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Just Dean's avatar

Nicely done. One of your best. I guess we have to wait to see who the other guest is.

A couple related items have come across my radar over the last few days. One was the SHIFTKEY podcast with Jesse Jenkins on the relative benefits of rooftop solar, https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-five-rooftop-solar , "Does Rooftop Solar Actually Help the Climate?" The answer basically is that it depends and he argues that in most cases it just displaces other less expensive solar, i.e. utility solar. I'm not sure I agree but you hardly ever want to challenge Jesse on such an issue. I put solar on my house 4 years ago and in the meantime my utility has had trouble adding solar because of supply issues. In my mind, a clean kWh today beats a clean kWh tomorrow. I think he concedes my point in the broadcast but in the end the listener is left questioning the value of rooftop solar which seems counterintuitive.

The other thing that I saw that I want to give a shout out for is the analysis at Carbon Brief that talks about the effect of electing Trump on carbon emissions, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-election-win-could-add-4bn-tonnes-to-us-emissions-by-2030/ . We need to be reminding people, especially younger voters, that we cannot afford to go backwards on climate change.

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Richard Reiss's avatar

Aren't most of these prices an illusion, even in the middle term? I think it's good to encourage people to see that the first stage of the energy transition is 'affordable' in our daily context, but the reality is, emissions are an existential problem that has to be solved, or at least ameliorated, even for the super wealthy with their ideas of digging a bunker in case of societal breakdown. If your house is on fire with all your money in it, counting the money while things are burning (including money) is a maladaptive response.

Bunkers are a good comparison on price, because obviously for some of us (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg), the price is right for a bunker. Interestingly, the price is still wrong for Zuckerberg to turn Facebook into a giant climate education and social contract generating machine.

Inferred by that logic, with super-wealth, there is no price worth the constraints of a functioning democracy. Life in a bunker is better than democracy.

Sidenote: if you really were in a bunker, any of the prices that seem familiar to us today are already out the window (or hatch, I guess). Do you have a dentist in your bunker?

There is also a middle term crisis that dwarfs prices as we know them: what happens if 100 million climate migrants try to enter the US over a 10 - 20 year period? That number could be on the low side judging by this paper:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1910114117

Meanwhile, the US will be experiencing internal migration.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374171735/onthemove

My guess is that if anything pushes us to spraying sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere, it will be the existential necessity of trying to keep a billion people in their own regions, after having bungled our concept of pricing in every decade prior.

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