This is an incredible analysis of how Putin's invasion of the world will re-order the global world, largely for the better. By a leading Chinese policy thinker, in Shanghai, originally written in Chinese. Brief thread, but read the whole thing. uscnpm.org/2022/03/12/hu- 1/
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Ramez Naam
@ramez
Climate and clean energy investor. Author of 5 books. Energy & Environment co-chair . Trying to build a better world.
Ramez Naam’s posts
THREAD: Solar is plunging in cost faster than anyone, including me, predicted. Today I'm publishing an update of my solar cost forecasts from 2015, with more data & improved methods. Tl;dr: Solar is on path to become insanely, world-changingly cheap. rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/sol 1/20
Biden should propose a US energy bill as a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia measure.
Take the energy components of Build Back Better. They reduce US demand for both oil and natural gas, which hurts Putin.
Add support for further LNG exports.
Balance it over 10 years for Manchin. Go.
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He closes by saying that China has 1-2 WEEKS in which to make a choice. And basically says that China should choose the West, and use its influence over Putin to end the war and bring him to heel. It says that China is the only nation that can. I don't disagree. 7/
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The whole thing is incredible, and very clearly argued. Read the whole thing here in the English translation. It's not more than a 10 minute read.
This is an incredibly exciting time to be in climate tech and clean energy. I don't think most of the public have any idea how much is happening. The momentum is remarkable, in technology, in policy, in consumer sentiment, in business decisions. On every continent.
Hey, it's Friday night. How about a twitter thread of unpopular opinions about climate policy generally, and the #GreenNewDeal specifically. Ready? Here we go. 1/
1. A thread on climate hope: There is an extremely important and hope-filled climate paper out in Nature today. It finds that, if all the countries of the world fulfilled their climate commitments, the world would most likely limit climate change to just under 2 degrees C.
Ventilator manufacturers can ramp up production. But they need assurance their products will be bought. Here's a perfect place for the US government to step in: Order the ventilators, front manufacturers the working capital, & distribute them to hospitals.
I also published the math on how much land it would take to power the US entirely with solar. It's here, with references:
People are still saying coronavirus is no big deal.
Italy, with less than 1/5th the US population, just reported 250 deaths in one day. And still rising.
Scale that to the US (5.5x the people), and you're talking about almost 1,400 deaths per day.
A 9/11 every 2.2 days.
Saudi Arabia planning 200GW solar development with Softbank. That's more solar than the entire world had installed until 2014. Insane. bloom.bg/2J1W1yP
Confession: I just don't understand the obsession with induction cooking as a climate priority. The bulk of natural gas use, even in residential homes, is space heating and water heating. Those are the climate priorities.
China has consistently deployed more solar and wind than it has promised, beating its clean energy targets. It may be on path to peak its carbon emissions sooner than its pledge of 2030. Great piece at carbonbrief.org/guest-post-wil
Solar in sunny places is just mind-bogglingly cheap now. The latest world record: 1.35 cents / kwh in Abu Dhabi. That compares to ~5 cent / kwh from the cheapest coal & gas plants around the world.
And solar & storage will keep getting cheaper.
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He writes that Putin's invasion of Ukraine will lead to:
1. Possibly an escalation of the war beyond Ukraine.
2. Certainly Putin's degeat.
3. The United States regaining leadership in the Western world, and the West being more united.
3/
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6. Further isolation of China, as the US, Europe, and also Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia turn against China.
"China will not only be encircled militarily ... but also challenged by Western values and systems." 6/
1. Solar just hit a stunning new record low price in the US. At these prices, solar kills coal and steals substantial share from Natural Gas. A brief thread.
Here's what De Blasio said to his son. Both respectful of police and true. thebea.st/13BjFvL
"Dystopian fiction is what happens when you take what happens to marginalized people and apply it to everyone" -
MIT Media Lab is offering a $250k Disobedience Award for courageous disobedience in the service of society: bit.ly/2mjG2ms
O'Hare, DFW. I suspect this is happening at other airports. We mandates screening for inbound international travelers, but didn't have the resources prepared.
So now these are infection zones. How many new cases of transmission will come from this?
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Passengers waited in line for hours at customs at @DFWAirport. Many concerned about being so close to others during the #COVIDー19 outbreak. The airport saying “CBP officers and the CDC are following federal guidelines to conduct enhanced screening for passengers” @FOX4
THREAD.
These articles about climate impact of Google, FB, Netflix , etc are largely BS. Electricity is the sector that's going clean the fastest. And digital tech is rapidly using less electricity per calculation, download, etc
Don't worry about your usage of the cloud. (1/n) twitter.com/bigthink/statu
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The original Chinese text is on the same page (link at the bottom). Remember, this is written by a senior Chinese policy thinker in Shanghai. It's incredible. /fin
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4. A new "Iron Curtain" falling globally, this time dividing democracies from authoritarian regimes, and extending into Asia.
4/
Electric buses are already responsible for several times more fossil fuel reduction than electric passenger cars. Few know this, but it's true. A remarkably fast-growing market.
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Electric bus projects in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador all announced in the last few months. As we said in our report last year: this segment is approaching the tipping point. twitter.com/BYDCompany/sta…
Biden was right on Ukraine the whole time. While such a broad range of people, from Kissinger to Carlson, to Chomsky and the NYT editorial board, were wrong.
I wish Biden had been faster and more assertive with support from the beginning. Still, he's done extremely well.
For anyone who's impressed by the Google AI engineer claim that their chatbots are sentient: What he's presenting is a highly edited transcript pieced together & re-ordered from parts of 9 different conversations. There's lots of smoke and mirrors here. Don't buy the hype. 1/2
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Replying to @tomgara and @colin_fraser
The PDF says it was 9 conversations, which have been spliced together, sometimes with the order of dialog altered, and with tangents removed
What Bill Gates actually said:
- Taxes should be more progressive.
- Doubling his tax rate sounds reasonable to him.
- Tax capital gains like income.
- Make it harder for the rich & corps to hide/shelter wealth.
- He'd vote for the "more professional" candidate (read: Warren).
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5. Growth in the power of the West, in both military strength and the strength and importance of western institutions. Greater hard power and soft. 5/
India canceled 14GW of new coal plants this month, as solar prices plunge:
Solar, wind, and batteries are about to enter their third, most disruptive phase yet. There's reason to believe their growth will accelerate, not slow. & that we'll phase out fossil fuel electricity at an incredible pace. A threid based on this post: rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the 1/
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Naturally I found one typo and one error in use of words in this thread right after posting it. Grrr, , when will you let me fix these? <ironically raised fist>
Okay. Here's a THREAD about divestment (and why it's driven mostly by economics, not good citizenship), theories of change in climate / energy, and the power of tapping into self-interested economic motivations among corporates, banks, and investers. Ready? Here we go.
We're entering the third, most disruptive, phase of clean energy. We've gone from:
1) Subsidy-dependent; to
2) Competitive for new power; to
3) Cheaper to build new solar & wind than to keep operating *existing* fossil fuel power plants.
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Solar or wind are cheaper to build than the money needed to keep running most of the world's coal plants, including in China, India and Germany, according to latest @BloombergNEF estimates
I was wrong about solar. It's getting cheaper waaaay faster than I expected. rameznaam.com/2016/09/21/new
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Hu Wei is the vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor’s Office of the State Council, the chairman of Shanghai Public Policy Research Association, the chairman of the Academic Committee of the Chahar Institute, a professor, and a doctoral supervisor. 2/
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Police are not soldiers. Their job is not to kill some 'enemy'.
They're civil servants. Their job is to preserve our safety. And the peace.
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The most effective climate policy of all time, for my mind, is Germany's early subsidy for solar and wind. These policies had impact not because of the emissions avoided in Germany (relatively small), but because they *made solar and wind cheaper* for the world. 5/
This is the paradox. Do we want houses to be a form of investment? Or do we want housing to become ever more affordable? We can't have it both ways, America. I vote for the latter.
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American policy is mostly oriented around making housing more expensive as homeownership is our country’s primary wealth building tool in the absence of a more broadly diversified social safety net. twitter.com/Austen/status/…
MIT researchers create a material that's as light as plastics, but twice the strength of steel. 2D polymer sheets. Very cool.
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Postscript:
1. The original article by Hu Wei has been censored inside of China.
2. Another Chinese policy thinker has published a rebuttal. (mp.weixin.qq.com/s/WCcXCEGZdsqL)
Put together, these suggest that Xi and China are unlikely to listen to this advice, and will back Putin. PS1/
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We do NOT have momentum in reducing carbon emissions of agriculture or manufacturing.
In agriculture, livestock methane emissions + deforestation to graze livestock are biggest problems. And meat consumption is doubling in next 40 yrs. This should scare you more than coal. 13/
The US was once a magnet, drawing in many of the most talented people around the world. Now we've reversed that, pushing them away. It's such a self-inflicted wound. Such an unforced error.
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The US Administration is considering an Executive Order to stop researchers and students with H-1B, J-1, and L-1 visas.
That will obviously reduce innovation in America by smart immigrants. What's more, it will also reduce innovation by *American* researchers.
Terrible policy. twitter.com/PMoserEcon/sta…
We should keep every nuclear plant on earth operating for as long as safely possible. Even if you're hugely bullish on renewables (as I am) and skeptical on economics of new nuclear (as I am), the existing fleet is a huge proportion of our carbon-free power.
Keep it running.
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Turkey Point in Florida becomes the first US nuclear power plants to have its operating license extended from 60 to 80 years. Odds are, a number of others will follow: utilitydive.com/news/fpls-turk
Climate change forecasts do not predict societal collapse or the extinction of humanity.
People saying so are not adhering to climate science. And are not helping us get climate or clean energy progress.
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Replying to @MichaelEMann @NafeezAhmed and @VICE
"It is now too late to stop a future collapse of our societies because of climate change.” = Perfect example of unhelpful doomist messaging premised on poor understanding of climate science.
#NewClimateWar
Those who hold a legal monopoly on violence should be held to the highest standards for its use, not the lowest.
#Accountability
Okay, energy twitter. Solar costs are coming down faster than just about anyone, including me, forecast. So I'm committing to publishing an update of my solar cost forecast this coming week. Spoiler: It shows a rather stunning pace of solar decline. Many won't believe it. 1/4
Why do carbon taxes fall short? Here's a quick tweet thread on their limitations. For context, I am a carbon tax advocate, was on the board of WA's 2016 revenue-neutral carbon tax initiative, etc.. (for & others) 1/
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Replying to @ramez
Can you give us a quick thread on why carbon+dividend falls short in those areas? Why does the mantra “price in the carbon, and you’ll get reduced carbon” not work there?
Fracking, overall, has been an incredible money loser for the companies doing it. Meanwhile, the companies deploying solar and wind have made steady, predictable returns.
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Replying to @NatBullard
$CHK files for bankruptcy. Chart for context. US shale patch since 2010, -$342 billion free cash flow
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Solar & wind are now cheaper in many parts of the world than new coal or gas. That happened *because Germany subsidized them when they were young and expensive*. And because China did a bit later. Like cheap solar in California & Nevada? Thank German & Chinese policy makers. 8/
Since 2013, battery prices dropped 3x as fast as optimists expected.
20x faster than EIA forecast.
(For )
Hundreds of videos of police brutality, from 's Twitter thread, collected on one page here: policeabuses.info
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Solar costs are now decades ahead of what most forecasts predicted. Solar prices are now:
- 7-10 years ahead of my 2015 forecast.
- 10-15 years ahead of my 2011 forecast.
- 30-40 years ahead of IEA's 2014 forecast.
- 50-100 years? ahead of IEA's 2010 forecast. 4/20
Most American thing. I love this country.
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LA Times reporter talks to taco truck operators. Finds most L.A. thing ever. latimes.com/local/californ
This is massive. I've been a skeptic of vertical farming, as it's mostly used for niche produce. But if this is true & costs can be reduced, the potential to feed more people on a dramatically less land is immense.
That, in turn, world let us return more land to nature.
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"Here we show that wheat grown on a single hectare of land in a 10-layer indoor vertical facility could produce … 220 to 600 times the current world average annual wheat yield of 3.2 t/ha.”
new article in PNAS: pnas.org/content/early/ (@OurWorldInData is the first reference)
The #1 thing most climate activists & fossil fuel folks don't understand is the learning rate of clean energy. Every watt of solar, wind, batteries, & EVs deployed lowers future costs. These technologies will disrupt both fossil fuels & carbon emissions. bit.ly/33e3io2
If you see police action, take out your phone and start filming. Whether you're involved or not. Always. That is the new rule.
"During the last decade Houston has moved > 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of homeless in the Houston region has been cut 63% since 2011"
news.yahoo.com/houston-moved-
I agree with every word of what says here about Putin. What will bring him down is our support for a complete Ukrainian victory.
Social change has far outpaced sci-fi, while technological change has (mostly) lagged behind it.
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So-called futurist: Soon we'll all be having sex with robots!
Random person: I have nonbinary gender.
So-called futurist: That's ridiculous.
90% of coronavirus carriers may not show any symptoms at all. This data from Italy is consistent with a recent study in Science using data from China.
Individuals who think they're perfectly healthy can still spread coronavirus. Shut it all down.
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According to Crisanti, the director of the virology lab of U Padua, as little as 10% of #COVID2019 carriers show any symptoms at all. He sampled repeatedly the entire 3k+ population of Vo ', one of the initial clusters.
Astounding price. 5 US cents / kwh, for a capacity factor likely > 50%. This is just over half the price that the IEA thought offshore wind reach by *2050* just a couple years ago.
Offshore wind is on path to be both cheaper and higher capacity factor than onshore.
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France Gets 600 MW offshore wind farm for 44 Euros/MWh. 12 & 13 MW Turbines Used. France will build 1 GW of offshore wind every year through 2028. offshorewind.biz/2019/06/20/dun
The amount of battery innovation going on right now - sodium-ion for low cost, iron based for cheap grid storage, underground pumped hydro, zinc-based, silicon anodes, and yes, lithium-sulfur and lithium-air for ultra high energy densities - is just mind boggling. Exciting times!
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Solid state lithium air battery with 4x the energy density. No nickel, no cobalt, tested up to 1000x cycles. This seems like it could be huge?
anl.gov/article/new-de
Since 9/11, right-wing terrorists in the US have killed twice as many people as jihadists. nyti.ms/21kBeds
Stunning.
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An impact crater, roughly 1.5 km wide, on the surface of Mars, captured by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 257 km above the planets surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL/UArizona
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The #GreenNewDeal does talk (vaguely) about decarbonizing agriculture & industry. That's better than nothing. Though it's one and only proposed solution - local ag- is a non-solution. Eating local is, usually, worse for the planet. Eat food from where it grows best. 15/
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Our biggest climate problems - the sectors that are both large and that lack obvious solutions, are: a) Agriculture and land use changes (AFOLU in the graphic) and b) Manufacturing / Industry. Together, these are 45% of global emissions. And solutions are scarce. 11/
1. Trump today imposed 30% tariffs on silicon solar panels imported into the US. This is dumb and avaricious, and will hurt the solar industry in the US. But, at most, it's a temporary speed-bump. Here's why.
My feed is full of climate doom porn today.
What I see is a world on path to roughly 2.5C in 2100, with serious problems, and yet a likelihood that humanity of that time will be better off than today, and thriving, even with the warming.
>2C doesn't mean "end of the world".
This is a remarkable video. It changed my view on how China has tackled the virus, and what might be required in the US and elsewhere.
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In Indiana, building new solar and wind is now cheaper than keeping *existing* coal power plants running.
1. We've entered the third phase of clean energy, where prices are so disruptively low that we get a new acceleration of deployment, particularly for solar and storage. The primary bottlenecks now are permitting, transmission (also permitting) & monopoly utility business models.
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The solar revolution is real. The world is forecast to install an incredible 251 gigawatts of solar this year, up 38% from 2021. Next year Bloomberg forecasts the world will install 320 gigawatts.
Cc: @ramez @Noahpinion @paulg @JesseJenkins
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl
This is an astonishingly bad take.
1) Gates said he supports much higher taxes. Including a wealth tax.
2) His foundation's work on things like eradicating malaria depend on US government programs. He's not going to piss off the US President, even Trump, and endanger that. twitter.com/AnandWrites/st
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Coal is a dead man walking. The peak of thermal coal demand, worldwide, was 2013. We've been on an undulating plateau. The real global decline is about to start. It's going to be fast and brutal for coal investors, and good for people and the planet. twitter.com/benserrurier/s
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This is extremely unhelpful framing of climate change, which plays into the hands of climate deniers and delayers. We're not 6-8 years away from "permanent biblical catastrophe". Saying that we are is both incorrect and gives ammo to those who think climate change is overblown. t.co/QdeBme56lA
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I'm increasingly becoming optimistic about nuclear fusion. It won't be commercially viable until the 2030s or 2040s. But it's increasingly looking feasible and even economically so. We've hit multiple exciting fusion milestones in the last 12 months.
I have to give Romney this one. I agreed with Obama at the time, and still think engagement was worth a try. And history shows that Romney (and McCain) were right about Putin.
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Replying to @atrupar
"They support the world's worst actors, whether Assad in Syria, Maduro in Venezuela, Kim Jong-un in North Korea. This is what they do. They basically poke us in the eye everywhere they can." -- Romney on Russia
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So the key here is that, if Germany had the power to make a new clean tech cheaper for the whole world, than the US (much larger) certainly does. And that is our most powerful lever in having an impact on global emissions and global climate change. 9/
People are extremely averse to the idea of cooling the planet by reflecting a tiny bit of sunlight through e.g., putting some sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere. But we are rapidly reducing sulfur aerosols right now, likely causing a surge of warming.
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For decades this area has been kept relatively cool by sulfur emissions from ships.
But this changed in 2020.
Is there anything more fascist than punishing people who don't show allegiance to a national flag or song?
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If the US is serious about climate policy, it ought to focus on these two sectors - agriculture and industry - that are soon to be the two largest emissions sources, and lack solutions. We should press to invent solutions, drive them down in price, and spread them globally. 16/
The Supreme Court says you have the right to record police: politi.co/1mKQ6ep
The DOJ says the same: politi.co/1mKQ46o
"I was just following orders" is no moral defense. Every ICE agent who separates a child from their parent is committing a cruel and heinous crime - a moral one if not a legal one. A just society would hold them accountable.
Merry Christmas.
If you're feeling down about the state of the world, I suggest this list by of 99 ways the world got better this year. It spans the environment, human rights, equality, reducing poverty, the decline of violence, & more.
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Postscript 3: This points out that Hu Wei's article was published by the US Carter Center & that there's no chance his advice will be taken by China. I largely agree with Hu Wei's analysis. I also agree that Xi is ignoring it. China is choosing Putin. zububrothers.com/2022/03/13/don PS3/
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Technologies improve via Wright's Law, which shows that every doubling of scale produces a typically constant reduction in cost. We can see Wright's Law (aka "the Learning Curve" in technology since the Ford Model T. 6/
2018 is on path to be a record year for coal in the US. A record year for coal plants shutting down, that is. ieefa.org/ieefa-report-u
1. A short thread on a fundamental trend in economics of physical stuff that's highly relevant to the conversation about nuclear & renewables:
A. Manufacturing things gets cheaper with scale.
B. Constructing things in the field gets more expensive with time.
The most important thing has done is started a global arms race in building electric vehicles. I don't know who will win, but I know Tesla started this, and we'll all benefit.
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Great piece on the race to build an electric pickup truck—and some of the challenges Tesla/Rivian/etc may face trying to break into this market: marker.medium.com/teslas-cybertr
Solar is already cheaper than most climate models think it will be by 2050. Great thread.
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This useful graph by @hausfath managed to get me angry in early morning. It shows that major models, used by policy makers to assess climate solutions, still wildly overestimate the cost of solar PV systems. The cost they project for *2050* is way higher than the present cost!
Texas's solar market is booming, despite a lack of explicit solar policies. What Texas does have is:
1. Lots of sun.
2. Lots of land.
3. A competitive non-monopoly utility model.
4. Easy permitting for both energy and transmission.
Every state and country can learn from 3 & 4.
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I doubt that many people that last year Texas was already the second-biggest solar market (defined as 'balancing authority') in the US in terms of power generated.
TX utility-scale solar generation CAGR 2012-21: 71%
TX solar % of total load in 2021: 3%
emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-
1. There's an incredibly bleak - & misleading - climate doomsday article in today. I have several problems with it. Short tweetstorm
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The common wisdom on how climate policies have impact is wrong. Politicians think that a country's climate policy is about reducing that same country's emissions. Nope. The most effective climate policies reduce *global* emissions, or at least provide tools to do so. 3/
1. Electric vehicles are now destroying 1.5 million barrels per day of oil demand. That's still not much (about 1.5% of global oil demand). By 2030, this could be 6-10x higher, ending the era of oil demand growth - bringing us to peak oil demand.
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Yes the oil market is tight. Now imagine it if demand were structurally higher by 1.5 million barrels per day. about.bnef.com/blog/zero-emis
