People who say climate crisis demands end of synthetic fertilizers need to say how they would do so. There are 3 options:
1. Eliminate half global population
2. Convert most, if not all, arable land globally to farmland
3. Global vegetarianism, forcibly for many
Choose one...
The paradox of degrowth is that if you limit it only to rich countries you realize very limited emissions reduction benefits and if you extend it globally, you condemn billions to extreme poverty. There is no just alternative to technological decoupling…
"The proximate cause is surging gas prices. But the underlying problem is that despite huge bets on RE, California, Britain, and Germany have chosen fossil fuels over nuclear energy to backstop electrical systems."
My latest
@ForeignPolicy
If you want to understand why so many of us are determined to build an alternative to the environmental movement, these three tweets give a pretty clear idea of why.
Thread:
CA Wildfires and PG&E shutoffs have become a projection screen for all sorts of claims and agendas. My takes:
1. Don't blame Gavin. Newsom hasn't been governor for even a year. Fire risk and deferred maintenance cumulative result of decades of neglect by Dems and Reps
In my new essay for New Atlantis, I write about how the climate discourse became increasingly detached from the actual climate science. Popular understanding of the relationship between climate change, extreme weather, and natural disasters is basically wrong. 🧵
1. More anti-nuclear bullshit from Harry Reid's last NRC chair,
@allisonmacfar
. Nuclear waste disposal is not a technical problem. It is a political problem, one that Macfarlane was installed at the NRC to perpetuate.
1. The roll out of hysterical nuclear "experts" last night by cable outlets like
@CNN
was really something, egged on by anchors losing their minds as they talked about images streaming from a dark CCTV camera despite having no idea what they were actually looking at.
Interesting that there has been virtually no coverage of this study. Global average mortality and loss rates down 5x over last decade. Effect is strongest for poorest populations.
@bradplumer
@SavorTooth
h/t
@RogerPielkeJr
France: 14 new reactors
Japan: Restart 25 reactors + new next gen reactors
UK: 8 new reactors
Poland: 6 - 9 new reactors
@fmanjoo
: Nuclear bros all up in my responses and Mark Jacobson told me nuclear takes too long to build so...
Facts:
1. Green anti-nuclear lobby far richer than pro-nuclear, inclusive of both industry and NGOs.
2. Green anti-nuclear lobby far more entangled with RE industry than pro-nuclear NGOs are with nuclear industry.
3. RE corporates larger, better connected than nuclear.
1. "Not anti-nuclear but..." is the true face of the anti-nuclear movement. Over decades, progressives and environmentalists have constructed a regulatory framework that has made it virtually impossible to license and build nuclear reactors economically.
The Death of Environmentalism indeed. California’s entire environmental community pulled out all the stops, basically holding statewide No Nukes rally for last two weeks. And California’s overwhelmingly progressive Democratic Senate just shrugged. The times they are a changing…
CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE HAS VOTED OVERWHELMINGLY TO KEEP DIABLO CANYON OPEN FOR AT LEAST 5 YEARS ✊🏼
history was made tonight. if we can extend nuclear power in california, we can do it everywhere! let’s go ☢️
Quibble with the methodology and exact $$ figure if you like but what is unquestionable is that America's anti-nuclear lobby is massively larger and better funded than the industry, much less tiny independent pro-nuclear NGO community.
"The death of anti-nuclearism, unfortunately, does not mean that the multi-billion dollar green lobby will cease opposing nuclear energy... They will need to be defeated."
My latest essay
@TheBTI
I predict that this paper will continue to be cited authoritatively by activists, journalists, and academics on this website for years after it has been completely debunked.
Climate damages are "6X LARGER than previously thought", says new NBER working paper
– every 1C wipes out 12% of global GDP
– every tonne of CO2 causes >$1,000 of damages
@GernotWagner
tells me: "Assuming nobody finds a flaw in this paper, it is going to truly change things"
1. I have a new essay on what
@michaelemann
climate war is really about. Reader's digest version: it's not about either science or climate action but reinforcing affective environmental identity.
A reminder that the terms “dangerous” and “catastrophe” are entirely tautological as used in climate discourse. Neither term is based on any actual impact on human societies that one might anticipate in event that thresholds are breached.
“As billions of people worldwide can attest, human-caused climate disruption has passed the ‘dangerous’ threshold. …What we must now strive to avoid is climate catastrophe.”
Eco-catastrophist tech bros need to get story straight. If we can support abundant humanity/nature in space or Mars we can figure out how to manage Earth system. Both
@elonmusk
&
@JeffBezos
actually promoting libertarian escape fantasies dressed up as space based eco-aspiration
Thread.
If we’ve figured out how to move large numbers of humans to space or even outside the solar system, we’ve long since solved energy scarcity on Earth.
New essay about the new conventional wisdom among many pro-nuclear progressives that insists that the lack of standardization and various other non-regulatory factors are the real reason that nuclear energy got so expensive. 🧵
1. This oped has stoked predictable outrage and ad hominem from the "online armies of deniers and alarmists. Gonna ignore the crazy and just reiterate a couple of points.
7 years after rulemaking began, 18 months after it went to commission for final approval, and, notably, less than 6 weeks after Jeff Baran's term expired,
@NRCgov
will approve new emergency preparedness requirements for small modular reactors.
The backflips by many on the EcoLeft to insist that the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka is due to neoliberalism or capitalism, not insane agricultural policies long advocated by EcoLeft is really something. A few points they always leave out:
People who tried to attribute the Sri Lanka crisis to agricultural policy should be embarrassed, as should journalists who amplify it incessantly at the expense of systemic drivers.
There is actually very good scholarship on why many people are both skeptical about climate change and strongly support nuclear energy. But doesn't fit the narrative so
@NaomiOreskes
makes up conspiracy theories instead.
TVA is publicly owned and boasts about the lowest emissions intensity and lowest rates of any utility in the country. Only bad faith environmentalism, more committed to renewable energy than climate mitigation, could turn it into the bad guy here.
The idea that this is primarily a linguistic problem — rather than an engineering, physics, economics, IR, and congressional bargaining problem — that requires the expertise of a doctor of Renaissance literature to help us solve is the problem.
👀
"Poor people have nothing to contribute to solving environmental problems/climate change"
Folks who keep citing
@NaomiOreskes
as an authority on climate politics, like Paul Erlich before her, are going to come to regret it.
After two decades of hyping solar,
@billmckibben
still doesn't get that VRE has external costs (firming) that are not reflected at the plant level or that a $34/MWh utility-scale solar plant is useless if you can't connect it to the grid and get electricity to demand centers.
1. Am I the only person who feels like climate and energy politics has been fully conquered by idiocracy? Half my twitter feed is taken up by people arguing about whether we should go 100% RE or ditch it and go all nuclear, as if either were remotely plausible.
Big green doing it again.
@NRDC
and
@SierraClub
blocking bill to keep two nuclear plants open because, checks notes... it allows municipal coal plants to remain open beyond 2045 if they CAPTURE all their carbon...
1. A short thread on Team Sky before diving into my work week. Should be clear at this point what marginal gains actually refers to – extralegal use of doping products under guise of therapeutic use.
@RogerPielkeJr
@Scienceofsport
1. So I am finding it gobstopping that we still don't have a serious proposal on the table from either the Administration or Congress to rapidly and massively scale up ubiquitous Covid testing so that as shelter in place efforts get Covid under control, we can restart economy.
4. More distributed generation and storage won't obviate need to transmit large volumes of electricity across substantial distances and is not alternative to grid power for most places. But will allow rich homeowners to insulate themselves from blackouts and feel virtuous.
Great thead. What Jan and Big Green really can't accept is that there is a civil society pro-nuclear movement that is transforming public discussion about nuclear and that is creating new political and policy possibilities that traditional green lobby is totally unprepared for.
This “report” is pure conspiracism, confabulating a vast new right-wing (and far-right) nuclear “lobby” bankrolled by industry.
The reality is that most contemporary nuclear advocates come from the left & climate activism, & quite deliberately don’t take a penny from industry
17. As I wrote a while back, the problem is not anti-nuclear ideologues like Macfarlane and her coauthors, it's peer-reviewers, editors, journalists who credulously let obvious inanities slide because they comport with long established green narratives.
Alternate headline: "Greenpeace chief demands countries make climate commitments they can't keep while complaining those commitments will be greenwashing."
My dead wrong in public election take:
1. Trump is now effectively the incumbent. The theory of the Biden reelect was to make it a referendum on Trump. But they could never do that because Biden was the incumbent. Swapping Harris for Biden effectively solves that problem.
2.
Coming soon? Me and
@jessicalovering
in
@greentechmedia
on why licensing and commercialization of advanced nuclear reactors appears to be proceeding much faster than most assessments have long assumed.
“NuScale started working toward regulatory approval in 2008. In 2020, when it received a design approval for its reactor, the company said the regulatory process had cost half a billion dollars, and that it had provided about 2 million pages of supporting documents to the NRC.”
Biden will not renominate Jeff Baran to NRC. Huge win for nuclear/
@TheBTI
. Me in
@HuffPost
:
“It’s pretty clear for first time maybe ever that Democrats recognize we need reform at NRC... that technology can’t succeed if NRC continues to approach this in way it historically has.”
SCOOP: The White House is abandoning its pick for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Senate refused to re-confirm Jeff Baran to the five-person NRC last year, and sent the nomination back at the start of 2024.
In a shift, Biden won't try again.
EQUITY ASSESSMENT OF THE IPCC AR6 SCENARIOS
Pre-print of paper () and policy brief () on “Equity Assessment of Global Mitigation Pathways in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report”.
As far as I can tell, the environmental and climate justice communities have been almost entirely silent about this. Important thread from the indispensable
@wang_seaver
...
Satellite images show how messed up much of our polysilicon production for solar panels is.
This is GCL-Poly's factory in the Xinjiang region. Powered by 4x660MW coal-fired units next to the plant, sits just 2.5 km from vast coal mines, and exploiting Uyghur forced labor. THREAD
11. To be clear, Putin IS a monster and Russian must be stopped. The Ukrainian people are heroic and inspiring. But in the fog of war, even a just war, we shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly and independent western media undermines itself when it behaves like state media.FIN
1. When all is said and done, I predict much of environmental community will end up opposing every low carbon technology at climate scale INCLUDING wind and solar. That's because movement is NIMBY all the way down. Here's how NY,
@nytimes
and these three guys illustrate problem.
Huge news.
@GavinNewsom
finally appears ready to join reality based community on CA energy and climate, trading blackouts and treadmill decarbonization for a reliable grid and durable emissions cuts.
"A climate movement less in thrall to fever dreams of apocalypse would focus more on balancing long-term emissions reductions with growth, development and adaptation in the here and now..."
"Nuclear is too expensive and we can't solve the waste problem!"
"We can run the whole country on variable renewables eazypeazy. All we have to do is build a massive low cost national supergrid!"
Why again does anyone still take
@NaomiOreskes
seriously?
With President and Congress dithering, a 6 point plan for COVID19 response and recovery.
1. Lockdown everything. Response from every economy in North America and Europe has been too little too late. Shut it all down and have a plan to bring it back.
LONG THREAD
1. Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans provoked predictable attacks
@TheBTI
by some usual suspects. Most work in solar industry or for industry publications and demand we confess our sins against solar. Calling out
@chrisnelder
@SolarInMASS
@Ben_Inskeep
@perklevnas
Household electrification reduces deforestation and land use change in sub-saharan Africa due to reduced firewood collection and improved ag productivity. I would guess that it is emissions reducing even if that electricity was coal-fired. h/t
@richardtol
What to Do with Climate Panic?
Find a good therapist who will help you work through the underlying neuroses that you are displacing onto climate change.
1. A prominent US environmental NGO has released a new report attacking advanced nuclear. I'm not going to link to it because it is mostly being ignored, deservedly, and adds nothing to the outdated talking points that anti-nuclear environmentalists have made for decades...
If one of the richest, most democratic, egalitarian and climate concerned countries in the world won’t stop producing and selling oil, how can we possibly demand that poor countries do so
@BrankoMilan
asks. Great question…
Predictably lost in gaslighting via cherry picked, out of context sentences from reviews of
@PatrickTBrown31
@Nature
paper is that NONE of the reviewers were actually suggesting that the authors account for or quantify the magnitude of non-climate factors in wildfire growth.
Kind of stunning that there’s not single mention in
@nytimes
extensive coverage of Rajapaksa’s downfall of synthetic fertilizer ban, which is where food shortages began and put the nation’s foreign reserve crisis into hyper drive.
After 200+ shows and 8 years the "Transition Show" finally does an episode on the energy source that provides half of our clean electricity.... and immediately conflates it with weapons. C'mon 🧐🚩
The fact that
@billmckibben
chides
@BillGates
for being behind the curve on energy technology while touting
@mzjacobson
as an authority tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual bankruptcy of the movement he leads.
This
@jon_rauch
in
@atlantic
piece gives very good account of effort to reinvent the nuclear industry, which is much needed. But efforts to parse problems with the industry from environmental opposition from an insane regulatory framework are misguided.
Increased emissions due to nuclear phaseouts in rich countries are greater than total emissions from all of sub-saharan Africa. New analysis from
@wang_seaver
and
@OSGuido
@TheBTI
...
The point is that even a casual policy decision in a wealthy country can produce CO2 emissions that far exceed the total national CO2 footprint of several poorer countries combined.
(Units below are in millions of metric tons of CO2e per year)
Excellent from
@monacharen
who provides a far more accurate representation of climate science and climate risk than does the "we believe in science" crowd...
This should put to rest notion that Greta is a prophet speaking uncomfortable truths to power. It was always clear to anyone willing to look that she is simply a tool of Big Green, promoted by adults as voice of the future even as she repeats the dogmas of the past...
Tomorrow the European Parliament will decide whether fossil gas and nuclear will be considered "sustainable" in the EU taxonomy. But no amount of lobbyism and greenwashing will ever make it "green".
We desperately need real renewable energy, not false solutions.
#NotMyTaxonomy
Notably, Democratic support up 12%, from 38% in 2016 to 50% today. Also notable, nuclear over this period is the only energy technology that has not seen a divergence in partisan opinion.
When environmentalists and renewable energy advocates say that nuclear supporters oppose renewables, what they actually mean is that they oppose a world powered entirely by renewable energy, which by definition excludes nuclear energy.
This sort of environmentalism is a cult, nothing else but a cult based on dogma and prejudice. It's dangerous that an issue as important as the environment is controlled by zealots.
2. Whether small modular reactors create marginally more or less waste than large light water reactors is an entirely academic question. No matter the technology, nuclear reactors create very little waste.
Idea: You couldn't have a degrowth movement in a pre-industrial society, when ppl understood the inputs to energy and housing. But industrial specialization abstracts the economy so much that academics can propose a "Cake for All!" program and call it Anti-Flourism.
Wow. RE supply chain is shot through with slave labor and terrible extractivism but the problem here is nuclear energy "upholding relations of domination." Riiight.... Climate Left is not serious about either climate change or justice...
Things more damaged than a Van Gogh painting, because climate change is infinitely more damaging than the most debatable climate protest. (I'm not justifying the tactics, just contemplating the scale of things.) Pakistan, Florida, New Mexico 2022. Homes, lives, habitats, hopes.
You can't have a modern and affluent society without large farms, processed food, and a food system that is technology intensive and labor sparing. Me and
@danrejto
in
@ForeignPolicy
Logic of climate movement at moment:
Scholars SHOULD be activists.
But saying scholar sounds like activist insults both
Lay people must never question expertise
Unless layperson is activist and scholar isn't
All rules reverse if scholar/activist on other team
Got that?
The nuclear bros theory of change:
1. Yell a lot on twitter about anti-nuclear falsehoods and conspiracies.
2. Yell some more on twitter about why RE too expensive and intermittent
3. People see truth. Change minds about nuclear.
4. Nations build lots of nuclear power.
Unpopular take. More telling story about race and politics of Dem Party is
@ewarren
poor performance in South Carolina, not
@PeteButtigieg
. Warren explicitly positioned as intersectional candidate yet hasn't succeeded w/non-white voters, or even women, anywhere (except Twitter)
Surprising precisely no one,
@foe_us
has sued
@PGE4Me
and CA labor groups over Diablo extension. But points here for creativity. FOE alleges breach of contract, claiming that the closed door deal brokered by green groups and PG&E is legally binding.
This is very promising, and a welcome contrast to
@SenSanders
old school and hard core anti-nuclear politics. Suggests that perhaps there is a generational shift underway on nuclear. Also points to the importance of new advanced nuclear technology...
Last night during the
#NY14
debate,
@AOC
made it clear that the door is open for nuclear energy in the
#GreenNewDeal
💯👏
"The GND leaves the door open for nuclear," but community input & vetting new technologies is key. 1/
"In the end, everyone knows what Sovacool, Jacobson, and other anti-nuclear academics are up to. They are simply highly credentialed ideologues. It’s the bullshit that I worry more about..."
My latest essay, "On Anti-Nuclear Bullshit,"
@TheBTI
The uptick of peeps in my responses post-Diablo vote making crazy anti-nuclear arguments has been interesting. Fascinating how much of it revolves around waste, which is really the least risky part of a not risky nuclear fuel cycle...
4. Nuclear reactors create far less waste than any fossil fuel. Less even than wind and solar which have major toxic waste issues associated with supply chains, production, and end of life. (This isn't an argument against wind or solar. But all energy technologies have impacts).
3. Whatever the arguments for private vs public ownership of grid, I see little basis for claim that public utility would be more likely to reduce fire risk. One way or another ratepayers or taxpayers will have to pay to fireproof system. Ownership structure is mostly irrelevant.
"In reality, the true face of the anti-nuclear movement today is a highly credentialed progressive policy wonk, a lawyer, or, academic, or journalist, who often claims not to be opposed to nuclear energy at all." New
@TheBTI
.
In name of protecting public from extremely low levels of radiation,
@NRCgov
has ignored substantial risks associated with not building nuclear plants, including hundreds of thousands of avoidable fossil fuel-caused deaths over last four decades.
Climate change is real. There is ample reason to address it. But the insistence that human extinction looms and that Exxon is responsible for every extreme weather event has driven rising polarization, anxiety, and fatalism, not effective action to address the problem.
9. One way or another, retrofitting state for current climate and fire reality won't be cheap or easy. The usual lazy, convenient, and reductive finger pointing won't change that. FIN