The tyranny of climate targets. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

12 - 15 minutes

Matthew Yglesias

6 Dec 2023

∙ Paid

Holding this year’s COP meeting in Dubai struck me as a somewhat odd call given the host country’s vested interest in promoting fossil fuel usage. In some ways, though, I think it’s been helpful in highlighting an issue that I’ve been wanting to write about: the odd weight placed in certain circles on largely meaningless climate targets.

The conference began on a contentious note with Emirati climate chief Sultan Al Jaber saying there’s “no science” behind the idea of phasing out fossil fuel use, “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” John Kerry, who runs a sort of odd White House office on climate diplomacy, responded that “the G7 countries voted that there should be a phasing out of unmitigated fossil fuel emissions and what there is science for is keeping 1.5 degrees as your North Star.”

The Emiratis are overstating the case here with this business about caves.

But I do think Al Jaber is raising a valid and important point, which is that you don’t need to deny the science of climate change to see that reducing global fossil fuel use to zero would have gargantuan social and economic costs, barring some huge technological breakthroughs. This is actually a pretty normal situation — there is a margin at which reducing X is cost-effective and there is another margin at which it isn’t — for a policy problem. But the climate debate is dominated by a right-wing camp of dismissiveness and conspiracy theorizing and an establishment that’s committed to the sort of odd abstractions we heard from Kerry.

It begins with the premise that 1.5 degrees centigrade of warming is the target the world has agreed on. From there, it’s possible to deploy various scientific models to estimate which emissions pathways are consistent with achieving the 1.5 degree goal. Then, with even more modeling, you can estimate what kinds of energy consumption are consistent with achieving that emissions pathway. Those models will tell you that after such-and-such a date, you “can’t” have any fossil fuel emissions that aren’t 1-to-1 matched by carbon capture or carbon renewal. So then you tussle over how to allocate that fossil fuel phaseout across different countries and different sectors. I think everyone is broadly aware that the world is not going to hit these targets. But the climate movement’s priority is to come as close as possible to hitting the targets, which means moving as ambitiously as possible in whichever jurisdictions the movement happens to obtain adequate political power. So California and several other states are setting target dates to phase out sales of internal combustion engine cars. Michigan recently set a target of decarbonizing its electricity grid by 2040. Everything kind of flows downhill as a nested series of target-setting initiatives.

The problem is that these exercises lose track of the questions that are actually of interest — how much emissions abatement is being achieved and at what cost?

I’ve mentioned this before, but a great illustration of the gap between ambitious target-setting and actually improving environmental outcomes is provided by the recent experience of New York State.

Back in 2019, New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which committed the state to achieving 100 percent emissions-free electricity by 2040. When you’re working with a 21-year timeline, you need to move quickly. But it’s now 2023, and the state has made zero progress toward decarbonizing its electrical grid because they shut down the Indiana Point nuclear power plant, and that has more than offset any renewable buildout. Those buildouts are still happening, which is good, but they also keep hitting snags. Some of the companies involved in offshore wind construction projects decided that their costs are rising, so they needed to ask the utility to pay them more. But the New York utility regulator said no to higher rates, so that’s not going to happen. Another offshore wind company wanted to use some park land for a transmission line to support an offshore project, but governor Kathy Hochul vetoed the bill that would have facilitated that.

Now, while Hochul hasn’t formally backed away from the 2040 target, she is proposing a change to emissions accounting that would de facto allow the state to move more slowly toward its goals.

And to be clear, it’s not like this is all Kathy Hochul’s fault. She wasn’t governor when Indian Point was shut down, and she wasn’t governor when the 2040 target was set.

The point is that the mere existence of the 2040 target does not cause zero-emission electricity to come into existence. For that to happen, specific measures need to be taken (or not taken), and those measures have costs. That could be a financial price, like agreeing to higher electricity rates to compensate wind builders for higher costs. But they could also be other kinds of tradeoffs, like letting the transmission line mar some park or whatever the perceived negatives of Indian Point were. If you don’t bear the necessary costs to generate enough electricity to meet your targets, then either the state is going to face rolling blackouts (obviously unacceptable to voters) or else the target will be suspended or delayed or otherwise gutted.

I’m not saying the target is totally pointless. As an exercise, it can be a useful way to help map out scenarios. But what reduces pollution is identifying specific ways to reduce pollution at acceptable costs, and then convincing people to bear those costs.

Greg Sargent wrote a column hailing the Michigan clean energy bill for successfully pairing strong climate targets with strong labor protections. But I have to say, I’m very skeptical that the decarbonization of Michigan electricity by 2040 is actually going to happen. In addition to the labor standards Sargent hails, the keys to securing union support for the bill was that it clearly endorses nuclear power (which is a great decision) and also natural gas, combined with carbon capture. That’s great if someone invents a cost-effective way of doing carbon capture sometime between today and 2040. But as of right now, no such technology actually exists. Putting it on the menu lets you build out renewables, while relying on natural gas to complement them and keep prices affordable, while saying that in the future their emissions will be addressed with carbon capture. It’s a completely sensible and pragmatic compromise, but actually hitting the target hinges on a hypothetical technological breakthrough. Again, that is not a criticism — we need new technology to beat climate change — it’s a reminder that the technology, not the target, is doing the work.

I think the really exciting thing about the Michigan legislation isn’t the stuff Sargent talked about, it’s the provisions centralizing authority over renewable permitting to beat the forces of NIMBYism. Actually increasing the supply and lowering the cost of clean energy reduces emissions. Targets themselves don’t do anything.

The other part of the targeting exercise that doesn’t make sense is that we all know there actually is not a binding global commitment to decarbonize.

That’s a big deal because the coordination issues in play with climate change are very significant. Suppose everyone on the planet agreed to never heat any dwelling to a temperature higher than 65 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s cooler than most of us find comfortable to keep our homes. But we also know that human beings can survive perfectly well in 65 degree temperatures. You might just dress a bit more warmly around the house. Everyone would find this somewhat irksome, but everyone would be fundamentally fine, and global emissions would also drop by some quantity X.

Now, suppose that just the state of Vermont adopts that rule.

From the standpoint of the residents of Vermont, this is every bit as irksome and annoying as the global rule. But while the global rule would have reduced emissions by a decently large sum, the Vermont-specific rule reduces emissions by only a teeny tiny fraction of X.

So even though from the standpoint of Vermonters, the two rules are equally burdensome, the burden/benefit ratio of the local rule is dramatically worse — like several orders of magnitude worse — than the global rule.

The target-setters are basically just ignoring this. They’re saying, sure it might cost such-and-such an amount to get Michigan to net zero, but it’s worth it because net zero is very beneficial. And it’s true that global net zero would have large global benefits alongside the large global costs. But Michigan net zero has identical costs to Michigan, with only a tiny fraction of the benefits. Outside the framework of a binding global agreement, you need to look at the specific cost-benefit profile of specific measures and assess them on the merits.

If you look at that in a purely carbon pricing mindset, that leads you to a modest price and a modest emission reduction. The good news is that there’s actually tons of emissions-reducing stuff we can do that has low or even negative economic costs — like Michigan’s move to make renewable permitting easier. But the reason to engage in targeted deregulation of geothermal, nuclear, and renewable energy isn’t to hit arbitrary targets, it’s that the economic costs of taking those steps is negative. By contrast, ideas that sound more modest than sweeping alterations to the regulatory landscape, like getting everyone to wear a sweater in the winter, have a much worse cost-benefit profile.

I’m such a grouch about this stuff, so as a believer in positivity and good vibes, I’d really encourage you to read some optimistic takes from Noah Smith alongside my grouching.

He says that “solar and batteries are going to win,” so we don’t need to worry about my weird nukes and geothermal stuff or hypothetical carbon capture schemes. He also says electric vehicles are going to win and links to a great Hannah Ritchie piece about “the end of range anxiety” thanks to bigger and better EV batteries.

On the other hand, I heard from someone who works in message testing that talking about electric cars at this point is about as politically toxic as talking about cutting police funding. So it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, sales are rising at a very rapid clip. On the other hand, most cars aren’t new and most new cars sold are still traditional ICE cars. And on the third hand, many ICE buyers are terrified of their ICE cars being banned.

So if EVs are winning and emissions are falling, why is there advocate pressure on the bluest states to enact unpopular gasoline car bans? By the same token, given how radioactive we know that taking away people’s gas stoves is, why was there pressure on New York to ban new gas stoves in new buildings? The answer is that even if renewables and EVs and heat pumps and induction stoves are winning out over time, they’re not winning out fast enough to hit the targets. The mandates are supposed to push the pace and keep the leading jurisdictions at least on track.

I think that responsible elected officials need to think harder about exactly how much sense this makes. New York, for example, already has the lowest per capita emissions of any state in the union, paired with a shrinking share of national population due to its extreme aversion to building new homes. Ensuring that all of the state’s meager new construction uses induction stoves has higher economic costs than changing land use to allow for more housing, and also has a smaller impact on national and global emissions. Or consider these state ICE car bans. California isn’t actually going to kick you off the road if you’re driving a conventional car, they’re just banning new sales at California dealerships. So presumably people who have a strong preference about this will end up driving used gasoline-fired cars. It makes proponents of the policy look politically extreme in exchange for very minimal benefits. In fact, by polarizing the issue and creating pro-gasoline identity politics, it may even be counterproductive to EV adoption.

But that’s because people aren’t asking the question “what is the specific measure here? What does it cost? What does it accomplish?”

Instead, they are focused on nonsensical localized versions of a global target that everyone knows the world isn’t going to hit. And it doesn't make sense.