When people want to act to limit climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, solar panels, LED bulbs, and electric cars may come to mind. But an often overlooked step is changing your diet.
Meat production worldwide is a major contributor of greenhouse gases, particularly red meat. Cows emit methane, but they also require a ton of feed (usually corn) that in turn requires a lot of fertilizer produced from natural gas. Some studies indicate that you can make a bigger impact reducing your carbon footprint simply by avoiding meat consumption — even more than driving a hybrid.
So leave it to Silicon Valley to address the challenge. A number of startups are figuring out alternative, cleaner ways to produce meat from plants, per the San Francisco Chronicle:
Impossible Foods, based in Redwood City, is one of two California companies racing to build a beefless burger so good that it fools carnivores. Impossible Foods’ Impossible Burger debuted in one New York restaurant in July and arrives in California this week. The company’s rival, Beyond Meat, has produced a Beyond Burger that is on sale in Whole Foods stores in the mountain states and may make it to the Bay Area by the end of the year.
Most manufacturers of processed food market their products as if they’re one cardboard box away from grandma’s best dish. Not Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat. Their methods are nakedly high tech. Their funding comes from tech-sector investors. And though both companies are emitting a tremendous amount of hype in the food world, their intended audience isn’t the organic-minded or even the vegetarian. Like most of Silicon Valley’s unicorn aspirants, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat say they’re out to change the world.
If Silicon Valley can “science the hell” out of meat production (to paraphrase Matt Damon in The Martian), it would be a major win for the environment. Convincing people not to eat meat is an almost impossible sell, and as more of the world industrializes, meat consumption is only increasing.
Sure, policy makers might be able to tax meat enough to discourage consumption, or meat prices may rise so much that it achieves the same effect, but that may be politically difficult or simply take too long. So it would be much better if we could instead provide people an alternative that tastes just like the real thing.
A guilt- and emissions-free burger? I for one certainly wish these companies well.
In Fortune, former Tesla VP Cristiano Carlutti dishes on the company and the upcoming Model 3 (Tesla’s first mass-market EV, due in 2017):
As far as the downsides of the Tesla Model 3, let’s try to look at things from a different perspective: the biggest downside of Model 3 in my opinion is that it doesn’t exist yet. Lots of things can change until the launch date and I would assume that, when it was presented earlier this year, Model 3 was probably nowhere near a decent stage of development.
In order to understand this perspective, you have to take a different look at the way the company operates: in my opinion, it’s fundamentally a very focused marketing machine that until now has been focused on selling shares, with car sales instrumental to that. Before some fans attack me because of this comment, let me tell you that… it was the right thing to do!
In other words, Elon perfectly knew since the beginning that he would need a massive amount of money to become a car OEM and that, in order to raise that money, he had to create and sustain excitement in investors even more than in clients. Another way to look at it is that at this prices, the purchase of Tesla stock is more irrational than the purchase of a Model S: the latter is a very good car, competitive in its market, while the stock is more of a bet (or a gamble) on future dividends that nobody knows if they will ever appear. Car sales and car fans are just instrumental to raise the money Tesla needs to reach the point where it will be self-sustainable: the gamble is that financial markets keep drinking the company’s kool-aid at least until the company becomes self-sustainable. If they stop drinking it too soon, it will be game over and an historical failure, if believers sustain the company long enough, it will be a masterpiece of entrepreneurship and a tremendous success.
A lot is at stake with the future of Tesla. The company is, in my view, the most important private sector clean technology purveyor out there. Elon Musk has almost single-handedly pushed EVs to the forefront of the public imagination, spurring other automakers to follow suit. He also is betting big on energy storage and its marriage with solar PV, which will be essential to decarbonizing the grid. Combined with electric transportation, Tesla’s technology deployment promises to help the world decarbonize at a much greater rate than we otherwise would.
I don’t want to overstate it, but Tesla is making a strong claim to being in position to quite literally save the world (at least from out-of-control climate change).
So we need the company to succeed and raise the capital it needs for the deployment it envisions. If Carlutti is to be believed, let’s hope Musk can keep stoking the imagination of investors — and more importantly, that he and his team can deliver on their big promise with the Model 3. They’ll need a car that meets expectations at the right price and delivery time, without some of the quality issues plaguing the Model S.
It’s possible to do, but not certain. Reason for us all to be nervously optimistic.
In the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, glitzy technology like solar panels and electric vehicles get a lot of attention. But often times there are some simple and relatively cheap technologies that can make just as much difference, particularly when looking at the costs.
Energy efficiency measures are a great example. Conserving energy is just as powerful, if not more so, than buying emissions-free energy like solar power. But it’s much cheaper. Case in point: updating your cable box to take advantage of new efficiency features can save you a lot on your utility bill.
Now David Roberts at Vox.com flags another promising technology: the heat pump.
A heat pump is a “mechanical-compression cycle refrigeration system” that can serve as both a furnace and an air conditioner (indeed, many air conditioners are just one-way heat pumps). From manufacturer Trane:
Even in air that seems too cold, heat energy is present. When it’s cold outside a heat pump extracts this outside heat and transfers it inside. When it’s warm outside, it reverses directions and acts like an air conditioner, removing heat from your home.
Because it merely moves, rather than generates, heat, it is far more efficient than combustion furnaces.
They key feature for our purposes is that heat pumps run on electricity. When Siemens modeled shifting 80 percent of citywide heat consumption over from natural gas to electric heat pumps, emissions declined another 14 percent…
Switching natural gas appliances to electric will be critical in the long term to reducing emissions from buildings. Right now, most furnaces and ranges are natural gas powered, but heap pumps can make the transition to electric heating much easier. Then when you combine it with emissions-free electricity such as from solar power, you’ve suddenly got a major climate win.
My guess is that with the right policy-based incentives (rebates and cheap financing), we could greatly spur consumer adoption of these technologies and ultimately bring the price down as economies of scale kick in. It would be a big win for the climate and potentially a cost-effective use of our resources.
Self-driving cars are already here. Automakers and software companies are testing them like crazy, and people like Elon Musk predict that they could be the norm within a decade.
There’s a lot to like about the technology: it can potentially make car accidents a thing of the past, allow us to avoid the pain and stress of driving and instead do something productive with that time, and potentially free up a lot of space in our built environment that is presently dedicated to parking cars, particularly if we switch to on-demand type ownership models (the “Netflix of cars” approach).
But from an environmental perspective, there’s a huge potential downside. If driving is made easy, the technology could encourage more driving and therefore more traffic. Just imagine how convenient it might be for people to live far from their jobs if the commute can involve a robot driving for them while they nap or work on a laptop.
So what can policy makers do to head off this dystopia? The solutions look a lot like what we need to do to address traffic and sprawl anyway, even without the new technology taking over:
- First, we should stop investing in highway expansion projects and instead use available dollars to maintain existing roads and highways. We shouldn’t build more capacity to accommodate endless self-driving traffic, which will only encourage more sprawl and congestion.
- Second, we should build more alternatives to traffic, such as bus-only lanes, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and rail transit. When we do build highways, we should include congestion pricing features, with the revenue reinvested in mobility options for that corridor. With viable and plentiful alternatives to driving, people won’t opt for self-driving cars as readily.
- Finally, and most importantly, we need to price transportation better to reflect the true costs. If people truly want to live far from job centers and use self-driving to navigate long commutes, that’s fine. But they should then pay for the costs to us all from the increased traffic and environmental degradation. That means switching from a gas tax to a vehicle miles traveled, or fee-per-mile, tax. As cars get more fuel efficient and transition to battery electric models, gas tax revenue will decline. Self-driving car owners will then need to help pay for the infrastructure they’re using.
There are other policy options to consider, but these three would be a great start to heading off a potential nightmare scenario of self-driving traffic and sprawl misery. And in the meantime, we can encourage the environmentally positive features of self-driving technology by encouraging more car- and ride-sharing business models and the development of “right sized” vehicles that fit the vehicle size to the trip.
In the end, it’s always better to be prepared for the future than overwhelmed by it.
Last night’s presidential debate was a real low for American democracy, with the audience cheering Donald Trump’s threat to jail his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, once he’s elected. Members of the media seemed to highlight the shocking claim almost in passing, perhaps because they don’t quite realize that they’d be next in jail.
But aside from these chilling words, there was actually a bit of substantive discussion in the debate, too. The second-to-last question on energy policy in particular caught my attention. Trump answered first, and Grist helpfully broke down the amazing amount of falsehoods in his reply:
• Trump: “[E]nergy is under siege by the Obama administration. … We are killing, absolutely killing, our energy business in this country.”
In fact: Total U.S. energy production has increased for the last six years in a row. The oil and gas sector has been booming during the Obama presidency, as have the solar and wind industries. Coal companies have been struggling — but that is largely not the fault of President Obama, just as the oil boom is largely not something he can take credit for.
• Trump: “I will bring our energy companies back. … They will make money. They will pay off our national debt. They will pay off our tremendous budget deficits.”
In fact: There is no remotely credible economic analysis to suggest that Trump’s proposals for expanded domestic fossil fuel extraction would generate enough additional tax revenue to close the budget deficit, much less pay off the existing national debt. It’s particularly implausible when you consider Trump’s massive tax-cut plans that would make both the deficit and debt considerably larger.
• Trump: “I’m all for alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar, etc.”
In fact: Trump’s energy plan offers nothing to increase solar or wind energy production, but instead focuses on boosting fossil fuels.
• Trump: “There is a thing called clean coal.”
In fact: The hope that coal plants’ carbon emissions can be drastically reduced — either through technology that captures and sequesters the emissions or that converts coal to synthetic gas — burns eternal for the coal industry’s cheerleaders. But no one has actually significantly cut emissions at an economically viable coal plant. The promises of “clean coal” projects have not been fulfilled.
• Trump: “Foreign companies are now coming in and buying so many of our different plants, and then rejiggering the plant so they can take care of their oil.”
In fact: What is Trump trying to say with this gibberish? We have no idea.
But lest we automatically assume Clinton’s answer pleased the environmental community, she made two comments that raised some hackles. First, she described natural gas as a “bridge” to cleaner fuels, which many environmentalists dispute due to the methane and other emissions involved. Second, she described the United States as “energy independent” when we’re still a net importer of crude oil and petroleum.
Still, the candidates are miles apart on this issue, as my colleague Dan Farber describes on Legal Planet, with Clinton the only real choice for those who care about the environment.
This is not a typical election with the usual policy disagreements among the candidates. Instead, it’s a race between two major party candidates with vastly different levels of respect for our American democracy and values. We shouldn’t overlook that fundamental difference, but we should also still use the occasion to talk about important issues like energy — and note the stark differences among the candidates’ views.
Yesterday was a big day of celebration for climate advocates in California. AB 32 (Nunez), the state’s signature greenhouse gas reduction bill, was signed in 2006 — ten years ago to the day. It requires California to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
The day was marked by a celebration at Sacramento’s California Museum, sponsored by the USC Schwarzenegger Institute. The “Governator” spoke, as did current Governor Jerry Brown, CARB chair Mary Nichols, Sen. Fran Pavley, Sen. Kevin De Leon, and former Assembly speaker Fabian Nunez.
You can watch the full video above, but some highlights involved a vigorous defense of California’s economic growth since AB 32 passed. Speakers noted that the state has just surpassed the United Kingdom as the world’s fifth largest economy and that California’s GDP of 4.2% in 2015 was twice the national GDP of 2%. So claims that AB 32 would tank the economy have been largely put to rest.
Still, there’s reason to be cautious about bragging too soon. The full force of our emissions reduction efforts has not been felt on our economy, other than some changes such as with fuels, more renewables, and the beginnings of an electric vehicle market. The 2020-2030 time frame will involve much more dramatic changes to our energy system and economy if we hope to achieve the targets.
It was also entertaining to watch Governor Schwarzenegger when Gov. Brown reminded the audience that the politically controversial Delta tunnels and high speed rail projects were launched on his watch. And Gov. Brown emphasized that we’re playing “Russian roulette” with the physics of extreme weather if we don’t act now.
So while yesterday was a day to celebrate, much work remains to be done. Fortunately, as the political showing yesterday indicates, we have powerful momentum and support to carry out the task.
America is an outlier country in terms of its citizens’ high level of disbelief about climate science. And a new Pew poll shows that the partisan divide is strong:
As with previous Pew Research Center surveys, there are wide differences among political party and ideology groups on whether or not human activity is responsible for warming temperatures. A large majority of liberal Democrats (79%) believe the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity. In contrast, only about one-in-six conservative Republicans (15%) say this, a difference of 64 percentage points. A much larger share of conservative Republicans say there is no solid evidence the Earth is warming (36%) or that warming stems from natural causes (48%).
Yet while Americans distrust the science, they seem to like some of the major solutions needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On energy:
Fully 89% of Americans favor more solar panel farms, just 9% oppose. A similarly large share supports more wind turbine farms (83% favor, 14% oppose).
By comparison, the public is more divided over expanding the production of nuclear and fossil fuel energy sources. Specifically, 45% favor more offshore oil and gas drilling, while 52% oppose. Similar shares support and oppose expanding hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for oil and gas (42% favor and 53% oppose). Some 41% favor more coal mining, while a 57% majority opposes this.
On rooftop solar:
Some 55% of homeowners under age 50 say they have given serious thought to installing or have already installed solar panels at home. Fewer homeowners ages 50 and older say the same (36%).
The key reasons people cite for considering solar are financial followed by concern for the environment. Among all who have installed or given serious thought to installing solar panels, large majorities say their reasons include cost savings on utilities (92%) or helping the environment (87%). Smaller shares of this group, though still majorities, say improved health (67%) or a solar tax investment credit (59%) are reasons they have or would install home solar panels.
And on restricting emissions:
Americans are largely optimistic that restrictions on power plant emissions (51%) and international agreements to limit carbon emissions (49%) can make a big difference to address climate change.
So it’s an odd story, but a reminder that climate advocates should focus on solutions in their messaging on this issue. Not only do solutions make people feel empowered, particularly if they’re centered on “local action,” but they help reframe the debate away from depressing and polarizing scientific findings.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the great climate messengers of the day. The hugely popular celebrity has chosen to make the cause of climate change his own, famously devoting his Academy Award speech this year to the subject and funding climate activism through his somewhat troubled personal foundation.
And now he’s set to release what looks to be a pretty epic documentary on climate change, entitled “Before the Flood,” with a trailer that feels like an action movie:
So it’s too bad he’s also one of the celebrity endorsers of an anti-housing ballot initiative in Los Angeles. Infill housing represents one of the most important ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Residents in infill neighborhoods drive less and live in more compact homes that use less energy and water. They also help reduce demand for sprawl housing that eats up open space and farmland.
This ballot initiative will make it harder to build such housing. DiCaprio’s position on this issue is squarely at odds with his important climate advocacy and undermines his credibility on this issue.
I’ll still look forward to watching the documentary and appreciate his advocacy, but I hope he reconsiders his support for the ballot measure.
Today is a pretty big day in the world of U.S. environmental policy. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument on state challenges to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan.” The Plan, promulgated under existing Clean Air Act authority, represents one of the centerpieces of the Obama Administration’s efforts to combat climate change. It also underlies the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate agreement signed in December.
So the stakes are high. Folks were lining up early to get a spot in the courtroom today, as Denise Grab of NYU Law’s Policy Institute tweeted at 5:30am:
75+ people already in line at 5:30 am in the rain for #CleanPowerPlan oral argument. That’s dedication. pic.twitter.com/gvblZqAefp
— Denise Grab (@denisegrab) September 27, 2016
The court debate will hinge on whether or not the EPA is limited to only regulating sources like power plants “behind the fence line” — in other words, only requiring on-site emissions reductions technologies — or whether the EPA can require grid-wide emissions reduction policies, like cap-and-trade or energy efficiency programs.
My UCLA Law colleagues Ann Carlson and Cara Horowitz, along with William Boyd (University of Colorado Law), describe the basic argument here on Legal Planet:
The Clean Power Plan uses the grid’s interconnectedness to reduce power-sector emissions in an efficient, effective way. The Plan would cut carbon dioxide emissions significantly by 2030 – to about a third below 2005 levels. The rule justifies that level of reduction by calculating, among other things, the potential for shifting generation toward low- and zero-emitting sources and away from coal-fired power plants. Yet the coal industry and conservative attorneys general who are challenging the CPP claim that we should ignore the interconnected electricity machine and treat its component parts – power plants – separately.
The case magnifies the intensity of the coming presidential election. Regardless of the outcome today, the case will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Due to a Republican senate blockade on Merrick Garland, President Obama’s pick to fill the open seat from Antonin Scalia’s death last February, the court only has eight justices. A 4-4 tie on this appeal will let the circuit court opinion stand.
So whichever candidate is elected president and fills that seat (or causes Republicans to buckle and confirm Garland in the lame duck session) will have a major impact on the national and international climate fight.
And as last night’s presidential debate showed, the candidates diverge sharply on this issue. Hillary Clinton was the only candidate to mention clean energy jobs and attack Donald Trump for his past statements on climate change as a hoax by the Chinese to gain a competitive advantage. He denied making that claim, but his 2012 tweet says otherwise. Meanwhile, his campaign manager affirmed today that he doesn’t believe in the science that humans are causing climate change.
So the choice could not be clearer on this issue in November. And the court decision stemming from oral argument today will loom large, regardless of how much the media pays attention to climate change during this campaign.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers has been making noise in the past year about how local restrictions on housing across the country has created a national economic drag. But now the council has come out swinging pretty hard against these “not-in-my-backyard” local policies.
In a new “Housing Development Toolkit” [PDF], the White House summarizes how the rise in local land use restrictions has hurt housing affordability across the country by restricting supply. It cites studies showing “sharp increases in zoning and other land use restrictions” in cities as diverse as Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. But special attention was placed on Los Angeles:
Though popular coverage of these challenges has been most focused on the Bay Area, Seattle, and major East Coast cities, Los Angeles provides a clear illustration of the impact of the primary barrier to development – restrictive zoning. In 1960, Los Angeles was zoned to accommodate 10 million people; after decades of population growth and increased demand, the city is today zoned for only 4.3 million people.
And what are the consequences of all these local restrictions? Well, it’s driven up rents and home prices in high-wage cities, which makes being poor in America even tougher:
In just the last 10 years, the number of very low-income renters paying more than half their income for rent has increased by almost 2.5 million households, to 7.7 million nationwide, in part because barriers to housing development are limiting housing supply.
And even for those who aren’t poor, the housing supply shortage appears to have significantly curtailed economic growth:
A recent study noted that in theoretical models of mobility, economic research suggests our Gross Domestic Product would have been more than 10 percent higher in 2009 if workers and capital had freely moved so that the relative wage distribution remained at its 1964 level. Most of this loss in wages and productivity is caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high-productivity regions, including zoning regulations and other local rules.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that those who are fortunate enough to own a home in high-wage metropolitan areas simply don’t want to let others have the same opportunity. As council chair Jason Furman pens in an accompanying op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:
But in other cases, barriers to housing development can allow a small number of individuals to enjoy the benefits of living in a community while excluding many others, limiting diversity and economic mobility.
In short, housing restrictions have become a key tool to maintain economic (and racial) segregation in our society.
Missing from this discussion, of course, is also the severe environmental impacts of this constrained growth. Because if growth isn’t happening in our low-emissions urban core, it’s going to be pushed out to sprawl areas, resulting in lost open space and more pollution from long driving commutes.
The White House report offers solutions, summarized in this bullet point list and expanded in the text of the report:
- Establishing by-right development
- Taxing vacant land or donate it to non-profit developers
- Streamlining or shortening permitting processes and timelines
- Eliminate off-street parking requirements
- Allowing accessory dwelling units
- Establishing density bonuses
- Enacting high-density and multifamily zoning
- Employing inclusionary zoning
- Establishing development tax or value capture incentives
- Using property tax abatements
All of these ideas are good ones and have been attempted and/or implemented to various degrees by cities and states around the country. But missing in the report is any discussion of a federal role to encourage adoption of these policies. Land use policies are inherently local, and locals won’t give up that sovereignty easily.
So what can the federal government do? Well, given the amount of infrastructure the federal government funds (albeit at a decreasing amount over the past few decades), it could use the power of the purse to motivate better state and local land use decisions. Basically, no more highway and transit dollars for communities that restrict housing growth. The federal government could also convert the federal gas tax to a “vehicle miles traveled” fee, in order to tackle the severe economic and environmental impacts of long commutes.
To be sure, this report is a great start and provides important political momentum to tackle a growing national crisis. Let’s hope the next step will involve actions to motivate better decision-making at the state — and especially local — levels. Because right now the constituencies against change are much more powerful and loud than those advocating for solutions.
