Clean energy has the arguments, but short-term economic stress is a hard sell, so let’s figure this out.

Another solid post from The Eco-Revolution. The title is “Stop Talking About Net Zero: How the right wing is weaponizing climate costs to scare voters and how to combat them.”

Definitely worth the read.

The Net Zero argument is an aspirational one, but from a practical perspective it raises a lot of questions and, as the above-referenced post points out, net-zero has been weaponized as an attack point on the affordability issue. “If only you didn’t have a net-zero mandate,” the argument goes, “things would be less expensive.”

Of course, we want to get to the point where we have far lower GHG emissions. The point is, as this post argues, that the energy generation and use sectors can be shifted to clean energy today to stop producing GHG emissions. This is the obvious and most direct solution to addressing climate change. By the way, we can expect continuing progress on the hard-to-mitigate industrial sectors, too. All the other approaches—carbon capture and offsets and other schemes—are sleight of hand maneuvers and surprisingly expensive ones at that.

Shifting to Clean Energy is an Investment

But here’s what we climate progress/clean energy proponents don’t talk about: the shift to a new energy system is expensive. Sure, in the longer-term, clean energy is the least expensive energy production system human’s have come up with, and less expensive by an impressive margin. For example, capital costs—the money needed to build—is similar for a solar farm to the cost of building an equivalent electricity output natural gas generator plant, but gas plants represent much higher operation costs, mainly because you have to keep buying natural gas fuel over the plant’s operational lifetime, plus other operational costs are higher, since gas generators have higher maintenance and operational personnel costs.

What isn’t more expensive, from a capital cost basis, is an existing gas generator plant versus building a clean energy electricity plant, because, of course, the capital money for the existing plant is already spent. The problem of costs comes to the fore when building new clean energy production systems (i.e., solar, wind, BESS, digital grid and demand and DER management, etc.) to replace existing (and global-warming producing emissions) fossil fuel energy production systems. Long term, clearly, renewables are the better deal in all sorts of ways, including reducing the amounts of direct subsidies to fossil fuel corporations by governments around the world through tax, accounting, and other legal mechanisms, along with outright grants. The bigger hidden costs addressed by replacing fossil fuel generation systems, however, are fossil fuel externalities, which is all the money spent each year to address fossil fuel pollution health consequences and climate change consequences caused by the production and use of fossil fuels. These externalities, according to the International Monetary Fund, have the world paying to address the negative consequences of the production and use of fossil fuels, and, together with the direct fossil fuel subsidies, reaches somewhere in the $5-7 trillion range, every year. These “indirect” subsidies are costs largely hidden from the public understanding, mainly through long-standing industry and special interest efforts keeping these costs from public knowledge and political debate.

Still, most people intuitively understand that building out new energy production systems to replace fossil fuel-based energy production systems represents additional costs, at least over a relatively short time, although replacement clean energy production systems prove cheaper over time since we stop the ongoing purchase of fossil fuels and have lower spending addressing externalities because of lowered emissions. But most people think of costs on short-term bases. The future investment argument, while very compelling, isn’t what most of us think about when faced with higher costs upfront.

The effort to establish the Electrotech Revolution means gaining the public’s interest and support for the Electrotech Revolution and that means we need to own the argument that this is a great investment, with lower costs over time, as one outcome. But we also need to be clear that the transition will impose short-term higher costs as we replace the dangerous and expensive fossil fuel energy production systems with more buildout of solar, wind, BESS, etc., as we decommission the polluting old systems as soon as possible.

These days, the best argument is to keep from building new fossil fuel energy production systems and only build renewables-based energy production facilities and to exploit the digital management technologies that expand the efficiency and capacity of our current electrical grids and distribution infrastructure. I imagine that once these clean energy systems are more ubiquitous the lower-cost arguments will be more widely understood as advantageous mainly through lower energy bills, but this takes time.

I’d love to see much of the cost of decommissioning fossil fuel energy production placed upon the fossil fuel corporations and their shareholders, but, of course, that presents the challenge of stranded assets for the companies themselves and the institutional investors such as retirement funds. I’d love to see this burden placed on the fossil fuel corporations, but I’m guessing that if people’s retirement funds take a sharp hit because of lost value due to stranded assets, this very active voting bloc will be made unhappy. Therefore, the more compelling argument to large investment funds is for these institutional investors to move away from new fossil fuel investments such as fossil fuel generators. This is the real threat of net-zero mandates to Big Oil: if a new gas plant violates a net-zero mandate, then the likelihood of the new gas plant being build fades.

Externalities ‘R Us

There is also the very real issue of fossil fuel externalities being put back on the fossil fuel corporations as public awareness grows about how much nations—and us, through taxes and assumed personal household costs—cover these businesses’ avoided expenses, whether through these corporations’ sweetheart leasing deals, extraction shortcuts (just the methane leaks alone!), plethora of deregulations, intrinsic refinery-related pollution, court battles against being named liable parties, and all the other forms of externalities.

Unfortunately, the clean energy movement has been largely unable even to get the issue of the cost of externalities to be part of the public discourse. I wrote a post about this issue titled “The Challenge of Conveying Climate Change Information in Climate Fiction,” which starts this way:

I think this is the exact quote: “You have thirty mentions of externalities! Cut that by at least half!”

I will keep the name of this beta-reader to myself, so to avoid an uncomfortable paparazzi-crushing lifestyle change for him, thank you very much. He was talking with me about Dear Josephine, my second book in the literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet. He was referring to the number of times the term that stands in for all the external costs the use of fossil fuel shifts to the public and thus not counted among the producers’ costs in fossil fuel production.

Externalities: You know, things like health problems that are attributed to pollution and particulates.

The post goes on to define externalities and discuss fossil fuel subsides and then the issue of conveying climate change facts within climate fiction.

Let’s Take Ownership of the Arguments on Energy Affordability

We’ve been letting the fossil fuel industry—Big Oil—dictate the terms of discussion, including their attempted ownership of the affordability issue, even while clean energy actually owns the argument of more affordable electricity. Substackers like The Eco-Revolution, Bill McKibben, Sam Matey-Coste, and David Roberts continue to educate us on this larger discussion.

The remaining problem to address is the short-term costs for clean energy investment. It’s a challenging argument because most people are worried about next month’s rent, not the promise that energy costs will indeed come down in a year or two or three. Most of us have difficulty with long-term investments for the future.

But no one is saying that the clean energy transition is easy, as far as I know.

A lot of people are saying its goddam important, though, and my hand is up, too.