things Take Precedence, Part 3: Lies, Damn Lies, and...

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

 

So once again I am deviating from my usual discussion about energy and climate to address something that just happened which necessarily requires our attention. The US Capitol in Washington DC was stormed and looted on Wednesday, and five people lost their lives in the chaos. The people responsible were supporters of outgoing President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed without presenting evidence that the election was unfairly stolen from him. What is truly frightening about this is that many people went to the length of committing what is essentially treason because they were lied to. However, having a quarter century of experience in climate science, I can tell you that the lying is nothing new. As hideous as Donald Trump is, and I see nothing to be gained by continuing to be diplomatic about that, he is more of an effect of the culture of lying that has developed in this country than the cause.
 

When I first started doing graduate research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City in 1996, I didn't appreciate the degree to which basic science was being questioned by the public at large. I understood why some people had concerns that addressing the problem of global warming would do more economic harm than environmental good, but I didn't think people would go so far as to deny the actual science and attack the character of the scientists. I was in my mid 20s, and I was naïve. I soon realized that people were being fed misinformation through all layers of the media, from talk radio, to relatively unknown sites on the nascent World Wide Web, to large newspapers and television networks owned and run by Rupert Murdoch. Some people had honest enough intentions, but spread falsehoods regardless. Others had intentions that were more genuinely malevolent. Most of the malevolence came from people in the fossil fuel industry, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and maximizing their profits regardless of the damage their industry causes to the long-term stability of the Earth’s climate. Some even came from a tiny minority of scientists themselves. These scientists took grant money from the fossil fuel industry, and reveled in getting far more press for being contrarian than their peers got for filling in the details. Meanwhile, the rest of the climate science community were (and still are) frequently accused of being willing to say anything for money and attention. As somebody who lived in Manhattan on $30,000 a year as a grad student and $50,000 a year when I became a postdoc, I tried to laugh off the insinuations. But they were not intended to be funny, and they got progressively more sinister as time went on. I suppose being on the low end of the totem pole had some benefits, as I never did anything that warranted enough attention to expose myself to death threats. Other people I worked with got such threats routinely. And once Andrew Breitbart (co-founder of the conservative website that bears his name) posted a tweet calling for the execution of my boss, I never felt comfortable working in my office again.
 

When Andrew Breitbart passed away in 2012, full control of the Breitbart website passed to its other co-founder, Stephen Bannon. Bannon, of course, is now best known for being the chief architect of Donald Trump’s successful Presidential campaign in 2016. So the people who had created and profited from a media ecosystem that actively misinformed a large portion of the population, and had made a point of using dehumanizing and threatening language against anyone who contradicted their narrative, didn’t simply have their foot in the door in the halls of government in Washington – they had control of the White House.
 

And now we’re here, with people from all parts of the country and walks of life (at least, all the ones where you’ll find white people) converging on Washington and going to absurd and horrifying lengths to defend a bald-faced lie. I pity them, but I will not forgive them so easily – plenty of otherwise decent, well-intentioned people who believed the wrong information lived in Germany in the 1930s. I have always wanted this blog to be a dialogue, where nobody needs to agree with me to feel welcome here. But in light of recent events, I am going to require a few things from my readers moving forward.
 

First of all, nobody is under any obligation whatsoever to like President-elect Biden. I’m personally concerned that his response to the climate crisis will consist of too much lip service and not enough aggressive action. But a free and fair election was held in this country in November, and Joe Biden won it. That is not up for discussion. Second, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has already killed well over 300,000 Americans and is presently getting worse. You can feel that our economic needs have not been properly accounted for in our response to the pandemic. That is a reasonable and defensible position. But you cannot argue that COVID-19 isn’t real or is not a big deal, or that we have in any way overreacted to it. The body count overwhelmingly indicates otherwise. And finally – since this is a climate blog, after all – you have to acknowledge that global warming is real, and serious, and our doing. You can have honest questions about the science or how we know what we know, and I will happily answer any that you have, but I am 100% finished with debating the existence of the problem. We should be debating what to do about it, and there is plenty of room for people of all perspectives and persuasions to contribute. But there is no room for lies. It does not matter if you’re one of the people who knows the truth but doesn’t care, or if you are their willing conduit. We have lost too much time.  And this week made clear that we are in imminent risk of losing far more than that, before we even consider the consequences of a warming world.

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John Kerry's Uphill Climb

 

By United States Department of State - Department of State, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24395911

Two weeks ago, President-elect Biden announced that former Secretary of State and one-time Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry will serve as Biden’s special envoy on climate. This newly-created Cabinet position will also be part of the National Security Council, indicating that Biden believes that responding to climate change is indeed a threat to American stability. Having been the leader of the American delegation to the Paris Conference in 2015, Kerry is a logical choice for the role. But Kerry has an uphill climb not only to make significant progress on the issue internationally, but also to sell serious action to combat climate change at home.

One of the first tasks of the new administration, and perhaps of Kerry in particular, will be to undo the damage done to America’s standing in the international community by our withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Five years ago the world, as it so often has on a broad range of issues in the past, looked to us for leadership on the most important long-term issue facing humanity this century. Presently, we are a non-participant. Kerry’s role in making the Paris Agreement happen allows him to command considerable respect beyond our borders, however, and I expect that restoring our reputation internationally will be the relatively easy part of his job. But President-elect Biden will need to get the American people to support action on climate change strongly enough that we will not tolerate another retreat on this issue, regardless of who succeeds him in the White House. And to do that, the Biden Administration will need to excel at salesmanship. It seems very likely at present that the most important salesman in this regard will be John Kerry.

An example of what Kerry needs to avoid can be seen in an exchange he made in Congress last year with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. To put it mildly, Massie’s line of questioning was idiotic. He referred to political science as a “pseudoscience,” and then proceeded to ask some questions concerning geology that would be acceptable coming from somebody with a pre-middle school level of education, not a Congressman who has been tasked by voters to make serious decisions on serious issues. I need to point out here that Massie’s educational background is not the problem – he has multiple engineering degrees from MIT, so it’s not that he should know better, he does know better. But this is the country we live in right now.  A particular facet of science is overwhelmingly accepted by the people who study it the most closely – i.e., the people from whom Kerry got his data – but the public at large is confused and misled about it by people whose motivations are selfish at best and genuinely malevolent at worst. Massie’s intent that day was to rattle Kerry, and he succeeded.  Sure, Massie got skewered in the media outlets where you would expect him to get skewered, but Kerry lost his composure, and with it the chance to change even a few minds.  If and when Kerry gets the opportunity to go back to Congress in his new role, he will need to do better than that.

Unfortunately, it’s not really clear how much “better than that” Kerry needs to be to make a difference. John Holdren, the Obama Administration’s science advisor, did a superior job handling similarly cringeworthy questions in this Congressional briefing from 2014, but he does not appear to have swayed the argument any either. (The linked clip is from The Daily Show; you do not have to like Jon Stewart’s snark, but ask yourself if you really want that quality of questioning coming from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.) Perhaps there is not much point in making a persuasive argument directly to Republicans in Congress, because it won't go anywhere. But Kerry, and obviously his boss as well, will still need to sell action on climate change to the American people. Some Americans might honestly have questions similar to the ones that these Congressmen had, because either their schools did not teach them adequately on this or because their education has been buried under misinformation coming from people who stand to further profit from inaction on global warming. 

Kerry has to be willing to patiently answer those questions. For example, carbon dioxide levels have certainly been higher in the distant past than they are now. And temperatures have gone up with carbon dioxide. And sea levels have gone up with remperatures. The last time the Earth was this warm, sea levels were 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) higher than they are now. And the last time the Earth was 3ºC warmer than pre-Industrial levels, which we’ll easily reach by 2100 if we do nothing, the Earth had sea levels 20 to 25 meters (65 to 80 feet) higher than they are now. Life existed and did well enough under those conditions, but most of humanity’s population and infrastructure can be found near the world’s coasts. Where will they go, and who will foot the bill? Furthermore, excepting occasional major volcanic eruptions which can significantly but temporarily lower temperatures globally, geology works on much greater time scales than half a century; global temperatures have risen nearly 1ºC since 1970, and the rate of increase is accelerating. Plus we can monitor the location of greenhouse gases more than well enough to isolate the major sources, so there really is no doubt where the added carbon dioxide is coming from.

In addition, Kerry needs to be willing to put himself in places where people will ask those questions. He may even need to visit communities that might be affected adversely, at least in the short term, by actions that a serious effort to combat global warming will necessitate. And he’ll need to have good answers for some harder questions when he does. 

Lent

Growing up, I had an uneasy relationship with the season of Lent.  I’ve never been really comfortable getting a black smudge on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and the idea of giving up chocolate or something like that for six weeks just seemed kind of pointless to me.  But I think that now I have a better understanding of it, or at least what it’s supposed to be.  Pretty much every religion has some concept of self-denial — not because it’s something painful that religions make people do, but because some things in life have more value than others,  and sometimes we don’t get to choose what we give up.  There are things that we need, things we can do without, and things that we should do without.  Taking an annual inventory of which category the things we indulge in fall under has value.  Giving something up isn’t meaningful in and of itself, unless we emerge from the period of sacrifice better and spiritually healthier for it. 

When Lent began, I was working on a piece for this blog about the cost of energy.  The basic thesis of that piece, which I will eventually finish, is that creating a world where our energy is obtained without emitting greenhouse gases will come with a price, but that the price is not so big compared to the cost of doing nothing.  The sacrifice, to the extent that there is one, will be temporary.  We will emerge from it in a world where breathing is easier, people who live on the world’s coasts are not in danger of being displaced with no place to go, and fewer people will lose everything to a storm, or fire, or the kind of conflicts that arise when the things we need are hard to come by.  To get there, we will need to reconsider what we really need, and re-evaluate the difference between what we can and what we should do without.  It’s a tough sell.  But giving something up to emerge better for it is a part of the faith of most religious people, and can serve a constructive purpose regardless of what you do or don’t believe.

Of course, while I was thinking about the climate and other things like my family, my job, and the upcoming elections, something else came up.  We all wound up giving up far, far more this Lent than we intended.  Nobody is enjoying this.  And it won’t end with a big celebration on Easter, at least not for anybody with any sense of responsibility.  But we’ve got this.  It’s part of our history, our traditions, our culture.  People have endured worse than this.  We are realizing that there are more things we can do without than we thought.  And we are gaining a greater appreciation of the things we do need, and the people who provide them for us.  Plenty of us are facing or dealing with great loss right now, and that is sad and awful.  But collectively we can emerge from this better, and healthier.  And that doesn’t seem pointless to me at all.

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Thoughts on Australia

Much of the world's focus at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 was on the massive heat waves and fires that afflicted the country of Australia. Multiple reports have suggested that over 1 billion animals have died in the blazes.  Did a change in climate play a role in this?  The answer is not a simple one — it never is — because there are other factors involved that should not be overlooked.  But there is sufficient evidence to implicate a warming, drying climate in the heat waves and fires that the island continent has been experiencing.

For starters, Australia suffered from a massive heatwave.  Obviously heat waves are more likely in the warming world. But what about the fires themselves? In a warming world, wet areas tend to get wetter and dry areas tend to get dryer. A regrettably prophetic 2016 study had suggested that California was becoming more vulnerable to forest fires due to a warmer and drier climate, well before the fires that afflicted the state over the last two years. And as it turns out, a paper concerning bushfires in southeastern Australia and their connection with climate change was published in 2007.  It stated, “A study conducted in 2005 examined the potential impacts of climate change on fire-weather at 17 sites in southeast Australia. It found that the number of ‘very high’ and ‘extreme’ fire danger days could increase by 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050.”  So the potential for fires to get worse in Australia as the climate warms has been known and documented for at least a decade.

But other factors have exacerbated the extent and damage of this summer’s fires.  One factor is natural: a periodic oscillation called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).  In the positive phase of the IOD, warm waters off the African coast lead to high rainfall in Africa, relatively cool and dry conditions in Indonesia, and relatively hot and dry air in Australia.  That is the present phase of the IOD, making it an important contributor to the fire season.  But there is also the factor of human carelessness and stupidity.  Much press has been devoted to the large number of fire-related arrests in Australia over the last couple of months, including over 40 deliberate fires and well over a hundred more accidental fires.  While that behavior is inexcusable, it is also not unusual; a 2009 survey by the Australian Government concluded that “between 2001–02 and 2006–07, the number of bushfires in Australia varied from approximately 46,000 to 62,000 per year, with an average of nearly 54,000 fires per year. This agrees quite closely with the average of nearly 52,000 fires per year calculated by the Australian Institute of Criminology using data from fire agencies from 1995–06 to 2005–06. It is estimated that 50 percent of fires are either deliberately lit or suspicious in origin.”  This leads to two important conclusions.  The first is that people directly affect the number of bushfires that get started, just like they played a role in the California wildfires.  The second is that a normal amount of human activity cannot begin to account for the extraordinary extent of the damage that this summer’s Australian fires have caused.

But if we are talking about the effects of a changing world on Australia, it is important to acknowledge how the politics and media of Australia are not helping the situation. This past year, the Australians held an election where climate change was very clearly on the agenda.  The party that wanted to do something about climate change lost to the party that didn’t. Why did this happen? Australian voters were more fearful of the consequences of doing something than they were the consequences of doing nothing. This happened despite the heat waves the country has recently experienced, and the Great Barrier Reef suffering massive bleaching events in the past couple of years to the point that it is in danger of dying altogether if the planet continues to warm. This fear of the cost of acting against climate change has been fueled in part by coal interests, predictably, but also the media -- especially Rupert Murdoch (the owner of News Corp. which runs Fox News in the USA), who owns 57% of the newspapers sold in Australia. (That statistic comes for a fairly old study, to be fair, but there's no reason to think that percentage has shrunk in the meantime.) That is a lot of control over a free press for one person to exert.

In 1998 the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, known for their advocacy of aboriginal land rights and their environmental activism, released a concept album called Redneck Wonderland about the state of Australia at the time. The album was prescient in many ways about how politics would change not only in Australia, but also in places like the United States and the United Kingdom, in the subsequent two decades. A song from that album called “Comfortable Place on the Couch” describes how people sit on the couch and absorb whatever their TV channel or newspaper (or website, if you bring it to the present) of choice tells them, without actually going out into the world and experiencing it for themselves. In the chorus, Peter Garrett sings “Some say the truth is what you see, I know the truth is what you feel” — predating Stephen Colbert’s more concise expression “truthiness” by a few years, and also predicting people’s stubborn indifference to what is going on right in front of their faces.  In many ways, this sums up what Australia has become today. Sydney is burning, the koalas are in danger of going extinct, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, and Australians reelected the people who want to sell a billion people in India all the coal that they can burn. As a climate scientist, I can only hope that the rest of the world doesn't wait till the change is right in front of them before they act to stop it.

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The Temperature in 2019

As is typical at the beginning of any new year, the scientific agencies responsible for global temperature records have all recently released their reports of the state of global temperatures in the year 2019.  With one exception, the agencies reported 2019 as the second warmest year on record. This is not really a surprising result; it has been clear from the middle of last year that the moderate El Niño event would make 2019 warmer than every year besides 2016 and possibly 2017.  There are a number of articles available that report on or summarize the overall findings, and I would particularly recommend the article that Zeke Hausfather published on the CarbonBrief site on Monday, but I would like to focus on one particular detail in the report that Dr. Jim Hansen published last week concerning the temperature data produced at NASA/GISS.

First, let’s give the data a little bit of context.  The IPCC reported last year that current climate models are predicting that global temperatures will rise to 3-4°C above preindustrial levels, if the status quo with regards to energy emissions continues unabated, by the end of this century.  But as Hansen and his colleagues pointed out in an excellent (and very readable) 2017 paper called Young people’s burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions, global temperatures have been increasing at an essentially linear rate of approximately 0.18°C per decade since 1970 (see Figure 2b in that paper).  The linearity is easily observed when you average out the temperatures using a 132-month running mean; this smooths out the natural variabilities due to the El Niño cycle, the solar cycle, and other factors.  With temperatures currently at 1.2°C above the mean temperature between 1880 and 1920 (identified as a reasonable estimate of ‘pre-industrial’ temperature), the current linear trend would place global temperatures at about 2.6°C above preindustrial levels in 2100. What this tells you is that the models expect the rate of temperature increase to accelerate if global CO2 omissions are not sufficiently curtailed.

And unfortunately, this is already starting to be seen in the data (see Figure 4 from Hansen's recent report).  According to the NASA/GISS temperature record, the global mean temperatures of the last five years are all above the linear trendline from Hansen’s 2017 paper. This result was predictable for the strong El Niño years of 2015 and 2016, and even for the moderate El Niño year of 2019. But the large temperature drop in 2018, as the El Niño segued into a strong La Niña event, still produced a mean yearly temperature above what would be expected from the trend. Does this prove that the trend is no longer holding? More data from the next few years will be necessary to confirm that. But the observations are fully in line with what models have predicted, and I would argue that the best guess right now is that the rate of increase in global temperatures is indeed accelerating.

So what does that mean? A continuation of the linear trend would have global temperatures a little higher than 1.3°C above preindustrial levels by 2030. I'm beginning to think that temperatures will be closer to 1.4°C above preindustrial levels by the end of this decade, and that it will be very difficult to avoid crossing the 1.5°C threshold by 2035.  Obviously how much CO2 we collectively emit in the meantime will matter, but it will take a massive effort to change our emissions that dramatically in that small a period of time.

As for 2020, a La Niña event does not appear imminent, so this year should be mostly neutral.  This neutrality should make this year a good barometer for what the current state of the climate really is.  I would expect the mean temperature for the year to hover at or bit below 1.2°C above pre-Industrial levels, making it the third or fourth warmest year in the temperature record.  Anything more than that would be very concerning.

Greetings from the Climate Strike

 This photo is from Greta Thunberg's Facebook page.

This past Friday, September 20, 2019, a youth-led climate strike took place in cities across the world.  Several million people globally, including up to a quarter million people (according to organizer estimates) in New York City, took to the streets to demand that world leaders respond to climate change and global warming with the urgency that science indicates is necessary.  As one of the massive army in New York, I was impressed and inspired by the energy of the protesters and their optimism in their own ability to make change.  But as an atmospheric scientist who has been studying the physics of climate for longer than most of my fellow protesters have been alive, I felt a tinge of sadness that it had come to this.

As sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg pointed out in her speech to the United Nations on September 23, "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear.”  The climate science community have gathered quite a bit more data since Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 visit to the U. S. Senate made “global warming” a household term, but the data have reinforced the conclusions, not altered them.  The Earth is getting warmer, at a rate which cannot be explained by any known natural cycles.  It can be largely explained, however, by the rapid, steady increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, instigated by the burning of coal and hydrocarbons for energy and aggravated by the loss of forests which serve as the Earth’s primary natural “sink” for the gas.  This is because carbon dioxide absorbs the kind of infrared radiation that the Earth emits, so that the energy contained in that radiation stays in the atmosphere and does not escape into space.  This warming will have consequences, including rising sea levels, stronger storms, and longer and more deadly heat waves.  And the cost of accepting these consequences will be far greater than the cost of preventing them would be.  None of this is new.  None of this is even up for debate on the grounds of reasonable doubt.  And yet, for as long as I've studied atmospheric science, I’ve felt that I was banging my head on a brick wall every time the subject came up in conversation.  I’m not sure that I’ve changed the mind of even one of my skeptical friends and relatives.  And people who have no interest in even acknowledging the existence of global warming, much less doing anything about it, continue to win far too many elections.  But young people have begun to realize that the consequences of global warming will affect them more than they will affect people my age, and they have started listening.  As Thunburg told Congress last week, “I don't want you to listen to me.  I want you to listen to the scientists.”  It would have been self-defeating, on many levels, for me NOT to go and lend my support.

The quote on the poster is from Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax"

I decided to wear a T-shirt I have that says “Ask me a question, I am a scientist.”  I got that shirt volunteering at the Long Island Mini Maker Faire in Port Jefferson, NY this past June.  As I said when I started this blog, one very useful thing we can do as individuals to combat global warming is simply to talk about it, in order to raise awareness and improve understanding.  I figured that shirt would be a good conversation starter.  And indeed, both before and after the march, I had a number of people come up and ask me questions.  Most of the questions were some variation of, “How screwed are we?”  That's not an easy question to answer, because how the Earth looks a century or two from now will depend quite a bit on our actions in the meantime.  The present politically-established benchmarks are not adequate to prevent massive long-term damage.  The Paris Agreement talks about limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-Industrial levels. But the last time the Earth’s temperatures were as warm as they are now (about 1ºC above pre-Industrial level) for a significant length of time, sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher.  And the last time levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were as high as they are now, sea levels were 50 to 60 feet higher.  That's the world our descendants would inherit if the current temperature or carbon dioxide level is maintained for a century and beyond — but of course we’re nowhere near leveling off anything.  The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way.  Clean energy is cheaper right now than most people realize, and the technology is improving and will continue to improve if politics allow it.  But, consequences are happening right now.  Sea levels have risen about 8 inches on average globally since the late 1800s, and about a foot in New York City.  That foot mattered when Superstorm Sandy hit my area in 2012.  And those extra inches mattered in the Bahamas this past month when Hurricane Dorian hit.  So did the increasing intensity of hurricanes — the Atlantic used to see a category 5 hurricane once every three years on average, but this is the fourth straight year we have seen one.  As of September 23, 53 people are confirmed dead because of Dorian, but over 1000 are still missing.  And the fierce heatwave in Europe this summer killed 1500 people in France alone.  It didn’t have to be that many, and yet that won’t be the worst heatwave that young or even middle-aged people in France will live through.  The rate of sea level rise has begun to accelerate, and is projected to accelerate further.  It may take a while to level off, even if we do start to act decisively; a just-published paper by a former colleague of mine concluded that it would take twenty years to slow down (much less stop) the rate of temperature increase even with a quick phaseout of fossil fuels.  And temperatures will have to go down before sea level rise can be reversed.  So lives hang in the balance right now, and the number of people killed, or displaced, or pushed from the category of people who “have” to people who “have lost,” will grow and grow.  Unless.

Taken from this article.

From Greta Thunberg's Facebook page.

Here on Long Island where I live, I have friends who write and sing children’s music.  My favorite song of theirs, titled “One Drop in a Bucket,” talks about how one seemingly small action can cascade into something much larger.  I wonder if Greta Thunberg, when she first showed up outside the Swedish Parliament on a Friday last August carrying her now-iconic poster, had any idea that millions of children would eventually join her.  Or that her simple action would be chapter one in a Tolkienesque quest that continues for her thirteen months later.  But that’s what happened.  For the first time in my professional life, I know that there is a large group of people who take the issue of climate change and global warming as seriously as it needs to be taken.  And to those people I can only say, “thank you.”  I’m sorry it has been left to your generation, and I take some responsibility for the fact that we have not done enough, nor have we really tried.  But I’m still here, and I promise to keep banging my head on as many brick walls as I come to, for as long as it takes.

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Hope for Renewables

One of the biggest obstacles that renewable energy needs to overcome, in order to provide the lion’s share of the world’s electricity needs, is that it delivers power intermittently.  Solar and wind do not generally provide maximum power at the times that power is needed most, nor can they be counted on to provide power steadily throughout the course of a full day.  And yet the share of renewables in the energy market is growing, largely to this point for economic reasons.  The most recent report on the levelized cost of energy by the investment banking firm Lazard has the price of new utility-scale solar ranging from $36-46 per megawatt-hour (MWh) of energy produced, while onshore wind varies from $26-56 per MWh.  Compare this to the $41-74 per MWh for new natural gas plants, and especially the $60-$143 per MWh for new coal, and the appeal of renewables becomes obvious even before taking environmental factors into account.  According to a recent report published by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the combined capacity of renewables (including hydroelectric, biomass, and geothermal) eclipsed that of coal in this country for the first time in April 2019.  Solar and wind do not yet control a big share of the energy market.  But that will change, perhaps sooner than you think, if the cost of wind and utility-scale solar continue to trend downward.  Plus, transitioning to a clean energy economy will need to be done with more urgency if the United States and the other nations of the world wish to meet their commitments to the Paris Agreement — assuming that those commitments are even sufficient to stop the effects of global warming from causing significant damage and upheaval on a global scale.  

There are basically three ways to address the intermittency issue if the goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the power generation sector.  One option is to maintain a significant supply of natural gas to run during times that solar and wind are not generating sufficient power.  But even though natural gas is relatively cheap and emits about half as much carbon dioxide per energy released than coal does, it is not likely that the Paris goals can be reached if emissions in the electricity sector remain substantial.  (Keep in mind that clean transportation presently appears to be a more distant objective that clean electrical power is.)  Another possibility is the continued use of nuclear power, including the construction of new nuclear plants.  Nuclear power does not produce greenhouse emissions, but it is beset by economic issues — according to Lazard, the cost of a new nuclear plants would range from $112-189 per MWh.  Ironically, nuclear plants are actually the cheapest type of power plant to operate once the cost of construction has been fully accounted for (only $28 per MWh, compared to $36 per MWh for coal), which means the bulk of their cost comes from their construction.  According to a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a lot of existing nuclear power plants struggle to achieve cost-competitiveness largely because the companies who operate them are still paying off the construction cost.  The third option is to have renewables produce excess energy at the times of maximum power generation, and then store this excess in batteries.  This option often gets downplayed because it's still fairly expensive; a Bloomberg report from this spring set the levelized cost of battery storage at $189 per MWh in the spring of 2019.  But that price is 35% lower than it was in the spring of 2018, and there are markets right now where renewables with battery storage are cost-competitive, even without subsidies.  Furthermore, a 2018 report from the World Economic Forum suggested that by 2028, the cost of renewables plus battery could be lower than the cost of gas “peakers” in the grid.  And on July 1, Forbes magazine reported on a deal struck by Los Angeles Power and Water to create the largest and cheapest solar-plus-battery project in the world.  The solar power will be delivered at roughly 2 cents per kilowatt-hour ($20 per MWh), with an additional cost of only 1.3 cents per kilowatt-hour ($13 per MWh) for the battery storage.  This combination comes in below typical cost for both natural gas and nuclear power, and it sets the price bar for renewables plus storage that much lower.  It's tough to guess how profitable this plant will be in the long run, but it indicates considerable optimism in the direction the price of renewables with battery storage is going.

In an ideal world, we would collectively aspire to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in electricity generation as quickly as possible.  I’ve discussed a bunch of the reasons for that here on this blog, and continuing to debate what scientists have accepted for over forty years belies the urgency needed to tackle the problem.  People do have a right to be concerned that aggressive reductions will create economic setbacks that will ultimately do more harm than good, but evidence for that being the outcome does not actually exist.  Instead, the Fourth National Climate Assessment of the U. S. Global Change Research Program concluded that limiting global warming to 1.5ºC above pre-Industrial levels as opposed to 2.0ºC would save the American economy half a trillion dollars annually. And the Office of Management and Budget under the Obama administration estimated the economic damage due to global warming, simply in terms of lost federal revenue, could range from $340 billion to $690 billion annually if the status quo in the energy sector continues to hold and global temperatures rise to 4ºC above pre-Industrial levels..  But economics can certainly influence the direction that greening our energy sector takes.  Nuclear power does not leave a carbon footprint, but the cost of constructing new plants remains prohibitive and is not likely to come down.  The cost of battery storage is generally higher for now, but it is trending in the right direction, there is some justification for optimism long-term, and one present development suggests that the cost decline is occurring at a faster rate than projections from last fall and even this spring were suggesting.  And in the meantime, new solar and wind farms are cheaper in most places than new coal and gas plants are; in fact, there are already places in this country where it would save money right now to replace an operational coal plant with renewables.  This doesn’t mean that a major shift to renewables will be easy; in fact, a report out just this week suggests that investment in renewables is not rising but declining.  Present economics does not justify this reticence, though, and environmental concerns clearly demand moving strongly forward.

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