Like it or not, cost is a big deal when it comes to resolving climate change, and the cost is high, but the climate progress movement doesn’t like to talk about this.
We in the climate progress movement need to talk about costs.
This post applies to Americans and other western nations, and mostly the middle-class that enjoys the capacity to cover the expanding costs related to climate change. I have no doubt that the costs of climate change will increase for people in the Global South, and these costs are likely to prove so much bigger, including unavoidable mass migration and increased hunger and thirst and disease and many other contributors to indices of misery and death. And while there are populations within the Global North that are closer in their conditions to the majority population in the Global South, this post reflects my expectations as a middle-class American.
This post is about issues that affect elections, too, because elections help drive real efforts toward climate progress or away from climate progress.
We in the climate progress movement need costs to be part of the political conversation, including honesty about how much sacrifice must be accepted to shift the planet away from its greenhouse gases mess. It may be true that calls for sacrifice don’t rally voters, but the good news—if you allow such a strange way to characterize our current situation—is that the money each of us will be called upon to spend remains far cheaper than doing nothing or too little. Even now, with all the slow and limited progress on climate action and all the resistance from the fossil fuel industry that has been very much part of our slower-than-needed action, the world faces decades of disasters and difficulties directly resulting from our poor progress to date. However, the result of doing too little about the climate crisis results in a very different and higher cost, charging our society’s very existence as the bill due.
Doomers and catastrophists aren’t wrong in their arguments that climate change can bring our society to the point of collapse. I suppose doom messages serve some purpose in educating others about the serious consequences we face, but otherwise I find far too many so-called doomers fixated solely on their proverbial approaching iceberg and not on the ways forward past the iceberg, and the result is that the edifying aspect of the message that we face serious problems becomes a drowning funereal dirge.
I find it fascinating that this sort of writing is so widespread, and it worries me that so many seem so intent on declaring game over, and that so many seem happy to keep doing it free of prescriptive actions. The net effect of such writing is as self-fulfilling prophecy.
Doomer writing is bad enough, and, in my opinion, entirely unhelpful. Perhaps a lot of doomer writing speaks to personal anxieties, but too often, the proliferation of this sort of messaging may be consequentially little more than click-bait hypocrisy to drive readers and followers among the various social media platforms. If you ever want your socks scared off, go to Medium and search on “civilizational collapse.” What should also scare you in the results is the large number of people who write this sort of thing.
On the other hand, I’m no Pollyanna.
My series of novels, The Steep Climes Quartet, is my attempt to imagine our future over the next two to three decades, and how this may unfold in people’s lives. In the second book in the series, Dear Josephine (publishing date of early Spring 2024; Book One, Kill Well, publishing in September 2023), the issue of costs as we grapple with climate change is a major theme. One of the recurring characters, who is a free-lance climate blogger and expert on policies and politics of climate change, critiques the climate movement in general for not taking the lead addressing the coming costs of climate progress. And then there is an executive director of a fossil fuel-funded think tank who wants to claim the costs of climate change amelioration as an election pocketbook issue to place in political roles those at the beck and call of big money interests.
It is easy enough to understand why there are fossil fuel people interested in discouraging greenhouse gases reduction—this threatens Big Oil’s business as usual. What worries me is that too often climate activists like to talk about the golden future of renewables, when greenhouse gases are not only reduced to traces, but energy is as cheap as sunlight, but they won’t address the costs involved for us in getting there. I agree that renewable energy can bring down energy prices—this is a likely outcome if we work hard at the problem. Unfortunately, this is not an outcome likely to happen anytime soon.
The fact is that those of us who can spend to move from fossil fuel to renewables, must do so, and there is no time to lose. These additional costs can be framed either positively or negatively, and if the climate progress effort—and the politicians we support—can’t put a positive spin on the costs, we can count on those politicians fighting actions on climate change to take the cost issue and run right into the arms of the Big Oil election contributors.
Costs will get talked about. Let’s make sure that rising costs get talked about in the right way, which, in its barest form, is that these costs are a bargain compared to doing too little because climate consequences are going to get more and more expensive, including to the point of extreme damage and loss, and that includes so many more American lives lost.
The requirements of the transition away from fossil fuel are challenging; just consider that today’s fossil fuel infrastructure has been in place in our economy and industry for a century or more and there are going to be many costs and upheavals as we move more and more to renewables. One example is the need to improve and expand the electricity transmission grids. There are several proposed acts in Congress at this very moment trying to address grid needs, including the Building Integrated Grids With Inter-Regional Energy Supply (BIG WIRES) Act (S. 2827), which was introduced by Senator John Hickenlooper on September 18, 2023, and Connecting Hard-to-reach Areas with Renewably Generated Energy (CHARGE) Act (S. 2480), which my senator, Edward J. Markey, reintroduced on July 25, 2023. But bills enacted into law need funding, and funding comes from only three main sources or some mix of these sources: 1) taking money allocated for something else and reallocating; 2) increasing the amount of money Congress can spend; 3) raising taxes.
Another requirement for reducing fossil fuel use is electrification for everything we can practically electrify, including home heating and cooling, cooking appliances and clothes dryers and water heaters, and cars and trucks. The Inflation Reduction Act has a lot of incentives in the form of tax credits and rebates to encourage people to switch to electric options, and there are many sweet deals out there. On the other hand, tax credits don’t do anything for someone with insufficient income tax to offset, although there are some provisions for very-low-income people to be granted such options. But even if you have a good salary that can benefit from tax credits, you still need to use your own money, even if you get back some of it. Heat pumps are an excellent example, where Federal tax credits are applied for up to 30% of the costs for purchase and installation, which means a property owner comes up with 70% when all is said and done. This is a great deal and the energy savings over the years will provide a good payback, but not spending the upfront cost for a heat pump and continuing to use the gas furnace already in place makes up for a lot of the future savings being passed over.
Here are some links to give you a sense of what government help is on hand:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cleanenergy/
Households can claim a tax credit for 30% of the costs of buying and installing a heat pump, up to $2,000 including support for any electric system upgrades needed to make the home heat-pump-ready.
Beginning in 2023 state programs offer low- and moderate-income households rebates for heat pumps at the point-of-sale, cutting costs of purchase and installation up to $8,000. If home electrical upgrades are needed to integrate new heat pumps, rebates of up to $4,000 are available to households.
Q: Can I claim a tax credit for eligible home improvements under the IRA?
A: The Act reinstituted and increased the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, which allows households to credit up to 30% of the cost of energy efficiency home upgrades against their taxes. Depending on the equipment or improvement made, this credit can total up to $3,200 per year for residential efficiency and electrification upgrades. Households are eligible for up to $1,200 per year for weatherization, including insulation and efficient windows and doors, as well as electrical panel upgrades installed in connection with a heat pump. Households can also claim an additional $2,000 for electric heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. The full credit is available for home improvements made starting in 2023. Please review our guide to IRA tax incentives, which the Mass Save Sponsors co-created with Rewiring America, to learn more about this tax credit.
https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-energy-rebates-incentives
Massachusetts Energy Rebates & Incentives
Guide to energy rebates and incentives available in Massachusetts including: energy efficiency (home, appliances, business), renewables, clean heating and cooling, alternative transportation and more.
I’m not saying don’t do it, and I’m certainly not minimizing the government assistance on offer. I think that these are all impressive efforts and anyone who can take advantage of the rebates and tax credits should get right to it. I am saying that these are examples of the costs as many of us as possible should be paying to reduce greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.
And then there is this idea that electricity costs will drop a lot soon. Unfortunately, this is a lot of malarkey because renewable energy build out is still underway. Renewable energy build out will be required for some time, too, because something that doesn’t get talked much about is the need not only to replace today’s electricity generated by fossil fuels but also to meet the demand for more non-fossil fuel electricity as we expand into pervasive electrification. The demand will outweigh supply for some time, which means power prices will not drop but probably rise, especially when you consider that power utilities are “public” utilities more in name than fact, with profit—or the “non-profit” variation on profit—remaining a driving market force. Who knows? Maybe all the climate change efforts will include putting utility regulators back in charge of public utilities, but I think that it is a safe bet that our electricity bill will continue on an upward path. We’re digging ourselves out of a carbon sinkhole, as we must, and there is a lot of shoveling ahead.
Even as more and more electricity is generated by renewable energy, fossil fuel energy costs are unlikely drop for quite awhile other than the usual market fluctuations. It more likely that fossil fuel will have increasing price pressures as the nation and the world get more serious and more successful about telling Big Oil to bugger off. One sign of such seriousness will be the reduction and cancellation of the direct and indirect subsidies going to the fossil fuel industry.
Don’t listen to the whiners who still cry about 2009’s Solyndra bankruptcy or renewable energy subsidies generally. The International Monetary Fund estimates that in 2022 alone, worldwide, over $7 trillion (yes, with a “t”) was provided to the fossil fuel industry. Some of these subsidies—a good 25% or so, if I’m remembering this right—are in the form of direct subsidies, whether tax breaks, advantageous accounting practice allowances, under-market public land leasing, and many other programs. However, the majority of these subsidies are indirect and are simply governments allowing fossil fuel companies to ignore the actual costs of fossil fuel production that include the negative characteristics of air pollution and climate change. Through such indirect subsidies, Big Oil gets to dump pollutants and greenhouse gases right into the atmosphere, letting the rest of us pick up the costs of the consequences of their free ride. In case I’m losing you, let me be clear that these consequences are significant, including millions dead and sick from the pollution each year and the huge prices we’re already paying and the even bigger bills coming due in the form of increased disaster recovery funds of floods and fires and storms, and spending on resiliency projects (e.g., flood control), and things like food price spikes because of drought and big climate-caused immigration, and go ahead and throw in additional political instability while you are at it.
Of course, considering the huge amounts of direct and indirect subsidies the U.S. pays each year to the fossil fuel industry, maybe we in aggregate are already paying very high fossil fuel costs, but in a way that hides the true cost from us. Not that anything is free, of course, but an obvious benefit with indirect subsidies is that these subsidies allow fossil fuel producers to ignore the harm their products and the production of their products cause, and by not having to pass on such costs this makes fossil fuel more profitable for Big Oil, it also makes fuel cheaper for us at the pump. There have been some governments at various times that have tried to reduce or eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and the result has often been protests and riots and (I’m guessing) the occasional coup. I recently came across an estimate of the true price of gasoline figured at $12 and change per gallon should the fossil fuel subsidies disappear, but that estimate was about ten years old, so feel free to add on a few more bucks. Certainly, the real price of fossil fuel keeps going up because there’s pollution and increasing climate change disasters and these are huge costs already and getting bigger every minute.
As nations become more serious about reducing their carbon footprint, more and more of the true costs are going to be handed back to Big Oil, perhaps in the form of a carbon tax, or subsidy cancellations, or mega-fines, or all of the above and any number of other potential mechanisms that reveal and capture the real cost of fossil fuels. Still, we can’t go cold-turkey on the long-entrenched fossil fuel economy, because it takes time—and diesel-powered trucks, industrial processing, manufacturing feedstock, and just about everything else—to transition to all renewable energy, and so the need for fossil fuels will continue for some time, albeit, one hopes, in ever-diminishing levels. This drop in volume will likely mean the smaller supply of fossil fuels will become more expensive relative to demand. Anything still using fossil fuels—Mexican tomatoes and pears from Chile getting trucked to supermarkets, gas for that gas car you’re still using, home heating oil or propane, and fertilizer, and airplane fuel, and on and on—will be more expensive.
There are those on the climate progress side who argue for an immediate ban on oil production, but you have to be willing to accept the deaths and turbo-boosted suffering of millions of people, or even billions of people, and those people will be, of course, the most vulnerable among us, which means the poor, largely in the Global South.
No, thank you.
There are many other increasing costs we face in our climate change work, such as insurance, where, if you’ve been paying attention, insurers are fleeing certain markets (e.g. Florida with flood insurance, and California with fire insurance), and those that stay are asking for bigger premiums or the government is getting into the insurance business, raising costs for all. It turns out that insurers and the massive re-insurers that backstop the insurers like their bottom lines to remain in the black on average, and these companies are experts in anticipating costs and they see hurricanes and wildfires and floods and droughts and heatwaves are increasing, and they don’t want to be left holding the bag. I live in the Berkshires and fully expect property insurance premiums to keep going up and I also expect the expansion of those required to have flood insurance, and that is mainly because absurdly heavy downpours and deluges are becoming more frequent, and property owners who once thought to be safe from flooding will be asked to think again.
The cost of dealing with climate change is going to be extracted one way or another, but any and all work to reduce greenhouse gases will pay better dividends in the long run. How long? The most recent National Climate Assessment report is sobering, and the latest climate change projections about the steeper rate of climb in the world’s average temperatures might drive you to drink.
For the foreseeable future costs will rise and that’s a fact. If the issue of costs is ignored by those of us in the climate progress movement, there will only be those working for the wrong outcomes talking about costs, pointing to climate change efforts and saying, “See? Those climate people want to pick your pocket, so vote for me!” Talking about rising costs is hard messaging, but surrendering the argument to the other side is too dangerous. The climate progress movement needs solidarity, and that includes on the issue of costs, and ways to make dealing with these rising costs fair.
In the end the argument is that not pursuing progress on the climate change front is the most expensive and costly action we can take. Work to improve our society’s and our world’s carbon standing will cost a lot, but not doing so will cost us so much more, and, possibly, everything.