'Nineties Dreams

Looking back one does not think of the 'nineties as a particularly utopian, optimistic, moment. The right crowd that history was at an end, and no one within the mainstream dared seriously challenge it.

Still, the period had expectations of something better ahead. The mainstream, at least, assumed a breathing spell from international conflict--not an end to conflict, but at least a lot less danger of great power war, and perhaps, more effective international management of such conflict as broke out, with the United Nations becoming a vehicle for a revived effort at collective security through which East and West together could conduct such humanitarian intervention as was needed. (Such thinking is even evident when one looks back at the pop culture of the time. Remember the plot of the first Street Fighter movie, where Guile commanded a peacekeeping force? Remember the UN special forces team in Clive Cussler's Sahara? Probably not. But I do.)

Such arrangements were not regarded as precluding a "peace dividend," which it was thought might help the country get its house in order. Even if much of the rhetoric could be read as nationalist rather than social democratic, preoccupied with competitiveness rather than equity, even conservatives thought neoliberalism had gone too far, and something had to be done (as one recalls reading, for instance, Mr. Southern Strategy himself, Kevin Phillips). The financialization and deindustrialization of the economy; the country's dilapidated physical infrastructure and the flaws of the educational system; the high-priced and underperforming health care system--there was expectation that all this would be redressed.

There was, too, some thought for the amelioration of the pressure on the natural environment. One heard much of deforestation, and pesticides, and the hole in the ozone layer, while the danger of climate change was already widely known, well understood. These were, after all, the years when, in what was then an exceptional investment for a basic cable channel, TBS produced Captain Planet, and the revival of G.I Joe sent Flint off to lead the Eco-Warriors (because a Joe has "got to care about the environment"), and on the big screen Steven Seagal battled eco-criminals in movies like On Deadly Ground. These were the years of the Rio Declaration, and of even Texas oil man and Middle East oil war-wager George H.W. Bush claiming that if reelected he would be "the environmental President" (and if far from perfect on that score, in light of the legislation he did sign in his four years, not necessarily insincere in making the claim, certainly in comparison with many of his successors).

Of course, the decade, and the generation since, proved a colossal disappointment. War with Iraq became permanent, with grave consequences for all concerned ("We think the price is worth it"), while in just a few years Cold War-style crises were becoming routine again (the Norwegian rocket incident, the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, the confrontation at the Pristina airport where, legend has it, James Blunt "saved the world"). Even before that the vision of collective security and humanitarian intervention via the UN broke down as Russia opposed NATO action in the Balkans (a far from trivial factor in reviving tension between Washington and Moscow), and a genocide in Rwanda unopposed by the world community revealed the gap between rhetoric and reality.

Peace dividend? By and large little changed from the Cold War. The force was cut by a couple of battle carriers, a few divisions, some wings; a few acquisitions programs were cut but replaced with others that, to the surprise of no one, proved equally expensive (the Seawolf subs replaced by the not-so-budget Viriginia class); and American forces remained massively present in Europe, East Asia, and more than ever before, the Middle East (with the Navy newly forming a Fifth Fleet, and headquartering it in Bahrain).

Where the American economy was concerned, the 'nineties did not mark the end of neoliberalism, but its locking in by a Clinton administration committed, above all, to balanced budgets achieved at the slightest possible trouble to the well-off and considerable trouble to those least well-off (up went fuel tax and payroll tax, while welfare was nearly "reformed" out of existence, even as corporate welfare moved ample, not least the giveaway of the airwaves to Big Media); to "Reinventing Government" along business lines; to free trade (NAFTA, GATT) and deregulation (regarding the ownership of telecommunications, banks, brokerages, while Reinventing Government meant regulatory enforcement generally became fairly "hands-off") and privatization (indeed, much more ambitious privatization, for instance, in regard to the military-owned utilities infrastructure and the Federally-owned portion of the electric grid and maybe even Social Security) than it actually managed to realize.*

Reversing financialization and deindustrialization? Forget it. Financialization, certainly, went into overdrive. The infrastructure? Well, that bill that Bill promised during the campaign as stimulus fell by the wayside, as did any really active role for government in industrial or uban development, the President preferring Third World-ish "enterprise zones" for bringing investment to poor areas. Education? The administration certainly proclaimed ambitious goals--and then mostly backed the private sector again, by way of support for charter schools. Health care reform? Sorry, Bill said to the supporters who had expected it, "I used up all my political capital on those free trade agreements you guys didn't want," treatment of the issue limited to Medicaid cuts and a feeble, market-centered attempt to hold down costs through Health Management Organizations.

The treatment of the environment? Entirely consistent with all that . . .

Of course, there was less backlash than there might have been, for various reasons. Where international relations was concerned, it mattered that Americans tuned out the rest of the world amid end-of-the-Cold War triumphalism, and that criticism of the country's military posture had become far less allowable since the '70s (a story David Sirota, among others, has told memorably), and that with the "culture wars" and upper-class identity politics swallowing up defense policy along with everything else, the debates over gays and women in the military were treated far more lengthily and seriously than the issue of what a military was for in the first place. (It mattered, too, that collective security, humanitarian intervention and the rest never had much of a popular base of support.)

Where the country's economic life was concerned, the initial confusion and surprise entailed a certain disenchantment, but this was muted by the fact that those who desired alternative policies had nowhere else to go (this was the behavior of the Democrat, after all!), and by the fact that, in the latter half of the decade, a Silicon Valley-cum-Wall Street bubble meant the kind of growth the country had not seen in a generation as people got new toys to play with ("What are these Internets I keep hearing so much about?"), convincing them there was fire as well as smoke here, while neoliberal hucksters like Tom Friedman talked up the moment for all it was worth. That Dow Jones average would go up and up for ever, they said, and through your pension fund, or even if you just quit your day job to become a day trader, you too would get a piece of the action, with the hugeness of the rapidly, eternally growing pie meaning that even a very little slice could have you retiring at forty. And all this would somehow take care of everything else, even the environment, as growing wealth and ever-more efficient technology effortlessly solved these problems that seemed to loom so large . . .

The illusions died, of course, war and even great power war resurging (Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine), neoliberalism rolling on and on from catastrophe to catastrophe (tech crash, global fuel and food crisis, the Great Recession and the decade of austerity which followed) as the talking about those same old economic and associated social problems (deindustrialization and infrastructure and health care) just went on and on and on without action, and the environmental calamity worsening well beyond the fears of most at the time (as climate change-driven apocalypse increasingly appeared in even the most mainstream discussion a threat not only within the life of the living, but the present generation). In the process the 'nineties has actually come to seem even to someone who thought they were fairly awful as, in at least some respects, less bleak than the vista before us now.

A 100 Percent Renewable Energy World?

I recently posted a lengthy piece in which I reviewed the familiar charges made by detractors of renewable wind and solar energy against the possibility of its playing a significant role in the energy mix during the coming decades.

Examining their charges with regard to price, subsidies, pollution, land use, I have been singularly unimpressed. For all their imperfections, they remain cheaper and less taxing to the environment in these respects than more established sources, often significantly. ("Wind power requires fossil fuels," the detractors whine--yes, in production and installation, and just that, so that its carbon footprint is about 1 percent that of a coal plant, 2 percent of a natural gas plant, which I suppose is why they don't usually get around to talking numbers.)

I remain unsure as to the real value of the EROEI calculations we have. These estimates often seem to me a case of impressive-seeming precision with much more doubtful accuracy. But the assessments are far from being altogether damning.

It also seems the matters of the intermittency, compensatory energy storage, and raw materials consumption get played up excessively. However, here I concede that the problems, past a certain point, are more substantial.

For example: it is clear that the intermittency of wind and solar creates challenges for those seeking to derive a large part of their electricity from them. However, we also know that modern, flexible, sufficiently connective grids can deliver reliable electrical output with a far higher proportion of intermittent wind and solar in the grid than the naysayers imagined. Twenty percent as the limit? The Germany and Danish grids are among the most reliable around with twice that, and it may be that with currently existing technology and known practice this can continue to be expanded into the sixty percent range.

Of course, that leaves the question of the other forty percent, which would seem to have to come from less intermittent sources. However, we know that hydroelectric works here, supplying many a nation with nearly all its power (advanced, high-income, intensively energy-consuming Norway getting 98 percent from this one source), while it provides the world as a whole with a sixth of its power. Geothermal production, rather less exploited, offers similar stability, and can be vastly expanded on the basis of current, never mind future, technique. Solar thermal energy production, increasingly affordable, offers considerable potentials (a decade ago there was already talk of its providing the world a quarter of its energy), with biofuels potentially playing a role in this area.

In short, with current know-how one can push the contribution of a broader mix of renewables far beyond sixty percent--perhaps not yet all the way to one hundred percent globally, but at least in a good part of it, not least the United States, coming fairly close. Meanwhile, advances in grids, and storage tecnologies for energy production of all kinds (battery prices are falling) hold out the hope of still more than that (all on top of the continued cheapening and increasing productivity of power output from these various sources).

This raises two possibilities, broadly speaking. One is to attempt to capitalize on known technique to the fullest extent, and develop the other possibilities to the end of closing the gaps.

The other is to deem the successes and the perhaps easily realizable potentials irrelevant, and declaring the cause totally and hopelessly lost for all time, write them off and seek something else entirely. Never mind what we're seeing in northern Europe and elsewhere; never mind how consistently wrong they have been in the past on this score. Don't bother going for more wind and solar, we may have too much already. Let's go on cooking with gas!

In the circumstances, it is astonishing that so many, so vehemently, promote the latter course as the sounder of the two options. But that is where the situation stands, with proponents of this view promoting their ideas as if they were rigorous, tough-minded thinking in contrast with the flakiness of those wishing for a 100 percent renewable base for electrical production--and viciously beating down anyone who suggests otherwise. (Mention Fukushima, and they roll their eyes at you ostentatiously, as if to say you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. You're not.)

The wrongheadedness of this view apart, there is also the dishonesty of their view of nuclear as tried and true and somehow a safe, conservative bet. The truth is that any course we take in regard to our energy base, like any large-scale, long-range investment, will involve uncertainty and risk, proportioned to the scale and range of that investment. (And indeed, has there ever been a larger-scale, longer-range investment than the need to change the energy base so as to ward off climate catastrophe?) Someone who thinks that multiplying the number of atomic reactors in the world is a risk-free, costless endeavor is not as out of touch with reality as the climate change deniers who insist that fossil fuels are JUST DANDY, but still needs to think long and hard about that position.

For my part: I have already gone on the record as saying I am not taking the hard, never-nuclear line. I am certainly for the 100 percent renewable energy objective, requisite moonshots and all. But I have also argued for continued development of Generation Four nuclear. (Think thorium-fueled molten salt plants.) The difference is that I see them as a Plan B, to fill in whatever gaps emerge in the broader plan. I trust they will not be many. Perhaps we will not even need the alternative at all. But the object of moving, moving in a big way, moving fast, is far too important for us to totally rule anything out.

The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript
5/31/19
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet
4/23/19
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The Mendacity of the Renewable Energy-Bashers

I have been writing about energy issues for over a decade. In that time I have noticed, time and again, the reliance of those who denigrate renewable energy on "fighting dirty"--relying on shoddy, mendacious argument, and irrational appeals, to bully those who disagree with them. It seems only appropriate to say something of that.

Double Standards in Technological Comparisons
First and foremost I have been struck by the tendency of detractors of renewable energy to present a balance sheet consisting solely of its credits, not its debits--often while pretending to compare it with the more established sources, often without actually presenting the figures on that balance sheet at all.

For example, they are quick to point out that renewables have received subsidies, and that they carry ecological costs--accounting for greenhouse gas emissions during their life cycle. They do not, however, concern themselves with the fact that the same goes for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--as if they had no costs or problems at all, as if they were totally wonderful and perfect. The result is that there is no comparison among these diverse options to see how they stack up in these respects, no consideration of whether renewables may, in fact, be advantageous to some appreciable, worthwhile degree--only much harping on any imperfection they may have, as if this were an automatic deal-breaker.

This may be an oversight on their part--albeit, one which suggests a strong bias in their focusing on the downsides of renewables while ignoring those of established energy sources. However, it may also be a matter of their knowing full well how poorly their favored sources stack up in any such comparison.

Yes, renewables have received subsidies--feed-in tariffs and the like. But so have fossil fuels--which may now be getting the benefit of as much as five trillion dollars a year according not to Greenpace, but to that high church of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund. Nuclear energy, too, has been a beneificary of heavy subsidy, and produced great externalities. (The renewables-basher gets contemptuous if you mention Fukushima, but guess what? The clean-up bill for that disaster was estimated at $200 billion--three years and much bad news ago.)

Yes, renewables have not been competing on a level playing field--because that field has been tilted so long and so sharply in favor of the established energy sources.

Yes, while the spinning of a wind turbine does not in itself produce greenhouse gas emissions, the production, installation, disposal of a wind turbine entails carbon dioxide emissions. How much?

Eleven grams per kilowatt-hour.

It is not zero.

But compare that with the kilogram of carbon dioxide (980 g) produced by a coal plant, the half-kilo (465) by a natural gas plant, which means that a wind turbine generates 98-99 percent less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity. Rather than cause for despair about them this is a powerful argument on their behalf.

Treating Technologies in Isolation
The pattern of giving half of the picture or less in the manner described above extends beyond comparisons between renewables and more established sources to lengthy debunking of the prospect of one source of renewable energy carrying the whole burden--100 percent solar, for example. This is, in part, because the idea of such a "monoculture" is an easy straw man. By and large, proponents of renewable energy, cognizant of the limits of any one form of production, advocate a mix of technologies, to cover a wide variety of circumstances and locations--solar working with wind working with hydropower and whatever else may be available at a particular location that, much as nuclear and coal and gas complement each other in today's grids, would do the same in a renewables-based economy, substantially overcoming weaknesses such as the intermittency of sources. The sun may not shine all day--but when it is not shining, the wind turbines may be spinning.

They also tend to ignore the significant ongoing changes in the way grids as a whole are run--in particular, the shift from grids generating wasteful "baseload" energy ("too much when you don't need it, not enough when you do") to flexible, "smart" grids able to cope swiftly and precisely with shifting supply and demand. As Germany has demonstrated, where grids are sufficiently flexible and connectivity, they can already substanially handle the task of matching intermittent wind and solar to demand at least as reliably as a grid based on more traditional supplies. The incorporation of still other options, like dispatchable hydroelectric power (already well-developed) and solar thermal (pricier as an electricity producer, but relatively low-cost as a way of storing renewable solar energy for dispatch later), provides still more options.

Ruling Out Further Technical Progress
In addition to their tendency to give the advantages of renewables (and disadvantages of other sources) short shrift, and envision renewables-based grids in straw man terms, the detractors of renewable energy, when going beyond the question of whether the technologies can bear a given burden now to whether they can possibly do so in the foreseeable future, dismiss any prospect of improvement in their cost or performance. That the price of solar power-generated electricity fell by seven-eighths in the last decade (to name just one of the more striking of the field's many areas of progress), and thus holds out promise of further improvements, especially if proper support were provided, is, in their view, completely irrelevant.

Of course, one may be willing to grant the point that one cannot build on the basis of unrealized possibilities. Yet, it is another thing to take that as reason not to try and develop those possibilities if the resources are available; and still more, rule out the option for all time. Moreover, while such detractors are extremely exacting with renewables in this area, they are often quite bullish on the prospects of technical progress in the areas they favor, like palliatives for the carbon emissions of continued fossil fuels consumption. Remember how Carbon Capture and Storage was going to save the world?

Once more, a double standard is in evidence.

"Too Good to Be True"
As might be guessed by anyone who has had much experience of specious argument, and those who offer it, the renewables-bashers cross the line into appeals to "truthiness"--the "quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true." How so? Simply put, much of their appeal rests on the idea that the promises made for renewables are just "too good to be true"--an appeal to cynicism and pessmism as such.

Why is that the case? One reason is that the pervasiveness and prestige of the idea that the world must always not be as we would like it to be, that the cosmos is rigged against any chance of human happiness (the "tragic view"), is somehow the beginning and end of wisdom--and that anyone expecting better is a fool--can scarcely be overstated. The idea that we cannot have a green modernity, being unpalatable, consequently seems the "truthier" for being unpalatable. Truthier, too, because of the pompous aloofness with which such words are often spoken, the comfortable being so inclined to lay down the "hard facts of life" to those they see as inferiors; and because of the simple-minded equation of irony with wit, the more for how snobbish irony can be. And truthier because we live in such a postmodernist, end-of-history cultural atmosphere, where people in middle age have no memory of a major problem being solved, only of endless talk, broken promises, betrayals, as things go on getting worse, much worse, especially in regard to the environment. (The environmental movement has won battles, but just about never any big ones, while everything we see in 2019 tells us just how badly they have been losing the war--for decades.)

It seems to me that it might even be the case that, even if people suspect the claims that a renewable energy-based modernity is unworkable are untrue, they are susceptible to going along with it because of that same harsh experience in these decades--that Big Business never loses a fight, that a greener economy can only happen at their sufferance, and that if this means atomic energy, nuclear or nothing, as their shills and their trolls so endlessly insist, then that is preferable to the alternative.

All of this derives additional force from the identification of aspirations to a world which is happier and greener with the countercultural "hippie," still after all these years held up as a straw man for the contempt of the right-wingers who won that particular kulturkampf and never let anyone forget it--hippies contrasted with the "practical men" (I suspect the gendered aspect of this is relevant) laying down the "hard facts of life."

Looking back over it all, one can see how many are intimidated, if not persuaded, by all of that. But to say that it is a logically compelling argument is something else.

There, they lose and lose decisively--and no one should ever forget that.

Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet: Postscript

Recently, irritated by the endless repetition of the same tired, debunked arguments purportedly showing why renewable energy sources can never be a major factor in resolving the energy-climate crisis by nuclear energy shills and others of their vile ilk (as well as a good many perfectly honest people taken in by their propaganda), I decided to write a post debunking these arguments--specifically the claims that renewables are too expensive, too unreliable, have too low an EROEI, and are too ecologically unsound (too polluting, too intensive in their use of land area and raw materials).

In that piece I concentrated on the production of electricity of wind and solar, to the exclusion of other types of renewables. Of course, no one expects that even the full diversity of these two sources (onshore and offshore wind, photovoltaic and thermal solar in its centralized and decentralized forms) will have to carry the burden by themselves, even in a 100 percent renewable energy-based economy. Hydroelectric and geothermal power each provide other options, with hydroelectric especially notable for its low monetary and energy cost, and easy dispatchability--alleviating one of those areas where wind and solar may be at some disadvantage, and in general simplifying the problem of shifting to a grid completely powered by renewables. I also limited my discussion of the prospects for progress in these areas, and particularly the possibilities of more radical technology rapidly aiding our progress--like the development of high-altitude wind power (one striking estimate regarding which is that it may have a whopping EROEI of 600!).

This was, in part, because as it was the piece quickly grew far longer than I had originally intended (4,500 words, with close to seventy hyperlinks playing the role of endnotes). However, it was also because I wanted to focus on the fuller capabilities of these technologies which seem so likely to be critical in any solution, as their concrete possibilities actually stand at the present time--the better to fulfill that object of answering those detractors whose attacks drove me to write in the first place.

Reflections on "The Moral Equivalent of War"

Several years ago I wrote a brief piece recalling the view of the energy crisis as "the moral equivalent of war," and why the crisis has so signally failed to call forth the implicit, and required, leadership, enthusiasm and effort.

One factor that I think merited more discussion is the utter failure of the environmental movement to offer any vision of a better life for the people of the world. Odd to me then, this now seems to me easily ascribable to its having been so strongly shaped by a constellation of toxic, reactionary ideas--Malthusianism, postmodernism, neoliberalism. After all, not only are such ideas incapable of offering visions of hope to people, but they emerged from a vicious desire to crush such hopes. And of course, neoliberalism, in as well as out of its environmental variation, was devoted to assaulting the idea of the public, the collective--the use of government power to solve problems--for the sake of protecting the prerogatives and profits of the financial sector.

Today, amid talk of a Green New Deal--in the United States, vehemently opposed not only by the avowed right, but the staunchly neoliberal "establishment" of the Democratic Party whose face has now become the sneering visage of Nancy Pelosi, and at the same time, resonating with a public increasingly demanding action--one wonders if the day of neoliberal environmentalism, in spite of the continued faith of elites, in it, is not drawing to a close.

Time Capsule: Thomas Friedman and Enron

It would be a great understatement to say that Thomas Friedman has long since lost whatever credibility he may ever have had as an economic thinker, or observer of the political scene. This is so much the case that it can hardly seem worth bothering with his prior statements. Yet, time and again I find myself thinking of one of his less well-known gaffes: his shameless and shameful fawning over Enron in The Lexus and the Olive Tree as the epitome of that dynamic, globalized turbo-capitalism for which he was such a cheer-leader; as proof positive of how the information economy was the real scene of the action now, quoting Kenneth Lay's remarks at paragraph-length and then himself declaring that "if Enron's exchange works, it could be the equivalent of discovering cyber-oil, for Enron and for the United States," then goes on to glory for several paragraphs more in the thought of how those loser Eurosclerotics across the Pond will soon find the American "hyperpower" even more than before the global sheriff and all-around "Michael Jordan" of the world economy.

Friedman even argued that while it engaged in ecologically threatening practices Enron, and other companies like it (he spoke its name this time in the same breath as "Nike, MTV, McDonald's, Pizza Hut . . . Taco Bell"), were ultimately to be regarded as the keepers of our environment for us, and our one hope for its salvation that "civil society" would get them to do the right thing in the end (even if he conceded that this seemed like "a hope and a prayer" at the time).

Less than three years later, Enron was not just bankrupt, but revealed as a colossal fraud. Alas, few if any bothered to point out Friedman's earlier praises, and I suspect still fewer than that read anything into it. But in hindsight it seems remarkably symbolic--about what the financialization at the heart of neoliberalization has meant; about the delusions regarding a New, information Economy; about the hopes of business, with a little encouragement from civil society, doing right by the environment (as cash continues to pour into fossil fuels). Symbolic of their inanity, and if they were not an ultra-cynical fraud from start to finish, their utter insanity. Indeed, nearly two decades after Friedman published that particular bucket of drivel, that little bit of it still seems representative of the illusions of the '90s, illusions whose discrediting is harder to deny or ignore now than before, but which still dominate the "respectable" discourse, as they can only do for so long as neoliberalism remains king, and even a good many critically minded observers accept the insistence that There Is No Alternative. Thus did it go, for example, in Adam Tooze's in many other respects excellent history of the financial crisis, Crashed.

The broader public seems to have other ideas, however, and I increasingly suspect that the courtiers of the Davos Crowd, still telling us that everything is just dandy, will have a harder and harder time ignoring this.

Bullshit Jobs--and Bullshit Consumption?

I have already written here about the idea of degrowth, and not in a positive fashion. While the idea is unrealistic, and its proponents are generally supporting it for intellectually and morally questionable reasons, it is a far different thing to say that, at least for substantial portions of the citizenries of the higher-income, more developed countries (and to differing degrees, well beyond these strata), people could easily be living better while consuming less. The reason is not because consumption levels make no contribution to human happiness, or consumer comforts are somehow pernicious, but because our lives are organized--indeed, organized for us--so that we are forced to consume a great deal in ways that, on balance, do not make us happier, and make many of us less happy.

I do not deny that the "manufacture of wants" by marketers, shopping-as-entertainment, and the rest, contain much that is unhealthy and hollow--and compel people to make choices they otherwise would not have, whether due to their manipulation by business, or the social pressure to fit in. However, that seems to me secondary. More significant is the fact that, to refer back to John K. Galbraith, public squalor forces people to pursue private affluence; that, partly because of that squalor (the costs of auto ownership, child care, etc.), two-income families are prone to fall into the two-income trap of which Elizabeth Warren wrote; and the design of consumer goods of all kinds for short lives and disposal rather than repair.

Considering those matters it seems to me that, as David Graeber observed, we are working bullshit jobs--to pay for what I will call "bullshit consumption," consumption that brings us no pleasure or benefit (consumption that, like many a bullshit job, amounts to "duct-taping"), and this, largely for the sake of keeping ourselves in bullshit jobs, while our expenditures keep other people in bullshit jobs in an economy that, in the end, has bullshit for an organizing principle.

Why We Really Consume As We Do

Neoliberal environmentalists, befitting their essentially misanthropic, right-wing outlook, and its tendency to reduce major problems to matters of individual failure (as their counterparts in other areas do when discussing poverty, substance abuse, obesity, etc.), make much of the depravity of people's spending and consumption habits. "Oh!" they say, "isn't it horrible! All that money they spend and that gas they burn and all those things they buy and throw away! What horrid self-indulgence! What appalling personal irresponsibility!"

I totally agree that our current consumption patterns are far from ideal. What I have taken issue with in the past, and continue to take issue with now, is their characteristically neoliberal explanation for why it is that people consume as they do. I take the position that there is a good deal of consumption which has nothing to do with the consumer's "choices" in any meaningful sense of that term, and everything to do with choices made by persons far more powerful than they, with a focus on three aspects of this--the private-public balance in our economic lives; the consumption directly required by the fact that it is required of people who work; and finally, the production priorities of manufacturers, who virtually eliminate consumer choice in many key areas.

1. The most basic reason why we consume so much is, to borrow from the ever useful John Kenneth Galbraith, the reality of public poverty, which makes high private consumption necessary to meet any given need. There is no public transport--and so people have no choice but more expensive, more polluting, private cars. There is no national health care system--and so they must buy health care as a commodity sold in the marketplace by a profit-seeking enterprise, which also entails great costs (with the result that the U.S. spends twice per capita what France does per capita, while achieving poorer outcomes, almost half the adult population uninsured and underinsured).

The average annual cost of car ownership is $8,500 per vehicle, and a typical household has two, suggesting a figure of $17,000. At the same time the price of health care for a family of four under a typical employee-sponsored insurance plan will run $28,000. Already this swallows up most of a median household budget (some $56,000 a year), while the pattern continues through every area of life--such as housing (which has contributed to those long commutes in which people burn up so much gas in their cars) or education (private schools, especially at the post-secondary level, demanding vast fees).

2. Much of our consumption is not a matter of indulgence, but a necessity due to our working lives. White collar workers are expected to purchase costly, formal work attire. The manner in which cities have been planned, people housed and work distributed means that each is apt have little choice but to drive a privately owned car long distances each day if they are to work at all. The long hours involved in preparing for work, getting to work, on the job, and then coming back from work, leave little time for meal preparation--and so they have to eat out, or buy pre-prepared frozen meals, simply because they are harried. The long hours, the lack of maternity and paternity leave rights mean that parents of even very young children have little choice but to turn to child care services, using which entails still more driving. (Indeed, the way extra clothes, transport, eating out and child care eat up a two-income household's second income was the basis for Elizabeth Warren's study The Two-Income Trap.) And of course, this taxing, grinding schedule, entails considerable physical and mental stresses, and physical and mental problems that run up their already burdensome medical bills.

3. In addition to the reality that so much consumption is a matter of individuals doing for themselves privately and less efficiently what might be done collectively at lower cost; and the bills, ironically, paid simply for the sake of being able to have a job which will pay the bills; there is the question of the goods that are made available for purchase. Orthodox economic theory imagines the consumer as king, but the reality is entirely different. Especially in an oligopolistic marketplace, consumers buy what business is willing to sell within their price range, and for most the range of choice simply does not include much that is sensible. Many a consumer would love to be offered a choice of goods that includes items which will be durable and long-lasting; and which it will be within the power of a non-specialist to repair more cheaply than replacing them outright. They would love to be able to not pay for the arms race among competing advertisers, love to not pay for features of which they know and understand nothing and which they are unlikely to never use, love to not pay extra for new versions that really offer no advantage over the old versions.

By and large, they do not get such choices. Instead they get goods which will last a short time, which it is extremely inconvenient and expensive to repair so that replacement is the more practical option, which are heavily advertised and loaded with unwanted and unneeded extras and modifications and the rest of what the term "product differentiation" covers. And when they throw out the old goods of this type, because they have been so short-lived and unrepairable, the companies do not exactly make it easy for them to minimize the cost to the environment as they do so. American cities recycle paper and plastic and glass; they do not recycle electronics the same way, dumping the responsibility on the individual consumer who must, yet again, pay a private company out of pocket for something that could be (and should be) a public service--which, inevitably, means less recycling of what can be recycled. When they throw out what cannot be recycled, the companies have not exactly worried about its doing as little damage to nature as possible.

One could imagine the situation being quite different. One could picture a situation where public affluence means that people can live decently with less overall and less private expenditure; where shorter work weeks and decent leave periods translate to less commuting and the rest and therefore less consumption; where people, able to buy even technologically advanced items designed to last, and which they can repair, buy less; and at every stage and in every way, less damage. That so many fail to acknowledge the possibility, indeed reject it vehemently the moment it is mentioned, says less about modern life than it does about their inability or unwillingness to imagine modernity on any other terms--their passionate belief in neoliberal capitalism or nothing, and determination to not proceed from their valid, correct awareness of its ecological sustainability to the social questions inextricably bound up with it.

Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet

One reality too little acknowledged is that the debate about the manner in which we produce and consume energy is dominated by those who can fund research and advocacy. By and large, it is the businesses supplying energy from fossil fuels and atomic fission, and those broadly sympathetic to their political agenda, who have such means, and use them, skewing the debate through the innumerable propaganda outlets which pass for "think tanks" and "news media." And they, of course, have been relentlessly hostile to renewable energy (with the nuclear sector lobbying governments hard to make life as difficult as possible for wind and solar producers, and trying equally hard to discredit those sources of energy in the eyes of the public).

At the same time much mainstream environmentalism tends toward extreme (and often, perversely gleeful) pessimism about technological possibilities for saving modern civilization--inclined to ignore the benefits and emphasize the costs of any development.

Making matters worse, popular science reporting, dependent as it is on sourcing, cannot avoid being affected by these tendencies. This is all the more so due to the conventional and uncritical outlook of mainstream journalists; the reality that many of those who work as science journalists do so with surprisingly little scientific knowledge, and still less understanding of the methods, economics, politics, sociology of science; and the reality that profit-minded news outlets cater to the appetite of some for "disaster porn," and generally seek attention through shock. All of this drives them to frequently use for their headlines the most negative possible reading of a given situation--and then, down in the text of the article, which fewer people will actually see, while those who will see it have already had their first impression of the piece formed, back off the extreme claim that the analysis does not actually support (for instance, this claim that wind farms may make global warming worse rather than better through their effect on wind flows).

In this post I address the arguments made by proponents of expanded fossil fuel or nuclear use (and collapse-besotted doomsayers) against the possibility of renewable energy sources becoming the principal providers of electricity in the near future, and especially the potentials of wind and solar energy in this regard. In particular this post examines the common claims that renewables are "too expensive," whether in price terms, or the inconvenience to consumers through their being "too unreliable"; the related charge that they offer "too little Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)"; and their being "too resource-intensive," whether due to the pollution they cause, their land area requirements, or the raw materials they consume, to such a degree as to render them a "cure worse than the disease"; and debunks each of them in turn. Finally it turns to the prospects for renewables becoming still more rather than less favorable in the years ahead.

"Too Expensive--and Unreliable"
A longtime objection to renewable energy has been its reputed high cost, historically declining due to technical progress and rising production volumes, but still higher than fossil fuels in the area of electricity production until very recently. The last few years, however, have seen the levelized, unsubsidized cost of wind energy, and even utility-scale photovoltaic solar energy become a cheaper source of power than coal ($29-$56 per megawatt-hour for wind, $36-$46 for solar depending on type, versus $60-$143 for coal according to a by-no-means-bullish report from Lazard Asset Management). Indeed, we have reached the point where constructing new wind and solar is cheaper than running existing coal facilities. The same goes for wind and solar relative to nuclear energy ($112-$189), while the price of these renewables is edging below that of combined cycle gas ($41-$74). Community, and rooftop commercial and industrial photovoltaics ($73-170 per megawatt-hour), are also producing electricity at prices comparable to nuclear power, while their price range also overlaps that of coal power; and even pricier concentrated solar thermal has begun to prove economically viable in particularly favorable locations.

Subsidies
Impressive as these figures are, one can argue that they still underestimate the progress renewables have made, and perhaps grossly--because of subsidies not to them, but to their competitors. Much as free-market pietists bemoan the measure of government support that enabled the enlarging scale of production and continued research and development that let renewables attain their present level of productivity (such as feed-in tariffs), the fact remains that this pales next to the extremely long and continuing history of far more massive subsidy of fossil fuels. This is all the more striking if one counts the tolerance of the massive externalities of fossil fuel production and consumption--its negative effects on health and the environment, the bill for which is paid by other people in other ways. Reasonably conservative calculations indicate that the total may run as much as $1 trillion a year for the U.S. alone, and over $5 trillion globally--such that were oil companies actually expected to pay for rectifying the associated market failures (the solution libertarians always advocate in theory and somehow always oppose in practice), they would swiftly go bankrupt. Nuclear energy, too, has been a massive recipient of subsidies, with colossal externalities (the bill for the cleanup after the Fukushima disaster already at $200 billion, and still counting).

The renewables-bashers typically ignore that side of the balance sheet entirely. However, no plausible calculation of the scale of public support to renewable energy production, or tolerance for any externalities that its production may entail, comes close to such figures, not for recent years, and cetainly not for the full history of the two kinds of energy production. In short, renewables have been competing and winning in spite of the government's distribution of subsidy, not because of it, and would likely be doing even better today were fossil fuels not so heavily backed, and as a result the price of oil, coal and gas would be so much higher.

Reliability
All that is very well the renewables-basher may acknowledge, but renewables simply cannot do what those more established energy production methods can with regard to continuity and flexibility of output, can they? One needs "baseload" power supplying a high minimum of electricity round the clock. Renewables cannot provide that, for the wind does not blow all the time, and the sun does not shine all the time. Therefore we can expect to see traditional, baseload sources such as coal and nuclear continuing to operate around the clock, and we could expect to see such traditional sources remain the mainstay of the grid (maybe eighty percent of it), reducing renewables to a supporting player. And so in the end not much has changed.

The Problem of "Baseload"
The characterization of the need for baseload electricity is increasingly questionable, not only hypothetically in light of evolving technology, but large-scale, real-world practice. First and foremost, that word "baseload" that renewables-bashers love to use to browbeat their opponents in debate "really means . . . too much power when you don’t want it, and not enough when you do." In an age of "smart grids" affording more detailed monitoring and control, this wasteful practice has increasingly given way to an emphasis on "flexibility"--the ability to direct power where it is needed, when it is needed, in line with fluctuations in supply and demand. Operative of a sufficiently wide area, such grids let areas generating power surpluses supply electricity to other areas capable of making use of that power, and vice-versa as conditions change--as has already been lengthily demonstrated in northern Europe. Dense, urbanized, highly industrialized Denmark and Germany have, despite being on the cutting edge of wind and solar investment, displayed superior grid reliability to other nations utilizing more traditional power sources and methods. Germany's performance actually improved (its already low 21 minutes lost per year in 2006 falling to just 15 minutes in 2017, even as the share of renewable-generated power in its electricity mix nearly tripled from 12.5 to 36.5 percent of the total). For its part, Denmark is doing about as well with an even higher share (deriving 44 percent of its electricity from wind in the latter year). Indeed, a recent estimate holds that the current technical state of the art may enable the problem to be managed in a grid deriving even 60 percent of its electricity from variable wind and solar.

Complementary Power Sources
The fact that flexible, connective grids can do much to compensate for the intermittency of renewables, however, falls far short of the palliatives, one of which is suggested by the claim that the wind does not blow all the time and the sun does not shine all the time. This could be usefully corrected to read "the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine all the time everywhere at the same time." One can derive considerable advantage from using the two in a complementary fashion, with solar power generating electricity when wind cannot, and the reverse also operative. Indeed, hybrid wind/solar farms combining both forms of production at the same site have already been demonstrated--and the practice been shown to provide a good deal of stability, even at local levels, while further enhancing the stability of grids over wider areas in favored regions.

Energy Storage for the Sake of Dispatchability
In addition to the advantages of a flexible grid incorporating a mix of different energy sources, there are a range of options for storing energy for the sake of its "dispatch" at need later. The cost of batteries admittedly remains high (even the cheapest option, the use of lithium batteries with photovoltaic solar power wiping out its cost advantage), but older, proven alternatives exist. One is the pumped hydroelectric storage which has complemented nuclear power generation for a half century. Another is the storage of excess heat in water, ice and underground rocks, which can when needed be released to drive steam turbines. Concentrated solar thermal lends itself particularly well to such storage, solar towers with storage now price-competitive with nuclear power, and even coal, in many locations ($98-$181 per megawatt-hour). While the spread of cheaper photovoltaic solar has far outpaced the development of solar thermal power, this enables its round-the-clock operation, and its more generally contributing to grid stability.

"Too Little Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI)"
Of course, the matter of price and reliability does not entirely settle the issue. Apparent cheapness can obscure a much more complex and problematic picture--and there may be other ways of calculating costs and benefits, with subsidy payouts only one of the factors skewing the matter.

Accordingly some prefer to speak in terms of Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI)--simply put, the ratio between the energy output of a system, and the energy it took to build and operate it. The EROEI concept can also be analyzed "macroeconomically," with the EROEI of a given society calculated, which has led to arguments that a given level of such return may be minimal for a society to maintain a given level of complexity.

A favorite tactic of renewables-bashers is to claim a particular EROEI figure as essential for modern life to go on, then present figures for renewable energy's output well below that mark--then smugly stand back and gloat over the dashed hopes of this energy form's proponents.

Alas, while the term EROEI sounds intimidatingly scientific, the reality is that EROEI calculations are highly unstandardized. They can be computed in as many ways as there are people to perform the computation, with the result that they vary enormously. Moreover, the factors entering into the calculation are subject to change over time, with rapid change especially likely to skew the estimates. (It appears plausible that the higher-performing wind turbines or photovoltaics of today have a higher EROEI than those of several decades ago, while as oil and gas production relies on less inaccessible supplies and more costly extraction methods, the EROEI of fossil fuels may be going in the opposite direction.) And with renewable energy sources the calculation is trickier because, compared with other sources, siting can make so much difference (the EROEI on solar in equatorial desert very different from that in the polar regions).

All of this leaves much room for the play of analysts' prejudices, enabling anyone to cherry-pick statistics that appear to support their argument, which even a specialist would need a good deal of time and effort to pick apart in detail. (The calculations regarding that far more established, prolific and technologically stable source, nuclear energy, have produced figures ranging from 60 to less than one, meaning that nuclear energy production actually uses up more energy than it produces.)

The question of how high an EROEI we must have to go on with modern life is even more complex and confusing. Clearly an energy source must "pay back" more than it takes to be worthwhile, but the question of how much more would be required to provide a satisfactory base for modern civilization is exceedingly uncertain, and no less contentious and clouded by prejudices. (Some say an EROEI as low as 5-7 would be adequate, while others cite far higher figures, suggesting 40 and more.)

In the absence of deeper explanation and context, any one such claim does not mean very much--and indeed, some go so far as to question not only the value of most such analysis (even its originator Charles Hall acknowledging the problematic nature of its application in these debates), but the value of the concept as such (for example, because EROEI is not the end all and be all of the gross and net energy actually made available).

Still, it seems worth noting that considerable meta-analysis of the subject, endeavoring to critically assess the available body of study, indicates that EROEI for many renewable energy sources is at least as good as many established sources in this regard. A 2010 "meta-analysis" examining fifty different studies conducted between 1977 and 2007 concluded that, according to even the more conservative operational studies, the average EROEI of a wind turbine was in the vicinity of 20 to 1. The figures for photovoltaic solar tend to be less impressive, but impressive nonetheless, another such meta-analysis providing figures ranging from 8 to 34. Solar thermal power, in spite of its high cost, tends to be rated more highly than solar photovoltaic power, with one 2013 study--notorious for its pessimistic estimates regarding renewable energy and very high estimates regarding established sources--placing it at 19 (in contrast with 16 for wind, and under 4 for photovoltaics).

By contrast, the EROEI on fossil fuel and nuclear production in North America is commonly reckoned as running in the 10-15 range.

At the least, this offers significant grounds for the position that--to the extent that we are getting anywhere in calculating these matters at all--actually existing wind and solar do no worse than traditional power sources (with this especially going for the less conventional oil production, as with fracking and tar sands exploitation, on which expanding fossil fuel production relies).

Of course, it must be acknowledged that where renewable energy is concerned, the combination of production with storage costs cuts into their return. Still, where solar thermal was concerned, at least, the aforementioned 2013 study reported an EROEI of 9 for the practice, above the threshold of economic viability set by the authors themselves.

"Too Resource-Intensive"
A certain sort of renewables-basher, trolling advocates of the technology, brings up, as if it were a profound revelation, "Did you know that building wind turbines and solar panels actually requires stuff? Stuff they dig out of the ground and process in factories? How horrible! Did you know that it actually takes energy to do all that? And you know where energy comes from, right? Fossil fuels! Horribly polluting! And you realize they have to put them somewhere, on actual land! Ugh! Besides, we'll run out of the resources we need before they can make a difference anyway. So, totally a deal-breaker."

The implication is that the proponent of renewables thought these items appeared by magic--and it is more insulting than intimidating. Yes, producing these technologies does involve the consumption of resources, which may be more or less polluting. No one imagined otherwise. However, the question is not whether energy production from renewable sources is ecologically perfect. The question is whether it is significantly preferable to the other options available--and when we are discussing climate change, whether the production, installation and operation of the required systems generates less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.

Pollution
Where pollution is concerned, it is indisputable that wind turbines and solar panels do not release pollutants into the air in the manner of coal and gas plants. In fact, when in operation wind turbines and photovoltaics produce no greenhouse gas emissions whatsoever. Emissions are involved in their production, installation, and disposal, but the evidence is that this is only a minute fraction of what is generated by fossil fuels. Coal produces almost a kilogram (980 grams) of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour, and natural gas nearly half that much (465 grams). By contrast all the costs associated with wind-energy amount to 99 percent less carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour than coal, and 98 percent less than natural gas (11 grams). Comparisons with nuclear energy seem more variable, given the variety of grades of uranium ore and the methods of their enrichment, among other factors, but it is safe to say that wind is a rough match with nuclear energy at its cleanest, and an order of magnitude or more better than nuclear energy at its dirtiest (130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour according to one estimate, with others running higher still).

As this goes to show wind power is not, for the time being, carbon-free--but this is a far different thing from implying (or outright declaring), as its detractors so regularly and vehemently do, that its present (comparatively minor!) fossil fuel requirement makes it no better than a coal or gas plant. The same goes for solar power in both its photovoltaic and thermal forms, which in even relatively critical assessments similarly represents an improvement over coal and gas. Moreover, one can envision even this slight footprint being further reduced--if the manufacture and transport of such systems itself becomes increasingly based on renewable sources (as would increasingly be the case as the transition away from fossil fuels advanced).

Land Use
All right, the renewables-basher concedes, maybe renewables do mean less pollution. But they require vast amounts of land area. Just look at those colossal wind farms and solar arrays! Think of how this would diminish our wilderness areas! The sacrifice of all that land we could be reforesting! (Suddenly oil industry shills become tree-huggers. Convenient.) Compare that with that wonder of efficient land use, a compact, little, nuclear power plant . . .

As it happens, calculations which show nuclear energy to be an efficient land user consider only the power plant, not the surrounding exclusion zone, nor the land use required by the rest of the fuel cycle, from uranium mining to waste disposal, creating a false picture. Not only does this sharply cut into any claims for nuclear energy's efficient land use, but there is the very different manner in which wind farms use their land. Far from placing all of their territory off-limits, other than that on which towers actually stand--over 99 percent of it--remains free, and has been successfully used for such activities as farming, with the land "cropped up to the base of each tower." The result is that, correctly utilized, they may be markedly more efficient land users than nuclear power plants.

Solar arrays (both photovoltaic, and concentrated solar, comparable in this respect) may likewise be a more efficient use of land than nuclear facilities (or coal production). They also have the potential to be more efficient still in practical terms, because they can with relative ease be deployed on otherwise unusable land, like contaminated areas, salt-affected land, and the surfaces of water reservoirs.

Raw Materials Sufficiency
Very well, the renewables-basher may grant, but a 100 percent renewable energy economy will still be out of the question regardless, because there is simply not enough material for the job. It is, for example, common for those attacking renewable energy to point to the steel requirements of wind turbines. However, the extent to which this is a genuine obstacle is, at the very least, debatable. One calculation recently posited that were the world to rely on 2-megawatt wind turbines for 100 percent of its electricity production, it would need 4 million such turbines, each averaging 260 tons, for a total of some 1 billion tons of steel.

Staggering as this sounds, it is worth remembering that the world produced 1.8 billion tons of steel in 2018. A billion tons is a bit over half of that. This would indeed be an intimidating figure--if someone was seriously considering switching to a 100 percent reliance on onshore 2-megawatt turbines for the world's electric power in a single year. To my knowledge, no one has suggested either such a complete reliance on this one source, or such a timeline for making such a complete transition to renewables.

It is worth noting, too, that any ambitious program of wind turbine construction would not come on top of existing steel production, but substantially represent a shift in the end of use of existing steel output to this from the fossil fuel industry--whose pumpjacks and derricks, pipelines and tankers, storage facilities and power plants, make it a colossal user of steel. (I have found comprehensive figures elusive, but Russia alone shipped four million tons of steel just for pipe for the oil and gas industry in 2018.)

In short, the idea that steel requirements singlehandedly doom any 100 percent renewable project to failure wildly exaggerates the issue. Indeed, serious study of the prospect of bottlenecks generally pays it little heed, instead focusing on the far more germane question of securing sufficient rare earth metals. However, examining the literature one quickly finds that the problem is less one of the scarcity of such resources in nature, or the technical impossibility of exploiting them, than the fact that demand for them could outstrip the world's productive capacity, and the concentration of some of these resources in a few countries, and above all, China--the vagaries of power politics, rather than natural abundance or the technological state of the art, the issue. This is not to be dismissed, but it is a very different thing from saying that the problem is intrinsically intractable, let alone that palliatives are unavailable (with quite modest recycling rates perhaps sufficing to redress even the more serious problems).

The Scope for Improvement
As demonstrated here, renewables, wind and solar included, even without subsidy, have become cheaper than established energy production sources. They demonstrate great reliability in practical operation, when a suitable mix of them is incorporated into a properly connective and flexible grid. Where pollution, and especially greenhouse gases, are concerned, they are, by orders of magnitude, superior to coal and gas use; their land area requirements are less exorbitant than their detractors claim, and perhaps superior to those of nuclear energy; and it appears that, at the least, the question of raw materials sufficiency has been overstated.

It would be excessive to claim that every problem on the road to a 100 percent renewable energy future has been solved. It seems plausible that the challenge of keeping the grid reliable will rise as renewable energy production expands in scale, and it is far from clear that every technology and practice required for the task has been fully worked out. (Indeed, this has been by far the most contentious issue in the debate sparked by Mark Jacobson's highly welcome plan for shifting the world to a 100 percent renewable energy economy by 2030.) It is equally true that the expanded production of wind and solar-generated electricity will require some mix of expanded mining efforts, recycling, and substitution far from clear or certain at the moment.

Yet, that not every detail has been worked out is an odd basis for vehement denial that a sharp expansion in renewable energy-based electricity production can be viable. A measure of uncertainty is always part of significant action in the world, the more so as that action is large-scale and deeply directed, while the alternatives appear even more doubtful. An expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption is already ecologically unacceptable in light of the persistent, massive failure to protect the environment from their massive pollution, and problematic in light of its falling return on investment by every measure (not least, because of the high reliance on unconventional oil to increase output). Similarly the expansion of nuclear power to meet our electrical needs, even were it deemed desirable, is a highly problematic endeavor given the technology actually at hand. That this does not usually concern the advocates of those technologies much reflects the double standard to which they tend (whether discussing subsidies, materials consumption, or anything else), and the fact that not only misinformation and shoddy reasoning, but bad faith, commonly underlies their arguments.

Moreover, it is clearly the case that technologists are only beginning to exploit the vast potentials for improvement in every one of the areas discussed here. The building of taller wind turbines with longer blades and higher capacities, and the optimization of wind farm layouts, can increase their yield appreciably. (Indeed, the increasingly tall towers on which the turbines are mounted is opening up the possibility of siting wind farms in new locations, not least inside forests.) At the same time, increasingly high-output units, as well as the possibility of reducing the carbon footprint of steel production with existing methods, hold out the hope of further economizing the emissions, land use and materials consumption of every kilowatt-hour of energy generated by this means.

It is much the same story with solar power, where the fuller utilization of individual photovoltaic cells through the use of more of their surface area, and the denser packing of panels with more cells, among other developments, show great promise of continuing the increase in their productivity and the drop in their cost--which will extend the cost-effectiveness to increasingly dispersed, small-scale residential production that could take much of the burden off of centralized production and extensive grids. Technologists are only beginning to properly explore the possibilities for enhancing grid efficiency and flexibility (the electrification of car fleets may actually be a help rather than a hindrance), and storing electricity from any and all sources, with the cost of what is perhaps the most flexible option, battery storage, plunging with much the same rapidity as the price of renewable energy production. Meanwhile, efforts to increase the recycling of rare earth metals, already underway because of the broad interest in the matter (the electronics sector relies on them heavily), offer some grounds for optimism in regard to materials requirements.

Any and all of this will mean cheaper and more reliable electrical power from renewables, considered in monetary terms, EROEI terms or anything else. It also holds out considerable hope of further lightening such burdens as the production of electricity from these sources seems likely to place on the natural environment.

None of this is cause for complacency--the pressure to move even faster than we already are too great for that. Accordingly these potentials are grounds not to calmly await the play of market force, but to back the swiftest and fullest development and deployment of all these technologies--not least, through "moonshot" efforts aimed at resolving the storage and raw materials problems that may lie ahead--to the end of deriving 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy at the earliest feasible date in a national and ultimately global Green New Deal.

Societal Slack and Progressive Taxation: A Second Look (Part II-Income Tax)

When revisiting my old post "Societal Slack and Progressive Taxation" I decided to enlarge upon the matter, specifically considering how corporations have paid steadily less in tax since the end of World War II (from 4-5 percent of GDP, down to 1-2 percent in recent years).

In this post I turn to the distribution of the personal income tax burden.

According to recent data from the Tax Foundation, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers took home 9.52 percent of all Adjusted Gross Income back in 2016. Some 141,000 people receiving some $2.1 million a year or more, they collectively got about $970 billion, and paid some $260 billion of that in tax.

As is often noted, the rate in the top tax bracket is far lower than it used to be. In 2016 it was 39.6 percent. By contrast, between the end of World War II and the early 1960s it was 91 percent, levied on, if one adjusts for inflation, roughly that level of income.

What would the '50s-era tax rate on the earnings of the top 0.1 percent above that $2.1 million level (such as was the case in 1950) raise? One can take the $970 billion figure and deduct from it the aforementioned income (the first $2.1 million made by that 141,000 persons). They would wind up with about $675 billion. Ninety-one percent of that sum would amount to over $610 billion--over twice that strata's entire tax contribution in 2016.

And of course, one could extend this pattern down through the rest of the 1 percent (1.4 million taxpayers with roughly $500,000 in income). Simply taxing everything between a half million dollars and $2.1 million at the 73 percent rate prevailing in 1950, one would wind up with another $460 billion--over $1 trillion in income raised on earnings above the half million dollar a year level, in contrast with the $500 billion actually paid by the top 1 percent. As this implies the practice does run into diminishing returns fairly quickly, but extending the approach down through the rest of the top 10 percent (with anything above $200,000 taxed at 53 percent, anything above $140,000 at 48 percent), would raise the tax collected on marginal income above $140,000 a year alone into the $1.7 trillion range, roughly $700 billion more than what the top 10 percent actually paid in 2016.

Moreover, there are respects in which these figures can be considered conservative. One is that the above, rough calculation did not take into account the intricacy of the bracket structure, which would have captured more wealth from each strata of taxpayer. (Income between $500,000 and $2.1 million would not all have been taxed at the 73 percent rate but, as income rose from the low to the high end of this range, been subject to seven progressively higher rates, with 1950 seeing anything above $1.65 million or so taxed at 90 percent.) Another is the way in which inflation and "bracket creep" translated to more people paying at higher rates (so that by 1963 anything above that $1.65 million, roughly speaking, was now subject to the maximum rate, and similar creep evident down the line). Still another is the fact that higher rates extended down somewhat below that most affluent tenth. (In 1963 anything above $14,000--$117,000 in today's terms--was taxed at 41 percent, higher than the maximum rate today.) The result is that a 1950s-like tax rate structure could raise still more than suggested above. Perhaps another trillion dollars a year would not be out of the question.

However, there is also another side to the issue, namely that nominal tax rates are one thing, and effective tax rates another. The exemptions built into the system, the possibilities for legal avoidance, the recourse to illegal evasion, doubtless translated to a lower effective rate, though by just how much is a highly contentious matter. Writers abiding by the libertarian "conventional wisdom" of the economics field are quick to insist, and vehement in insisting, that the '50s did not see the rich actually paying the extravagant rates the nominal figures imply.

The idea that effective tax levels are not really much lower than they were before strikes me as implausible in light of the sharp cuts in rates for which conservatives fought so long and hard; by the reality of the growing share of income (more on which below) enjoyed by the most affluent, which is very plausibly a function of their being more lightly taxed; and changing conduct on the part of corporations whose stockholders, inhibited from taking out as much in dividends as they theoretically could by high personal income tax rates, shifted to treating corporations like ATMs after the tax cuts (payout rates 50 percent in the '60s, dipping in the '70s and exploding to a whopping 94 percent by the turn of the century).

Moreover, there is a point that those dismissive of the significance of the higher rates overlook--namely that in the '50s the rich were less rich, absolutely and relatively, and therefore relatively less of their income, and everyone's income, subject to higher marginal rates. In 1950 scarcely 20,000 of 55 million taxpayers, 0.036 percent of the population, reported making $100,000 or more, qualifying for those top three brackets. Where the larger picture is concerned the share of income enjoyed by the most affluent 1 percent ran at 8-9 percent of the total during the decade, the top 10 percent about 30-35 percent of the total figure.

By contrast, hundreds of thousands now report making twice the equivalent of $100,000 in 1950s-era dollars (about $1 million), while that top 1 percent now commands 19 percent of the nation's income, and the top 10 percent, 45-50 percent of the total. Had the richest been so rich then, and the income distribution as skewed then as it is now, then the '50s-era system would have meant much more income subject to the highest rates. All others things being equal, the effective rates would have reflected this--and it can only be expected that, were such a rate structure in place today, we would also see that.

Still, as the large sums discussed here suggest, the additional revenue that could be generated by even an effective rate considerably below the nominal rates, capturing only part of the income discussed above, would be far from trivial. (Were new higher, nominal, rates to raise the effective rate on just the richest 0.1 percent by half from the current 27 percent to 40 percent as a whole, which may not be unprecedented--all the caveats about changing methods for calculating AGI over time notwithstanding--this would still translate to an extra $130 billion a year, $1.3 trillion in ten years.)

Additionally, there are grounds for thinking that the effective rates of the 1950s do not necessarily represent some theoretical maximum. Per capita income is three to four times what it was in the 1950s, and the reality is that much of our economic trouble has come not from there being to little capital available, but too few profitable opportunities for its investment. (The ultimate cause of slow growth and asset bubbles, it is why financial institutions were so willing to buy crummy mortgage-based securities back in the early 2000s, with the horrid implications with which we are all still coping.) There is also the reality that the data on household income, as Thomas Piketty argued, tend to underestimate rather than overestimate how much the wealthiest have, indicating hidden potentials, the proportions of which are hinted at in the multi-trillion dollar "black hole" in the world's balance sheets.

Consequently, the bottom line is that if it had to be done the obstacle to raising substantially more revenue by way of the income tax (even just raising it on the narrow stratum of the most affluent taxpayers) would not be the means to pay, but the political obstacles to changing tax rates.

1. IRS data indicates that in 1980 0.2 percent of taxpayers were paying 40 percent or more. Below that level another 7.5 percent paid between 30-40 percent.