Is the energy transition big or small?
Just asking questions
Between the US election, wars in Ukraine, Palestine & Lebanon, and Sudan, and some concern that, as William Gibson described in Pattern Recognition, I have become disconnected with a bit of my soul flying over the Pacific, I’m more than a little blocked. So apologies for the haphazard thoughts that follow. You could always just return to doomscrolling.
Over the past week or so, a question inserted itself into my brain, and I can’t seem to shake it out: Is the energy transition big or small?
Obviously, climate change is big. The trillion ton blanket of greenhouse gasses that traps heat on an utterly vast scale is already making a mockery of denial and calls for delay to climate action. The hurricanes Helene and Milton, Asheville’s decimation, floods in Spain, etc. I mean, I was worried last night about kids in their costumes suffering from heatstroke while trick or treating. Summer is expanding, winter shrinking. Waters have moved, ice is melting. We are on Eaarth.
The energy transition is a little different. Like agriculture in rich countries with heavy mechanization, the energy system doesn’t employ a lot of people directly.1 But, of course, like with agriculture, it underlies everything. Without our energy systems, modern life crumbles to dust.
The plan, though, is not to allow that to happen, but to swap out a fossil-heavy energy system for a decarbonized one. Arguably, we’re already in the mid-transition.
My question then is can we do this switch, or at least productively think about it and maybe even sell it, as something happening n the background, on the sidelines of the dramas of life the universe and everything that proceed apace on the main stage. Or is this the drama itself, a world historical happening that only happens if we invest not just 1-2% of GDP but our attention, creativity, sentimentality — our very souls — to it?
The Potential Smallness of Green Growth
To be sure, this question is really only possible because the idea of green growth is plausible in a way that it just wasn’t even a decade ago. Cheap renewables and batteries create a path to a decarbonized future through clean electrification of everything that didn’t even exist in model land. Decarbonization was going to be a project of either modest significance when compared with the glories of compounded economic growth (e.g. W. Nordhaus) or rely on magical maths of bioenergy carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), vast fields of switchgrass that would be burned to power our modern conveniences but capturing the resulting emissions from the burning and sequestering them in Tartaros with the titans for an age.
Now, however, we can imagine living our lives and the world simply decarbonizing around us. We make some of these decisions, nudged by policy to replace the gas burning furnace with a heat pump and perhaps a plug-in hybrid that only uses gasoline on the three days in which you take your family on a long-road trip, but mostly it happens out of our view. Light switches flip on as ever before, but the LEDs are now no longer powered by coal or gas but wind turbines or solar panels or some battery that had been charged by those or other clean sources of generation. A billion machines are slowly, quietly, cleanly replaced with faster, quieter, and cleaner alternatives. The major players in the electricity, industrial, and transportation sector are wrenched a bit—plants shut down earlier than hoped for, proven reserves of fossil fuels on asset sheets stay in the ground, aluminum, steel, cement, and chemicals become greener, some tech bets win and others lose (thermal storage! nuclear renaissance! geothermal! hydrogen!)—but things mostly come out for the vast majority of us on the outside. The service-based economies of the rich world continue to churn through sales receipts, marketing budgets, annual reviews, intellectual property litigations, content creation and curation, food and beverage accounting, and so on.
I would put Saul Griffith as the leading exponent of this perspective: clean abundance will just be a better world. You don’t sell the EV or heat pump by talking about how it helps fight climate change; you just brag about how much zip it has or how it will save you money.
The politics here are the politics of nudging, de-risking, pushing the status quo onto a new track through quiet technocratic policies and technological innovations and avoiding provoking backlash with higher costs or reduced consumption.2 There are often references to the “millions of green jobs” that will be created, but really, we’re talking about fewer men working in the service centers of auto dealerships and more of them installing insulation and solar panels. We’re talking about taking people now toiling in transmission factories and shifting them into battery production or metals refining. The IRA is the exemplar. Mostly carrots, and few sticks. And while some may hope it is seen as a “Big Deal” it is easy to dismiss it as the barest minimum of action. Adam Tooze, who has become withering on Biden and Bidenomics, calls them “minor adornments” on the US fiscal picture:
The $370 billion in the IRA for clean energy sounds like a lot of money; its boosters project that private investment will take that sum up to $1 trillion or more. But this money is spread over ten years and the US economy comes to over $20 trillion. As a share of GDP, the baseline commitment of the IRA is less than 1 per cent.
But this was the politics: if Kamala wins, it probably even works as a real contribution to reducing global emissions. Increased adoption of clean technologies will lead to more production of them, which will, through the logic of learning curves, lead to lower prices and more adoption. Ad infinitum. The billion machines will be replaced, our cities will be cleaner and quieter, and carbon emissions will be a mere fraction of where they are today at the final peak of fossil capitalism.
Small, incremental changes that add up over time can remake the world. And doing so in ways that avoid the problems of polarization can have real advantages. But one must wonder if technocratic fiddling and secret congress is sufficient to tackle the climate crisis.
The Benefits of Bigness
War metaphors proliferate despite their obvious problems. Simple narratives of good vs. evil, of villains and heroes, are core to American politics and culture. In an age of relative comfort and plenty, coming to grips with a crisis — an emergency even3 —can provide purpose and meaning that can shake us out of our complacency.
Our world on the other side of the energy transition will literally look different (it will sound different too, though I doubt that too many will be disturbed by the comparative silent hums of EVs replacing the revving of internal combustion engines). Solar panels will cover roofs and vast amounts of land that had been crops, pasture, and forests. Wind turbines will loom atop hills and over farms. Transmission lines will dangle their wires between massive towers for thousands of miles at a stretch. Banks of batteries will pop up in all kinds of places — garages, stoves, basements, power substations, EV charging kiosks.
In a country where hours long city council meetings are needed to debate the facade choices of a new apartment building and a bike trail expansion of 0.1 mile can be expected to take 5 years including environmental reviews, it is hard to imagine that a radical remaking of what America looks like and its material underpinnings can proceed quietly.
But maybe saving the world — or at least doing one’s part in a global effort to mitigate the disastrous effects of the pollution that we and our ancestors have been dumping into the thin veneer around our blue marble upon which all complex animal life depends — is a big purpose that can activate supporters more than opponents.
There’s no real conclusion here. I don’t have an answer other than that it isn’t always the case that good politics is good policy and vice versa. Would that it were so simple.
A major difference between them, however, is that while agriculture can be profitable due to policy supports and protection, the energy companies that power modern society with fossil fuels are some of the most profitable institutions in our current capitalist age. More on the role of profits later.
Of course, the geopolitical piece here — the need to make things in ‘Merica (and partners and allies) rather than rely on red China to produce the world’s green tech — is a bit darker and more conflictual in ways that make even the small politics loom large, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Don’t call it an emergency. MUCH more on that at a later date.