Trembath, A brkthru
http://energy.nationaljournal.com/contributors/alex-trembath.php
SEE SHILLENBERGER
ABUNDANCE BS
---
reving dr
Abundists haven’t been shy about their support for high level Trump toadies.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum
A billionaire software magnate with a side hustle leasing his land to oil companies, Burgum has become a favorite of the Abundance crowd. When his name was announced, Politicoreported that much of the jubilation came from Burgum’s attention to “one of the abundance agenda’s key fixations, or bogeymen: permitting reform.”
In Open Philanthropy’s announcementof their $120 million Abundance And Growth Fund (funded largely by tech titans Dustin Moskovitz and Patrick Collison), they cite Burgum’s previous calls for zoning reform and infrastructure investment as proof that abundance ideas have been “gaining traction for some time on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum.”
Matthew Yglesias, who Derek Thompson described as the “OG grandfather” of the ideas in Abundanceand is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, reassured his liberal audience that Burgum is “a totally solid pick who’ll do good things.” Yglesias also previously supported Burgum for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Alec Stapp, the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress made his support for Burgum very clear, saying “Excited to see Burgum land a cabinet role in the new administration. He’s a YIMBY abundance guy.” Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, also chimed in, adding “I think it was a really good pick.”
When speaking about Trump’s intent to nominate Burgum to lead the Department of the interior, CEO of theInclusive Abundance Initiative, Derek Kaufman said “We are excited for the abundance community to resume work with the new administration on electricity transmission and permitting reform, which came so close to becoming law at the end of 2024.”
Alex Trembathof the Breakthrough Institute celebrated Burgum’s first day in the Trump administration simply, posting a quote from Burgum that reads simply: “We are entering an era of abundance”
Armand Domalewski, a self-appointed abundance influencer with an increasingly prominent voice in the abundance world, celebrated Burgum’s appointment, posting “BURGUM BROS WE ARE SO BACK.”
Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation has been particularly thrilled with Burgum’s inclusion in the Trump administration, declaring “In Burgum we trust” and celebrating Burgum’s role in exempting companies from the Endangered Species Act and in ensuring further fossil fuel exploitation.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright
Oil and gas magnate Chris Wright is perhaps the single most popular Trump appointee among the Abundance crowd. Politicodescribed his nomination as having brought together “unlikely friends” to support “Chris Wright’s ‘energy abundance’ future” and as being backed by “the loose coalition of analysts and writers pushing for an ‘abundance agenda.’”
Inclusive Abundance’s Derek Kaufmanhas praised Wright’s appointment as a win for abundance and helpfully pointed out that “The word ‘abundance’ appears 11 times in the confirmation hearing transcript for President Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Energy, Chris Wright. It was invoked by Senators across the political spectrum, ranging from Mike Lee (R-UT) to Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to Martin Heinrich (D-NM).”
In their $120 million abundance grant announcement, Open Philanthropycelebrated the conservative embrace of abundist ideas, citing Wright’s appointment as evidence. “On the right, President Trump has issued an executive order focused on reducing energy costs […] and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has argued for the removal of burdensome regulations on nuclear power.”
Institute for Progress’ Aidan Mackenziealso praised Chris Wright’s nomination, saying “Both Burgum and Chris Wright seem committed to an all-of-the-above approach to energy; they’re very pro-oil and gas, but they’re also excited about forms of clean energy, especially nuclear and geothermal.”
The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembatheven defended Wright’s assertion that climate change is not a crisis, saying “Chris Wright’s claim that climate change is not a “crisis” is, while not the last word on the subject, much more scientifically defensible than the claims of his environmentalist critics.” Trembath later posted “Chris Wright: smart choice.”
Thomas Hochman summed up his opinion of the appointment simply: “Wright pursuing an all-of-the-above approach to energy production… pretty ideal”
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya
The Trump administration has utterly dismantled the National Institutes of Health and is currently proposing a 40% cut, which would devastate scientific advancement for generations. But don’t worry, abundists have full confidence in Trump’s NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya. While he does have a medical degree, Bhattacharya has never practiced medicine nor even completed a medical residency.
Open Philanthropy was bullish on Bhattacharya in March, when they said, “There is also cross-partisan interest in improving science policy, from newly nominated NIH director Jay Bhattacharya’s calls for a focus on reproducibility and funding high impact research, to the launch of the new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate at the NSF during the Biden administration.” Tragically, the Trump administration has proved less interested in funding research than cutting it, throwing the NSF that Open Philanthropy was so excited about into complete chaos.
The Foundation for American Innovation’sChief Economist, Samuel Hammond,said Bhattacharya’s appointment was cause for optimism, posting “That said, how many people do you know going into HHS? The folks I know around Jim O’Neill, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Makary are extremely high quality and serious about reform. Doesn’t mean I’ll agree with all their ideas, but there are some genuine reasons for optimism if you know anything at all ahout [sic] the behind the scenes.”
Institute for Progress’co-founder and co-CEO, Caleb Watney, elevated Bhattacharya’s analysis of the “increasing difficulty of funding novel research and younger scholars at the NIH,” a hobbyhorse of the abundance community, and said he was “very glad to see a larger focus on this issue.”
---
REF
Abundance Will Meet the Energy Demands of AI - Heatmap News
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
American electricity consumption is growing for the first time in generations. And though low-carbon technologies such as solar and wind have scaled impressively over the past decade, many observers are concerned that all this new demand will provide “a lifeline for more fossil fuel production,” as Senator Martin Heinrich put it.
In response, a few policy entrepreneurs have proposed novel regulations known as “additionality” requirements to handle new sources of electric load. First suggested for electrolytic hydrogen, additionality standards would require that subsidized hydrogen producers source their electricity directly from newly built low-carbon power plants; in a Heatmap piece from September, Brian Deese and Lisa Hansmann proposed similar requirements for new artificial intelligence. And while AI data centers were their focus, the two argued that additionality “is a model that can be extended to address other sectors facing growing energy demand.”
There is some merit to additionality standards, particularly for commercial customers seeking to reduce their emissions profile. But we should be skeptical of writing these requirements into policy. Strict federal additionality regulations will dampen investment in new industries and electrification, reduce the efficiency of the electrical grid through the balkanization of supply and demand, and could become weapons as rotating government officials impose their views on which sources of demand or supply are eligible for the standards. The grid and the nation need a regulatory framework for energy abundance, not burdensome additionality rules.
After decades of end-use efficiency improvements, offshoring of manufacturing, and shifts toward less material-intensive economies, a confluence of emerging factors are pushing electricity demand back up again. For one, the nation is electrifying personal vehicles, home heating, and may do the same for industrial processes like steel production in the not-too-distant future, sparked by a combination of policy and commercial investment. Hydrogen, which has long been a marginal fuel, is attractingsubstantial interest. And technological innovation is leading to whole new sources of electric load — compute-hungry artificial intelligence beingthe most immediate example, but also large-scale critical minerals refining, indoor agriculture like alternative protein cultivation and aquaculture, and so on.
In recent years, clean energy has seemed to be on an unstoppable path toward dominating the power sector. Coal-fired generation has been in terminal decline in the United States as natural gas power plants and solar and wind farms have become more competitive. Flexible gas generation, likewise, is increasingly crowded out by renewables when the wind is blowing and the sun shining. These trends persisted in the context of stable electricity load. But even as deployment accelerates, low-carbon electricity supply may not be able to keep up with the surprisingly robust growth in demand. The most obvious — though not the exclusive — way for utilities and large corporates to meet that demand is often with new or existing natural gas capacity. Even a few coal plants have delayed retirement, reportedly in response to rising demand and reliability concerns.
Given the durable competitiveness of coal and especially natural gas, some form of additionality requirement might make sense for hydrogen production in particular, since hydrogen is not just a nascent form of electric load but a novel fuel in its own right. Simply installing an electrolyzer at an existing coal or natural gas plant could produce hydrogen that, from a lifecycle perspective, would result in higher carbon emissions, even if it displaces fossil fuels like gas or oil in final consumption. Even so, many experts caution that overly strict additionality standards for hydrogen at this stage are overkill, and may smother the industry in its crib.
Likewise, large corporate entities and electricity customers adopting additionality requirements for their own operations can bolster investment in so-called “clean firm” generation like nuclear, geothermal, and fossil fuels with carbon capture. In just the past month, Google announced plans to back the construction of new small nuclear reactors, and Microsoft announced plans to purchase electricity for new data centers from the shuttered Three Mile Island power plant, the plant made famous by the 1979 meltdown but which only closed down in 2019. Three Mile Island’s $100-per-megawatt-hour price tag would have been unthinkable just a few years ago but is newly attractive.
Notice the problem Microsoft is trying to solve here: a lack of abundant, reliable electricity generation. Outdated technology licensing, onerous environmental permitting processes, and other regulatory barriers are obstructing the deployment of renewables, advanced nuclear energy, new enhanced geothermal technologies, and low-carbon sources. Additionality fixes none of these issues. Of course, Deese and Hansmann propose “a dedicated fast-track approval process” for verifiably additional low-carbon generation supplying new sources of AI load. Yet this should be the central effort, not the after-the-fact add-on. The back and forth over additionality rules for the clean hydrogen tax credit is a case in point. The rules for the tax credit will (likely) be finalized by January, but lawsuits already loom over them. Expanding this contentious additionality requirement to apply to broad use cases will be even more contentious without solving the actual shortage data center companies care about. Conversations about additionality are a distraction and misplace the energies of policymakers and staff.
Substituting one regulatory thicket for another is a recipe for stasis. Instead of adding more red tape, we should be working to cut through it, fast-tracking the energy transition and fostering abundance.
With such broad requirements, what’s to stop future administrations from expanding them to cover electric vehicle charging, electric arc furnace steelmaking, alternative protein production, or any politically disfavored source of new demand? Could a second Trump Administration use additionality to punish political enemies in the tech industry? Could a Harris Administration do the same? What if a future administration maintained additionality standards for new sources of load, but required that the electricity come from fossil fuels instead of low-carbon sources?
Zero-sum regulatory contracts between sources of electricity supply and demand are not simply at risk of becoming a tool for handing out favors on a partisan basis — they already are one. Two pieces of model legislation proposed at the July meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators that collaborate to write off-the-shelf legislative measures, would require public utility commissions to prioritize dispatchable generation and formally discourage intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind. One of the proposals suggests leaning on state attorneys general to extend the lifespans of coal plants threatened with retirement.
These proposals did not move forward this year, but it is unlikely that the motivating force behind them is exhausted. And whatever one thinks of the relative merits of intermittent versus firm generation, ALEC’s proposals demonstrate just how easily gamed regulations like additionality could be and the risks of relying on administrative discretion instead of universal, pragmatic rules.
This is not how the electric grid is supposed to work. The grid is, if not an according-to-Hoyle public good, a shared public resource, providing essential services to customers large and small. Homeowners don’t have to sign additionality contracts with suppliers when they buy an electric car or replace their gas furnace with an electric heat pump. Everyone understands that such requirements would slow the pace of electrification and investment in new industries. The same holds for corporate customers and novel sources of load.
The real problem facing the AI, hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, and renewables industries is an inability to build. There are more than enough clean generators queueing to enter the system — 2.6 terawatts at last count, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The unfortunate reality, however, is that just one in five of these projects will make it through — and those represent just 14% of the capacity waiting to connect. Still, this totals about 360 gigawatts of new energy generation over the next few years, much more than the predicted demand from AI data centers. Obstacles to technology licensing, permitting, interconnection, and transmission are the key bottlenecks here.
Would foregoing additionality requirements and loosening regulatory strictures on technology licensing and permitting increase the commercial viability of new or existing fossil fuel capacity, as Deese and Hansmann warn? Perhaps, on some margin. But for the foreseeable future, the energy projects and infrastructure most burdened by regulatory requirements will be low-carbon ones. Batteries, solar, and wind projects make up more than 80% of the queue added in 2023. Meanwhile, oil and gas benefit from categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act, while low-carbon technologies are subject to stricter standards (although three permitting bills recently passed the House, including one that waives these requirements for new geothermal projects).
Consider that 40% of projects supported by the Inflation Reduction Act are caught up in delays. That is $84 billion of economic activity just waiting for the paperwork to be figured out, according to the Financial Times. Additionality requirements are additional boxes to check that almost necessarily imply additional delays. Permitting reform makes them redundant and unnecessary for a cleaner future.
This underscores perhaps the most essential conflict between strict additionality requirements and clean energy abundance. Ensuring that every new policy and every new source of demand allows for absolutely zero additional fossil fuel consumption or emissions will prove counterproductive to global decarbonization in the long run. Natural gas is still reducing emissions on the margin in the United States. Over the past decade, in years with higher natural gas prices, coal generation has ticked up, indicating that the so-called “natural gas bridge” has not yet reached its terminus. Even aggressive decarbonization scenarios now expect a substantial role for natural gas over the coming decades. And in the long term, natural gas plants may prove wholly compatible with abundant, low-carbon electricity systems if next-generation carbon capture technologies prove scalable.
The United States is the world’s energy technology R&D and demonstration laboratory. If policies to prune marginal fossil fuel consumption here stall domestic investment and scaling of low-carbon technologies — as current permitting regulations already do, and proposed additionality requirements would do — then we will not only slow U.S. decarbonization, but also inhibit our ability to export affordable and scalable low-carbon technologies abroad.
Environmental progress’s surest path is in speeding up. For that to happen, we need processes that allow for rapid deployment of clean energy solutions. Expediting technology licensing, fast-tracking federal infrastructure permitting, and finding opportunities for quicker and more rational interconnections should be first and foremost.
The real solution lies in building a regulatory environment where energy abundance can flourish. Clearing the path for clean energy development, we can achieve a future where energy is affordable, reliable, and abundant—a future where the United States leads in both decarbonization and economic growth. It’s time to stop adding barriers and start speeding up progress.
....$
Heat Waves, Hot Rods, and Mr. Wonderful
Three climate stories that caught my eye today.
June 25, 2026
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Slate
It’s been a busy few days for climate and energy news. So instead of focusing on a single story in this edition, let’s try something different and check in with a few big ones I’ve been thinking about:
Europe’s heatwave
Wednesday was the hottest day ever recorded in France, according to the country’s weather agency, Météo-France. The commune of Palluau, not so far from the country’s Atlantic coast, recorded a high of 43.8 degrees Celsius, or 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
How the Slate Truck Got So Cheap
It’s not the hand-crank windows.
June 25, 2026
Heatmap Illustration/Slate, Getty Images
Today’s top-of-the-line electric vehicles are self-driving computers on wheels built to feel as futuristic and digital as possible. They come with artificial intelligence-powered assistants, enormous touchscreen interfaces, and huge batteries.
The Slate pickup truck’s signature feature? Hand-crank windows.
Gassed Up
On alumina, CANDUs, and copper
[
June 25, 2026
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
*Current conditions:France just recorded its hottest day ever, with Wednesday’s temperatures soaring to just under 111 degrees Fahrenheit; nearly 50 people died drowning while seeking respite from the heat • A pair of 7.1-magnitude earthquakes struck Venezuela, collapsing buildings in Caracas • Wind has whipped the Cottonwood Fire, one of six wildfires raging in Utah, into a larger blaze now covering 60,000 acres — and it’s still at 0% containment.
THE TOP FIVE
1. One of the highest-ranking Democrats yet calls for a data center moratorium
New Jersey Representative Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce committee, joined calls for a national moratorium on data center construction ahead of Wednesday afternoon’s markup of a series of bills related to the buildout of infrastructure to support artificial intelligence software. In a statement, Pallone described the bills as a “useful first step,” but one that, “compared to the challenges the American power grid is facing,” amounts to “not nearly enough.” Rather, he backed a “national AI data center moratorium until we can find a way to ensure they don’t harm our nation’s air, water, and power bills.” Pallone’s new public position makes him one of the highest-ranking Democrats yet to back the idea, championed by the likes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of halting permitting on new data centers in response to the growing blowback from voters.
---
ABUNDANCE NOT ASTRO BS BRKTHRU
Bottom-Up Abundance | The Breakthrough Institute
*Last week, fifteen cohosts, nine sponsoring organizations, and over 600 people convened for Abundance 2025 in Washington, DC. This was the second annual Abundance conference, and I had the privilege to help organize each. Below I’m publishing a slightly edited version of the short remarks I gave on stage, in which Ipushed back onutterly rejected the accusation that abundance is an “astroturfed” movement. As I said, “Abundance is bottom-up. We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each other.”
It’s been a pleasure getting to know my esteemed colleagues in the abundance coalition over the last few years. I think it was around three years ago at this point that a bunch of us started talking about what it would look like, and the work it would do in the world, to convene this nascent, tenuous thing called the abundance movement. I was happy to help launch this event last year and am genuinely stunned to look out tonight at what this conference, and this coalition, have so quickly grown into.
Because I know many of us among the cohosts and sponsors of the conference—and I’m sure many of you in housing, energy, governance, tech, and other spaces—feel like we’ve been doing abundance since long before there was a movement or an agenda or a book. Breakthrough was founded almost twenty years ago to create an environmentalism that builds. The Federation of American Scientists, one of our cohosts, was founded 80 years ago and obviously represents a critical undercurrent of abundance, which is the liberatory power of science and technology. What we now think of as state capacity has been building momentum for years, drawing on ideas from dynamism and civic-tech reform. And I know my YIMBY friends have been doing housing abundance for over a decade at this point, and have really set the high-water mark for what mass-appeal, boots-on-the-ground abundance activism can look like.
I like to say that the different abundance factions use different nouns but similar verbs: build, densify, unleash, expand. But what I think brings us all together is not just a generic vocabulary or even just a broadly shared agenda.
We face an entirely new set of challenges in American politics and culture. It was one thing to build a more abundant society at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, or during the New Deal or the postwar era. Today, abundance faces novel headwinds, and it’s not just NIMBYs and degrowthers. Incumbency dynamics, regulatory bloat from decades of administrative inertia, technological stagnation, and what economists call cost-disease effects have made it difficult to deploy effective state capacity, to afford essential but labor-intensive goods and services like education and childcare, and to imagine let alone build a future more technologically advanced and, well, abundant than our own.
I think that’s why we’re all here. Exceptional circumstances brought us together.
And so I feel the need to take a moment to address a certain report published by the Revolving Door Project. Because even accounting for my pro-abundance bias, I’m left a bit nonplussed by much of the criticism levied at abundance. The American Prospect described this coalition—literally, many of the cohosts of Abundance 2025—in pretty conspiratorial terms, writing suggestively that our groups “have connections to corporate interests” with “financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.” A writer in the New International accused the abundance coalition of employing an “astroturf” strategy. Revolving Door Project released a whole report “on the people and orgs behind this movement, hopefully shedding some light on this mysterious bunch.” The implication of all this criticism is clear: abundance is not a legitimate movement.
And if I leave you with one takeaway, I hope it’s this: that accusation is totally, categorically false. Abundance is not this astroturfed conspiracy. In fact just the opposite: abundance is emergent. Abundance is bottom-up. We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each other.
The people and ideas in this ballroom pull on strands from multiple fields—think tanks, activists, organizers, elected officials, journalists, philanthropists, technologists and entrepreneurs and investors—and multiple ideological traditions—liberalism (classical and otherwise), urbanism, supply-side progressivism, state capacity libertarianism, industrial conservative populism, ecomodernism, humanism, effective altruism, and beyond. There are, as we learned this morning, many Varieties of Abundance. We’re all here not because we agree on everything that our corporate overlords tell us to believe, but to do the messy work of figuring out what unites us across differences, how we can collaborate to solve real material problems in the world, and whether this audacious thing called Abundance can meaningfully change American politics and culture.
We each have our own story of how we got to this room. And the reason you know it’s not some astroturfed conspiracy is because I don’t think any of us knows exactly where it’s going from here. Last week I had to pause Marshall Kosloff’s podcast because he said something I found so inspiring, he said because abundance “is so unsettled, people can actually contribute.” To me that’s what’s most exciting, and vital, about abundance, and about this crowd.
My contribution is that I’ve dedicated my career to modernizing environmental politics for the 21st century. Your contribution may be quite different from mine. But if anything could bring together nuclear and solar advocates, housing activists, scientists, AI researchers, state capacity reformers, Congressional representatives and comptrollers, and beyond, it would have to be an idea as capacious and compelling as abundance.
GGL
[### #512 | Alex Trembath: How the Abundance Agenda Can Build ...
YouTube · The Realignment
760+ views · 1 year ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QQsBB2zJzI)
1:09:00
Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Institute, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Alex discuss the takeaways from Abundance ...
8 key moments in this video
Missing: libertARIAN HAYEK FRIEDMAN
[### Eco-Modernism and Abundance with Alex Trembath
YouTube · Competitive Enterprise Institute
130+ views · 3 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnUTVTx6dH8)
43:07
Our interview this week is with Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute. We discuss the meaning of eco-modernism, opportunities for ...
CITE
Active Incrementalism and the Politics of Austerity 91
reflected a public embarrassment for the government, as Premier Wall publicly mused about implementing the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to override the SC C ’s decision (Trembath 2015).
Young people are increasingly pessimistic about climate change, and a narrative around 'climate doom' is becoming more and more common. Should we doom about the climate? And if not, how do we combat the doom narrative? Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute and Jessica Weinkle, professor at UNC Wilmington, join the show to discuss why climate doom exists, the reality of how climate change is happening, and how to move forward.
9/24
Of Course "Misinformation" Isn’t the Cause of Climate Change
https://substack.com/home/post/p-148590592
By Alex Trembath
The world currently produces over 8 billion tons of coal, 35 billion barrels of oil, 115 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer, and 4 trillion cubic meters of natural gas every year. There are over 1.3 million miles of rail lines, 2 million miles of liquid and gas pipelines, and 40 million miles of roads in the world. There are an estimated 800 crude oil refineries, 3000 petrochemical plants, and 35,000 mines. There are about 1.5 billion cars and 1.5 billion cows. A little less than one third of the world’s 36 billion acres of land is used for crop production and ruminant pasture.
The world has over 25,000 jet planes and over 100,000 large ships. This infrastructure, serving a global population of 8.2 billion increasingly urban humans, produced about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, the latest pulse in a cumulative, centuries-long emission of of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, which to date have warmed the planet by about 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.
These are the material facts of the world’s climate problem. I mention them because some climate activists have identified the chief obstacle to solving it: misinformation. And if that sounds like a non-sequitur, that’s because it is.
Fortunately, last month, the political scientist Holly Jean Buck deconstructed the misinformation-obsessed climate advocacy framework. In an excellent Jacobin essay, she wrote that, instead of working with communities on the ground to deploy low-carbon technology and infrastructure, “the intellectual wing of the climate movement has decided to wage an information war focused on uncovering what Big Oil knew and policing speech.”
The speech police, predictably, did not appreciate this. Rebecca Leber from the Center for Climate Integrity said Buck’s piece “fundamentally misunderstands climate disinfo.” Drilled reporter Amy Westervelt called it “a mediocre website article.” In a response published by Jacobin, Public Citizen’s Aaron Regunberg implies that Buck is herself a servant of fossil-funded misinformation, writing “It is very much in Big Oil’s interest for climate advocates to, as Buck suggests, stop ‘obsessing over climate disinformation.’”
The climate activist Genevieve Guenther seemed to take Buck’s essay personally, as her recent book makes precisely the argument that Buck critiques. In The Language of Climate Politics, Guenther argues that “partisans on the right and the left often repeat the same fossil-fuel talking points, and this repetition produces a centrist consensus upholding the status quo, even as global heating accelerates.” To Guenther and her allies, treating climate change as an infrastructural and technological challenge, as opposed to a political and linguistic one, is tantamount to climate denial. After the Jacobin essay was published, Guenther re-upped attacks that she made in her book, in which she called Buck “a [carbon dioxide removal] advocate who uses fossil fuel talking points” and accused her of using “clever implicatures to create the false belief that carbon dioxide removal technologies are sure to work.”
Buck, whose previous position in the DOE’s Fossil Energy and Carbon Management office earned Guenther’s scorn, is now a professor at the University of Buffalo and the author of a book titled Ending Fossil Fuels.The assault on her integrity was so obviously unfair that a number of other advocates and analysts (myself included) came to Buck’s defense on Twitter. And for a moment there, the whole thing may have felt like a narrow argument between Buck, who has argued that carbon dioxide removal is a public good that should be overseen by the state, and Guenther, who says this is a climate denier talking point.
But we shouldn’t let these dramatics obscure the deeper arguments made by Buck who, for her part, did not mention Guenther in the Jacobin essay. Because Guenther’s book, which was endorsed by Michael Mann and Bill McKibben, is indeed only the latest exponent of the vast conspiratorial body of work that Buck rightly criticized.
As Ted and I have each discussed previously, the ongoing climate misinformation wars can be traced back to a 2012 workshop organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which wrote the playbook on climate activists’ assault on the fossil fuel industry’s social license. The strategy has since been employed in the ExxonKnew campaign and the InsideClimateNews investigations into Exxon’s internal and public-facing climate science, the global fossil fuel divestment campaigns, climate liability lawsuits now numbering in the hundreds, misleading calculations attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change, and books like Guenther’s, which asserts that the concepts of “growth,” “innovation,” and “resilience” (among other things) are forms of fossil industry propaganda.
According to this theory of change, if enough climate litigants win civil suits against oil companies (as Our Children’s Trust did in Montana last year), and if enough universities and municipalities divest from fossil fuel companies (as over 1500 institutions had at last count), and if academics “expose” enough decades-old oil industry climate research, and if enough activists use terms like “global heating,” “fracked gas,” and “fossil capital,” the world’s governments will be pressured to do…uh, something…to mercilessly shut down the fossil fuel industries.
Of course, over a decade removed from the 2012 UCS workshop, and U.S. and global oil and gas production are higher than ever, as is global coal production. The linguistic theory of climate change has failed dismally.
But wait. Doesn’t persistent fossil fuel production suggest the dismal failure of allefforts to decarbonize global energy systems?
It does not, for the simple reason that there is more than one theory of change.
As David Roberts inadvertently but helpfully summarized last week, the misinformation-and-propaganda theory contrasts with what we might call the realpolitik theory of climate change:
Of course, fossil fuels are not “intrinsically indispensable.” Nuclear reactors, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, electric heat pumps, electric vehicles, and other technologies offer off-the-shelf alternatives to fossil fuels up and down the value chain. But the theory that Roberts sarcastically offered above—put differently, that fossil fuels are powerfully useful products whose replacement poses engineering and economic difficulties—does explain a number of important realities about the world that the propaganda theory has no explanation for.
The realpolitik understanding of climate change explains why widespread fossil fuel exploitation began centuries before the purported misinformation campaigns that climate activists obsess over. It explains why the pace of decarbonization has been remarkably persistent over the decades (and was actually faster before climate change became a major public concern). It explains why rich countries, home to the private fossil conglomerates targeted by the climate misinformation police, are actually experiencing declining fossil fuel consumption and emissions. It also explains why poorer countries, which have yet to achieve a material standard of living close to what we in the wealthy world enjoy, account for the overwhelming share of growth of fossil fuel consumption and emissions. It explains why the majority of global fossil fuel reserves, and the vast majority of reserves in low- and middle-income countries, are owned by governments, not corporations like Exxon.
Of note, it also explains why coal consumption is plateauing globally and on the decline in every rich country. Coal-fired electricity generation faces competition from more technological alternatives than any other fossil fuel application, including nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and bioenergy. Perhaps most significantly, coal faces competition from natural gas, another fossil fuel whose newfound abundance has undercut coal markets in the United States and around the world. (Again, the misinformation police have no explanation for this fossil-on-fossil violence.)
Ridiculously but illustratively, it explains why Legos (yes, Legos) are still made of petroleum and not organic alternatives, as revealed in an excellent investigation into the company’s failed efforts to produce oil-free toy bricks. Decarbonizing Legos, let alone the entire modern global economy, turns out to be difficult.
This does not mean that climate progress is impossible or that fossil fuels can be replaced “only partially.” Rather, it means that replacing them requires attacking their biogeochemical and engineering advantages, not their linguistic ones.
The generous interpretation of the climate conspiracy theorists is that they, faced with the mind-boggling math of decarbonization, have chosen a set of tactics to which they, as mostly academics and journalists, are more comfortable pursuing: PR campaigns against big corporations. As Buck put it in her essay, “if disinformation is the main problem, then the chattering classes are central to the climate fight.”
A more cynical interpretation would be that anti-industrialism is thegoal, and that the apocalyptics provided by climate anxiety provide the best fodder for generating wider anti-modernist enthusiasm. Notably, these apocalyptics rely on an understanding of climate science that is completely without empirical basis. We could even call it “catastrophist misinformation,” although it’s really more like willful scientific illiteracy. And yet, many pragmatic climate advocates, who may not think that climate change is caused by oil industry propaganda, appear wooed by these activists who, though perhaps a bit enthusiastic, nonetheless draw more attention to their shared cause.
So the reaction to Buck’s essay should serve as a cautionary tale to the ecomodernists, climate pragmatists, and other purveyors of climate realpolitik who might otherwise make excuses for catastrophist conspiracy theorists. As this episode reveals, in the view of Guenther, McKibben, Mann, and their allies, the climate problem is not actually carbon emissions. The problem is propaganda, by which they mean, apparently, “growth,” “resilience,” and “innovation.” Any effort to reduce emissions or improve society’s response to climate change that deviates from this terminological campaign is, according to its leaders, definitionally engaged in climate denial.
I, personally, would advise against making common cause with these people. You wouldn’t want to be the next climate advocate caught saying the wrong thing.
===
Climate Economists Need to Get Their House in Order
On The Limited Value of the Social Cost of Carbon
By Alex Trembath
In my latest post, co-authored with Patrick Brown, we argued that Adrien Bilal and Diego Känzig’s recent intervention into the social cost of carbon (SCC) literature was bad enough: explicitly activist, self-consciously outlandish, and methodologically nonsensical. What was worse, we wrote, was that many of the experts who have long maintained the validity and usefulness of the SCC were more than happy to throw that framework under the bus in favor of more eye-poppingly alarmist research. The apparent lack of rigor and guardrails within the expert climate research community revealed, once again, how powerful the narrativization of climate science has become.
Some observers took this to mean that Patrick and I were endorsing a scholarly consensus on the SCC. “I thought you guys were defending the mainstream consensus of climate economics,” inquired Heatmap’s Rob Meyer, “which holds that there are technically accurate ways to approach these problems without recourse to pure politics.”
In the broadest sense, I suppose we do defend the mainstream view on the social cost of carbon. We believe that a ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the biosphere creates impacts and harms that are worth mitigating and addressing—hence our careers in climate research and advocacy. But Meyer’s description of “mainstream consensus” provides a good summary of the SCC framework, and why we’ve stopped short of endorsing it, either as an epistemological pursuit or, more importantly, as an input into policymaking.
And this is only the latest controversy over the social cost of carbon which, at the very least, suggests a need for a more honest reckoning over the utility of the metric among climate economists.
The most strident attacks on the SCC, William Nordhaus’s DICE model, and other conventional climate economics frameworks are, to be sure, crazy. They imply that there are no benefits to fossil fuel exploitation to balance against climate risk in a cost-benefit analysis. On the other hand, identifying a precise cost-benefit equilibrium estimate for the social cost of carbon is, fundamentally, impossible. And it’s not just the fat tails of climate risk distribution, the controversies about the discount rate, or the other long-standing hurdles to a more robust SCC consensus. It’s that climate change is a slow-moving and massively complex global threat. We simply have no access to essential information, such as the size of the global economy decades from now and its resilience to climate impacts or even the exact sensitivity of the climate to emissions, that would inform a robust cost-benefit analysis.
So it’s fair to say that climate policy is a matter of weighing costs and benefits of fossil fuels. But that’s about as much as you can say. The questions of how to address climate change, and how to trade off climate action against other societal priorities, are ones for transparent scientific and democratic deliberation, not technocratic authority.
Indeed, what was most interesting about the reaction to our post wasn’t just the relative lack of defense of the new SCC research, but the strength of the consensus againstthe usefulness of the SCC.
“I think the social cost of carbon (SCC) is a ~useless metric,” tweeted UT Austin engineering professor Arvind Ravikumar. Our former colleague Zeke Hausfather called it “just a thin veneer of objectivity covering what is ultimately a naked value judgment.”
Putting the finest point on it was Columbia’s Noah Kaufman, who recently served on the Biden Administration’s Council of Environmental Quality. “The value of climate damages is not a thing we can estimate,” Kaufman wrote. “There is no consensus. Never will be.”
That, presumably, would be news to EPA’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) on the Social Cost of Carbon, which describes its charge as “developing a consistent set of SC-CO2 estimates to be used in regulatory impact analyses.” Indeed, it is the IWG’s estimates of the SCC that the EPA is currently relying upon to “estimate the global social benefits of CO2 emission reductions expected” in the agency’s proposed regulations on power plant and tailpipe emissions.
The EPA’s draft power plant rule acknowledges “limitations” to the IWG’s consensus, speculating that the estimates they use “likely underestimate the damages from CO2 emissions,” promising to “further improve SC-GHG estimation going forward.” It is surely with these future improvements in mind that economist Gernot Wagner insisted that Bilal and Känzig’s outlier SCC estimate would “change everything.” One gets the distinct sense of an activist academy, deliberately producing “more robust methodologies” (read: indecipherably convoluted models) to cook the books in favor of more stringent regulations.
After all, the EPA’s summary notwithstanding, there’s no reason to presume mainstream SCC estimates are biased asymmetrically downwards. As the economist Matthew Kahn has described it, “In the language of economics, the Social Cost of Carbon is a reduced form object that is constantly changing. It could shrink over time if we use markets, innovation and experimentation to learn how to protect ourselves and our assets from heat, floods and other weather risks.”
One wonders how reliable the economic metric could be for policymaking when estimating it has proven so vexing. And that’s exactly the conclusion many economists and policymakers have come to. “I don’t think it has any influence on the structure or stringency of the regulations,” Columbia’s Kaufman told me. “And it shouldn’t.”
So which is it? Are Bilal, Känzig, and their defenders correct that their outlier results “change everything” and “have salient consequences for decarbonization policy?” Or is the very metric these economists are attempting to influence “useless?”
If the SCC is an important concept for regulatory rulemaking, then climate economists should, at minimum, enforce more rigor in establishing its definition and level. Such enforcement would exclude transparent nonsense while including the ways in which emissions mitigation, societal resilience and adaptation, and the use of more realistic warming scenarios can decrease SCC estimates. If, however, Kaufman and Hausfather are correct, then the SCC merely provides substantively irrelevant superficial scientism into the regulatory process. And if that’s the case, the EPA should probably tell Bilal, Känzig, Wagner, and other economists trying to push the SCC ever upward that they can stop wasting their time.
---
slate asu future tense
in 1980, Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich famously bet libertarian economist Julian Simon that the price index of several precious metals would increase over the ensuing 10 years. Ehrlich, author of the apocalyptic hit The Population Bomb, expected that resource scarcity would inevitably drive up prices. Simon took the bet, insisting that the free market and human ingenuity would find ways to produce more resources at lower costs. Simon won.
That wager, expertly recalled in Paul Sabin’s *The Bet*, is a microcosm of the left-right divide on the environment and economic growth that has existed for the past several decades. Ehrlich was on the left: an angry, pessimistic academic demanding government policy to halt the growth of population, technology, and consumption. Simon was on the right: a sunny, gregarious economist arguing the free market would forever solve humanity’s resource challenges and that government should get the hell out of the way. Lefties and righties across Western economies have played these roles consistently for a generation.
That divide no longer matters.
Or, at least, it’s on its way out. Two remarkable books that came out this year—Austerity Ecology & the Collapse Porn Addicts by Leigh Phillips and The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey—each makes the case that growth, technology, and accelerated modernization can solve the twin global problems of poverty and environmental devastation. The twist is that Phillips and Bailey argue from diametrically opposed left and right positions.
Phillips’ important socialist polemic—subtitled A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff—resurrects the progressive vision of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Somewhere in the last 50 years, Phillips writes, the left abandoned progressivism. “The New Left in America,” he argues, “from its birth in the early 1960s, turned away from the expansive ambition and productivism of earlier social democratic and Communist left, and toward the fear of the large, the modern, and the technological.” From this perspective, Phillips advocates global socialist government, nuclear power, biotechnology and genetic modification, and even space exploration.
Bailey, a scholar and columnist at the libertarian Reason magazine, makes a similar case. An update to his 1993 book *Eco-Scam*, End of Doomcounters 50 years of apocalyptic environmentalist rhetoric on pesticides, GMOs, fossil fuels, and other hallmarks of modernity. Along the way, he regularly chides environmentalists and big-government bureaucrats for slowing the advance of promising technologies.
Bailey writes that not only are the risks of advanced technologies massively overhyped by nominal lefty spokespeople like Vandana Shiva and Bill McKibben, but said technologies in fact have the consistent and demonstrable effect of lifting people out of poverty and saving more room for nature. For instance, Bailey cites studies showing that biotech crops have produced $120 billion in economic gains for farmers over the past 20 years while sparing 300 million acres—an area almost twice the size of Texas—from being converted to agricultural land. The evidence in Bailey’s book is convincing: Technology boosts incomes and saves nature.
On GMOs, nuclear power, energy consumption, and industrial activity, Phillips the socialist and Bailey the libertarian agree. But for their positions on the role of government, they have written nearly the same book. How can this be?
The two authors do not fit neatly into political categories. Phillips excoriates his fellow leftists for abandoning their historical faith in progress, technology, and institutions. According to Austerity Ecology, the anti-technology “small-is-beautiful” ideology of the modern left feeds right into the anti-government right of the latter 20th century. This is an evolution of the progressive movement that Phillips harshly rejects. Bailey, likewise, contrasts sharply with past conservative ideas of Malthus, Thomas Jefferson, and other anti-modernists.
Left and right have been around for centuries. But they’ve never actually been the most relevant ideological divide. Rather, humanity has always been tugged between the proponents and skeptics of progress. In his recent work, University of Warwick’s Steve Fuller has borrowed a 40-year-old distinction between “up-wingers” and “down-wingers” to advocate a proactionary principle, a deliberate contrast to environmentalism’s hallowed precautionary principle.
Fuller describes how the reorientation from “left-right” to “up-down” could take place:
The “90-degree revolution” I foresee is that the communitarians and the traditionalists will team up to form the “down-winging” pole, while the technocrats and the libertarians will join forces to form the “up-winging” pole. … The geometry of the political imagery implies that the Left and the Right are each divided and then re-combined to form the Up and the Down.
It’s a compelling visual, and the new books by Phillips and Bailey make me think Fuller’s revolution might actually be taking place. (The two are, of course, not alone—see also the reorienting work of Michael Lind, Ruth DeFries, Martin Lewis, Jim Manzi, and other scholars who confound conventional political categories.)
I think it would make for an encouraging change, for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m an up-winger, so of course I’m in favor of this ideological revolution. Second, it wouldn’t really be a revolution, but more a reversion to the mean: the up-down distinction has historically been more practically relevant than the left-right distinction. Third, an up-down distinction would redound to the benefit of upwingers. Downwingers are present on both the left and the right, but are more sound than fury—refocusing the debate toward upwinger varieties on the right and the left would further marginalize the opponents of progress.
Fuller’s framework explains why ostensibly lefty environmentalists like Naomi Klein can adopt similar back-to-the-land, localist positions as right-wing doomsday preppers and reactionary anti-urbanites. More optimistically, it’s how socialist technocrats and libertarian free-marketers could collaborate on technological innovation, global growth, and open societies.
==
Senior Analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, graduate of UC Berkeley, board member California Lightweight Crew Association #GoBears
Experience
Policy Associate
The Breakthrough Institute
October 2011 – Present (3 years 9 months)Oakland, CA
Analysis of American federal energy policy, energy markets, and energy technology innovation.
Breakthrough Generation Co-Director
The Breakthrough Institute
August 2011 – Present (3 years 11 months)Oakland, CA
Clean energy policy research and analysis.
Policy Fellow
The Breakthrough Institute
May 2011 – August 2011 (4 months)
President
Cal Lightweight Crew
May 2010 – May 2011 (1 year 1 month)
Oversee club and team operations, incl. recruitment, fundraising, travel and equipment, alumni relations and coaching.
Policy Fellow
Americans for Energy Leadership
June 2010 – March 2011 (10 months)
http://leadenergy.org/
Twitter: @LeadEnergy goldfarb ~ david roberts grist
Intern
Organizing for America
January 2010 – June 2010 (6 months)
Duties/Responsibilities: Local outreach and volunteer effort for progressive causes and candidates, sponsored by Organizing for America, the organizing arm of the Obama Administration and formerly Obama for America.
Intern
San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development
July 2009 – May 2010 (11 months)
I do work on cleantech business development in San Francisco.
UC Berkeley Chapter Director
Students for Gavin Newsom
August 2009 – November 2009 (4 months)
I manage the UC Berkeley operations for Students for Gavin Newsom. Let's get Mayor Newsom elected governor!
Intern
Mayor's Office of Climate Protection Initiatives
May 2009 – August 2009 (4 months)
I worked on projects for Wade Crowfoot, the Mayor's Director of Climate Protection Initiatives in City Hall.
===
Alex Trembath is a senior analyst at Breakthrough. He is the lead or coauthor of several Breakthrough publications, including Coal Killer: How Natural Gas Fuels the Clean Energy Revolution, Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence and Where the Shale Gas Revolution Came From. He is also co-director of Breakthrough Generation, the Breakthrough Institute's annual summer policy fellowship, which brings together some of the brightest young thinkers in the world to work together researching policy, politics, and technology. Alex came to the Energy and Climate Program by way of Breakthrough Generation 2011, where he contributed research on the collapse of federal funding for clean tech research, deployment, and innovation.
At Breakthrough, Alex has focused on renewable energy technologies, American federal energy policy, and the history of public investments in technological innovation. His writing on energy technology and policy has been published by the *Boston Globe*, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, *Forbes*, Politico,andBloomberg. He also writes regularly for the *National Journal* and the Energy Collective. His research and analysis have been featured in the*New York Times*, the *Washington Post*, the *Wall Street Journal*,*Time Magazine*, the *Los Angeles Times*, *Bloomberg*, *Forbes*,E&E News, CNN, and other major media outlets.
Alex is a graduate of University of California at Berkeley where he received his Bachelor's in Environmental Economics and Policy. While at Cal, Alex was active in the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative and California Lightweight Crew. In 2009, he worked at San Francisco City Hall on local cleantech and community development in the Mayor's Office of Climate Protection Initiatives. In college he worked on several political campaigns, including Gavin Newsom's gubernatorial run in 2009 and Organizing for America. In 2011 Alex completed a policy fellowship with Americans for Energy Leadership, where he wrote on U.S. energy policy and politics. He has lived in the Bay Area for the last decade, and is a proud son of South Bend, Indiana. He enjoys rowing and exploring the Bay Area. Follow Alex on Twitter @atrembath.
Publications
A Climate Pragmatism Project
How Natural Gas Fuels the Clean Energy Revolution
Beyond Boom and Bust: Report Overview
Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence
US Government Role in Shale Gas Fracking History: An Overview and Response to Our Critics
An Overview and Response to Our Critics
Blog Posts
Is Coal Really “Peaking” in China?
Better Technologies Needed for Emissions to Start Falling
US Coal Exports Do Not Offset Massive Emissions Reductions from Natural Gas
A Response to CO2 Scorecard
--
’s the elegant solution climate hawks have been looking for since the death of cap-and-trade. But as Dr. Rob Gross, the Director of the U.K. Imperial College Centre for Energy Policy and Technology stated, this idea is, “so simplistic it is absurd.” Carbon taxes are doomed to fail because they do little to drive what is needed most: innovation that generates affordable clean energy that all 7 billion humans will want to adopt, not out of altruism or coercion, but out of self-interest.
Economists’ attraction to a carbon tax was on full display recently when economist Greg Mankiw wrote in the New York Times, calling a carbon tax a climate policy “America could live with,” compared to the grab bag of regulations and fuel standards targeted by the Obama administration.
Carbon tax supporters believe it will lead consumers to use less dirty energy. Mankiw writes, “When making everyday decisions, people would naturally look at the prices they face and, in effect, take into account the global impact of their choices.”
If greenhouse gasses were a pollutant like sulphur dioxide that largely stays within national borders such a policy might make sense. But they are not. It’s a global pollutant. That’s why we talk about addressing global warming, not American warming.
Mankiw’s preferred climate solution aims at getting U.S. consumers to buy slightly more fuel efficient cars or turn off light bulbs more regularly because energy prices are modestly higher. This will have little impact on global emissions because virtually all their growth will be in rapidly growing developing nations like China and India. Moreover, greenhouse gases are not like traditional pollutants in another sense: they are cumulative, essentially filling the atmospheric “bath tub.” We therefore can’t afford to simply slow their growth; we need to dramatically cut emissions.
This gets to the second major problem with the carbon tax. The only way to get to dramatic cuts in global emissions is by developing significantly cheaper and better clean energy technologies. Current clean energy alternatives cost significantly more than conventional energy. Expecting consumers and businesses, especially in poor developing nations, to pay a large price premium for clean energy is wishful thinking.
The only path to cheap and reliable clean energy is innovation: better batteries, better solar cells, better biofuels, better nuclear reactors, etc. Unfortunately, few economists focus on innovation and to the extent they do they see it as “manna from heaven,” something that just happens. To the extent a carbon tax induces innovation it is through the magic of the market: higher prices provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to develop a better energy mousetrap.
Economists have built a cottage industry out of comparing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and conventional pollution regulations. But an innovation strategy to develop cheaper, better clean energy technologies doesn’t make the cut. Frankly, this shouldn’t be a surprise as innovation is not part of neoclassical economists’ lexicon. In Mankiw’s seminal textbook Principles of Economics, the word “innovation” is barely mentioned in almost 900 pages of text.
But breakthrough technologies like jet aircraft, gas engines, computers and cell phones have never emerged because their competitors’ price increased. Steve Jobs didn’t develop the PC because the price of a typewriter went up. We have to only look to Europe for a natural experiment. Their gas prices are more than twice as high as in the United States and serve as a defacto carbon tax. While Europeans buy smaller cars and take more mass transit, they don’t buy more electric vehicles because they are expensive and provide limited range. While a higher gas price can spur carmakers to make smaller, more fuel efficient internal combustion engine cars, it has not and will not spur them to develop cheap batteries that let you drive 500 miles without a charge.
So where do breakthroughs like cheap clean energy come from if not from marginally higher prices? As innovation economist Mariana Mazzucato recently opined, “A quick look at the pioneering technologies of the past century points to the state, not the private sector, as the most decisive player in the game.” In other words, smart government innovation policy that works with industry is how the world will get cheap clean energy.
For policymakers, this means fully funding clean energy research budgets and strategically supporting proof-of-concept technology demonstrations and early commercialization. To be clear, a carbon tax can make this easier, especially if some of the revenues are devoted to a smart and effective clean energy innovation system. But to believe that modest price signals in the United States alone will transform the world’s energy system is an illusion. As such it’s time to overcome climate policy group-think and embrace a robust clean energy innovation policy.
*Stepp is senior policy analyst at the Information Technology and innovation Foundation (ITIF) and Trembath is a policy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute.
===
The Case for IRA Reform
Feb 05, 2025
By Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/the-case-for-ira-reform
Twenty years ago, Breakthrough helped launch the first effort to accelerate climate mitigation through large-scale federal investment in low carbon technology. At the time, the idea that public investment, not carbon regulations or pricing, would be the long pole in the decarbonization tent was controversial, indeed, "contrarian." Today it has become conventional wisdom among Democrats, progressives, and most of the center left, culminating in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
But there was always a misunderstanding among many, both proponents and critics of this approach, about what "make clean energy cheap," a term that we coined, actually entailed. For a lot of proponents, it simply meant subsidizing clean energy, mostly wind and solar, basically forever. Critics saw it the same way and rightly pointed out that maintaining subsidies as clean tech began to scale would become incredibly expensive, inefficient, and—particularly with variable renewables—would distort electricity markets in ways that would likely raise overall costs even with substantial subsidies.
But the point of “making clean energy cheap” was not to do so via perpetual subsidy but to invest in innovation and early stage commercialization of clean technologies to “cut the Gordian Knot” that created the zero-sum tradeoff between the cost of energy and carbon emissions, as we wrote in one early policy review. So long as clean energy was substantially more expensive than fossil fuels, efforts to mitigate climate change would impose substantial economic costs on consumers and businesses that were, in the best case, challenging to sustain politically and, in the worst case, damaging economically.
Making clean energy cheap in real, unsubsidized terms remains the right approach today and, in our view, the only plausible way to assure either US energy security or significant global decarbonization in the long term. With the Trump Administration now in power and Republican majorities in Congress vowing to repeal the IRA, we published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month arguing that the incoming Trump Administration should reform but not repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. We argued that with US electricity demand set to increase substantially alongside major expansion of US natural gas export capacity, making clean energy cheap will likely be necessary to assure that all energy in the United States remains cheap.
In the intensely polarized environment that has overtaken US climate and energy politics, this seemingly obvious point has become anathema to many partisans on both sides of the issue. So it is worth reviewing why a sustained commitment to US federal energy innovation, tied to real progress on the cost and productivity of clean energy technology rather than arbitrary and implausible emissions reduction targets, should remain a priority for both Democrats and Republicans in Washington.
Increasing the Cost of Fossil Fuels and the Iron Law of Climate Politics
Efforts to cut emissions by making fossil fuels more expensive have reliably foundered virtually everywhere whenever those policies result in, or simply happen to correspond with, a significant increase in energy prices. Well over a decade ago, Roger Pielke Jr. dubbed this phenomenon as the Iron Law of Climate Policy. In recent years, climate advocates have variously attempted to bargain with Pielke’s Iron Law by producing spectacular estimates of the social and economic cost of future warming, proposing to recycle proceeds from carbon taxes back to consumers, or hiding the “green premium” (the additional cost of clean energy) in subsidies that purport to offer energy consumers something for nothing. But thus far, the Iron Law remains undefeated.
The reelection of Donald Trump and the unpopularity of the IRA are but the latest examples of the Iron Law. It was unfortunate for Biden and IRA supporters that the passage of the IRA happened to coincide with post-COVID inflation and a big runup in energy and commodity prices. But the IRA also contributed to that runup, adding a half trillion dollars in public spending to an already overheating economy and offering huge public incentives for utilities and developers to deploy intermittent renewables even when penetrations of those sources were already high and hence the electricity they produced had increasinglylow value to the grid.
The cost of the IRA to the public purse was also high. Initial estimates of the cost of the IRA by the Congressional Budget Office projected that the entire cost of the legislation for clean energy over the first ten years of its implementation would be around $390 billion. More recent estimates project the total cost of these programs to run closer to a trillion dollars, with the cost of wind and solar subsidies alone substantially exceeding the cost of the original estimates not only for the clean energy subsidies but for the entire cost of the package, inclusive of non-climate related spending.
Source: CBO, CRFB, Goldman Sachs, NBER, Credit Suisse, OMB, Breakthrough Institute Analysis.
The reason that the cost of the IRA is so high is because it proposes to subsidize mature, widely commercialized technologies. Solar now accounts for roughly 5% of US electricity generation and almost 25% in California. Wind accounts for over 10% of US generation and almost 30% in Texas. EVs will likely account for around 10% of US vehicle sales this year. With federal tax credits covering a third (or more) of the cost of wind and solar installations and $7500 for every EV that automakers sell, the aggregate costs of this approach to bringing down the unit costs of clean energy gets really expensive really fast. Renewables subsidies before the pandemic totaled less than $10 billion in federal expenditures annually. Current estimates suggest they will total three to six times as much on an annualized basis over the next decade.
Despite this significant escalation in the projected cost of the IRA, US emissions appear likely to significantly undershoot the original emissions reduction estimates that proponents of the IRA argued the package would achieve. After passage, Princeton’s Net Zero project estimated US emissions would fall 50% below 2005 levels by 2035. Last year, they softened this projection to 40% below 2005 levels. A 2024 report from Princeton, Rhodium, Energy Innovation LLC, and MIT found that deployment trends in low-carbon electricity were insufficient to achieve the goal of 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 established by the IRA. And as we found last year, taking these revisions into account, IRA investments would likely sustain the existing pace of US emissions reductions, not significantly accelerate them.
These downward projections come even as the estimated cost of the IRA programs has roughly doubled. So exactly as many skeptics suggested back in the mid and late 2000s, the attempt to use public clean energy subsidies as a reverse carbon tax is already proving to be an inefficient and expensive way to cut emissions.
Why Are Subsidies Needed if Wind and Solar Are Already So Cheap?
The idea that we need to subsidize wind and solar energy to make them cheap will strike many as odd, given that by many estimations, they are already incredibly cheap. Over the last decade, a wide range of prominent voices have insisted that wind and solar energy were the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in many places. As David Roberts wrote at Grist ten years ago, “a range of renewables are now competitive with fossil fuel power, without subsidies, and are only going to strengthen their position in coming years.” Chris Nelder shared this optimism as early as 2012, writing “unsubsidized solar generation could be cheaper than conventional grid power within a decade.” In 2013, Noah Smith predicted 2020 would be the year “when solar will actually start being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, without subsidies.” Influential industry analysts, such as the investment firm Lazard, also regularly declared solar and wind cost-competitive with or without subsidies.
What explains the shift from these celebrations a decade ago to the passage of the IRA in 2022?
The official answer to this question is that reducing emissions is a worthwhile public pursuit and the policies initially designed as temporary innovation subsidies were appropriately transformed into quasi-permanent emissions reduction subsidies. The less official answer, though, is that renewable energy advocates realized that absent very cheap storage and very substantial expansion of transmission capacities, continuing deployment of wind and solar wouldn’t be economically viable without direct subsidies in perpetuity.
Bret Christophers got a lot of attention for explicating the need for sustained subsidies to assure continued wind and solar deployment in his book The Price Is Wrong,published last year. But many energy analysts have been aware of the problem for over a decade. As declining unit costs of wind turbines and solar panels did indeed spur ballooning solar and wind penetration on electric grids, the value provided by that electricity declined. One of us (Alex) coauthored one of the early articles on the “value deflation” problem with Jesse Jenkins in 2015 writing that since geographically proximate wind turbines and solar panels tend to all generate electricity at the same time (when the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining), “the marginal value of variable renewable energy to the grid declines as the penetration rises.”
As Jenkins would go on to tell Brad Plumer in 2016, renewables’ grid parity with fossil fuels was “just the beginning of the race…solar cost reductions then have to continue to outpace their declining marginal value.” And as Zeke Hausfather wrote in a Breakthrough Institute report on solar value deflation in California in 2022, “some degree of future subsidies — either in the form of current tax incentives or future nominally technologically-neutral mechanisms like carbon pricing or a clean energy standard — will likely be needed to sustain cost-effective deployment of the high levels of solar…”
Up through the end of the first Trump administration, the prospects were thin for permanently extending policies which advocates had long insisted were temporary. Then came covid. Policymakers’ immediate response to the pandemic was rapid and enormous federal relief spending, and climate advocates leapt at the opportunity. Congress’s multi-year pandemic spending spree culminated with the Inflation Reduction Act in the summer of 2022, which not only extended but expanded clean energy subsidies far beyond what advocates could have dreamt of just a few years earlier.
And that’s how energy innovation subsidies that everyone agreed would eventually become unnecessary became emissions reduction subsidies scheduled to expire only when U.S. power-sector emissions are 75% below 2022 levels, which translates to 84% below 2005 levels.
How to Right Size the IRA
Our advocacy for sunsetting clean energy subsidies is nothing new. From early in the last decade, most notably in a 2012 report titled Beyond Boom and Bust,coauthored with Jenkins, we advocated for doing so. Most recently, we did so in the early days of the Biden administration, in a report titled Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud,coauthored with Hausfather. As we noted in the Wall Street Journal, most IRA spending is slated to go to wind, solar, and electric vehicles:
Somewhere between half and three-quarters of projected Inflation Reduction Act spending over the next decade will be for wind, solar and electric-vehicle subsidies. These are all mature, cost-competitive technologies that don’t need further subsidization. Cutting their subsidies could amount to somewhere between $300 billion and $650 billion in savings.
Doing so need not bring about the death knell for any of these technologies. The solution to the value deflation problem is not to continue to subsidize deployment of variable renewable energy onto grids that don’t need it. It is to invest in and deploy transmission and energy storage technologies to increase the value of intermittent energy by making it available where and when there is actual demand for it. Similarly, the solution to range anxiety among mainstream automobile consumers is to invest in charging infrastructure and better batteries, not to continue to prop up the sector by handing out $7500 to predominantly high-income households to purchase or lease EVs.
There are substantial funds for batteries, charging, and transmission in the IRA and IIJA that we would strongly argue that the Trump administration and Congress sustain, much of it in the IIJA which, in contrast to the IRA, was passed with substantial bipartisan support.
Consistent with our long-standing advocacy, wind and solar tax credits will be folded into a technologically neutral clean energy tax credit in 2026 that applies to nuclear, carbon capture, and geothermal energy as well. This shift was long overdue and provides critical support for those technologies, as well as next generation renewable technology such as perovskite solar panels. The sunset of these credits is presently tied to emissions targets. By shifting phaseout criteria to trigger at a given threshold of grid penetration, Congress could sustain support for early stage clean energy generation technologies while eliminating the lion’s share of the projected cost of the IRA over the next decade.
Sunsetting federal support at 5% or 10% of total annual generation would allow for continued federal support for technologies as firms are attempting to commercialize them without committing the federal government to costly subsidies far into the future for mature technologies. Congress could even do so regionally, and not nationally, sunsetting support for qualifying technologies when they exceeded a set percentage of annual generation by NERC region. As recently as 2021, Senators Crapo and Whitehouse proposed this very model of subsidy reform, expanding the PTC and ITC to cover nuclear and geothermal in a way that “phases out credits as technologies mature, which provides an on-ramp for the most innovative technologies to get to market and then compete on their own.”
For EVs, the IRA and IIJA already provide substantial support for charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing. These latter investments are separate from consumer subsidies, have helped the US inshore manufacturing for battery technologies, and notably, have broad application beyond EVs. Current EV subsidies may help stimulate demand for domestically-sourced critical minerals. But Congress ought to promote battery metals security specifically rather than incidentally through the downstream EV credit. Phasing down generous consumer subsidies while sustaining support for minerals, battery manufacturing, and charging will nudge automakers to repurpose new assembly lines toward hybrid and other products that are better suited to the US market, to target export markets where EVs may be better suited presently, or to delay some EV production for a period of time while battery technologies improve to the point that they can meet the demands of US auto consumers.
The further requirement for this strategy to succeed in supporting US energy abundance is permitting, transmission, and interconnection reform. As noted above, wind and solar are not economically viable without subsidies not because solar panels and wind turbines aren’t cheap but because it has become increasingly difficult to site them in many places and to get the power they generate to the places where it is needed when it is needed.
Democratic leaders in the last Congress ultimately abandoned the opportunity to pass a legislative package inclusive of permitting and transmission reform, at the behest of an unholy alliance of environmental groups adamantly opposed to any meaningful reform of the National Environmental Policy Act and investor-owned utilities wary of competition that grid interconnection would bring.
That decision was myopic before the election and unconscionable after it. In the absence of forever subsidies for wind and solar, permitting reform and interstate transmission are essential if those industries are going to thrive. No one appears to have done any modeling directly comparing the emissions benefits of solar and wind with subsidies and without permitting reform and transmission versus with permitting reform and interstate transmission and without subsidies. But given that Jenkins’ modeling at Princeton’s Net Zero project, conducted shortly after passage of the IRA, found that 80% of the estimated total emissions reductions through 2035 vanished without major expansion of transmission, we suspect that transmission, interconnection, and cheap battery storage are much more critical to the future of wind and solar, and the emissions benefits that additional wind and solar deployment might bring, than are the IRA tax credits.
Today, a deal for permitting and transmission reform is likely the one post-IRA policy arena where Democrats still have some leverage, in that any significant reform of NEPA will require Democratic votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. This, together with an IRA reform package that cuts wind, solar, and EV subsidies but preserves incentives for early-stage innovation hold the possibility of not only saving key elements of the IRA but establishing a durable bipartisan consensus in Congress on energy innovation and regulatory reform.
Resisting the Siren Song of Resistance
Among architects and partisans of Biden era climate policy, there is an understandable temptation to simply resist changes to the IRA. A less ambitious climate agenda could slow emissions progress. Trump’s popularity and power may already be peaking. The preponderance of IRA investments in red states and districts will incentivize Republicans to protect them. Taken together, state-based action in blue states and resistance in key red states where IRA investments are already at work might hold IRA opponents at bay until the political winds shift again, when a Democratic Congress in 2026 and President in 2028 might ride into town to save the day.
But less than a month into the second Trump presidency, it is worth considering that other possibilities loom large. Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency and sweeping executive orders suggest that betting on a bumbling second Trump administration unable to get out of its own way, manage its political coalition, or effectively press the case for its agenda is, at best, a risky proposition. Trump and his allies are much clearer this time around about what they want to do and how they intend to do it than they were in January of 2017.
Republicans in Congress will be under immense pressure to move quickly to eviscerate the IRA in its entirety. Moreover the most salient IRA investments for red districts and states—and for key Republican constituencies—are not wind, solar, or EV tax credits. The choice for climate and clean energy advocates is unlikely to be between preservation of the IRA in full versus partial repeal but rather between partial repeal and full repeal. That will require that Democrats and pragmatic climate advocates make hard choices, recognize that Trump and Congressional Republicans are going to take a pound of flesh out of the IRA, and think strategically about what it should be.
The same will be true around key regulatory reform issues. Lasting reforms will require statutory changes that can’t be effectively accomplished through budget reconciliation. Democrats in Congress have leverage - less leverage than they did last year but likely enough to demand reforms that are technologically neutral and that bring reasonable changes to transmission and interconnection rules along for the ride.
Bipartisanship can, of course, be a siren’s song of its own. But it is worth considering that insofar as it can be achieved, the advantages of durable policies achieved through normal legislative deliberation versus more sweeping policies achieved via reconciliation and executive action are potentially significant. Even without repeal, the IRA and various executive and regulatory actions undertaken by the Biden administration were on course to fall well short of the administration’s targets, even before the coming growth of AI driven load demand was accounted for. Given all of the technological, macroeconomic, and political uncertainties involved over not just the next four years but the next forty, sacrificing speed, scale, and ambition for energy policies that are built to last and have significant buy-in from both parties has always been the smarter and more likely path to clean energy abundance.
That is all the more the case with the Democratic coalition now in tatters. Perhaps a Democratic restoration over the next two or four years is in the cards. But it could just as easily go the other way, with Republicans holding on to one or both houses of Congress in 2026 and JD Vance succeeding Trump in 2028. Absent a Democratic trifecta in 2028, Biden’s climate and green industrial policies will be impossible to reconstruct should Trump and Republicans succeed in dismantling them in the current Congress. Even with a trifecta, it is highly uncertain whether Democrats would once again choose to spend political capital on a policy issue that few voters prioritize and that has demonstrably backfired on the party politically.
Ultimately, we don’t know if a return to the sustained bipartisan energy innovation consensus of the last decade or the construction of a new, abundance-focused consensus around regulatory reform for the next decade is possible. But Democrats and clean energy advocates would be well served to try.
==