The energy debate the American people deserve

Welcome back to Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about the surprising rise of clean energy.

My name is Julian Spector. I live in Los Angeles and report on clean energy for Greentech Media, and I write this for fun since MoviePass shut down and so did all the theaters.

It’s debate season at Bright Ideas, but this week I’m departing from my roster of Julian-approved clean energy debate topics, to debate a debate about clean energy. Here’s the lineup:

• Readers have spoken on the matter of California v. Texas

• This week’s debate: The arguments the VP candidates should have made

• And I’m reading about mushrooms, and you really should too

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The readers have spoken

Last week we debated whether California or Texas did clean energy better. California invested early and really made the market through concerted state policy—with some bumps along the way. Texas Runs as close to a free energy market as anyone, and renewables and batteries now dominate new construction.

Here’s how Bright Ideas readers reacted:

Jason Sorter @jasonsorter

@JulianSpector I've had the privilege of looking under ERCOT's hood and it is a well-oiled machine. The Great State of Texas. By a mile or two.

Different states have different natural resource distributions which may make incentivizing clean power easier or harder. Texas has a history of taking a more hands-off and independent approach to power generation (and even individual rights in general) than California, which tends to micromanage industry due to a big emphasis on the health of its citizens. All of these play into how each state develops a functional clean energy industry and market.

~Alex Francisci

Kev @cleantechkevin

@JulianSpector Texas’ grid design is better but the cost reductiona Texas enjoys now were not possible without California’s leadership. So I guess Texas but they’re not a ‘leader’ they’re a follower who did it better.

The debate we deserve

Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris competed last week, and climate and energy had an actual role to play. Of course, the moderator threw away the first question on “do you believe in man-made climate change.” Imagine starting a health care debate with “do you believe in man-made medicine,” and the Republican answers “there is medicine, and the issue is, what’s the cause, and what do we do about it?” Not a meaningful conversation!

But things got meatier as the candidates sparred over what climate action means for jobs, and what to do about fossil fuels. It’s clear that the Democratic ticket actually thinks about clean energy and the Republican ticket does not. But both candidates made choices to obscure or deflect certain elements of their platforms, and I want to dig in on those points.

I don’t mean to suggest a superficial both sides-ism. I mean that, Harris and Pence each chose to obscure specific realities about American energy, and to ignore others entirely. Today I’ll lay out what they could have said had they been willing or able to confront the truth head on.

Two worldviews, but neither fully captured the ascendancy of clean energy.

Trump and Pence have given up on coal

Remember when Trump was going to bring coal back? He and Pence seem to have forgotten, perhaps because they have nothing to show for their efforts. Coal power has collapsed under Trump. More coal plants retired under his watch than in Obama’s first or second term. Coal miner employment fell by 10 percent.

It’s hard to confront this reality without acknowledging that even the rampant undoing of modern environmental regulations and a cozy relationship between the executive branch and coal lobbyists proved insufficient to save coal. The energy industry trend lines are clear on this: it’s going away, sooner or later. The natural gas that Trump boosts in his “Energy Dominance” agenda killed it off through cheaper competition, and cheap renewables sealed the deal.

By the way, coal workers who voted for Trump are mad about this. I recommend this devastating feature from NYT for some personal accounts of the betrayal. Also, look for the surprisingly powerful account of the dying moments of the Navajo Generating Station, the plant that built the modern southwest.

Harris didn’t want to talk about coal either

Maybe Democrats still feel the heat from when Hillary Clinton said she was going to put coal out of business in 2016. But learning too much from that incident gets in the way of a potent attack.

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of how Trump made and flagrantly broke his promises to voters than what happened with coal. By any objective metric, he failed to bring it back. It was likely impossible, but it’s an example of Trump correctly diagnosing a group of Americans who were being left behind by political elites, riding their hopes into power, and having no real strategy for improving their lives in the long run.

That’s where a confident Democrat can pivot into what a Green New Deal offers: an actual plan to help fossil fuel workers adapt to structural changes in the energy system.

It could go something like this:

Coal miners powered our nation for generations. But times change, and coal just can’t compete like it used to. What matters now is that we don’t leave those coal miners and their families out to dry after they served for so many years. That’s why we’re investing X billions of dollars to help them transition to new energy jobs, such as Y, Z, etc. We understand that false promises aren’t going to help you feed your families. We need government support so your communities can start a new chapter.

Will that win their trust? Who knows. But honestly acknowledging their pain and offering a plausible strategy should resonate better than brushing this group of people under a rug.

The Dems don’t want to run against fracking

It’s jarring to see the ticket with the most ambitious clean energy plan of any presidential election ever try so hard to say it also totally digs fossil fuels. It gives the impression that something is not on the level here.

But that’s what Harris did, repeatedly denying that she and Biden would ban fracking, as Pence asserted they would. But she didn’t attempt to reconcile a pro-fracking stance with her actual platform, which would ban gas from the power sector in 15 years, and phase out fossil fuels from heating buildings.

The fact that the Biden platform would eliminate the market for fracked gas is a plausible reason to decline to oppose fracking right now. If Biden gets his way, there wouldn’t be much point. But viewers can tell if someone’s trying to have it both ways, and asserting you want a carbon free world while supporting the production of fossil fuels leaves an unresolved contradiction on the table.

Harris could go with something like:

Natural gas played a crucial role in helping our nation move away from dirtier power plants. In my home state of California, gas supplies nearly half of our electricity, and keeps the lights on when the solar power stops flowing. It has a vital role to play. But we need to do everything we can to limit the dangerous emissions from gas that escapes the pipelines, and eventually, we need to find ways to replace it with non-polluting technologies. Our utility companies are already working on this right now.

Pence wants to tout CO2 reductions while denying man-made climate change

This was very confusing. Like head-wants-to-explode inexplicable. Pence pointedly declined to say that humans cause climate change. He boasted about pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord. But then he went on, twice, to praise American innovation for achieving a reduction in carbon emissions.

Why would a reduction in CO2 merit any praise whatsoever if not for the fact that burning fossil fuels causes climate change? Is there some other CO2 related issue that doesn’t get enough air-time? Does atmospheric CO2 concentration correlate with cohabitation out of wedlock, or some other unspeakable ill?

Also, is Pence aware that the carbon reductions he referenced resulted from cheap natural gas outcompeting coal power, and driving coal plants out of business? He just praised the thing that’s hurting all those coal miners who trusted Trump to help them. See point above.

Dems are afraid to run on the Green New Deal

This was weird, because Biden built up a great deal of good will with the grassroots climate movement by adopting more aggressive policies in his post-primary reconciliation with the Sanders camp. But Harris clearly didn’t want to associate herself with the Green New Deal, and neither does Biden.

That’s a confusing choice, because Harris herself co-sponsored the Green New Deal (!). Moreover, ambitious investment in a clean energy economy consistently polls well, including in battleground states. Leave it to Democrats to get scared about affiliating themselves with something most people want. Running away from the phrase concedes the right wing characterization of it as an extreme and ruinous power grab. 

The Green New Deal is more of an idea than a creed. Mayors and governors have already adopted Green New Deals of their own; Biden could too, if he wanted to own it. The gist of the concept is aggressive decarbonization while supporting a just transition for workers displaced by the shift, and paying attention to communities that have suffered from pollution. Biden’s actual platform does all those things. Why not run on the ideas they chose to run on?

Neither Harris nor Pence told us what’s up in energy right now

Maybe I’m biased by knowing stuff about energy, but I don’t see how you can have an informed debate on this topic without acknowledging the tectonic shifts underway in the industry.

Pence conjured a sepia-tinted Golden Age where fossil fuel jobs formed the backbone of American prosperity, put kids through college, etc. In contrast, he sees clean energy as a dangerous, expensive thing that socialists want to inflict.

Harris occupied a more ambivalent imagined energy world. She doesn’t want to get rid of fossil fuels. But she does want to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity and buildings and vehicles. And clean energy has potential to create jobs, but it’s unclear what role it plays right now.

An anecdote that would have illuminated the conversation is this: the same week the candidates met in Utah, Exxon Mobil’s fall from greatness reached a potent milestone. After years as the most valuable public company, Exxon is now worth less than NextEra. NextEra, readers of this newsletter may know by now, is the largest renewables developer, and also owns the highly effective monopoly utility Florida Power & Light. The Sunrise Movement and Wall Street agree on this one.

Harris could have cited a compelling Bright Ideas post that explains that four of the top five solar states, and four of the top five wind states, voted for Pence and his boss in 2016. If investing in clean energy is socialism, the GOP has a socialism problem. If the free market leads us in the right direction, should we not follow Texas, the freest of energy markets?

There’s also the fact that nearly every large electric utility in the entire country has pledged to eliminate carbon emissions, and aims to do so profitably. Even the major oil companies have promised long term decarbonization and ramped renewables investment. Can you impose a mandate on American businesses, as Pence fears, if the businesses beat you to it? Any serious energy debate needs to start by recognizing industry is ahead of either party in buying into clean energy and profiting from it.

If you have notes on my notes, let me know! Email me or tweet me @JulianSpector.

I’m reading about mushrooms and you really should too

It started with a New Yorker book review with so many mind blowing facts that I ran out and acquired the book the next day.

This book is Entangled Life, a paradigm-shifting account of how fungi run the world, written by the impeccably named scientist Merlin Sheldrake.

Here are just a few facts that you deserve to know about fungi:

• Fungi predated plants and animals in colonizing land on Earth. They provided root systems to feed nutrients to plants for millions of years before plants evolved roots.

• Most plants today still connect to one or more fungi, and this interspecies relationship allows trees to trade carbon for nutrients the fungi procure, like phosphorous and nitrogen. In places where nitrogen is scare, fungi get a better exchange rate. Scientists have observed fungi conducting arbitrage, by shifting nutrients to places where they’re scarce to get more carbon from the tree partners.

• Much of the world’s coal dates from a time before fungi figured out how to decompose wood. All the dead trees piled up for years without decomposing as they would today. This organic matter got compressed over millennia and became coal.

• Fungi can break down some crazy things. Like radiation—fungi popped up in Chernobyl, eating the radiation. Other fungi can dissolve diapers and sprout perfectly edible mushrooms. Another kind dissolves cigarette butts.

• Lichen is a hybrid creature, a combination of fungi and plant. Lichens can survive the vacuum of space. They may have brought life to earth, embedded deep inside a space rock. We know that exposed lichen burn up upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, but with a bit of stony protection…

• For a Halloween spook-fest, check out the fungus Ophiocrodyceps. It has a keen sense of the interior lives of ants. As in, it occupies the interiors of live ants. And controls their minds, so they climb rainforest foliage to an ideal spore dispersal height and sink their teeth into the plant to secure themselves. You won’t believe what happens next.