Renewable energy foes hike risk of climate catastrophe
Peter Thiel, Facebook investor and Donald Trump supporter, is by all accounts a terrible person. He did, however, come up with one classic line about the disappointments of modern technology: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” OK, now it’s 280, but who’s counting?
The point of his quip was while we’ve found ever more clever ways of pushing around bits of information, we are still living in a material world — and our command of that material world has advanced much less than most people expected a few decades ago.
Well, there is one area of physical technology, renewable energy, in which we really are seeing that kind of progress — progress that can both change the world and save it. Unfortunately, the people Thiel supports are trying to stop that progress from happening.
Not long ago, calls for a move to wind and solar power were widely perceived as impractical if not hippie-dippy silly. Some of that contempt lingers.
But the truth is nearly the opposite, certainly when it comes to electricity generation. Believers in the primacy of fossil fuels, coal in particular, are now technological dead-enders; they, not foolish leftists, are our modern Luddites.
About the technology: As recently as 2010, it still consistently cost more to generate electricity from sun and wind than from fossil fuels. But that gap has already been eliminated, and this is just the beginning. Widespread use of renewable energy is still a new thing, which means that even without major technological breakthroughs we can expect to find better and cheaper ways to operate as they accumulate experience.
Recently David Roberts at Vox.com offered a very good example: wind turbines. Windmills have been around for more than 1,000 years, and they’ve been used to generate electricity since the late 19th century. But making turbines really efficient requires making them tall enough to exploit the faster, steadier winds that blow at higher altitudes.
And that’s what businesses are learning to do, via a series of incremental improvements.
There is no longer any reason to believe that it would be hard to drastically “decarbonize” the economy. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that doing so would impose any significant economic cost. The realistic debate is about how hard it will be to get from 80 to 100 percent decarbonization.
For now, however, the problem isn’t technology — it’s politics.
The fossil fuel sector may represent a technological dead end, but it still has a lot of money and power. In the 2016 election cycle the coal mining industry gave 97 percent of its contributions to GOP candidates.
What the industry got in return for that money wasn’t just a president who talks nonsense about bringing back coal jobs and an administration that rejects the science of climate change. It got an Environmental Protection Agency head who’s trying to suppress evidence on the damage pollution causes, and a secretary of energy who tried, unsuccessfully so far, to force natural gas and renewables to subsidize coal and nuclear plants.
The point is that Trump and company aren’t just trying to move us backward on social issues; they’re also trying to block technological progress. And the price of their obstructionism will be high.