What’s the biggest obstacle to delivering clean energy?

Welcome back from a long and psychically draining Election Week break. This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about the rise of clean energy, written by me, journalist Julian Spector.

If you’re just joining us, I’d recommend subscribing, because it’s free and then you’ll never have to wonder what’s really going on with clean energy.

And if you’re an avid subscriber, and you have friends who are wondering how to sound smart about clean energy once President Elect Joe Biden takes office, sign them up!

And a couple programming notes: This week, the company I work for, Greentech Media, is hosting a virtual Energy Storage Summit. We’ve got interviews with the leading movers and shakers in this industry, which is crucial to delivering a cleaner electricity system. I’ll be hosting a bunch of panels and discussions from my home studio with my new LED ring light to illuminate my face.

Also, Wednesday is the annual Energy Conference at Duke University, my alma mater. They’ve got talks with ace energy journalist Amy Harder of Axios, and Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is putting millions of dollars into crucial climate technologies. Back when I was on campus, everyone just talked about investment banking and consulting. Now there’s an annual career fair with dozens of energy employers coming to pick up talent. Those times, they change.

Election week is over, though Republicans doesn’t seem to think so.

I’m too early to wade into predictions about the pathway for a clean energy overhaul in a divided Washington. But it’s clear that the kind of landmark clean energy stimulus Joe Biden ran on depends on a supportive Senate, and we’ll have to wait for the Georgia runoffs to see how that looks.

I’d caution against assuming that Democratic control of Congress necessarily translates into meaningful climate or energy legislation. Case in point: even before Biden’s win was officially called, centrist Democrats got to work blaming losses in hotly contested House races on progressive people and their “unprofessional and unrealistic” ideas. As Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy observed in The Intercept:

Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission.

If this kerfuffle is any indication, a full-fledged Green New Deal is too hot for Democrats to handle, even if they locked down the Senate. Stay tuned for a couple months of wonky explainers on how to do the most with executive branch regulatory powers.

But in the mean time, I’m going to pick back up with my series of debates on key questions concerning the future of clean energy. This week, I’m looking at what are the biggest obstacles to accelerating clean energy uptake. Figuring out the primary obstacle is the first step to overcoming it.

Instead of a point/counterpoint debate, it’ll be a series of ideas vying for your attention. But as with the earlier debates, I want to hear what resonates with you, dear reader. Which is the biggest obstacle? Which is the most overrated? What am I neglecting entirely?

Fossil fuel money and influence

The only thing standing in the way of meaningful progress on climate change is Big Oil. The oil, gas, and coal industries are so rich from peddling planet warming pollutants, they can buy off politicians with political donations, and buy off the public with advertising and climate denial propaganda.

This is no secret—just look at all the publicly reported ties between the Trump Administration and oil and coal lobbyists. Or check out Ohio’s corruption scandal, where the utility allegedly funded an illicit political network in exchange for bailing out its coal and nuclear plants.

People fundamentally want clean air and a livable future. But they’re thwarted by politicians who are paid to slow-roll action, and by media and culture that took way too long to accurately frame the risks of inaction.

Oh the things that could be negotiated here, if not for all that fossil fuel money sloshing around. (Photo credit: Architect of the Capitol)

Technological barriers

Solving climate change would be great if we could, but we’re not ready yet. Wind and solar are great for part of the day, but we still need fossil fuels to deliver 24/7 power. Technologies to store clean power for days and weeks have yet to commercialize. Nuclear power obviously can deliver round-the-clock carbon free power, but it freaks people out, and at least in the U.S., the industry is incapable of delivering on anything resembling a timeline or a budget.

Electric cars exist, at a price premium. But they need to charge on a clean grid to really help the climate, so see the above points. Long haul trucking is not close to being electrified, and then there’s global shipping and air travel.

Given how long it’ll take to figure out clean alternatives to the energy needed to live a modern life, we’re probably going to need some machines to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, or catch it when we emit it, but that stuff’s super far off too.

None of this is to say we should give up and embrace a hotter planet. It’s just that, it’ll be hard to achieve a wholesale switch to clean energy until we have better tools.

It’s a big, hard problem

We actually have just about all the tools we need to make a serious overhaul toward a clean energy system. It’s just a big undertaking to actually pull it off.

Take the grid. Those clean energy sources some people denigrate are perfectly capable of pushing us to very high levels of clean electricity. Right now we may need gas to keep the system running, but we’re already seeing utilities pick clean replacements for gas. It’s just that the grid is a truly monumental, century old machine that spans the entire continent. You can’t just snap your fingers and get innovations that work in one place to instantly spread everywhere else.

It doesn’t help that the federalist system results in different policies and regulations across 50 states. A clean energy success story in one state can’t necessarily spread to neighboring states without some regulatory trench warfare. Electric car ownership isn’t as attractive if moving to a new home takes you to a place with no charging infrastructure.

The good news is, the tools we have work, and even decades of influence by fossil fuel companies couldn’t stop this momentum. Indeed, several major fossil fuel companies see the trend and are investing in clean stuff, too. The trick is, institutional inertia defies easy fixes. And a clean energy overhaul requires overcoming inertia in the power sector, building sector, transportation sector and the public sector, all at once.

And besides getting elite buy-in at those institutions, you’d have to convince the general populace that they should stop using energy the way they’re used to, and live their lives in a different way. That is possible, especially if the new way is cheaper and better on multiple levels. But that kind of mass conversion takes time and effort.

It’s capitalism’s fault

Tinker around the edges all you want, but clever market based solutions can’t solve the problem at the heart of climate change, because the market created it.

Historically speaking, the rise of fossil fueled society grew directly out of capitalist factory owners in the British Industrial Revolution, who opted to power factories with coal-fired steam power instead of water power. As Andreas Malm notes in his history Fossil Capital, this switch was not obvious, and in fact incurred greater expenses for factory owners compared to the status quo water power. But it gave them more control over their workforce, and that proved so alluring that they dug in on this new technology.

Since then, fossil fuels boomed because they let captains of industry extract more profit than other forms of energy. And they use those profits to ensure they don’t pay a price for the pollution and effects of burning those fuels.

As long as the capitalist ethos reigns, we’ll keep burning fossil fuels. To stop climate change, we must overthrow the supremacy of the market itself.

Republicans are the obstacle

President Trump calls climate change a hoax and boosts fossil fuel donors whenever possible. Mitch McConnell represents coal country and won’t let meaningful clean energy legislation through the Senate. It wasn’t always like this; Republicans used to agree climate change was a problem, but then Obama wanted to do something about it, so that had to become a bad thing.

Sure, some Republicans accept basic science and want to do something about it. It’s just hard to find ones that fit that description and still hold elected office. If we want anything more than “innovation,” then voting out Republicans is the primary obstacle to achieving a clean energy overhaul.

Democrats are the obstacle

Democrats accept climate science, and say they want to do something about it. And hey, they gave us the non-binding Paris Agreement, which Trump then disregarded.

Then, when the progressive wing rallied real grassroots momentum for muscular action to clean up the economy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed this incipient movement in a Politico interview.

“The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is but they’re for it right?”

Now centrist Democrats are afraid that anything that hurts fossil fuel jobs is politically dangerous, even if it makes many more clean energy jobs along the way. As long as these internal divisions persist, major clean energy legislation is unlikely.

Hit me with your best thoughts. I normally would close with a pop culture recommendation from my life, but this past week was all trickling election returns and Great British Baking Show, and I already wrote about Great British Baking Show.

See ya next week!