NYC Monthly Climate Dinner -- csaee_d

Optional Reading (we will assume most attendees haven't done the reading and give a presentation for 30-60 minutes at the start bringing everyone up to speed).

This Month's Topic:
Environmentalism: Competing Visions For the Future

Traditional environmentalist's view of the future, as perceived by much of the public

Abundance environmentalist's view of the future

The traditional environmental movement often carried a deep suspicion of technology, industrial development, and economic growth. Many environmentalists opposed nuclear power, large infrastructure projects, suburban expansion, and much of the industrial economy itself. The movement accomplished important goals — cleaner air and water, preservation of wilderness, and reduced pollution — but it also helped create a vast regulatory structure that makes building almost anything in America extraordinarily difficult.

The results are visible everywhere. The United States still lacks the extensive networks of bullet trains common across Europe and Asia. Major infrastructure projects routinely spend years or decades trapped in lawsuits, environmental reviews, and permitting battles before construction even begins.

This creates a major contradiction for climate policy. Decarbonizing the economy requires building enormous amounts of new infrastructure: transmission lines, renewable energy, nuclear plants, geothermal systems, rail, mining, and energy storage. That would be difficult under any circumstances, but under the current permitting framework it becomes well-nigh impossible. As a result, some climate-focused organizations such as Citizens' Climate Lobby have begun advocating “permitting reform” to streamline some of these barriers so clean-energy infrastructure can actually be built.

Environmentalism has also often projected a message of sacrifice: consume less, travel less, own less, and feel guilty about modern prosperity. Combined with an undercurrent of hostility toward many aspects of ordinary American life, this message has not been especially attractive to much of the public.

A more successful environmental movement would present a vision of abundance instead — a future powered by cheap, clean energy and advanced technology.

There are good reasons for optimism. Wind and solar power have become remarkably cheap, especially solar, whose costs continue to fall rapidly. Their main weakness is intermittency: the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. Batteries remain extremely expensive for storing enough electricity to fully stabilize the entire grid for long periods. But not every industrial activity requires perfectly continuous operation.

Some forms of energy-intensive manufacturing could simply run intermittently whenever renewable electricity is abundant and cheap. Hydrogen production, fertilizer manufacturing, aluminum refining, desalination, synthetic fuels, and other bulk industrial processes could ramp production up and down based on the availability of cheap energy. In many cases, stockpiling the manufactured products themselves would be far cheaper than storing vast amounts of electricity in batteries.

Other technologies are promising as well. Next-generation nuclear reactors may eventually provide abundant low-carbon electricity with improved safety and potentially lower costs. Geothermal energy today is mostly limited to geologically favorable regions, but advances in deeper drilling technology could eventually make geothermal power available across much larger parts of the world.

An optimistic climate politics would emphasize these possibilities: abundant clean energy, advanced industry, modern infrastructure, and rising prosperity. People are far more likely to support a future that promises abundance than one centered on guilt, austerity, and permanent limits.