The scariest thing...

Hi,

Happy Halloween to all who celebrate. If you read this sometime within a few hours of when it gets sent, I’ll be on my way to or already safely ensconced in Sedalia, Missouri. If I’ve made it to Sedalia by the time you read, I’ll probably be lookin’ for a quirky dive bar with longstanding local lore while MJ Lenderman’s music adorns my rental car’s speakers and I keep a watchful eye out for the trick or treaters that will invariably invite me into a delightful nostalgia.

I’ll tell you more about why I’m in Sedalia next month—topic for another time. Today, I’d like to embrace the ~spirit~ of Halloween to acknowledge we’re in a very ~spooky~ season. Not just because it’s Halloween but for many reasons. Like, I don’t know, because this is the last Thursday newsletter I’ll send before the U.S. presidential election!! Egad!!!

Really, this piece isn’t predominantly about the election. Because I don’t think that’s the scariest thing in the world right now. Rather, this newsletter is about what scares me more.

P.S., if you would rather learn about something not scary and nice and uplifting and technical and interesting, say, a new climate and energy technology, feel free to port over to my latest podcast about Reverion, a company building carbon-negative biogas plants here.

♡ If you find this work valuable, you can support it here. I put a lot of time into it. ♡

OPINION

Next week, it's likely large swathes of Americans will be upset, one way or another. That alone is scary! Stay safe out there. There may well be reason to be upset. Protest and make your displeasure known as you see fit. I trust you.

The election may well be scary to you or your people and communities for a whole host of reasons. To be sure, I absolutely think the election matters a great deal, both to climate and energy-related issues and countless other ones. On the climate and energy front, if Trump wins, climate-related and cleaner energy deployment, investment, and regulation in the U.S. will likely slow down markedly or, in some cases, disappear altogether, at least for some time. That will then risk metastasizing across the world, as the U.S. is a leader in innovation, policymaking (at times), and exporting its expertise worldwide. I've written about why U.S. leadership on climate and energy efforts is essential here.

It's hard to say exactly what Trump's Admin would do, how it would do it, and whether and to what extent it would be successful in dismantling funding mechanisms and policies or dampening the progress of tech adoption and deployment trends that are well underway (like solar and battery energy storage and EV adoption). Plenty of what Trump has said he'd like to do is well documented. He recently said, "My plan will terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam," while discussing the Inflation Reduction Act, which has benefitted states that will likely vote 'red' from an electoral college perspective more than ones that will vote 'blue.'

What happens is equally if not more contingent on the composition of the House and Senate. I can simultaneously extend a lack of full clarity to the question of what, precisely, a Harris Admin would do. But the tenor of what we might imagine will happen based on the two outcomes is, of course, quite different.

So yes, the election does matter a great deal. Further, there are many elections happening in the U.S. next week. Other elections besides the Presidential one are also quite important; they're probably more important in aggregate than the Presidential one. Here's an example of one that matters to climate and energy a great deal, as covered by Jeva Lange at Heatmap. Finally, there are always other important elections happening worldwide that matter and don't get much coverage.

That said, again, I don't think the election is the scariest thing right now. Here's why.

The things that won’t change fast enough in four years

Here’s what scares me: There are at least three things that will remain true in 2028, as they are today, regardless of the election outcome:

1. The U.S. will continue to produce more oil & natural gas than any other country.

2. The U.S. will continue to spend more on its military than any other country (investing a lot of capital in it that could be invested elsewhere).

3. Greenhouse gas emissions won’t fall as fast as needed to curb warming.

I won’t belabor point #2 too hard, as it’s not my primary beat. Some fast facts include: 

• The U.S. spends more on its military than anything else, save for healthcare. Military spending is the #1 component of U.S. discretionary spending (healthcare is categorized as non-discretionary).

• The U.S. spends more on its military than any other country by a wide margin. That’s $ that could be spent on other things, like, say, building more, lower-emission grid infrastructure!

This chart, which I’ve already surfaced previously, can do the rest of the talking for me:

On point #1, I wish more people knew that the U.S. is the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer. It’s not Russia. It’s not Saudi Arabia (though they may export more). Every time I tell friends this, it’s news to them. Further, oil production has grown more under the last two Democratic Presidential administrations than the last two Republican ones. The story for natural gas isn’t all that dissimilar, though gas production did grow more under Trump’s last Admin than Biden’s or Obama’s:

I’m not here to opine on or to make firm and final statements on whether that’s ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Energy security is a critical consideration that matters more to many voters than climate change. But the point remains: The U.S. is going to keep producing humongous volumes of oil and natural gas for the next four years, outpacing any other country in the world, regardless of who is President.

This doesn’t square super well with scary point #3, namely that, regardless of who is President through 2028, greenhouse gas emissions won’t be falling as fast as they need to be to slow the daunting, relentless march of global warming and climate change. Several reports over the past week have crystallized this fact. For instance, as outlined in the latest World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency (‘IEA’) (and summarized by the NYT):

The result of the world’s inability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so far could drive anywhere from 2.4° to 3.1° C of warming, roughly double (or much more in the upside case) than what the world has experienced since the Industrial Revolution and well above the major international targets previously set for what scientists and policymakers would like to limit warming to (1.5°C or 2°C).

It bears repeating that greenhouse gas emissions globally today are still rising or are at least relatively flat, whether you look at carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide. The 3% decrease referenced above from the World Energy Outlook report is a forward-looking estimate. No global reduction in emissions has been reliably realized so far, outside of during the COVID pandemic, when the massive economic slowdown that rippled across the world reduced emissions a lil’ bit.

The forecast 3% vs. 33% emissions reduction gap referenced earlier is a ginormous delta. It’s not all the U.S.’s fault. Today, more global emissions stem from other countries. Emissions are going down in some places (like the U.K. and Europe, especially on a per capita basis). However, emissions are stubbornly high, if not rising, in places like China, India, other growing countries in Africa, and elsewhere. Plus, the U.S. is still responsible for the highest share of historical carbon dioxide emissions and continues to emit lots of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions.

Here’s another scary digression. While it imports less natural gas from Russia than it did before Russia invaded Ukraine (a war that’s now in its tenth year, frankly), the European Union still imports significant volumes of gas from Russia, even as it sends weapons and money to Ukraine. It simultaneously subsidizes the Russian war effort by importing Russian gas while resisting Russia with sanctions and by funding Ukraine’s war effort. This is a Catch-22 that hammers home the difficulty of—and the insufficiency of capital resources allocated to—decarbonization.

What’s more? The 3% to 33% emissions reduction gap I’ve been harping on isn’t for lack of effort. That’s scary. It’s not like there isn’t a lot of work being done. We cover it here week in and week out. But we collectively still need to move and operate a lot harder better faster stronger, not to mention smarter and perhaps just plain differently in some (or many cases). On the smarter and ‘differently’ front, I’ll always come back to the fact that methane mitigation efforts receive just ~1-2% of climate finance, even as methane has driven 25%+ of post-industrial global warming. Reducing methane emissions would slow warming a lot faster than helping corporations track their emissions with software and AI plug-ins (sorry if you just caught a stray; that work can help, too).

The words we use

Let it suffice that all of the above is scary to me.

What's more, and waxing more philosophically here, what also scares me is the ~discourse~ and the words we use. There are people who think the specter of thermonuclear warfare is the most dangerous threat to humanity and the planet. Others think the most dangerous threat is another global pandemic. Others think it's climate change. Others think artificial intelligence is the biggest extinction-level risk. Others think a second Trump presidency is the most dangerous thing imaginable. Others think a Harris presidency is!

I don't know what the scariest thing is, nor will I try to convince you to think a certain way about any of the above. That's actually the point. One of the most troubling things to me today is the manner in which many vital discussions are catastrophized or presented as deserving of an absolute claim on people's attention and the world's resources. At the most specific level of how we talk to one another, every time someone calls an election, or something else, the most important thing that's ever happened in the history of humanity, or every time someone says something is an extinction-level threat and that it's the most important one we should all be focused on, no exceptions allowed, it drives no small portion of listeners to apathy, anxiety, or anger. It dilutes the efficacy of calls to action and urgency. It's the boy who cried wolf. It isn't that complicated.

Sometimes, there's an intentional angle to this dynamic. As wrote Rusty Guinn for Epsilon Theory recently:

Other times, it's less intentional. Other times, it's earnest, though that doesn't necessarily help. For a climate-focused example, I think climate practitioners and communicators do themselves and the rest of us a disservice when they chalk everything under the sun that's bad up to climate change. Yes, climate change is intricately and inextricably intertwined with almost everything imaginable on Earth. But no, it's not always the primary (or even secondary or tertiary) cause of bad things that happen.

Take the frightening proliferation of billion-dollar damage-causing hurricanes. I do not doubt that climate change has made hurricanes more damaging and disastrous. I articulated that here. At the same time, hurricanes are indubitably more damaging now because the world has built a lot more expensive stuff in hurricane-prone areas.

I think people trust communicators less when they leave out nuance like this. I think people intuit when they are not being told the full story. I do not think the average American or global citizen is incapable of appreciating that hurricanes are more damaging today because of climate change and because of where we have collectively decided to move, live, and build. I do not think people are dumb. I do not think climate communications have to be drastically simplified to be effective.

Hence, for my part, I try my best to use specific, circumspect, qualified language when I talk about these things, whether in these pages or elsewhere. I aim for the additional nuance. I yearn for it everywhere I myself read. Some of you may think I’m far too moderate in my underscoring of the urgency of action on climate and energy issues. I am receptive to that criticism. At the same time, how effective has the past decade-plus of climate communications been at mobilizing the broader public to care? Again, I am not claiming to know, nor am I suggesting that more, shall we say, intense communications about climate risks haven’t changed minds or mobilized action. But I have my doubts about the extent to which they have been optimally effective at inspiring people, companies, and politicians to get to work in an engaged, energized, enthusiastic manner.

Unknown unknowns

One more scary thing. As if all of the above wasn't enough. I'll keep this one shorter, as I've written about it before and will continue to do so. The scariest thing about climate change to me is not what we know will happen. It's what we don't know about climate change and Earth's climate systems, which far outstrips what we do know. Climate change is more about the dysregulation of the Earth’s climate system, which is incredibly complex, so much so that it will probably elude our full understanding forever, than just warming.

Climate science is constantly getting better—we're constantly learning more. That’s good, and reduces uncertainty, but also underscores the amount of uncertainty: Climate scientists and researchers are surprised all the time, often negatively, sometimes positively. We don't fully understand the implications of climate change; there are likely many implications of climate change we aren't even considering yet.

Uncertainty is not a reason to not be concerned or to sow doubt as to how bad climate change could be. We know that greenhouse gasses warm the planet, that air pollution from fossil fuel combustion kills people, that all other imaginable forms of pollution are harmful, that ecosystem and biodiversity loss are devastating. But what's scariest of all to me is that we don't know the full scope of all the other downstream impacts of these things that we do know are happening. Uncertainty is risk. Plain and simple. Uncertainty—especially at the scale of something like the Earth's climate system—is the very type of thing one and all should aim to prepare for most actively and ardently.

The net-net

I’m not a pessimist. We need to move faster, do better. That requires more of the same in some cases (deploy solutions that work!) and challenging prevailing notions, whether that only a global carbon tax would solve everything or that individual responsibility is an over-’trumped’ charge foisted on us by oil and gas companies. Yes, there were and are intentional campaigns to encourage individuals to consider their carbon footprint to shift focus from corporations to consumers. But I do think it is also our responsibility to help. Plus, action, however ‘small,’ is a great way to feel agentic. To feel better. To feel good. I trust you’re already hard and thoughtfully at work, in your own way, as best as you know how and can handle. You can also always hit me up for ideas or discussion, too. If you respond to this email or any email of mine for that matter, believe it or not, I actually get back to you (though sometimes it takes time).

Thinking of you,

— Nick