The counterfactual decrease in emissions from low demand growth was larger than all other factors combined.
Just looking at actual decreases (not counterfactual), the decrease in emissions from switching coal to natgas was larger than the decrease in emissions from everything else combined (even with subsidies on everything else and no subsidies on natgas).
I agree that, based on these numbers, the largest factor is not “a lot more effective than all others combined” as predicted in the post. But I wouldn’t say it “demolishes the thesis”—however you slice it, the largest factor is still larger than everything else combined (and for actual decreases, that largest factor is still natgas).
Have there been substantial reductions in emissions from solar and wind? Yes. But remember the key point of the post: we need to consider opportunity costs. Would emissions be lower today if all the subsidies supporting solar/wind had gone to natgas instead? If all those people campaigning for solar/wind subsidies had instead campaigned for natgas subsidies? And that wouldn’t have taken magical predictive powers ten years ago—at that time, the shift was already beginning.
It says that shifts between fossil fuels are about half the decrease (ignoring the counterfactual one, which obviously is highly dependent on the rather arbitrary choice of expected growth rate). I don’t know whether that’s all fracking, and perhaps it’s hard to unpick all the possible reasons for growth of natural gas at the expense of coal. My guess is that even without fracking there’d have been some shift from coal to gas.
The thesis here—which seems to be very wrong—was: “Practically all the carbon reduction over the past decade has come from the natgas transition”. And it needed to be that, rather than something weaker-and-truer like “Substantially the biggest single element in the carbon reduction has been the natgas transition”, because the more general thesis is that here, and in many other places, one approach so dominates the others that working on anything else is a waste of time.
I appreciate that you wrote the OP and I didn’t, so readers may be inclined to think I must be wrong. Here are some quotations to make it clear how consistently the message of the OP is “only one thing turned out to matter and we should expect that to be true in the future too”.
“it ain’t a bunch of small things adding together”
“Practically all of the reduction in US carbon emissions over the past 10 years has come from that shift”
“all these well-meaning, hard-working people were basically useless”
“PV has been an active research field for thousands of academics for several decades. They’ve had barely any effect on carbon emissions to date”
“one wedge will end up a lot more effective than all others combined. Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things”
All of those appear to be wrong. (Maybe they were right when the OP was written, but if so then they became wrong shortly after, which may actually be worse for the more general thesis of the OP since it indicates how badly wrong one can be in evaluating what measures are going to be effective in the near future.)
Now, of course you could instead make the very different argument that if Thing A is more valuable per unit effort than Thing B then we should pour all our resources into Thing A. But that is, in fact, a completely different argument; I think it’s wrong for several reasons, but in any case it isn’t the argument in the OP and the arguments in the OP don’t support it much.
The questions you ask at the end seem like their answers are supposed to be obvious, but they aren’t at all obvious to me. Would natural gas subsidies have had the same sort of effect as solar and wind subsidies? Maaaaybe, but also maybe not: I assume most of the move from coal to gas was because gas became genuinely cheaper, and the point of solar and wind subsidies was mostly that those weren’t (yet?) cheaper but governments wanted to encourage them (1) to get the work done that would make them cheaper and (2) for the sake of the environmental benefits. Would campaigning for natural gas subsidies have had the same sort of effect as campaigning for solar and wind? Maaaaybe, but also maybe not: campaigning works best when people can be inspired by your campaigning; “energy productions with emissions close to zero” is a more inspiring thing than “energy productions with a ton of emissions, but substantially less than what we’ve had before”, and the most likely people to be inspired by this sort of thing are environmentalists, who are generally unlikely to be inspired by fracking.
“it ain’t a bunch of small things adding together” → Still 100% true. Eyeballing the EIA’s data, wind + natgas account for ~80% of the decrease in carbon emissions. That’s 2 things added together.
“Practically all of the reduction in US carbon emissions over the past 10 years has come from that shift” → False, based on EIA 2005-2017 data. More than half of the reduction came from the natgas shift (majority, not just plurality), but not practically all.
“all these well-meaning, hard-working people were basically useless” → False for the wind people.
“PV has been an active research field for thousands of academics for several decades. They’ve had barely any effect on carbon emissions to date” → Still true. Eyeballing the numbers, solar is maybe 10% of the reduction to date. That’s pretty small to start with, and on top of that, little of the academic research has actually translated to the market, much less addressed the major bottlenecks of solar PV (e.g. installation).
“one wedge will end up a lot more effective than all others combined. Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” → Originally intended as a prediction further into the future, and I still expect this to be the case. That said, as of today, “one wedge will end up a lot more effective” looks false, but “Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” looks true.
… So a couple of them are wrong, though none without at least some kernel of truth in there. And a couple of them are still completely true.
And it needed to be that, rather than something weaker-and-truer like “Substantially the biggest single element in the carbon reduction has been the natgas transition”, because the more general thesis is that here, and in many other places, one approach so dominates the others that working on anything else is a waste of time.
No, as the next section makes clear, it does not need to be one approach dominating everything else; that just makes for memorable examples. 80⁄20 is the rule, and 20% of causes can still be more than one cause. 80⁄20 is still plenty strong for working on the other 80% of causes to be a waste of time.
Those numbers say:
The counterfactual decrease in emissions from low demand growth was larger than all other factors combined.
Just looking at actual decreases (not counterfactual), the decrease in emissions from switching coal to natgas was larger than the decrease in emissions from everything else combined (even with subsidies on everything else and no subsidies on natgas).
I agree that, based on these numbers, the largest factor is not “a lot more effective than all others combined” as predicted in the post. But I wouldn’t say it “demolishes the thesis”—however you slice it, the largest factor is still larger than everything else combined (and for actual decreases, that largest factor is still natgas).
Have there been substantial reductions in emissions from solar and wind? Yes. But remember the key point of the post: we need to consider opportunity costs. Would emissions be lower today if all the subsidies supporting solar/wind had gone to natgas instead? If all those people campaigning for solar/wind subsidies had instead campaigned for natgas subsidies? And that wouldn’t have taken magical predictive powers ten years ago—at that time, the shift was already beginning.
It says that shifts between fossil fuels are about half the decrease (ignoring the counterfactual one, which obviously is highly dependent on the rather arbitrary choice of expected growth rate). I don’t know whether that’s all fracking, and perhaps it’s hard to unpick all the possible reasons for growth of natural gas at the expense of coal. My guess is that even without fracking there’d have been some shift from coal to gas.
The thesis here—which seems to be very wrong—was: “Practically all the carbon reduction over the past decade has come from the natgas transition”. And it needed to be that, rather than something weaker-and-truer like “Substantially the biggest single element in the carbon reduction has been the natgas transition”, because the more general thesis is that here, and in many other places, one approach so dominates the others that working on anything else is a waste of time.
I appreciate that you wrote the OP and I didn’t, so readers may be inclined to think I must be wrong. Here are some quotations to make it clear how consistently the message of the OP is “only one thing turned out to matter and we should expect that to be true in the future too”.
“it ain’t a bunch of small things adding together”
“Practically all of the reduction in US carbon emissions over the past 10 years has come from that shift”
“all these well-meaning, hard-working people were basically useless”
“PV has been an active research field for thousands of academics for several decades. They’ve had barely any effect on carbon emissions to date”
“one wedge will end up a lot more effective than all others combined. Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things”
All of those appear to be wrong. (Maybe they were right when the OP was written, but if so then they became wrong shortly after, which may actually be worse for the more general thesis of the OP since it indicates how badly wrong one can be in evaluating what measures are going to be effective in the near future.)
Now, of course you could instead make the very different argument that if Thing A is more valuable per unit effort than Thing B then we should pour all our resources into Thing A. But that is, in fact, a completely different argument; I think it’s wrong for several reasons, but in any case it isn’t the argument in the OP and the arguments in the OP don’t support it much.
The questions you ask at the end seem like their answers are supposed to be obvious, but they aren’t at all obvious to me. Would natural gas subsidies have had the same sort of effect as solar and wind subsidies? Maaaaybe, but also maybe not: I assume most of the move from coal to gas was because gas became genuinely cheaper, and the point of solar and wind subsidies was mostly that those weren’t (yet?) cheaper but governments wanted to encourage them (1) to get the work done that would make them cheaper and (2) for the sake of the environmental benefits. Would campaigning for natural gas subsidies have had the same sort of effect as campaigning for solar and wind? Maaaaybe, but also maybe not: campaigning works best when people can be inspired by your campaigning; “energy productions with emissions close to zero” is a more inspiring thing than “energy productions with a ton of emissions, but substantially less than what we’ve had before”, and the most likely people to be inspired by this sort of thing are environmentalists, who are generally unlikely to be inspired by fracking.
Let’s go through them one by one:
“it ain’t a bunch of small things adding together” → Still 100% true. Eyeballing the EIA’s data, wind + natgas account for ~80% of the decrease in carbon emissions. That’s 2 things added together.
“Practically all of the reduction in US carbon emissions over the past 10 years has come from that shift” → False, based on EIA 2005-2017 data. More than half of the reduction came from the natgas shift (majority, not just plurality), but not practically all.
“all these well-meaning, hard-working people were basically useless” → False for the wind people.
“PV has been an active research field for thousands of academics for several decades. They’ve had barely any effect on carbon emissions to date” → Still true. Eyeballing the numbers, solar is maybe 10% of the reduction to date. That’s pretty small to start with, and on top of that, little of the academic research has actually translated to the market, much less addressed the major bottlenecks of solar PV (e.g. installation).
“one wedge will end up a lot more effective than all others combined. Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” → Originally intended as a prediction further into the future, and I still expect this to be the case. That said, as of today, “one wedge will end up a lot more effective” looks false, but “Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” looks true.
… So a couple of them are wrong, though none without at least some kernel of truth in there. And a couple of them are still completely true.
No, as the next section makes clear, it does not need to be one approach dominating everything else; that just makes for memorable examples. 80⁄20 is the rule, and 20% of causes can still be more than one cause. 80⁄20 is still plenty strong for working on the other 80% of causes to be a waste of time.