As I've been asking on X, how can you have high confidence for a ghg-forcing signal in extreme rainfall events if your (and IPCC) primary timeline is "since 1950" given many sobering paleo studies in various places - Caribbean for hurricanes (Donnelly et al 2007), US Northeast (extreme scouring floods, 2002 Noren et al etc) and California (2024 for atmospheric rivers) showing past bouts of extrarodinary storminess in various climate conditions on the long timescales necessary to understand patterns in rare events? Here's a query I sent to the folks at World Weather Attribution: As you likely know I’ve been reporting on the seriousness of human-driven climate change since 1988. At the same time, my extensive reporting on paleo climate research has been humbling in revealing past patterns in extreme events (particularly storms and extreme rainfall but also drought).
One question I’ve had about attribution studies on extreme precipitation events (and tropical systems) is this: Doesn’t the robustness of the CO2 attribution hinge on whether climate models fully capture and reproduce variability in extreme events over long time scales?
If all scientists had was the observational record, you would have a point. But the physics of the problem is really the linchpin. We know there's more water converging into the storm. In order for rainfall to not be increased by climate change, you have to posit that the storm dynamics are changing in such a way as to cancel that increase in water vapor convergence out. No evidence or argument exists that supports that.
Importantly, the argument for a human component to the rainfall intensity (or extreme tempeatures) is NOT based on the fact that previous events have not exceeded this one. That's simply not part of the argument, never has been, never will be. A one-in-10,000 year event a few thousand years ago could indeed have exceeded this one. It's a logical mistake to think that today's event in Florida must therefore be unimpacted by humans.
And, no, the robustness of this conclusion is not entirely based on climate models reproducing natural variability. Again, this is ignoring the role of simple physical arguments. I strongly recommend you read the IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 11, section 7 to see how they make the argument.
The basic physical mechanisms are key of course. Warmer air, more available water for rain. And I don’t disagree with your conclusion about Florida’s dumps and CO2-driven warming. And the IPCC section on extreme precipitation is great.
As for JAC's pithy remark, I don't perseverate on models. But I do have questions about their utility in gauging the future of small-scale events that are also major rainmakers (the late-season tropical system that caused Vermont’s 1927 flood of record, e.g. https://www.weather.gov/media/btv/events/1927Flood.pdf .) or California’s atmospheric rivers. These are the events that can make or unmake communities.
That’s why I pay attention to paleotempestology researchers, who continue to reveal dynamics with startling levels of variability in extremes. Donnelly's work in the Caribbean for instance.
(For what it's worth, I haven’t seen Pielke or Lomborg focus on this work.)
I sense a lack of crosstalk between that field and modeling?
A fresh example is this April 2024 paper from USGS: Atmospheric river activity during the late Holocene exceeds modern range of variability in California
"If the pattern of millennial-scale variability that we documented through the Holocene persists into the future, New England storminess would continue to increase for the next 900 yr. Because climate synopses compiled from instrumental records cannot distinguish underlying natural increases in storminess from anthropogenic effects, detected increases in contemporary storminess may not be a reliable indicator of human-induced climate change."
That was 22 years ago, but Bierman and Steig haven't pointed me to any more recent work undercutting their cautionary conclusion. Have you?
Would love to host an observation/modeling crosstalk webcast on this.
And in the end of course, the key need is to curb heat-trapping emissions to limit future risk and cut vulnerability and exposure to flooding now, particularly for communities in today's climate hazard hot zones. Both have to be priorities, as I wrote in addressing your adaptation critique: https://revkin.substack.com/p/dont-fall-into-the-binary-emissions?utm_source=publication-search
In drier regions and conditions warmer air means it takes higher water vapor content to reach saturation in order to rain; those will occur less often and it will tend to rain less. As well as have higher evaporation potential, ie more drying. Water vapor content only rises where there is a source of water to make vapor.
Thanks, Ken. It's probably more accurate to say that advecting humid air masses can deliver more water in rainstorms than they previously would. That would have an impact on the "Pineapple Express", a recurring atmospheric river that delivers copious, intense rain to America's west coast. Climatically dry conditions in S. California notwithstanding, when it rains, it pours!
It is those occasional rains in the dry times - often the only rains in the dry times - that get missed. Like California in a lot of Australia (where I am) sees swings from dry to wet and back again. The extremes of that do appear to be getting more extreme. With CO2 at record levels and (still) record emissions taking it higher we can expect that, notwithstanding the potential for more of the unexpected.
Hi Andrew, I'd be very grateful if you cleared up this confusion with the WWA at Imperial saying about British storms that;
'Looking at average SSI on storm days, while some studies using other methods suggest an increase in storminess in a future climate, our analysis has shown a decreasing trend. Our results show that average SSI indices as observed this year became about a factor of 2 less likely. The synthesis of the models also shows a negative trend and, when combined with observations, the results indicate that a stormy season as observed this year is nowadays a factor of about 1.4 less likely due to human induced climate change. ' https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/autumn-and-winter-storms-over-uk-and-ireland-are-becoming-wetter-due-to-climate-change/
The say when it rains it's wetter but another stormy season like that of 23/24 is less likely to occur again due to climate change?
Thank you Andrew. It's being used to claim that climate scientists are lying, and ignoring their own research, when they say that human climate change is going to make Britain wetter.
How would climate change produce less storms in an area? Are there other areas, such as Florida, where storms, not just rainfall, are more likely?
Yes, you could be getting fewer storms in a region but, when the storms occur, they are windier/rainier.
I have not read the report in detail, but my guess is that this is cause by the jetstream moving and taking the storms with it. Thus, the storms would still be occurring, but somewhere else.
The authors may well have been quoted out of context when speaking to the media, but I wish that they took more care to not appear to be hiding information from their paper. It gives grist to the mill of the skeptics.
Those living in South Florida will go about their business as normal until some epic water calamity occurs. And then it will finally dawn on them what’s coming. They’ll all try to sell their property at once, and the real estate market will collapse.
And then they’ll all move to North Florida, where they’ll drive around town recklessly, blaring their horns at anyone who won’t exceed the speed limit by a wide margin.
About the question in this article ... I would say.. NO!
Why If climate change is an emergency do we see on almost all metrics no significant long-range change in extreme weather, sea level, sea ice, and other adverse condition indicator? (Note” that weather is what happens daily and climate is what happens over a 30-year moving average.) These facts have been well documented using reliable institutional sources. More at Climate Quiz - CO2 Coalition https://co2coalition.org/climate-quiz/
Thank you for this post. I'd also note that in addition to the 7% increase/degree in the capability of the air to carry water vapor which is key for the heaviest precipitation events, there is the related factor of increased evaporation from the oceans which drives the increase in total precipitation.
Thanks for the information. The problem is that those who advocate for climate change policy either misunderstand the near catastrophic economic impacts of the policies for which they advocate, are unwilling to engage in good faith cost benefit analysis or are unwilling to concede that more government in one area necessarily means less government in another.
1) There is no 'tax the rich' policy. The confiscation of all billionaire wealth in America would only run the American federal government for six months.
2) As tax as percentage of GDP increases, general economic prosperity and economic growth slows. The only exceptions are the hyper-efficient Nordic Model states who happen to be both more free market than America (with he exception of green social engineering and stronger worker protections), and willing to persuade their poorer and middle class voters to part with more of their money in taxes.
3) People don't believe the claims about wind and solar- nor should they! It's not just the unit cost of Solar PV which people need to look at, or the costs of wind turbines. There are sorts of externalities which come into play and the LCOE calculations are pure economic fairytales. Recent history shows that getting to around 40% of energy from all renewable sources, including nuclear costs bill payers around x1.7 per energy unit, compared to a less green intensive approach. And high energy costs equals economic disaster. Just ask Germany, which is rapidly losing its middle class as it loses its manufacturing base. The only countries which have managed energy transition at all well are France and Sweden, both of which rely considerable on nuclear.
4) Climate policy currently hurts the poor more than climate change, although this may change over time. There used to be reasonable Left-leaning American thinktanks which conceded that Africa needs to grow its share of the global carbon energy budget (not counting transport) in order to stand any chance of economic development, peaking at around 2050, but today at least it seems as though the source has disappears. None of the ten African countries which have the most renewable energy sources are on the list of the four most successful African economies, in terms of GDP per capita.
5) There are ways to change the game. Stop pretending Fear is a form of persuasion. In reality it convinces the wealthy and the comfortable that the most economically vulnerable in their own societies need to make sacrifices. There are better ways to persuade. Inform parents that even though their kid might find riding on a bus unpleasant, the lack thereof is terrible for their long-term mental health. Ride-sharing only with friends is a suboptimal solution- with the exception of chronic and sustained bullying kids need to come into contact with other kids who make them socially anxious.
Similarly, how many American workers are in receipt of their three days additional annual leave for taking socially responsible ways into work (including ride shares)? Remote work is demonstrably better for the climate, but call centres and the like aren't being decentralised because of the commercial real estate sectors. The manufacturing economy is 23% of all climate change (including materials for construction and infrastructure), yet why can't I search on Amazon for manufactured goods by years of guarantee?
6) A reasonable approach might be linking climate change expenditure to reductions in the bureaucracy for mandatory spending, which is massive in most Western countries. There now exists the technology to run all welfare payments through a single phone-based account linked to a PAYE-based negative income tax system, taking individual circumstances into account, but the Left has its own form of solution aversion when it comes to massively reducing the federal and state public sector workforces, which are by any economic measure a waste, both in terms of expending scarce resources for the public purse, and in terms of the lost opportunity costs of labour which is effectively wasted. 90% of workers would almost never have to speak to the IRS again.
If Sweden during the pandemic has taught us anything it is that soft persuasion techniques work better than government force and coercion, by virtually every metric imaginable.
Wow. That's some serious decarbonization alarmism. Lots of unsupported assertions. Right from the outset, "...those who advocate for climate change policy" is a transparent straw man for Geary Johansen's cultural enemies, namely anyone who recognizes the "free" market's propensity for socializing every transaction cost it can get away with. His hobby horse appears to be taxes, but he doesn't much like any collective interventions in the market.
Moving on, "People don't believe the claims about wind and solar- nor should they!" What people besides Geary? What claims? Reputable, non-partisan sources report a "‘Turning point in energy history’ as solar, wind start pushing fossil fuels off the grid" (yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/05/turning-point-in-energy-history-as-solar-wind-start-pushing-fossil-fuels-off-the-grid). I, for one, have no problem believing it. Why does Geary believe otherwise? What are their preferred sources of information?
And so forth. IMHO, Geary Johansen's comment is nothing but right-wing culture war rhetoric. I'll feed the troll no further.
You make some good arguments, although I would appreciate not resorting to ad hominem. Here's the thing- when you look at electricity prices by country in Europe or electricity prices by state in the US then we quickly see that the LCOE is a fiction.
That's fine, provided you're willing to argue from the basis that the investment was sound as a developmental cost, a series of incremental technological innovations aimed at making wind and/or solar feasible for the emerging economic powers like China and India, who will likely massively outstrip America and Europe by the end of the century. Of all forms of green investment, technological innovation, the so-called green premium, has proven to be far the wisest form of investment the West can possibly make- so much so, that it convinced the Chinese to double their offshore wind in 2022 alone, a single year.
But that's not the argument that most ideologues make. It's that solar and wind are feasible at scale. The problem is those who have gone furthest in decarbonising (without substantial nuclear), Germany, the UK and California have hit a wall. In the UK, the Tory government recently bowed to pressure to increase offshore wind unit energy prices by 50%. Additionally this will require quite substantial investments in energy infrastructure.
In case you don't want to look at the links, the BBC source details how in order to increase offshore wind further, prices from this source will need to rise by 50%. and the Sky source details how it was necessary in 2022 to spend $215 million switching portions of the offshore grid off at source.
Most climate economists and climate policy advocates with a background in engineering now concede that nuclear will need to play a substantial role as baseload energy in the energy mix for most countries. 40% is one estimate, low IMO, but this of course doesn't include the necessity of running cars using EV or water-sourced hydrogen, which is of course an endothermic process, which requires significant energy input to release the hydrogen from the H20.
Both Project Drawdown and the Copenhagen Consensus agree that wind is good investment. But the threshold tops out at around 30%, beyond which the price per unit rapidly begins to accelerate. In the West degrowth is not an option- at least not for current demographics and political leanings. The Greens were slaughtered in the recent EU elections and attempting to restrict cars from cities in known right-wing hotbeds like Cambridge, one of the original university towns, leads to the Tories being elected to the local council for the first time in 22 years.
My whole point was formulated along the lines of the fact that we need to come up with better arguments and policies, ones which aren't predicated on ideological preferences or defaulting to a 'hide the costs' approach. And be willing to accept some energy solutions many people are uncomfortable with. It's not Germany, the UK and California which are the energy successes- it's France and Sweden, which is why, in addition to wind and solar China and India are both investing massively in nuclear.
I never said that wind and/or solar shouldn't play a role. At modest levels both can contribute- especially as new housing comes online and tile integrated solar for roofing becomes an increasing part of the landscape. But don't present an over-optimistic picture of wind and solar. Research also shows that the Right is also incredibly susceptible to arguments which favour nuclear. Plus, when both the EU and the UN suddenly reclassify nuclear and natural gas (as a transition tool) as green sources of energy, it's time to realise that the policy makers have looked at the raw data and realised that politically and from an energy engineering perspective, beyond certain thresholds solar and wind simply aren't feasible.
Sorry of if I didn't explain myself fully. I actually support energy transition. I just think it has to be done in a viable, politically and economically sustainable manner. Of the 1 in 10 of the world's climate scientists who are based in the developing world almost all are in favour of a green growth agenda through technological innovation and almost none are in favour of degrowth.
People in the West aren't going to give up their cars, but they can be persuaded to use them a lot, lot less. Personally, I only drive mine less than 1,000 miles a year. I used to drive 12,00 miles a car, and the car I drive now has significantly better road mileage. Wherever possible, I try to use public transport, especially trains. If successive UK governments since the early nineties had opted for a persuasion-based strategy aimed at people using their cars less, ride sharing, avoiding the school run, etc- instead of a prohibitive approach, aimed at stopping people from driving to work entirely- then it's highly likely we could have cut total carbon emissions from non-commercial transport in the UK by 50% by now. Instead, the lack of progress should be a source of shame for the UK- despite a switch to smaller more efficient cars our transport carbon costs haven't shifted downwards at all. Force and coercion don't work- but better persuasion can. In same period, the Swedes 'socially responsible' 'approach reduced their emissions from transport by 24%!, and it's one of the few issues where they haven't deployed the persuasion approach as well as they have on other issues- for the simple reason that emotive issues tend to attract a natural desire to curtail the behaviour of others to affect radical change.
And SMRs are going to be a game changer. They will be much less expensive than big nuclear. There is almost no environmental risk- they literally cannot explode or meltdown. Why do so many arguments from some, but not all, on the Left involve ordinary people making sacrifices- especially when recent science on issues like beef, for example, show that grass-fed cattle are a completely different animal to feedlot cattle, the latter of which are a substantial contributor to climate change, when the former are not (increased carbon soil sequestration, nitrogen fixing in soil from manure, much lower nitrogen generally, because of low crude proteins in diet). Almost all of the world's ocean dead zones are found in places where the American feedlot approach is practiced, including most of Chile.
The global market for grass-fed beef was $12.4 billion in 2023, by 2033 that's projected to grow to $20.4 billion. In the UK, Rewilding Britain sees cattle grazing as an integral part of their project to restore Britain's countryside. Sure, current global pastureland can only support around 27% of global demand, but there are some pretty proven marketing strategies which show that if you give consumers a choice between grass-fed, feedlot and other alternatives they will go to the supermarket with the intention of buying grass-fed, take one look at the price and buy chicken or salmon instead. The really insane thing is pushing grass-fed actually reduces consumption through pricing mechanisms and presents people with the belief that they've freely made their own choices.
My point would be this- stop trying to use fear to make people give things up. It won't work. Instead find smarter ways to persuade them, recognise the limits of the technology currently being deployed and don't discard any potential climate solution. And above all, don't attach the cause of climate change to a particular political choice- because America in particular has a habit of politicising everything. It's counter productive. And before you accuse the Republicans of being the only ones opposed to climate solutions, it's worth noting that fracking reduced America's carbon emissions by a greater amount than any other source.
I'll make one last good faith effort. If you had a coherent, fact-based argument to make, calling your comment nothing but right-wing rhetoric would be the argumentum ad hominem. Going through your lengthy reply above, there may be a pro-nuclear argument in there somewhere. All too often, nuclear-power advocates are really just greenie-bashing, even though not every greenie is anti-nuke. But you started right out with the rhetoric of a right-wing ideologue. You claimed that anyone who advocates for climate change policy misunderstands the "catastrophic" impacts of unspecified policies. That's sheer anti-collectivist alarmism. Then you say, about published expert analyses, "There are all sorts of externalities which come into play and the LCOE calculations are pure economic fairytales." That's transparent rhetoric, not rational argument. As if the rest of us aren't aware of externalities, with the rapidly accumulating global costs, in money and grief, of anthropogenic climate change the biggest in history. And "policy makers have looked at the raw data and realised that politically and from an energy engineering perspective, beyond certain thresholds solar and wind simply aren't feasible" evinces a somewhat startling faith in policy makers, never mind the unsupported judgement about feasibility!
Next, there's "Stop pretending Fear is a form of persuasion." Is there a policy recommendation there? If "Fear" of having to pay an open-ended bill for the socialized costs of the fossil carbon market doesn't persuade you to support some serious decarbonization policy or another, what will? Or do you have a workable plan to promote the cost-efficient construction of more nukes?
One more example: "Of the 1 in 10 of the world's climate scientists who are based in the developing world almost all are in favour of a green growth agenda through technological innovation and almost none are in favour of degrowth." Leaving aside how you came to that conclusion, did you think anyone here is seriously arguing for degrowth? I, for one, don't publicly advocate for anything but decarbonization! Whether you believe it or not, the costs already paid for climate change to date, and the consensus projection of ever higher cost as long as the market-driven transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere continues by the gigatonnes annually, are not merely a liberal preoccupation.
I could go on and on, but it's already tedious. Look, you're entitled to your opinion. You're even entitled to present it at length on this blog - Hell, I can't stop you. But you should recognize that your primary purpose in posting here isn't to help the global economy decarbonize as quickly as possible, it's to advocate your anti-collectivist political ideology. Again, you're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to point out that you're fooling yourself if you think you're not one of those ideologues you called out.
For the record, I'd never "accuse the Republicans of being the only ones opposed to climate solutions." Nonetheless, it's abundantly documented (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html) that the GOP has been the principal obstacle to collective decarbonization of the US economy, at least since early in this century. Consequently, any US voter who prioritizes capping the cumulative cost of anthropogenic global warming sooner rather than later has no choice but to vote Democratic in every election, until some Republican candidate defies their party and publicly supports specific decarbonization legislation, whether carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable energy development and consumer adoption, or regulatory command and control. Under the political system America's founders left us with, a vote this November for any POTUS candidate but Biden, or no vote at all, in a state that could go either way, is numerically equivalent to a vote for a return to official climate-science denial by the federal government. That's not ideology, it's plain fact.
On the developing world 1 in 10 figure I was quoting a source quoting a source, but I did manage to find the direct source. It's from a survey of 800 climate researchers for The Conversation.
I was slightly mistaken- it was 90%+ green growth or a growth for both non-OECD and BRICS. The article also mentions that the higher the average income of a country, the greater the preference for degrowth over green growth.
On the subject of fossil fuel subsidy I'm against it. However, it's worth noting that until quite recently (2019 was the last year I checked) fossil fuel subsidy in America was roughly the same as green subsidy. Subsidy is one of the major reasons why LCOE calculations are flawed. It's also worth noting that there is a world of difference between subsidy as taxpayer funding as opposed to subsidy as a 'discount' on future tax revenue, which is only a partial discount. There are all sorts of wacky accounting ideas when it comes to public finances. For example, forgiving student loans would be considered a tax expenditure for federal budgetary purposes.
'"catastrophic" impacts'- how about deliberately keeping Africa poor, because we won't allow them to significantly develop their fossil fuels? They only need about 7% of the world's carbon budget for energy in order to develop economically, and then only temporarily. One of the more reasonable Left-leaning think tanks in America actually conceded the point showing that their carbon consumption would peak by 2050 and fairly rapidly recede, but Google doesn't seem to want to give me the source- it was quite easy to find until quite recently.
Anyway, for what it's worth here is Rose M. Mutiso, an African women giving a TED Talk on the subject.
And of the four most successful African countries today, none are in the top 10 for green energy generation.
Here's the thing. In 2022, the World Food Programme issued its annual report. Predictably, 80% of the world's food insecurity was because of war. It's been that way for a couple of decades. The remainder is evenly split between economic shock and climate/weather disruption. And of the 10% which was economic shock, a substantial portion relates to the West operating ESG finance. I know full well that the Sri Lankan collapse wasn't solely due to ESG pressures, just as I know that Eskom the South African major energy supplier had endemic corruption problems, but the decision to stop using synthetic fertilisers was just as closely tied to the need to please Western ESG green finance directives, as the decision not to develop natural gas sources in South Africa, which is exactly what the South Africans are doing now, as their citizens are forced to sit in darkness for long periods whilst energy rationing takes place.
And for the record I know you probably know that synthetic fertilisers usage hasn't increased in the West since 1961. You don't strike me as somebody who has just watched a few completely biased Netflix documentaries and come to the conclusion that Green Revolution farming, which saved over a billion lives through the work of Norman Borlaug was wrong. In North America synthetic fertiliser hasn't really grown at all, despite quite substantial increases in yields. In Europe synthetic fertiliser usage has actually decreased substantially since '61.
But do you know where fertiliser usage has increased massively? In the least economically developed countries in the world. So the area where I most tend to loose it is with the activists who push sustainable farming. Don't get me wrong. America made a huge mistake when they centralised their animal farming out from crop farming. In all probability its the biggest contributor to ocean dead zones because the crude proteins in the food for feedlot cattle are far higher, which is a recipe for nitrogen run-off. By contrast, crop run off is a relatively easy fic with the deployment of cover crops. Any YouTube video on the subject will show easily perceptible miraculous results. But activists who confuse the Green Revolution with synthetic fertiliser, two things which happened about a century apart, really do my head in. When they talk about moving to 'sustainable' methods of farming they don't even understand that there is only enough natural nitrogen to feed about four billion people, that organic requires twice as much land, or that what they are really talking about is making the poorest farmers in the world, much, much poorer...
It's the chart in the very bottom right. You can search by country or region, and it even includes a category for least developed countries.
And, yes I am anti-collectivist in terms of political movements, but actually support moderate collectivism like the right of a country to negotiate drug prices or the rights of workers to form unions for the purposes of collective bargaining. It's just collectivist governments that don't tend to work. Just ask the Nordic Model countries- they are quite emphatic they are free market capitalist societies with larger social safety nets. Here is a former prime minister of Denmark, Lars Løkke Rasmussen speaking at Harvard on the subject.
And incidentally I agree with you on the historical role of the Republican Party on blocking action on climate change. But within the Democratic Party it's only the likes of Corey Booker or Andrew Yang who are at all rational on the desperate need for more nuclear. Again, it comes back to baseload energy. Big hydro is good. So is nuclear. Pumped hydro only goes so far, although it's very useful for managing peak demand and tackling the intermittency issue. Battery storage at scale is a non-starter. The materials needed compete with other vital aspects of the green transition.
"'catastrophic" impacts'- how about deliberately keeping Africa poor, because we won't allow them to significantly develop their fossil fuels?"
Oh, for - who's this "we" you're talking about? Just who are you accusing of "deliberately keeping Africa poor"? Who is going to stop them from developing their fossil fuels? More broadly, have you got anything besides "more nukes"? Something you can support with links to peer-reviewed analysis, perhaps?
Nevermind, I'm starting to repeat myself. I'm tired of playing whack-a-nuke-troll. Somebody else take a turn with the mallet.
Ok, here is Howard Nicholas- a Sri Lankan Marxist economist who goes into great detail about how the West has deliberately kept Sub-Saharan Africa as a cheap raw material and resource extraction hub.
It's a story of six key factors: foreign aid to keep strong men in power; debt and foreign loans, often when not needed, and resulting in Head of State assassinations when not taken; monopoly buying structures, ensuring costs stay low; international economic institutions like the IMF encouraging and structuring debt so it can never be repaid; the destruction of food self-sufficiency extending to definable double standard on food subsidy between the West and developing nations, the latter of which are allowed none; and lastly poor educational systems.
Enter China. There is currently a raw material resource Cold War going on between America and China in Sub-Saharan Africa. This Intercept article details how between 2008 and early 2022 US-trained officers had led no less than nine coup attempts in five countries in West Africa alone.
Here is former Greek Finance Minister and prominent socialist Yanis Varoufakis (recently de-banked using PEPS, his money stolen, for daring to support Julian Assange) discussing one aspect of the struggle between the West and China in Africa.
The thing is China isn't as addicted as the West to the enforcement of low raw costs materials from resource abundant Sub-Saharan Africa. They can afford to substantially uplift African living standards whilst raising their own. They are even offshoring much of their lower value manufacturing, particularly in areas like textiles, effectively making East Africa China's China- whilst simultaneously adding infrastructure and energy projects. Granted they are a major investor in renewables and hydro, but they are also/have built gas and coal plants (at much lower levels than from hydro).
All of this has the West in something of a panic. It's not just China which threatens their addiction to enforced low raw material prices, it's the possibility of economic development in Africa itself.
It shows in the COP agenda. At COP27 African leaders were still pretty insistent upon receiving a greater share of the global carbon budget for energy. By COP28, the demand had effectively been sidelined as a priority.
You might have heard the slanders and false accusations which were levelled at the Head of COP29, Sultan al-Jaber. The media deliberately lied in smearing him as a climate denier. What he actually said was “Show me the path to socio-economic development that does not lead us back to living in caves.” Hyperbolic perhaps- but certainly no reason to label him a climate denier, when he was raising a legitimate question on behalf of developing world.
The reason why I talked about catastrophic impacts is because we have a problem far larger than most who focus solely on climate realise. The relationship between energy and income per person by country is an incredibly tight correlation and it's also reflected in the fact that carbon consumption and income per person is also tightly correlated, so much so that it will remain causative unless we can bring as many and as much forms of low or no carbon sources of energy online as quickly as possible. If one plugs in current levels of economic development into the Nordhaus DICE model then one finds around 2.5º C of warming by 2100. The Guardian has quoted 80% of climate scientists as saying this is the best case scenario, but it's actually the most likely prediction given current economic trends.
Here's my thing. I don't trust Western corporations not to use the climate agenda to not use their influence with the IPCC and other global institutions not to cynically exploit it as yet another front in their hegemonic battle to keep resource extraction cheap and by extension keep Sub-Saharan countries poor for the simple reason that the resources extraction in entirely dependent upon continuing African poverty and a lack of industrial and economic development.
One study I read showed that a renewable only path would cost around $298 billion. And I know I'm right just by looking at the numbers. The Sustainable African Scenario invests $10 billion per year and promises to rise to $50 billion per year by 2030 (which I will believe when I see). In 2022, total African aid was $53.5 billion. Setting aside $10 billion a year for vital medical and educational needs, we could use the existing money we spend to give them a fair chance of real genuine economic development through modest universal access to electricity through renewables by 2030. It's that important for the simple reason that more energy ends poverty.
But do you really think the West will, given the economic interests at stake? Especially when we have a proven track record of keeping them poor and using foreign aid to broker arms sales and support the lavish lifestyles of corrupt Western-friendly dictators? That's why I argue for natural gas development- because I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in the benign sounding promises of Western Leaders, and increasingly neither do African leaders. It's why the Harris summit was such a disaster, and why Western journalists are facing increasingly hostile African leaders when they have the gall to lecture them on China.
As I've been asking on X, how can you have high confidence for a ghg-forcing signal in extreme rainfall events if your (and IPCC) primary timeline is "since 1950" given many sobering paleo studies in various places - Caribbean for hurricanes (Donnelly et al 2007), US Northeast (extreme scouring floods, 2002 Noren et al etc) and California (2024 for atmospheric rivers) showing past bouts of extrarodinary storminess in various climate conditions on the long timescales necessary to understand patterns in rare events? Here's a query I sent to the folks at World Weather Attribution: As you likely know I’ve been reporting on the seriousness of human-driven climate change since 1988. At the same time, my extensive reporting on paleo climate research has been humbling in revealing past patterns in extreme events (particularly storms and extreme rainfall but also drought).
One question I’ve had about attribution studies on extreme precipitation events (and tropical systems) is this: Doesn’t the robustness of the CO2 attribution hinge on whether climate models fully capture and reproduce variability in extreme events over long time scales?
Relevant papers are linked on X here:
https://x.com/revkin/status/1802651814728253615?s=51&t=NSdlg-25PEF03VHLsAWnjg
Relevant studies keep piling up, including this new one on atmospheric rivers…
Atmospheric river activity during the late Holocene exceeds modern range of variability in California
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01357-z
Can you point me to output of yours or others that addresses this question?
If all scientists had was the observational record, you would have a point. But the physics of the problem is really the linchpin. We know there's more water converging into the storm. In order for rainfall to not be increased by climate change, you have to posit that the storm dynamics are changing in such a way as to cancel that increase in water vapor convergence out. No evidence or argument exists that supports that.
Supporting this simple physical interpretation are observations since the middle of the 20th century and, yes, climate models. I actually wrote a post about that here that expands on this: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/pinning-down-climate-changes-role
Importantly, the argument for a human component to the rainfall intensity (or extreme tempeatures) is NOT based on the fact that previous events have not exceeded this one. That's simply not part of the argument, never has been, never will be. A one-in-10,000 year event a few thousand years ago could indeed have exceeded this one. It's a logical mistake to think that today's event in Florida must therefore be unimpacted by humans.
And, no, the robustness of this conclusion is not entirely based on climate models reproducing natural variability. Again, this is ignoring the role of simple physical arguments. I strongly recommend you read the IPCC AR6 WG1, chapter 11, section 7 to see how they make the argument.
Ignoring well-understood physical mechanisms to perseverate over models is the Revkinest thing.
I think Andy R. is spending too much time with my friends, Roger and Bjorn. That is not the road to enlightenment.
The basic physical mechanisms are key of course. Warmer air, more available water for rain. And I don’t disagree with your conclusion about Florida’s dumps and CO2-driven warming. And the IPCC section on extreme precipitation is great.
As for JAC's pithy remark, I don't perseverate on models. But I do have questions about their utility in gauging the future of small-scale events that are also major rainmakers (the late-season tropical system that caused Vermont’s 1927 flood of record, e.g. https://www.weather.gov/media/btv/events/1927Flood.pdf .) or California’s atmospheric rivers. These are the events that can make or unmake communities.
That’s why I pay attention to paleotempestology researchers, who continue to reveal dynamics with startling levels of variability in extremes. Donnelly's work in the Caribbean for instance.
(For what it's worth, I haven’t seen Pielke or Lomborg focus on this work.)
I sense a lack of crosstalk between that field and modeling?
A fresh example is this April 2024 paper from USGS: Atmospheric river activity during the late Holocene exceeds modern range of variability in California
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01357-z
Have model runs of late Holocene reproduced this kind of behavior?
Finally, back to the 2002 paper on a long-term rise in extreme scouring rainfalls in the Northeast - by Noren, Bierman, Steig, Lini, Southon. https://www.uvm.edu/~pbierman/classes/morph/morph2003/documents_dnldorview/readings/noren_storms.pdf
"If the pattern of millennial-scale variability that we documented through the Holocene persists into the future, New England storminess would continue to increase for the next 900 yr. Because climate synopses compiled from instrumental records cannot distinguish underlying natural increases in storminess from anthropogenic effects, detected increases in contemporary storminess may not be a reliable indicator of human-induced climate change."
That was 22 years ago, but Bierman and Steig haven't pointed me to any more recent work undercutting their cautionary conclusion. Have you?
Would love to host an observation/modeling crosstalk webcast on this.
And in the end of course, the key need is to curb heat-trapping emissions to limit future risk and cut vulnerability and exposure to flooding now, particularly for communities in today's climate hazard hot zones. Both have to be priorities, as I wrote in addressing your adaptation critique: https://revkin.substack.com/p/dont-fall-into-the-binary-emissions?utm_source=publication-search
In drier regions and conditions warmer air means it takes higher water vapor content to reach saturation in order to rain; those will occur less often and it will tend to rain less. As well as have higher evaporation potential, ie more drying. Water vapor content only rises where there is a source of water to make vapor.
Thanks, Ken. It's probably more accurate to say that advecting humid air masses can deliver more water in rainstorms than they previously would. That would have an impact on the "Pineapple Express", a recurring atmospheric river that delivers copious, intense rain to America's west coast. Climatically dry conditions in S. California notwithstanding, when it rains, it pours!
It is those occasional rains in the dry times - often the only rains in the dry times - that get missed. Like California in a lot of Australia (where I am) sees swings from dry to wet and back again. The extremes of that do appear to be getting more extreme. With CO2 at record levels and (still) record emissions taking it higher we can expect that, notwithstanding the potential for more of the unexpected.
Hi Andrew, I'd be very grateful if you cleared up this confusion with the WWA at Imperial saying about British storms that;
'Looking at average SSI on storm days, while some studies using other methods suggest an increase in storminess in a future climate, our analysis has shown a decreasing trend. Our results show that average SSI indices as observed this year became about a factor of 2 less likely. The synthesis of the models also shows a negative trend and, when combined with observations, the results indicate that a stormy season as observed this year is nowadays a factor of about 1.4 less likely due to human induced climate change. ' https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/autumn-and-winter-storms-over-uk-and-ireland-are-becoming-wetter-due-to-climate-change/
The say when it rains it's wetter but another stormy season like that of 23/24 is less likely to occur again due to climate change?
Many thanks
Jo
I just skimmed this. I think what it's saying is that stormy days will occur less frequently, but when stormy days occur, they will produce more rain.
So rainfall frequency and intensity could be increasing- though stormy days decreasing?
Thank you Andrew. It's being used to claim that climate scientists are lying, and ignoring their own research, when they say that human climate change is going to make Britain wetter.
How would climate change produce less storms in an area? Are there other areas, such as Florida, where storms, not just rainfall, are more likely?
Yes, you could be getting fewer storms in a region but, when the storms occur, they are windier/rainier.
I have not read the report in detail, but my guess is that this is cause by the jetstream moving and taking the storms with it. Thus, the storms would still be occurring, but somewhere else.
Thank you Andrew- that makes total sense.
The authors may well have been quoted out of context when speaking to the media, but I wish that they took more care to not appear to be hiding information from their paper. It gives grist to the mill of the skeptics.
There's literally nothing you can do if someone is sufficiently motivated to misrepresent your views.
Indeed. 🙏🏽
A Floridian makes his prediction.
Those living in South Florida will go about their business as normal until some epic water calamity occurs. And then it will finally dawn on them what’s coming. They’ll all try to sell their property at once, and the real estate market will collapse.
And then they’ll all move to North Florida, where they’ll drive around town recklessly, blaring their horns at anyone who won’t exceed the speed limit by a wide margin.
About the question in this article ... I would say.. NO!
Why If climate change is an emergency do we see on almost all metrics no significant long-range change in extreme weather, sea level, sea ice, and other adverse condition indicator? (Note” that weather is what happens daily and climate is what happens over a 30-year moving average.) These facts have been well documented using reliable institutional sources. More at Climate Quiz - CO2 Coalition https://co2coalition.org/climate-quiz/
Thank you for this post. I'd also note that in addition to the 7% increase/degree in the capability of the air to carry water vapor which is key for the heaviest precipitation events, there is the related factor of increased evaporation from the oceans which drives the increase in total precipitation.
Thanks for the information. The problem is that those who advocate for climate change policy either misunderstand the near catastrophic economic impacts of the policies for which they advocate, are unwilling to engage in good faith cost benefit analysis or are unwilling to concede that more government in one area necessarily means less government in another.
1) There is no 'tax the rich' policy. The confiscation of all billionaire wealth in America would only run the American federal government for six months.
2) As tax as percentage of GDP increases, general economic prosperity and economic growth slows. The only exceptions are the hyper-efficient Nordic Model states who happen to be both more free market than America (with he exception of green social engineering and stronger worker protections), and willing to persuade their poorer and middle class voters to part with more of their money in taxes.
3) People don't believe the claims about wind and solar- nor should they! It's not just the unit cost of Solar PV which people need to look at, or the costs of wind turbines. There are sorts of externalities which come into play and the LCOE calculations are pure economic fairytales. Recent history shows that getting to around 40% of energy from all renewable sources, including nuclear costs bill payers around x1.7 per energy unit, compared to a less green intensive approach. And high energy costs equals economic disaster. Just ask Germany, which is rapidly losing its middle class as it loses its manufacturing base. The only countries which have managed energy transition at all well are France and Sweden, both of which rely considerable on nuclear.
4) Climate policy currently hurts the poor more than climate change, although this may change over time. There used to be reasonable Left-leaning American thinktanks which conceded that Africa needs to grow its share of the global carbon energy budget (not counting transport) in order to stand any chance of economic development, peaking at around 2050, but today at least it seems as though the source has disappears. None of the ten African countries which have the most renewable energy sources are on the list of the four most successful African economies, in terms of GDP per capita.
5) There are ways to change the game. Stop pretending Fear is a form of persuasion. In reality it convinces the wealthy and the comfortable that the most economically vulnerable in their own societies need to make sacrifices. There are better ways to persuade. Inform parents that even though their kid might find riding on a bus unpleasant, the lack thereof is terrible for their long-term mental health. Ride-sharing only with friends is a suboptimal solution- with the exception of chronic and sustained bullying kids need to come into contact with other kids who make them socially anxious.
Similarly, how many American workers are in receipt of their three days additional annual leave for taking socially responsible ways into work (including ride shares)? Remote work is demonstrably better for the climate, but call centres and the like aren't being decentralised because of the commercial real estate sectors. The manufacturing economy is 23% of all climate change (including materials for construction and infrastructure), yet why can't I search on Amazon for manufactured goods by years of guarantee?
6) A reasonable approach might be linking climate change expenditure to reductions in the bureaucracy for mandatory spending, which is massive in most Western countries. There now exists the technology to run all welfare payments through a single phone-based account linked to a PAYE-based negative income tax system, taking individual circumstances into account, but the Left has its own form of solution aversion when it comes to massively reducing the federal and state public sector workforces, which are by any economic measure a waste, both in terms of expending scarce resources for the public purse, and in terms of the lost opportunity costs of labour which is effectively wasted. 90% of workers would almost never have to speak to the IRS again.
If Sweden during the pandemic has taught us anything it is that soft persuasion techniques work better than government force and coercion, by virtually every metric imaginable.
Wow. That's some serious decarbonization alarmism. Lots of unsupported assertions. Right from the outset, "...those who advocate for climate change policy" is a transparent straw man for Geary Johansen's cultural enemies, namely anyone who recognizes the "free" market's propensity for socializing every transaction cost it can get away with. His hobby horse appears to be taxes, but he doesn't much like any collective interventions in the market.
Moving on, "People don't believe the claims about wind and solar- nor should they!" What people besides Geary? What claims? Reputable, non-partisan sources report a "‘Turning point in energy history’ as solar, wind start pushing fossil fuels off the grid" (yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/05/turning-point-in-energy-history-as-solar-wind-start-pushing-fossil-fuels-off-the-grid). I, for one, have no problem believing it. Why does Geary believe otherwise? What are their preferred sources of information?
And so forth. IMHO, Geary Johansen's comment is nothing but right-wing culture war rhetoric. I'll feed the troll no further.
You make some good arguments, although I would appreciate not resorting to ad hominem. Here's the thing- when you look at electricity prices by country in Europe or electricity prices by state in the US then we quickly see that the LCOE is a fiction.
That's fine, provided you're willing to argue from the basis that the investment was sound as a developmental cost, a series of incremental technological innovations aimed at making wind and/or solar feasible for the emerging economic powers like China and India, who will likely massively outstrip America and Europe by the end of the century. Of all forms of green investment, technological innovation, the so-called green premium, has proven to be far the wisest form of investment the West can possibly make- so much so, that it convinced the Chinese to double their offshore wind in 2022 alone, a single year.
But that's not the argument that most ideologues make. It's that solar and wind are feasible at scale. The problem is those who have gone furthest in decarbonising (without substantial nuclear), Germany, the UK and California have hit a wall. In the UK, the Tory government recently bowed to pressure to increase offshore wind unit energy prices by 50%. Additionally this will require quite substantial investments in energy infrastructure.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67430888
https://news.sky.com/story/britons-paying-hundreds-of-millions-to-turn-off-wind-turbines-as-network-cant-handle-the-power-they-make-on-the-windiest-days-12822156
In case you don't want to look at the links, the BBC source details how in order to increase offshore wind further, prices from this source will need to rise by 50%. and the Sky source details how it was necessary in 2022 to spend $215 million switching portions of the offshore grid off at source.
Most climate economists and climate policy advocates with a background in engineering now concede that nuclear will need to play a substantial role as baseload energy in the energy mix for most countries. 40% is one estimate, low IMO, but this of course doesn't include the necessity of running cars using EV or water-sourced hydrogen, which is of course an endothermic process, which requires significant energy input to release the hydrogen from the H20.
Both Project Drawdown and the Copenhagen Consensus agree that wind is good investment. But the threshold tops out at around 30%, beyond which the price per unit rapidly begins to accelerate. In the West degrowth is not an option- at least not for current demographics and political leanings. The Greens were slaughtered in the recent EU elections and attempting to restrict cars from cities in known right-wing hotbeds like Cambridge, one of the original university towns, leads to the Tories being elected to the local council for the first time in 22 years.
My whole point was formulated along the lines of the fact that we need to come up with better arguments and policies, ones which aren't predicated on ideological preferences or defaulting to a 'hide the costs' approach. And be willing to accept some energy solutions many people are uncomfortable with. It's not Germany, the UK and California which are the energy successes- it's France and Sweden, which is why, in addition to wind and solar China and India are both investing massively in nuclear.
I never said that wind and/or solar shouldn't play a role. At modest levels both can contribute- especially as new housing comes online and tile integrated solar for roofing becomes an increasing part of the landscape. But don't present an over-optimistic picture of wind and solar. Research also shows that the Right is also incredibly susceptible to arguments which favour nuclear. Plus, when both the EU and the UN suddenly reclassify nuclear and natural gas (as a transition tool) as green sources of energy, it's time to realise that the policy makers have looked at the raw data and realised that politically and from an energy engineering perspective, beyond certain thresholds solar and wind simply aren't feasible.
Sorry of if I didn't explain myself fully. I actually support energy transition. I just think it has to be done in a viable, politically and economically sustainable manner. Of the 1 in 10 of the world's climate scientists who are based in the developing world almost all are in favour of a green growth agenda through technological innovation and almost none are in favour of degrowth.
People in the West aren't going to give up their cars, but they can be persuaded to use them a lot, lot less. Personally, I only drive mine less than 1,000 miles a year. I used to drive 12,00 miles a car, and the car I drive now has significantly better road mileage. Wherever possible, I try to use public transport, especially trains. If successive UK governments since the early nineties had opted for a persuasion-based strategy aimed at people using their cars less, ride sharing, avoiding the school run, etc- instead of a prohibitive approach, aimed at stopping people from driving to work entirely- then it's highly likely we could have cut total carbon emissions from non-commercial transport in the UK by 50% by now. Instead, the lack of progress should be a source of shame for the UK- despite a switch to smaller more efficient cars our transport carbon costs haven't shifted downwards at all. Force and coercion don't work- but better persuasion can. In same period, the Swedes 'socially responsible' 'approach reduced their emissions from transport by 24%!, and it's one of the few issues where they haven't deployed the persuasion approach as well as they have on other issues- for the simple reason that emotive issues tend to attract a natural desire to curtail the behaviour of others to affect radical change.
And SMRs are going to be a game changer. They will be much less expensive than big nuclear. There is almost no environmental risk- they literally cannot explode or meltdown. Why do so many arguments from some, but not all, on the Left involve ordinary people making sacrifices- especially when recent science on issues like beef, for example, show that grass-fed cattle are a completely different animal to feedlot cattle, the latter of which are a substantial contributor to climate change, when the former are not (increased carbon soil sequestration, nitrogen fixing in soil from manure, much lower nitrogen generally, because of low crude proteins in diet). Almost all of the world's ocean dead zones are found in places where the American feedlot approach is practiced, including most of Chile.
The global market for grass-fed beef was $12.4 billion in 2023, by 2033 that's projected to grow to $20.4 billion. In the UK, Rewilding Britain sees cattle grazing as an integral part of their project to restore Britain's countryside. Sure, current global pastureland can only support around 27% of global demand, but there are some pretty proven marketing strategies which show that if you give consumers a choice between grass-fed, feedlot and other alternatives they will go to the supermarket with the intention of buying grass-fed, take one look at the price and buy chicken or salmon instead. The really insane thing is pushing grass-fed actually reduces consumption through pricing mechanisms and presents people with the belief that they've freely made their own choices.
My point would be this- stop trying to use fear to make people give things up. It won't work. Instead find smarter ways to persuade them, recognise the limits of the technology currently being deployed and don't discard any potential climate solution. And above all, don't attach the cause of climate change to a particular political choice- because America in particular has a habit of politicising everything. It's counter productive. And before you accuse the Republicans of being the only ones opposed to climate solutions, it's worth noting that fracking reduced America's carbon emissions by a greater amount than any other source.
I'll make one last good faith effort. If you had a coherent, fact-based argument to make, calling your comment nothing but right-wing rhetoric would be the argumentum ad hominem. Going through your lengthy reply above, there may be a pro-nuclear argument in there somewhere. All too often, nuclear-power advocates are really just greenie-bashing, even though not every greenie is anti-nuke. But you started right out with the rhetoric of a right-wing ideologue. You claimed that anyone who advocates for climate change policy misunderstands the "catastrophic" impacts of unspecified policies. That's sheer anti-collectivist alarmism. Then you say, about published expert analyses, "There are all sorts of externalities which come into play and the LCOE calculations are pure economic fairytales." That's transparent rhetoric, not rational argument. As if the rest of us aren't aware of externalities, with the rapidly accumulating global costs, in money and grief, of anthropogenic climate change the biggest in history. And "policy makers have looked at the raw data and realised that politically and from an energy engineering perspective, beyond certain thresholds solar and wind simply aren't feasible" evinces a somewhat startling faith in policy makers, never mind the unsupported judgement about feasibility!
Next, there's "Stop pretending Fear is a form of persuasion." Is there a policy recommendation there? If "Fear" of having to pay an open-ended bill for the socialized costs of the fossil carbon market doesn't persuade you to support some serious decarbonization policy or another, what will? Or do you have a workable plan to promote the cost-efficient construction of more nukes?
One more example: "Of the 1 in 10 of the world's climate scientists who are based in the developing world almost all are in favour of a green growth agenda through technological innovation and almost none are in favour of degrowth." Leaving aside how you came to that conclusion, did you think anyone here is seriously arguing for degrowth? I, for one, don't publicly advocate for anything but decarbonization! Whether you believe it or not, the costs already paid for climate change to date, and the consensus projection of ever higher cost as long as the market-driven transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere continues by the gigatonnes annually, are not merely a liberal preoccupation.
I could go on and on, but it's already tedious. Look, you're entitled to your opinion. You're even entitled to present it at length on this blog - Hell, I can't stop you. But you should recognize that your primary purpose in posting here isn't to help the global economy decarbonize as quickly as possible, it's to advocate your anti-collectivist political ideology. Again, you're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to point out that you're fooling yourself if you think you're not one of those ideologues you called out.
For the record, I'd never "accuse the Republicans of being the only ones opposed to climate solutions." Nonetheless, it's abundantly documented (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html) that the GOP has been the principal obstacle to collective decarbonization of the US economy, at least since early in this century. Consequently, any US voter who prioritizes capping the cumulative cost of anthropogenic global warming sooner rather than later has no choice but to vote Democratic in every election, until some Republican candidate defies their party and publicly supports specific decarbonization legislation, whether carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable energy development and consumer adoption, or regulatory command and control. Under the political system America's founders left us with, a vote this November for any POTUS candidate but Biden, or no vote at all, in a state that could go either way, is numerically equivalent to a vote for a return to official climate-science denial by the federal government. That's not ideology, it's plain fact.
On the developing world 1 in 10 figure I was quoting a source quoting a source, but I did manage to find the direct source. It's from a survey of 800 climate researchers for The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/idea-of-green-growth-losing-traction-among-climate-policy-researchers-survey-of-nearly-800-academics-reveals-213434#:~:text=However%2C%20our%20survey%20of%20nearly,neither%20be%20viable%20nor%20desirable.
I was slightly mistaken- it was 90%+ green growth or a growth for both non-OECD and BRICS. The article also mentions that the higher the average income of a country, the greater the preference for degrowth over green growth.
On the subject of fossil fuel subsidy I'm against it. However, it's worth noting that until quite recently (2019 was the last year I checked) fossil fuel subsidy in America was roughly the same as green subsidy. Subsidy is one of the major reasons why LCOE calculations are flawed. It's also worth noting that there is a world of difference between subsidy as taxpayer funding as opposed to subsidy as a 'discount' on future tax revenue, which is only a partial discount. There are all sorts of wacky accounting ideas when it comes to public finances. For example, forgiving student loans would be considered a tax expenditure for federal budgetary purposes.
'"catastrophic" impacts'- how about deliberately keeping Africa poor, because we won't allow them to significantly develop their fossil fuels? They only need about 7% of the world's carbon budget for energy in order to develop economically, and then only temporarily. One of the more reasonable Left-leaning think tanks in America actually conceded the point showing that their carbon consumption would peak by 2050 and fairly rapidly recede, but Google doesn't seem to want to give me the source- it was quite easy to find until quite recently.
Anyway, for what it's worth here is Rose M. Mutiso, an African women giving a TED Talk on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hmn5Gmn2dw&t=2s
And of the four most successful African countries today, none are in the top 10 for green energy generation.
Here's the thing. In 2022, the World Food Programme issued its annual report. Predictably, 80% of the world's food insecurity was because of war. It's been that way for a couple of decades. The remainder is evenly split between economic shock and climate/weather disruption. And of the 10% which was economic shock, a substantial portion relates to the West operating ESG finance. I know full well that the Sri Lankan collapse wasn't solely due to ESG pressures, just as I know that Eskom the South African major energy supplier had endemic corruption problems, but the decision to stop using synthetic fertilisers was just as closely tied to the need to please Western ESG green finance directives, as the decision not to develop natural gas sources in South Africa, which is exactly what the South Africans are doing now, as their citizens are forced to sit in darkness for long periods whilst energy rationing takes place.
And for the record I know you probably know that synthetic fertilisers usage hasn't increased in the West since 1961. You don't strike me as somebody who has just watched a few completely biased Netflix documentaries and come to the conclusion that Green Revolution farming, which saved over a billion lives through the work of Norman Borlaug was wrong. In North America synthetic fertiliser hasn't really grown at all, despite quite substantial increases in yields. In Europe synthetic fertiliser usage has actually decreased substantially since '61.
But do you know where fertiliser usage has increased massively? In the least economically developed countries in the world. So the area where I most tend to loose it is with the activists who push sustainable farming. Don't get me wrong. America made a huge mistake when they centralised their animal farming out from crop farming. In all probability its the biggest contributor to ocean dead zones because the crude proteins in the food for feedlot cattle are far higher, which is a recipe for nitrogen run-off. By contrast, crop run off is a relatively easy fic with the deployment of cover crops. Any YouTube video on the subject will show easily perceptible miraculous results. But activists who confuse the Green Revolution with synthetic fertiliser, two things which happened about a century apart, really do my head in. When they talk about moving to 'sustainable' methods of farming they don't even understand that there is only enough natural nitrogen to feed about four billion people, that organic requires twice as much land, or that what they are really talking about is making the poorest farmers in the world, much, much poorer...
Anyway, here's the source:
https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizers
It's the chart in the very bottom right. You can search by country or region, and it even includes a category for least developed countries.
And, yes I am anti-collectivist in terms of political movements, but actually support moderate collectivism like the right of a country to negotiate drug prices or the rights of workers to form unions for the purposes of collective bargaining. It's just collectivist governments that don't tend to work. Just ask the Nordic Model countries- they are quite emphatic they are free market capitalist societies with larger social safety nets. Here is a former prime minister of Denmark, Lars Løkke Rasmussen speaking at Harvard on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO7wgS5tdz4&t=1s
And incidentally I agree with you on the historical role of the Republican Party on blocking action on climate change. But within the Democratic Party it's only the likes of Corey Booker or Andrew Yang who are at all rational on the desperate need for more nuclear. Again, it comes back to baseload energy. Big hydro is good. So is nuclear. Pumped hydro only goes so far, although it's very useful for managing peak demand and tackling the intermittency issue. Battery storage at scale is a non-starter. The materials needed compete with other vital aspects of the green transition.
"'catastrophic" impacts'- how about deliberately keeping Africa poor, because we won't allow them to significantly develop their fossil fuels?"
Oh, for - who's this "we" you're talking about? Just who are you accusing of "deliberately keeping Africa poor"? Who is going to stop them from developing their fossil fuels? More broadly, have you got anything besides "more nukes"? Something you can support with links to peer-reviewed analysis, perhaps?
Nevermind, I'm starting to repeat myself. I'm tired of playing whack-a-nuke-troll. Somebody else take a turn with the mallet.
Ok, here is Howard Nicholas- a Sri Lankan Marxist economist who goes into great detail about how the West has deliberately kept Sub-Saharan Africa as a cheap raw material and resource extraction hub.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaqgQvLn5sQ
It's a story of six key factors: foreign aid to keep strong men in power; debt and foreign loans, often when not needed, and resulting in Head of State assassinations when not taken; monopoly buying structures, ensuring costs stay low; international economic institutions like the IMF encouraging and structuring debt so it can never be repaid; the destruction of food self-sufficiency extending to definable double standard on food subsidy between the West and developing nations, the latter of which are allowed none; and lastly poor educational systems.
Enter China. There is currently a raw material resource Cold War going on between America and China in Sub-Saharan Africa. This Intercept article details how between 2008 and early 2022 US-trained officers had led no less than nine coup attempts in five countries in West Africa alone.
https://theintercept.com/2022/03/09/intercepted-podcast-africa-coup/
Here is former Greek Finance Minister and prominent socialist Yanis Varoufakis (recently de-banked using PEPS, his money stolen, for daring to support Julian Assange) discussing one aspect of the struggle between the West and China in Africa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Y57ULVqC8&t=15s
The thing is China isn't as addicted as the West to the enforcement of low raw costs materials from resource abundant Sub-Saharan Africa. They can afford to substantially uplift African living standards whilst raising their own. They are even offshoring much of their lower value manufacturing, particularly in areas like textiles, effectively making East Africa China's China- whilst simultaneously adding infrastructure and energy projects. Granted they are a major investor in renewables and hydro, but they are also/have built gas and coal plants (at much lower levels than from hydro).
All of this has the West in something of a panic. It's not just China which threatens their addiction to enforced low raw material prices, it's the possibility of economic development in Africa itself.
It shows in the COP agenda. At COP27 African leaders were still pretty insistent upon receiving a greater share of the global carbon budget for energy. By COP28, the demand had effectively been sidelined as a priority.
You might have heard the slanders and false accusations which were levelled at the Head of COP29, Sultan al-Jaber. The media deliberately lied in smearing him as a climate denier. What he actually said was “Show me the path to socio-economic development that does not lead us back to living in caves.” Hyperbolic perhaps- but certainly no reason to label him a climate denier, when he was raising a legitimate question on behalf of developing world.
The reason why I talked about catastrophic impacts is because we have a problem far larger than most who focus solely on climate realise. The relationship between energy and income per person by country is an incredibly tight correlation and it's also reflected in the fact that carbon consumption and income per person is also tightly correlated, so much so that it will remain causative unless we can bring as many and as much forms of low or no carbon sources of energy online as quickly as possible. If one plugs in current levels of economic development into the Nordhaus DICE model then one finds around 2.5º C of warming by 2100. The Guardian has quoted 80% of climate scientists as saying this is the best case scenario, but it's actually the most likely prediction given current economic trends.
https://ourworldindata.org/worlds-energy-problem
Here's my thing. I don't trust Western corporations not to use the climate agenda to not use their influence with the IPCC and other global institutions not to cynically exploit it as yet another front in their hegemonic battle to keep resource extraction cheap and by extension keep Sub-Saharan countries poor for the simple reason that the resources extraction in entirely dependent upon continuing African poverty and a lack of industrial and economic development.
One study I read showed that a renewable only path would cost around $298 billion. And I know I'm right just by looking at the numbers. The Sustainable African Scenario invests $10 billion per year and promises to rise to $50 billion per year by 2030 (which I will believe when I see). In 2022, total African aid was $53.5 billion. Setting aside $10 billion a year for vital medical and educational needs, we could use the existing money we spend to give them a fair chance of real genuine economic development through modest universal access to electricity through renewables by 2030. It's that important for the simple reason that more energy ends poverty.
But do you really think the West will, given the economic interests at stake? Especially when we have a proven track record of keeping them poor and using foreign aid to broker arms sales and support the lavish lifestyles of corrupt Western-friendly dictators? That's why I argue for natural gas development- because I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in the benign sounding promises of Western Leaders, and increasingly neither do African leaders. It's why the Harris summit was such a disaster, and why Western journalists are facing increasingly hostile African leaders when they have the gall to lecture them on China.