In 2009, Obama couldn't pass his climate bill. In 2021, we outdid what his bill would have done.

[SaysWho?]

That 2009 climate bill, the one that President Barack Obama couldn’t pass? It required the U.S. to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent by 2020 as compared with their all-time high. Yet last year, our emissions were down 21 percent. The same bill said that the U.S. had to generate 20 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2020. Last year, we met that target. We will surpass it in 2021.

 

 

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Decarbonization isn’t best accomplished by fiat, they argue, but by feedback loop; it proceeds by a self-accelerating process that I have called “the green vortex.” The green vortex describes how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.

 

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The green vortex also makes Biden’s climate and infrastructure agenda, the American Jobs Plan, fit into place. Large swaths of Biden’s plan, which has been criticized for a lack of focus and unnecessary constraints, are devoted to beefing up industries. This choice makes more sense in light of the green vortex. It focuses much of its attention on industries that are crucial to decarbonization but that remain in their early stages. So it spends, for instance, $174 billion on “winning” the global EV market, chiefly by building “domestic supply chains” for electric vehicles and helping consumers buy specifically American-made vehicles.

 

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This focus on domestic production, on American-made cars and steel, runs against 40 years of textbook economics, which has prized efficiency above all. Herbert Stein, President Richard Nixon’s chief economist, once declared that “if the most efficient way for the U.S. to get steel is to produce tapes of [the TV show] Dallas and sell them to the Japanese, then producing tapes of Dallas is our basic industry.” And it’s true that fostering a domestic carbon-capture industry might suck up dollars that could go toward decarbonization elsewhere. But if you’re trying to accelerate a vortex, it makes sense: Biden is betting that a strong domestic EV industry will build political demand for more decarbonization down the road.

 

“I feel a little weird looking at Biden’s infrastructure plan, because I say, ‘Well, you’re doing everything I would tell you to do,’” Kelsey told me.

 

Could a dynamic like the one these policy wonks and academics describe really save the world? According to Kelsey, it already has—just not for climate change. The green vortex helped fix the fraying ozone layer in the 1980s, she argues, when it allowed for the global phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. “The most important thing, the underreported thing, is that the same companies that made the polluting CFCs also made the substitute for CFCs,” she said.

 

[Uaarkson]

Cool. We’re still fucked, though.

[CitizenVectron]

11 minutes ago, Uaarkson said:

Cool. We’re still fucked, though.

 

You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did

[cusideabelincoln]

THE MARKET REGULATES UTSELF!!

[SaysWho?]

6 hours ago, Uaarkson said:

Cool. We’re still fucked, though.

 

 

It’s likely that some here want to will that into happening in their accelerationist fantasy. Everyone has a fetish, you know? 😬

[Joe]

25 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

 

 

It’s likely that some here want to will that into happening in their accelerationist fantasy. Everyone has a fetish, you know? 😬

A significant portion here actively want it to happen.

[Air_Delivery]

When they say last year they mean the pandemic year of 2020 right?

[Uaarkson]

11 minutes ago, Air_Delivery said:

When they say last year they mean the pandemic year of 2020 right?

I was thinking the same thing.

[TwinIon]

24 minutes ago, Air_Delivery said:

When they say last year they mean the pandemic year of 2020 right?

Yeah, the link in the article that shows emissions were down 21% makes it clear that the pandemic is the reason for much of the change. Here's a pretty useful graph:

 

Power was on it's way down thanks to the decline of coal, which doesn't seem to have been sped up by the pandemic.

 

The other major sources all deviated sharply from what we would have expected because of the pandemic. Transportation, industry, and buildings are all either flat or on a slight upward slope from 2009, but took a nosedive thanks to COVID.

 

The conclusion to that article clearly states: "If COVID-19 and the resulting recession hadn’t happened, we estimate that US emissions would have declined by only around 3% this year." (as opposed to the 10.3% drop we got.)

 

Basically, the only good thing we've done is get rid of coal and partially replace it with renewables (and natural gas, which is a much lesser gain). Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much.

[Joe]

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These numbers are not a mere fluke. Last year was a singular, awful moment in economic history, but even accounting for the effects of the COVID-19 recession, America’s real-world emissions last decade outperformed the Obama bill’s targets. From 2012 to 2020, real-world U.S. emissions were more than 1 billion tons below what the bill would have required, according to my analysis of data from Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm.

 

[SaysWho?]

36 minutes ago, Joe said:

These numbers are not a mere fluke. Last year was a singular, awful moment in economic history, but even accounting for the effects of the COVID-19 recession, America’s real-world emissions last decade outperformed the Obama bill’s targets. From 2012 to 2020, real-world U.S. emissions were more than 1 billion tons below what the bill would have required, according to my analysis of data from Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm.

 

People want things to go badly so.... badly that ignoring the article might mean none of this is happening.

 

I know folks here like to shrug not reading off with, "Who has time for that?!" but considering how sure of ourselves we are as a collective, read the damned article before commenting, holy shit! This isn't about 2020 itself; the gains and reductions in CO2 in the atmosphere, plus the much larger market penetration of alternates like solar, well preceded the pandemic.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

It's all very well and good that the piecemeal approach the article describes has had some degree of success through the creation of a positive feedback loop, but let's not kid ourselves that it's any substitute for the comprehensive, top-down, national-level strategy that will be absolutely necessary to stabilize the rapidly deteriorating climate situation.

[SaysWho?]

The story details that the federal bill that we tried to pass and sign could have potentially put us at a better place, but that the goals have been met anyway, and exceeded.

 

I truly feel this board would have been happier hypothetically if we passed the bill and reduced emissions by 17% than the 21% we did now. Or still would have said we're fucked when people who are actual scholars on the subject and published research haven't even thrown up their hands.

 

And nobody tell me they've read that research when this article was too much.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

38 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

I truly feel this board would have been happier hypothetically if we passed the bill and reduced emissions by 17% than the 21% we did now.

 

I would have greater confidence in the long-term viability of continued reductions -- even if they are smaller -- if they were derived from a comprehensive national-level strategy than I do in a larger reduction derived from a piecemeal approach.

 

So, yes - I would prefer the 17% reduction over the 21% reduction given the overall context under which the respective reductions are achieved.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

3 hours ago, Joe said:

A significant portion here actively want it to happen.

 

Guilty as charged!

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

The reduction in emissions in the 2009 bill were not ambitious enough