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      ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’ Is a Legitimate Question

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      In December, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they had achieved on Earth what is commonplace within stars: They had fused hydrogen isotopes, releasing more energy in the reaction than was used in the ignition. The announcement came with enough caveats to make it clear that usable nuclear fusion remains, optimistically, decades away. But the fact that nuclear fusion will not change our energy system over the next year doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change our energy ambitions for the coming years.There are three goals a society can have for its energy usage. One is to use less. That is, arguably, the goal that took hold in the 1970s. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” is the key mantra here, with the much-ignored instruction to reduce coming first for a reason. Today, that ambition persists in the thinking of degrowthers and others who believe humanity courts calamity if we don’t respect our limits and discard fantasies of endless growth.The second goal is to use what we use now, but better. That is where modern climate policy has moved. The vision of decarbonization — now being pursued through policy, like last year’s Inflation Reduction Act — is to maintain roughly the energy patterns we have but shift to nonpolluting sources like wind and solar. Decarbonization at this speed and scale is so daunting a task that it is hard to look beyond it, to the third possible goal: a world of energy abundance.In his fascinating, frustrating book “Where Is My Flying Car?” J. Storrs Hall argues that we do not realize how much our diminished energy ambitions have cost us. Across the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the energy humanity could harness grew at about 7 percent annually. Humanity’s compounding energetic force, he writes, powered “the optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.”But starting around 1970, the curve flattened, particularly in rich countries, which began doing more with less. In 1979, for instance, Americans consumed about 10.8 kilowatts per person. In 2019 we consumed about 9.2 kilowatts a person. To a conservationist, this looks like progress, though not nearly enough, as a glance at CO2 emissions will confirm. To Hall, it was a civilizational catastrophe.His titular flying car stands in for all that we were promised in the mid-20th century but don’t yet have: flying cars, of course, but also lunar bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, undersea cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on. Hall harvests these predictions and many more from midcentury sci-fi writers and prognosticators and sorts them according to their cost in energy. What he finds is that the marvels we did manage — the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-screen televisions, streaming video and audio content, mRNA vaccines, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, to name just a few — largely required relatively little energy and the marvels we missed would require masses of it.But they are possible. We’ve flown plenty of flying car prototypes over the decades. The water crises of the future could be solved by mass desalination. Supersonic air travel is a solved technological problem. Lunar bases lie well within the boundaries of possibility. The path that Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, outlined for nanotechnology — build machines that are capable of building smaller machines that are capable of building smaller machines that are capable of, well, you get it — still seems plausible. What we need is energy — much, much more of it. But Hall thinks we’ve become an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society gripped by “the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy.”Here, Hall’s account drips with contempt for anyone who does not dive out of the way of today’s industrialists. He reaches back to old H.G. Wells stories to find the right metaphor for where our civilization went sideways, finding it in the feckless Eloi, a post-human race that collapsed into the comforts of abundance. The true conflict, he says, is not between the haves and the have-nots but between the doers and the do-nots. “The do-nots favor stagnation and are happy turning our civilization into a collective couch potato,” he writes. And in his view, the do-nots are winning.“Where Is My Flying Car?” is a work of what I’d call reactionary futurism. It loves the progress technology can bring; it can’t stand the soft, flabby humans who stand in the future’s way. There is nothing inexplicable about why country after country sought energy conservation or why it remains an aim. A partial list would include poisoned rivers and streams, smog-choked cities, the jagged edge of climate change and ongoing mass extinction and the geopolitical costs of being hooked on oil from Saudi Arabia and gas from Russia.Hall gives all this short shrift, describing climate change as “a hangnail, not a hangman” (for whom, one wants to ask), and focusing on the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies. He laments how the advent of nuclear weapons made war so costly that it “short-circuited the evolutionary process,” in which “a society that slid into inefficient cultural or governmental practices was likely to be promptly conquered by the baron next door.”Hall’s sociopolitical theories are as flimsy as his technical analyses are careful. His book would imply that countries with shallow public sectors would race ahead of their statist peers in innovation and that nations threatened by violent neighbors would be better governed and more technologically advanced than, say, the United States.Among his central arguments is that government funding and attention paradoxically impedes the technologies it’s meant to help, but — curiously for a book about energy — he has little to say about the astonishing progress in solar, wind and battery power that’s been driven by public policy. He predicts that if solar and wind “prove actually usable on a large scale,” environmentalists would turn on them. “Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming,” he writes. “They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people.”But on this branch of the multiverse, most every environmentalist group of note fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really the Deploy Solar and Wind Everywhere and Invest in Every Energy Technology We Can Think of Act. And if they had their way, it would have been far bigger and far better funded.Indeed, the existence of Hall’s book is a challenge to its thesis. “Where Is My Flying Car?” is now distributed by Stripe Press, the publishing offshoot of the digital payment company Stripe, which was started by two Irish immigrants in California. That state is the home of the postmaterialist counterculture that Hall sees as the beating heart of Eloi politics, and there is little fear of a near-term invasion by Mexican forces. Even so, California has housed a remarkable series of technological advances and institutions over the past century, and it continues to do so. The fusion breakthrough, for instance, was made by government scientists working in, yes, Northern California. There is an interplay here that is far more complex than Hall’s theories admit.But Hall’s book is worth struggling with because he’s right about two big things. First, that the flattening of the energy curve was a moment of civilizational import and one worth revisiting. And second, that many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible.The remarkable burst of prosperity and possibility that has defined the past few hundred years has been a story of energy. “Take any variable of human well-being — longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population — and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.”Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits. Mann notes that visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was freezing in Versailles, and no amount of wealth could fix it. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but his ink still froze in his inkwells come winter.Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. The demographer Hans Rosling had a striking way of framing this. In 2010 he argued that you could group humanity by the energy people had access to. At the time, roughly two billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cook food and heat water by fire. About three billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for labor-saving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and they — we — used around half of global energy.The first reason to want energy abundance is to make energy and the gifts it brings available to all. Rosling put this well, describing how his mother loaded the laundry and then took him to the library, how she used the time she’d once spent cleaning clothes to teach herself English. “This is the magic,” he said. “You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books.” There is no global aid strategy we could pursue that would do nearly as much as making energy radically cheaper, more reliable and more available.Then there is all we could do if we had the cheap, clean and abundant energy needed to do it. In a paper imagining “energy superabundance,” Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado sketch out some of the near-term possibilities. “Flights that take 15 hours on a 747 could happen in an hour on a point-to-point rocket,” they write. Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people, and desalination, which even now is a major contributor to water supplies in Singapore and Israel, would become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible, giving us a path to reversing climate change over time.Vernon and Dourado’s definition of superabundance is fairly modest: They define it as every person on Earth having access to about twice the power Icelanders use annually. But what if fusion or other technologies give us energy that becomes functionally limitless? I enjoyed the way Benjamin Reinhardt, a self-proclaimed ergophile, rendered this kind of world, writing in the online journal Works in Progress:You could wake up in your house on the beautiful coast of an artificial island off the coast of South America. You’re always embarrassed at the cheap synthesized sand whenever guests visit, but people have always needed to sacrifice to afford space for a family. You say goodbye to yours and leave for work. On your commute, you do some work on a new way of making high-temperature superconductors. You’re a total dilettante but the combination of fixed-price for infinite compute and the new trend of inefficient but modular technology has created an inventor out of almost everybody. Soon enough, you reach the bottom of the Singaporean space elevator: Cheap space launches, the low cost of rail-gunning raw material into space and decreased material costs made the whole thing work out economically. Every time you see that impossibly thin cable stretching up, seemingly into nothingness, it boggles your mind — if that’s possible, what else is? You check out the new shipment of longevity drugs, which can only be synthesized in pristine zero-G conditions. Then you scoot off to a last-minute meet-up with friends in Tokyo.As you all enjoy dinner (made from ingredients grown in the same building and picked five minutes before cooking) a material scientist friend of a friend describes the latest in physics simulations. You bask in yet another serendipitous, in-person interaction, grateful for your cross-continental relationships. While you head home, you poke at your superconductor design a bit more. It’s a long shot, but it might give you the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better.The fusion demonstration is a reminder not of what is inevitable but of what is possible. And it is not just fusion. The advance of wind and solar and battery technology remains a near miracle. The possibilities of advanced geothermal and hydrogen are thrilling. Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built.“In 100 or 200 years, everything will look radically different,” Melissa Lott, the director of research at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A Climate Change Skeptic’s Change of Heart

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      More from our inbox:How to Help the Homeless in Los AngelesDemocratic Wishes That Came True, Alas!Divorce and Politics Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Yes, Greenland’s Ice Is Melting, But … ,” by Bret Stephens (column, Oct. 30):Mr. Stephens’s piece is right on point — had it been written 20 years ago. Regrettably the environment did not wait for him or others “to be brought around” about “the need for action.” Rather, with scientific consensus building around an expected rise of two to three degrees Celsius by 2100, the partial solutions Mr. Stephens champions will leave us facing extreme climate impacts.Better that we adopt a more radical approach in the hope that we can stem the coming tide. Indeed, as Mr. Stephens suggests, we should focus on fixing the environment for our great-grandchildren, and need to consider family planning policies that reduce the size of future generations to help achieve a better balance between humanity and nature.Scott MortmanManalapan, N.J.The writer is an environmental lawyer and an adviser to the Fair Start Movement, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing child welfare and family planning.To the Editor:Bret Stephens wisely recommends that a lack of self-righteousness and an open mind would do a lot to advance public thinking about climate change, using his own evolution on the subject as Exhibit A. However, his fears about government playing a big role in addressing rising temperatures ignores some important recent history.Mr. Stephens points out that nuclear power will have to play a role in a less carbon-intensive future but fails to mention that its very existence was brought about by a massive program of government-funded and -directed research and development. He also points out that cheap natural gas produced by fracking has helped reduce our carbon footprint, and ignores the fact that both public and private funding played an important role in funding the research and development for that technology.And, perhaps most significant, he doesn’t mention the pivotal role played by German and Chinese government subsidies in driving down the price of solar panels by bringing their production up to scale.Fighting climate change is a very complex matter and will require carefully intertwining public and private initiatives. To see the marketplace as the sole possible agent of change fails to acknowledge how progress has occurred.Joshua MarkelPhiladelphiaTo the Editor:Letting market forces drive the consumption of goods and services might work for much of our economy, but it clearly hasn’t worked when it comes to protecting the health and well-being of our planet and its inhabitants from global warming. It takes too long.In 1888, the first U.S. wind turbine produced electricity. In 1900, more than a third of vehicles on our roads were electric. In 1954, Bell Labs developed solar energy. American clean energy science and innovation were there all along, but the oil and gas lobby was a powerful headwind to its usage.Our government needs to push against the destructive effects of global warming. We are running out of time.Fred EganYork Harbor, MaineTo the Editor:For the better part of 10 years, I have tried to convince my father of the seriousness of climate change and, for the most part, those conversations have not been fruitful. But after sending Bret Stephens’s article to him, we had a very thoughtful discussion about the importance of addressing it.I appreciate Mr. Stephens’s vulnerability and willingness to admit that his views have changed as he has learned more. In doing so, he gives conservatives an avenue not just to engage with the issue, but potentially to lead.I would like to hear more from Mr. Stephens about how climate activists could be more persuasive to climate skeptics. As he pointed out, climate change should not be just a left-of-center concern. We must be able to persuade everyone that we need to address global warming.Brendan HastingsChicagoHow to Help the Homeless in Los AngelesA homeless encampment adjacent to a parking lot in Venice, Calif., that has been designated for an affordable housing development.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane,’” by Ezra Klein (column, nytimes.com, Oct. 23):Mr. Klein is absolutely right: It is insane to try to solve Los Angeles’s housing crisis without a radically innovative approach. Fortunately, Los Angeles voters will be able to vote for one on the same ballot as their new mayor. Measure ULA would raise more than $900 million annually to prevent homelessness and create housing. It replaces politics as usual with the urgency and innovation we need.Written by housing providers and homelessness experts, Measure ULA dedicates 70 percent of revenues to affordable housing, the majority to support fast-moving, less expensive and other kinds of affordable housing that Mr. Klein wants to see.Sophisticated construction methods can bring down housing costs, as can the purchase of existing apartments and hotels for long-term housing. The measure also encourages community land trusts, single-family homes, residential hotels, accessory dwelling units and cooperative living models.Prevention is by far the cheapest solution to homelessness, and Measure ULA also funds rental assistance and legal services for tenants facing eviction.L.A.’s housing and homelessness crises are persistent and challenging, but they are not insoluble. Measure ULA attacks the problems at the root, and that is why it is the best hope in a generation for making meaningful progress toward housing every Angeleno with dignity.Stephanie Klasky-GamerNorth Hollywood, Calif.The writer is the president and C.E.O. of LA Family Housing, an affordable housing developer and homeless services provider.Democratic Wishes That Came True, Alas! Nicole Craine for The New York TimesTo the Editor:I remember that back during the primary season the Democrats were not only wishing that extreme Republican candidates would win, but in some cases they were actually helping them get the nomination because “they would be so easy to defeat!” At the time that practice seemed ill advised and downright insane.And sure enough, now there are extreme, election-denying Republican candidates poised to win office around the country. What the Democrats failed to recognize is that during the general election campaign, fringe candidates gain legitimacy.In the primary they’re the loony among several candidates who usually split the vote. Then the extremist voters coalesce around the extreme candidate and, presto chango, they’re the legitimate Republican nominee. Then established Republicans, for fear of any Democrat ever winning anything, endorse the extremist.The Democrats should have been more mindful of that old saw “Be careful what you wish for”!Ozzie SattlerPhoenixDivorce and PoliticsTo the Editor:As a man who has experienced the slow deterioration that leads to a divorce, I have wondered why I didn’t do more to stop the process. I think the answer is that my pride allowed many small irritations, over many years, to fester and grow past a breaking point. Once that happens, reason leaves, anger replaces it and the end point becomes almost inevitable.The political situation we are now in, as a country, feels very much like the downward spiral that ends in a divorce. Things that, at one time, could and needed to be discussed and debated to reach compromise have become weapons to attack the other side. Anger and hate grow, and it seems that the breaking point is in sight.But, unlike a divorce, we can’t just split the assets and go our separate ways, keeping the tears and pain within the family and friends. And whatever the outcome, there will be no do-overs when we look back. So I pray that we come to our senses and realize the incredible risks we are taking by letting pride and anger replace patriotism and respect for all.Mike WroblewskiAtlanta More

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      A Dire Outlook as Climate Action Falls Short

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      More from our inbox:Pennsylvania Political Ads: ‘A Flood of Falsehoods’A Republican No MoreBig Lie LawyersProtests in Brazil: A Harbinger for the U.S.?Flooded farmland in Hadeja, Nigeria, in September.Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Climate Pledges Fizzle as Havoc Looms for Globe” (front page, Oct. 26):Whatever happened to mutually assured destruction?During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union never attacked each other directly for fear of a nuclear war that would destroy both nations. But today, world-threatening climate change is apparently not enough to bring the U.S. and China to the negotiating table.Without prompt and drastic action by both nations (and others) to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is aimed at a global temperature rise of at least 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Tens of millions of people worldwide will be displaced from their homes. Hundreds of millions will suffer severe drought and food shortages due to crop loss. Billions will face dangerous, possibly deadly heat waves.Are the U.S. and China assuming that their populations will magically be spared? Or is an existential threat to both our nations no longer considered enough for our leaders to take seriously?Amy LivingstonHighland Park, N.J.To the Editor:There’s no doubt that our planet is fast approaching the point of no return for avoiding a future of unimaginable, ever-worsening climate chaos. As you report, the perilous position we find ourselves in is due largely to decades of gross inaction from the world’s biggest climate polluters. The only question now is what to do about it.Your article notes that some progress in the name of climate action has recently been made in the United States, with hundreds of billions of dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act allocated for encouraging “cleaner technologies.” But the fact is that incentivizing the development of cleaner energy sources will not by itself make a dent in carbon emissions.Our recent analysis showed that while use of renewable energy rose significantly in the previous decade, fossil fuel production increased even more. In truth, the only way to meaningfully reduce climate-killing carbon pollution is to halt it at its source, by stopping new oil and gas drilling and fracking, and preventing the buildout of new infrastructure like pipelines and export terminals that encourage the devastating extraction.Wenonah HauterWashingtonThe writer is the founder and executive director of Food & Water Watch.To the Editor:Carbon and methane emissions cause temperature to increase, and we are reading that methane emissions are rising faster than ever. At the same time, climate pledges around the globe to cut those emissions are falling short.Many people understand the potential negative effects of climate change, but don’t see the urgency to address it. We need to rectify all of these failings and create the will for faster action. Our citizens must understand and believe that the cost of inaction is too high and demand stronger action now.Perhaps some people are more worried about the immediate economic and inflation aspects. I want to remind them that every negative effect of climate change is bad for the economy and even more inflationary. Climate-related weather events (wildfires, floods, drought, hurricanes, etc.) drain production and supply and escalate demand and prices.If we don’t decrease the use of fossil fuels soon enough, climate migration will become a large issue. Such movements will harm local economies both to and from those migration areas. Climate inaction is too costly to ignore, and we need action now.Jonathan LightLaguna Niguel, Calif.Pennsylvania Political Ads: ‘A Flood of Falsehoods’Chester County elections workers scanning mail-in ballots in 2020. Unsigned letters circulated in the county this year warning residents that their votes might not have counted.Matt Slocum/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “With Push of a Button, Lies Flood a Swing State” (front page, Nov. 1):As a Pennsylvania voter, I find that it has become increasingly difficult to cut through the deluge of disinformation that has flooded the airwaves, our mailboxes and social media channels in connection with the coming election.Regrettably, far too many people choose to peddle propaganda in a brazen attempt to mislead voters, and the relative ease with which deceptive and denigrating material is widely disseminated degrades an already tenuous political system.With an electorate that is already jaded and exceedingly cynical because of the rancor that has become so pervasive in American politics, we cannot afford to give voters yet another reason to stay home on Election Day. Pennsylvanians deserve better than a flood of falsehoods that threatens to wash away the decency and credibility that we desperately need in our electoral process.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa.A Republican No More Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesTo the Editor:My grandfather was a conservative Pennsylvania Republican. My father was a conservative Pennsylvania Republican. And I naturally became a conservative Pennsylvania Republican, holding onto it as I moved over the years to Ohio, Connecticut and New York.Several months ago, I registered as a Democrat, pen twitching in my hand, yet knowing that it was time to speak up the only way politicians comprehend.Donald Trump brought me to this. He has yet to wear his proper label. He is, and should be publicly recognized as, a cult leader: unbelievably dangerous, persuasive and dense.Until Republican Party leaders recognize that they have been “drinking the Kool-Aid” because they are afraid of the cult leader, I have no use for them, nor should any clear-thinking Republican.J.H. QuestIthaca, N.Y.Big Lie Lawyers T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesTo the Editor:The continued attack on our free and democratic elections revealed in “Same Trump Lawyers Gear Up for Midterms” (news article, Nov. 3) is even more disturbing in light of the fact that almost all of the lawyers mentioned in the article face outstanding bar complaints from The 65 Project, the bipartisan accountability group I run.These complaints were filed months ago, and in the face of inaction by the various state bar associations, these Big Lie lawyers have continued their attacks on our democracy.Until the state bar associations take action by referring these attorneys to the relevant disciplinary committees and imposing sanctions — up to and including disbarment — their actions described in this article will just be another stop along the way to more attempts to overturn elections in 2022 and 2024.Michael TeterSalt Lake CityProtests in Brazil: A Harbinger for the U.S.?Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro gathering outside the Brazilian Army’s national headquarters on Wednesday in Brasília, the capital. Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Denying Defeat, Bolsonaro’s Supporters Ask Army to Step In” (news article, Nov. 3):It used to be that we were afraid of a coup, of a strongman or the army taking over against the will of the people. Now it seems that the people themselves are the problem. In Brazil, tens of thousands are protesting the results of their recent election, demanding a new election or, most chillingly, a military government “permanently,” as one put it.This sounds disconcertingly familiar, as millions in this country are demanding similarly authoritarian forms of government. The focus here has been on disinformation and conspiracy theories circulating on social media, and on Donald Trump himself, America’s Bolsonaro. But the real problem, here as in Brazil, is the inexplicable desire of millions of ordinary citizens to live under an authoritarian regime.We should hope that Brazil’s reaction to Jair Bolsonaro’s loss is not a harbinger of our own experience two years hence.Tim ShawCambridge, Mass. More

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      I Feel Utterly Hopeless About American Climate Policy

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      In a column published in June 2021, I declared the coming year would be a “hinge in history” for American participation in the global effort to address the climate crisis. Having won the White House and control of the House and the Senate, Democrats had cracked open a rare window of political opportunity — their first chance since 2010 to pass major federal legislation to reduce our carbon emissions.But the window wasn’t very big, and it wouldn’t stay open long. President Biden had proposed setting a target of 2030 for the United States to cut carbon emissions to half of 2005 levels. He’d outlined hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in clean energy, public transit, electric vehicle infrastructure, severe weather preparedness and climate-related research and development. Now, in the face of united Republican opposition, and with midterm politicking rapidly approaching, could Democrats seize what I called “the country’s last best political opportunity” to address climate change and pass Biden’s plan?Well, a year has passed, and the answer is in: Nope.When Senator Joe Manchin pulled his support last week for even a significantly scaled-down version of Biden’s climate plan, America’s great window of opportunity all but slammed shut. Manchin’s decision was no surprise — he has been stringing his party along for more than a year — but for me it still packed a wallop.Was I thrown into a spiral of despair about the incapacity of our political system to take on urgent issues? Was I left feeling hopeless about the world’s efforts to avoid climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios? Did I wonder more than once what even was the point of Democrats running the show if they could not secure this plan? Yeah, maybe just a little.It is difficult to overstate the case for a huge federal effort on climate change. It’s popular — most Americans think Congress should address the causes and effects of climate change. And because there are new disasters brought about by a warming planet seemingly every week now, the issue will only grow more urgent. (About 100 million Americans are sweating through severe heat this week.)Biden’s plan also made economic sense: Regardless of whether America participates, a global transition to renewable fuels is already underway. China leads the United States (and the rest of the world) in growth in renewable power generation capacity and in solar panel manufacturing; because the Chinese government is investing heavily in renewables while we are not, we risk falling further behind in industries that will dominate the future.It has also rarely been clearer that our dependence on fossil fuels is doing us no national security favors. Biden was in Saudi Arabia last week when he conceded defeat on the climate bill. He was there to ask one brutal petromonarch for more oil because another brutal petromonarch is using his fossil fuel profits to finance an invasion of a sovereign neighbor. But despite an embarrassing fist bump with the Saudi crown prince, whose country Biden once aimed to sideline as a global “pariah,” the president hasn’t yet secured any guarantees for more oil. That may change at an upcoming meeting of the OPEC+ oil cartel — but shouldn’t we be striving for a future in which we wouldn’t have to bend to such characters because they happen to sit on a lot of dead plants and animals?It’s precisely the strength of the case for federal climate action that has left me feeling so down. Democrats seem headed toward losing their congressional majorities in the midterms, and Biden’s approval ratings are abysmal. It is difficult to imagine the party will get another shot at taking major climate action anytime soon. What will become of climate change as a political issue if Democrats are out in the political wilderness? Are we doomed to another decade of inaction?Climate experts told me not to abandon all hope. Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research group, took issue last year with my characterization of Biden’s plan as a do-or-die moment for the American climate movement.“There isn’t a 12-year deadline or a one-year deadline,” Trembath told me this week. He argued that advocacy that leans on such deadlines is bound to provoke nihilism, and that a better way to talk about climate change is as a long-term issue that we will have to keep dealing with for as long as we live. More

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      10 Challenges Biden Faces in Righting the Economy

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential InaugurationliveLatest UpdatesQuestions, AnsweredWho’s PerformingHeightened SecurityPast Inaugural FirstsJoseph R. Biden Jr.Credit…Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site index10 Challenges Biden Faces in Righting the EconomyThe pandemic has damaged the economy and cost millions of people their livelihoods. These are some of the areas that demand Joe Biden’s attention.Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit…Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 19, 2021Updated 2:59 p.m. ETAll presidents come into office vowing to rapidly put into effect an ambitious agenda. But for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the raging coronavirus pandemic and the economic pain it is causing mean many things must get done quickly if he wants to get the economy going. In a speech Thursday on his $1.9 trillion spending proposal, Mr. Biden repeatedly stressed the need to act “now.”But piecing together a majority in Congress could take time: Compromises and concessions will be needed to get the votes he will need to advance legislation.The new president is expected to reverse many of Donald J. Trump’s policies that undid those of the Obama administration, in which Mr. Biden was vice president. But in some areas crucial to business — like trade relations with China and the European Union — he probably will not return the United States to the pre-Trump order. Nor is he likely to back off from the Trump administration’s efforts to curb the power of large technology firms.Here are some policy areas that will demand Mr. Biden’s attention, and determine the success of his presidency. — More

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      How Sustainable Is the Rally in Renewable Energy Stocks?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Sustainable Is the Rally in Renewable Energy Stocks?Solar and wind power companies have soared in value. Are they in a bubble or in a virtuous upward cycle?Installing solar panels on a rooftop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Solar power is the cheapest source of electricity in many countries, according to the International Energy Agency.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York TimesJan. 14, 2021Updated 1:50 p.m. ETThe overall stock market was fabulous last year, but as investors focused on climate change, renewable energy stocks did even better.Consider that while the SPDR S&P 500 Exchange-Traded Fund Trust, which tracks the benchmark S&P 500, returned 18.37 percent in 2020, the Invesco Solar E.T.F., which tracks an index of solar energy stocks, soared 233.95 percent, according to Morningstar Direct. The Invesco WilderHill E.T.F., which invests more broadly in alternative energy of various types, rose 204.83 percent.Returns like those are so strong that they are unlikely to be replicated: It is possible that the stocks of companies engaged in carbon-free energy production are already in a bubble. Jason Bloom, head of fixed income and alternative E.T.F.s for Invesco, describes the sector this way: “I would call it rational optimism in view of improving fundamentals.”The International Energy Agency recently called solar-generated energy the “cheapest” electricity source in many countries. In the United States, it accounts for just 3 percent of energy output, but it is increasing rapidly. Wind power, which now supplies roughly 8 percent of domestic energy, has also been growing. There is plenty of room for expansion for many renewable energy companies.The results of the presidential election have already bolstered the returns of these companies, too. While President Trump has promoted the use of fossil fuels like coal, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has advocated a $2 trillion climate plan to “achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.” His plan, not yet fully detailed, includes a variety of investment inducements and tax breaks.That would be more ambitious than the once-trendsetting 2045 goal of carbon-free energy production set by California. Already, solar power accounts for 18 percent of electricity generation at the utility Southern California Edison, said Erica Bowman, the company’s director of resource and environmental planning and strategy.Garvin Jabusch, chief investment officer for Green Alpha Advisors, an alternative energy investor, notes that the cost of generating electricity from solar energy is 90 percent lower than 10 years ago. Mr. Jabusch expects alternative energy prices to decline further with expanded demand. Mr. Jabusch favors companies that are “growing production capacity,” like First Solar, which has opened a new plant in Lake Township, Ohio, to expand production of its solar panels.For all its promise, investment in solar and wind power is limited by the laws of nature: Solar units can produce electricity only when the sun is shining, and wind turbines need wind.For the most part, Southern California Edison backs up its solar power with electricity generated by natural gas. But the utility recently contracted for nearly 600 megawatts of lithium ion battery storage so it can store excess electricity produced under ideal weather conditions.“Battery prices are down 90 percent over the last five to eight years,” Ms. Bowman said. “As we transition to a cleaner grid, solar generation coupled with battery storage is the cost-effective solution for California,” she added.Hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, have emerged as a possible near-term solution for use in trucking and shipping, says Mr. Bloom. But such applications will require a costly expansion of the hydrogen gas filling station network, said Steve Capanna, director of U.S. climate policy and analysis for the Environmental Defense Fund. Right now, he said, beyond “a handful in California,” there aren’t many such stations.Buying shares of renewable energy stocks now requires a degree of faith, because they are so expensive, partly because of the low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, which have helped to drive the overall stock market higher. Fed support may be the biggest reason the market has withstood all the grim economic news of the coronavirus to continue its seemingly unending valuation advance.Paul Coster, a JPMorgan analyst, said that the high prices in the renewables sector are based on solid achievement. “It’s not like the dot-com era,” he said. “These are real actors with real technology.” He added, “We’re living in this wonderful moment in time when virtue and self-interest coincide.”Perhaps, Mr. Coster mused, there are still good reasons to own some of these stocks. He cited FuelCell Energy, which has negative cash flow and has consistently reported quarterly earnings losses. Mr. Coster said investors may want to project out several years.By 2025, he said, it’s “feasible” that FuelCell Energy would have $60 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, justifying a rich, growth stock valuation. Even so, the company’s shares more than doubled in the last month, and on Jan. 14, Mr. Coster warned that at current prices, the stock was already “richly valued.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Al Gore: I Have Hope on the Climate Crisis. America Must Lead.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyAl Gore: Where I Find HopeThe Biden administration will have the opportunity to restore confidence in America and take on the worsening climate crisis.Mr. Gore was the 45th vice president of the United States.Dec. 12, 2020Al Gore at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2015.Credit…Francois Mori/Associated Press­­­­­This weekend marks two anniversaries that, for me, point a way forward through the accumulated wreckage of the past year.The first is personal. Twenty years ago, I ended my presidential campaign after the Supreme Court abruptly decided the 2000 election. As the incumbent vice president, my duty then turned to presiding over the tallying of Electoral College votes in Congress to elect my opponent. This process will unfold again on Monday as the college’s electors ratify America’s choice of Joe Biden as the next president, ending a long and fraught campaign and reaffirming the continuity of our democracy.The second anniversary is universal and hopeful. This weekend also marks the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement. One of President Trump’s first orders of business nearly four years ago was to pull the United States out of the accord, signed by 194 other nations to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases threatening the planet. With Mr. Trump heading for the exit, President-elect Biden plans to rejoin the agreement on his Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.Now, with Mr. Biden about to take up residence in the White House, the United States has the chance to reclaim America’s leadership position in the world after four years in the back seat.Mr. Biden’s challenges will be monumental. Most immediately, he assumes office in the midst of the chaos from the colossal failure to respond effectively to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic devastation that has resulted.And though the pandemic fills our field of vision at the moment, it is only the most urgent of the multiple crises facing the country and planet, including 40 years of economic stagnation for middle-income families; hyper-inequality of incomes and wealth, with high levels of poverty; horrific structural racism; toxic partisanship; the impending collapse of nuclear arms control agreements; an epistemological crisis undermining the authority of knowledge; recklessly unprincipled behavior by social media companies; and, most dangerous of all, the climate crisis.What lies before us is the opportunity to build a more just and equitable way of life for all humankind. This potential new beginning comes at a rare moment when it may be possible to break the stranglehold of the past over the future, when the trajectory of history might be altered by what we choose to do with a new vision.With the coronavirus death toll rising rapidly, the battle against the pandemic is desperate, but it will be won. Yet we will still be in the midst of an even more life-threatening battle — to protect the Earth’s climate balance — with consequences measured not only in months and years, but also in centuries and millenniums. Winning will require us to re-establish our compact with nature and our place within the planet’s ecological systems, for the sake not only of civilization’s survival but also of the preservation of the rich web of biodiversity on which human life depends.The daunting prospect of successfully confronting such large challenges at a time after bitter divisions were exposed and weaponized in the presidential campaign has caused many people to despair. Yet these problems, however profound, are all solvable.Look at the pandemic. Despite the policy failures and human tragedies, at least one success now burns bright: Scientists have harnessed incredible breakthroughs in biotechnology to produce several vaccines in record time. With medical trials demonstrating their safety and efficacy, these new vaccines prefigure an end to the pandemic in the new year. This triumph alone should put an end to the concerted challenges to facts and science that have threatened to undermine reason as the basis for decision-making.Similarly, even as the climate crisis rapidly worsens, scientists, engineers and business leaders are making use of stunning advances in technology to end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels far sooner than was hoped possible.Mr. Biden will take office at a time when humankind faces the choice of life over death. Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of severe consequences — coastal inundations and worsening droughts, among other catastrophes — if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050.Slowing the rapid warming of the planet will require a unified global effort. Mr. Biden can lead by strengthening the country’s commitment to reduce emissions under the Paris Agreement — something the country is poised to do thanks to the work of cities, states, businesses and investors, which have continued to make progress despite resistance from the Trump administration.Solar energy is one example. The cost of solar panels has fallen 89 percent in the past decade, and the cost of wind turbines has dropped 59 percent. The International Energy Agency projects that 90 percent of all new electricity capacity worldwide in 2020 will be from clean energy — up from 80 percent in 2019, when total global investment in wind and solar was already more than three times as large as investments in gas and coal.Over the next five years, the I.E.A. projects that clean energy will constitute 95 percent of all new power generation globally. The agency recently called solar power “the new king” in global energy markets and “the cheapest source of electricity in history.”As renewable energy costs continue to drop, many utilities are speeding up the retirement of existing fossil fuel plants well before their projected lifetimes expire and replacing them with solar and wind, plus batteries. In a study this summer, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Sierra Club reported that clean energy is now cheaper than 79 percent of U.S. coal plants and 39 percent of coal plants in the rest of the world — a number projected to increase rapidly. Other analyses show that clean energy combined with batteries is already cheaper than most new natural gas plants.As a former oil minister in Saudi Arabia put it 20 years ago, “the Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.” Many global investors have reached the same conclusion and are beginning to shift capital away from climate-destroying businesses to sustainable solutions. The pressure is no longer coming from only a small group of pioneers, endowments, family foundations and church-based pension funds; some of the world’s largest investment firms are now joining this movement, too, having belatedly recognized that fossil fuels have been extremely poor investments for a long while. Thirty asset managers overseeing $9 trillion announced on Friday an agreement to align their portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050.Exxon Mobil, long a major source of funding for grossly unethical climate denial propaganda, just wrote down the value of its fossil fuel reserves by as much as $20 billion, adding to the unbelievable $170 billion in oil and gas assets written down by the industry in just the first half of this year. Last year, a BP executive said that some of the company’s reserves “won’t see the light of day,” and this summer it committed to a 10-fold increase in low-carbon investments this decade as part of its commitment to net-zero emissions.The world has finally begun to cross a political tipping point, too. Grass-roots climate activists, often led by young people of Greta Thunberg’s generation, are marching every week now (even virtually during the pandemic). In the United States, this movement crosses party lines. More than 50 college conservative and Republican organizations have petitioned the Republican National Committee to change its position on climate, lest the party lose younger voters.Significantly, in just the past three months, several of the world’s most important political leaders have introduced important initiatives. Thanks to the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the E.U. just announced that it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent in the next nine years. President Xi Jinping has pledged that China will achieve net-zero carbon emissions in 2060. Leaders in Japan and South Korea said a few weeks ago said that their countries will reach net-zero emissions in 2050.Denmark, the E.U.’s largest producer of gas and oil, has announced a ban on further exploration for fossil fuels. Britain has pledged a 68 percent reduction by 2030, along with a ban on sales of vehicles equipped with only gasoline-powered internal-combustion engines.The cost of batteries for electric vehicles has dropped by 89 percent over the past decade, and according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, these vehicles will reach price parity with internal-combustion vehicles within two years in key segments of vehicle markets in the United States, Europe and Australia, followed quickly by China and much of the rest of the world. Sales of internal-combustion passenger vehicles worldwide peaked in 2017. It is in this new global context that President-elect Biden has made the decarbonization of the U.S. electricity grid by 2035 a centerpiece of his economic plan. Coupled with an accelerated conversion to electric vehicles and an end to government subsidies for fossil fuels, among other initiatives, these efforts can help put the nation on a path toward net-zero emissions by 2050.As the United States moves forward, it must put frontline communities — often poor, Black, brown or Indigenous — at the center of the climate agenda. They have suffered disproportionate harm from climate pollution. This is reinforced by recent evidence that air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels — to which these communities bear outsize exposure — makes them more vulnerable to Covid-19.With millions of new jobs needed to recover from the economic ravages of the pandemic, sustainable businesses are among the best bets. A recent study in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy noted that investments in those enterprises result in three times as many new jobs as investments in fossil fuels. Between 2014 and 2019, solar jobs grew five times as fast in the United States as average job growth.Still, all of these positive developments fall far short of the emissions reductions required. The climate crisis is getting worse faster than we are deploying solutions.In November of next year, all of the signatories to the Paris Agreement will meet in Glasgow with a mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions much faster than they pledged to do in 2015. What will be new in Glasgow is transparency: By the time the delegates arrive, a new monitoring effort made possible by an array of advanced technologies will have precisely measured the emissions from every major source of greenhouse gases in the world, with most of that data updated every six hours.With this radical transparency, a result of efforts of a broad coalition of corporations and nonprofits I helped to start called Climate Trace (for tracking real-time atmospheric carbon emissions), countries will have no place to hide when failing to meet their emissions commitments. This precision tracking will replace the erratic, self-reported and often inaccurate data on which past climate agreements were based.Even then, a speedy phaseout of carbon pollution will require functional democracies. With the casting of a majority of the Electoral College votes on Monday for Mr. Biden, and then his inauguration, we will make a start in restoring America as the country best positioned to lead the world’s struggle to solve the climate crisis.To do that, we need to deal forthrightly with our shortcomings instead of touting our strengths. That, and that alone, can position the United States to recover the respect of other nations and restore their confidence in America as a reliable partner in the great challenges humankind faces. As in the pandemic, knowledge will be our salvation, but to succeed, we must learn to work together, lest we perish together.Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his work to slow global warming.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More