Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition are back with host Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori for another episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom!
This week, our panelists examine the federal budget’s climate change and carbon removal proposals and connect the dots between the budget and the infrastructure bill. We also address the G7 Summit, discussing concerns around whether G7 leaders are doing enough, and pondering why there is no end date for coal. Our panelists look at clean energy standards and President Biden’s suspension of new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands, then discuss the early heatwave and strained grid in Texas. As always, we conclude the episode with an uplifting environmental win— restored protections to the Tongass National Park in Alaska.
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the June 17th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. As always, I have with me Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. Holly, how are you doing this week?
Holly Jean Buck: I’m doing good enough, thanks.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. How are you, Chris?
Chris Barnard: Apparently better than Texas so far this week.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We’ll get to Texas eventually. Any place pretty much on the West Coast, you’re probably doing better than right now. And then I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So this week, it has felt like we’ve been kind of going in two opposite directions. The price of oil continues to increase, even with incentives in the budget for carbon removal and other climate change proposal, and record amounts of renewable energy coming online. Or maybe we’re in for the same old, same old as the G7 continues to discuss, but does not deliver on many climate change proposals.
And finally, in Alaska, we continue to have oil drilling 100 miles west of the Arctic National National Wildlife Refuge, ONWAR, but the Biden administration is trying to call all that back with the oil and gas leases in ONWAR itself. Who knows, as the court has just, as a federal court has just put a huge moratorium on that. Currently, as Chris was referring to, we have record heat all over the West Coast, including into Texas, which has caused their grid to again be strained. But we also know that California is in the same boat.
So I kind of wanted to start with what’s old news. But obviously a huge important piece to the climate puzzle, which is the proposed White House budget. First off, Chris, maybe you can give our listeners a little bit of an overview of how the budget interacts with some of the bills that we were talking about last week, because most of us aren’t so familiar how federal infrastructure bills maybe play with federal budget proposals.
Chris Barnard: Sure, happy to. So essentially, kind of politics 101, the White House and the Biden administration doesn’t itself have the power to create laws or to create funding streams. To raise taxes, reduce taxes, whatever it is, when it comes to a budget, all they have the power to do is make recommendations and requests. And so that’s what the Biden administration did in the last few weeks. They proposed their budget for fiscal We have a fiscal year starting, I believe, on October 1st, and they’ve asked, I believe it is for $6 trillion for the budget for the White House and for the United States government in the coming fiscal year.
But again, they are entirely reliant on Congress Put forward what they would are essentially counter proposals for the budget with what Congress is interested in what they’re willing to do. And then you have kind of the political horse trading between Republicans and Democrats on to what extent they’re willing to accommodate the President and the administration on the policy And then ultimately it is still down to Congress to make laws and to allocate spending, decide how much money goes where and whatnot. But obviously, especially right now with Democrats having both the House and the Senate and Biden be a Democratic president, they will try as much as possible to accommodate the Biden administration, but understanding as well.
That there is a very, very slim majority, especially in the Senate. So a lot of this stuff might not necessarily go through simply because of the political reality. So that’s really kind of the setting the stage for what the federal budget request from the president does.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So in your humble opinion, What do you think of the current proposals from an environmental perspective? And I mean, the budget is obviously vast, so we can only touch on a few of these things, but anything in particular stand out to you about what you’ve read or heard about?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, I found it particularly interesting that just several decades ago, Bill Clinton, a Democratic president said the era of big government is over. And now there have been kind of comments saying the era of big government is back because it is the biggest budget request ever. It is a lot of money and a lot of that will be targeted towards climate issues, including the American Jobs Plan, which is Biden’s signature infrastructure plan. But as we kind of talked about in this space before, there’s a lot of stuff in there that I don’t particularly consider infrastructure and that I think are unhelpful to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on.
So it’s an interesting one because it is a lot of money and it is a lot of Government intervention for those things. Some of the things I do like are what I’m sure we’ll be talking about some of the support for basic research and design for carbon capture for other technologies, and I think that’s a valuable role that The government can play. And a lot of people across the aisle have been asking for innovation funding to kind of increase a lot, especially after Trump gutted it while he was president. So I am excited to see some of that go up and especially kind of some of the programs coming out of the Department of Energy when it comes to hydrogen, carbon capture, nuclear, all those things I think are very exciting.
Geothermal as well specifically got a huge bump this year or proposed bump this year. Not everything that I’m happy with, but I do think there are some areas that, especially on the innovation side, that could be good.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so one thing I did notice is there’s a dedicated line for carbon dioxide removal from the Department of Energy, $63 million. Am I getting my zeros right? $63 million. What I’m wondering is, is that enough? And maybe I’ll pitch this over to Holly. And two, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything distinctive between a lot of information and interest in the non-nature-based solutions. So have we been giving enough interest to the nature-based solutions in this budget or proposed budget?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, is any of this enough compared to the scale of what’s needed? No. And it’s hard to speak about the 63 million without knowing exactly what that’s for. So that’s apart from carbon capture, which has 150 million, carbon storage, which has 117 million, and carbon utilization at 38 million. So carbon dioxide removal is still Pretty small compared to the sorts of things that you know have been in the budget repeatedly CCUS is some well established in the budget right. So I’m assuming that will maybe be like direct air capture prize or initial R&D stuff.
Maybe Chris knows more, but I would just point out that there was quite a lot of nature based carbon removal related stuff under the Department of Agriculture that was also funded in this budget and Carbon 180’s blog has a pretty good breakdown of where that’s all going.
Radhika Moolgavkar: What I noticed was there wasn’t as much, or maybe it’s just not highlighted around the blue carbon and the deep ocean nature-based solutions. And that’s sort of what has piqued my interest lately. And I don’t know if either of you two have spent much time thinking about it, but somebody made the very astute observation to me a couple of weeks ago, like the ocean is vast. So you have lots of area to And so I’ve been hoping that we see more nature-based solutions in the blue carbon and ocean CDR space than what I’m seeing.
But maybe Chris, Holly, you know something I don’t.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, on that point, I would just add that the science is still emerging there. And the National Academies has a committee, which full disclaimer I’m on, that’s evaluating Ocean carbon dioxide removal and is going to recommend a research strategy for that. So with a greater research basis, I assume we might see some things in future budgets related to that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, that’s good to hear because that’s kind of what I was thinking about. Chris, were you thinking something?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, it’s interesting. You’re right. There seems to be a pretty strong focus on the Department of Agriculture, but not much beyond that when it comes to nature-based solutions. On the blue carbon side, entirely correct. It’s still kind of something that they’re researching. And there’s some interesting bills that have been put forward by Lisa Murkowski from Alaska. It was kind of a pretty bipartisan Republican senator. And she proposed a bill that would essentially create an inventory of what our blue carbon capacities are And so, again, that’s the cool thing about the budget.
It’s not the be all and end all when it comes to these things. And a lot of individual members of Congress, be it in the House or the Senate, are interested in these issues and hopefully they’ll push for them when Congress is making laws. So on blue carbon, I think that there’s good advancements there, even though it might not be in the budget.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, and I think you’re right. The budget sort of is a tone setting document, even though, of course, it is important in that it is a funding mechanism, but it also sets, I think it gives a macro perspective on what a president’s priorities are. And clearly, climate change is a priority of President Biden’s because it’s a, as they call it, a whole budget approach to climate change. So multiple departments funded in multiple ways. One other area that I am curious about, and Holly, I kind of want to get your perspective on this, is the environmental justice focus, right?
So, I mean, it’s mentioned apparently 30 times in the bill. There’s a $1. 4 billion in spending. What are you hearing from maybe your climate activist friends on the left about this, and is it a good start?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, my suspicion is that it’s a good start. Sometimes... These things, I mean, there’s a new term that’s come out, justice washing, right? So that, you know, sometimes these things can be mentioned, but 1. 4 billion is a starting commitment. I know that there’s a lot of really talented, smart people in the administration thinking about this. So, I mean, my hope, and I think the hope of a lot of people is that we move beyond sort of a more technocratic focus on Distributed justice. So using tools to map out where projects are and allocating risks, that kind of thing, to thinking about procedural justice, which is how are decisions made?
Do people have a say about what’s going on in their community? And maybe we’ll see some funding dedicated in those areas as well in the future. And I look forward to learning more about what that $1. 4 billion will actually fund.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and if my memory serves me correctly, right, in the most recent COVID bill, or in some bill, they put forward more funding for Black and BIPOC farmers, and that’s now being challenged, right, by other farmers saying that it’s unconstitutional, I believe. I thought I read a story about that, or at least there are complaints that why are you favoring BIPOC farmers over white farmers? Really interesting. It will be an interesting space to see how the administration can walk that line. I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer to that, but clearly going to be a big part of the conversation moving forward.
All right. Well, with that kind of unhappy note, I’m going to pivot a little bit to the G7. And as probably everybody knows, it was the big political story of last week. America is back. Joe Biden was in A beautiful part of England that I visited before. It looks almost tropical if you look at those pictures with the palm trees. Though when I was there, it was definitely not tropical. But beautiful beaches and hopefully a great conversation was happening there and some progress was being made. But Chris, you know, there’s been a lot of criticism too that it wasn’t enough.
So as always, it’s never enough. But did they even make any significant progress, do you think, in any way?
Chris Barnard: Well, I mean, it’s one of those... Typical, big kind of public facing international events and stuff rarely ever gets done at those things. It’s always the backroom things, dealings and discussions that lead up to it or afterward. And those kind of happen between the diplomats and the teams and all that rather than the heads of government and heads of state just meeting together because it really is pretty much just a photo op. And obviously this was a very prominent one because it’s the first one they’ve done since the whole pandemic.
And it’s Biden’s first overseas trip and everything. So, I mean, I wasn’t at all surprised to see that they just had a lot of talking points and a lot of kind of, oh, we’ll invest more in climate change and we’ll phase out coal and we’ll hold China accountable and things like that without really following up with any type of action. I’m not surprised at all by that in the least. So, yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much my view of it. It’ll be interesting, the really interesting international The global event will be COP26 in November in Glasgow, and especially since it was pushed back by a year.
And so there was no kind of international conference on this issue last year. There really is a lot of pressure on the delegations and committees and all that to come up with tangible solutions. And I don’t think it ever really was the goal of the G7 to achieve that. It was really more of a photo op in a beautiful place of England, as you said.
Radhika Moolgavkar: For me, as I was watching those leaders, I was kind of wondering, and maybe this is a bigger picture question than sustainable environmental stuff, but how relevant is the G7, especially when it comes to stuff like coal production, when you don’t have China and India at the table, right? I mean, I don’t know what they could accomplish without having two of the three biggest producers of coal at the table, but Holly, you’re smiling, so maybe you have a thought that I didn’t think of.
Holly Jean Buck: No, I mean, what they said is that they would stop international funding for coal projects without CCS, carbon capture and storage by next year. And, you know, people wanted a specific coal phase out date. It doesn’t surprise me that, you know, Biden wouldn’t want to put one on there given the domestic politics of the moment. AKA Senator Joe Manchin.
Unknown speaker: Indeed.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. I mean, the other thing that you mentioned just now is they’re only funding carbon capture technology with new coal plants. And I couldn’t help but wonder if that would become a perverse incentive where you would just have old plants staying online longer in a way without the technology and wouldn’t actually would make things worse. Just an open question, but I was wondering how effective I think that policy would be. We often see that these mandates actually end up in creating worse situations because then people just drag out their CapEx for as long as they can instead of investing in new stuff because it’s too expensive.
Anyway, the other thing that was discussed, maybe not discussed at the G7, but kind of broke this week in relationship to the G7 is that new carbon tax that Europe is proposing Essentially, it is a tax and it’s still not been fully, I think, rolled out, but some early documentation has been rolled out. A tax where in Europe, they will measure the amount of carbon in your supply chain, essentially, and then tax you on it if you want to import anything in. Chris, as our conservative, how do you feel about that?
And also as our closest European friend, too.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, well, so to set the stage a little bit, the European Union, despite having internal free trade, is pretty protectionist when it comes to its external borders. And they essentially want to make sure that any regulation or even kind of Money and policy they put towards reducing the impact of Europe on climate change in terms of emissions. They don’t want European producers to just move across to somewhere else in the world where those regulations don’t exist. And as a result, it having zero tangible effect on emissions and climate change. But then secondly, also I think it’s the only way that you’re going to make sure there is some kind of level playing field and to avoid what they call carbon leakage and carbon emissions just being offshored.
Other countries will be happy about that. I doubt it. I mean, the US and Japan already have kind of been a little bit iffy about this. And so politically might not be the play, but I do think it makes economic and environmental sense. I also think that this should be accompanied by many other kind of clean free trade policies that would open up free trade before environmental goods and services and really focus on that carrot rather than the stick approach. But yeah, those are just kind of my general thoughts.
Radhika Moolgavkar: The thing you said about leakage, I’m not totally sure. I think this, at least as I’ve read it, would prevent leakage, right? Because they are going to tax things. At least the Wall Street Journal article made it seem like they will tax raw aluminum, but they won’t tax an aluminum can. So if somebody is savvy enough to just change their structure and import a finished good, they kind of avoid...
Unknown speaker: And I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point.
Chris Barnard: If the history of the cap and trade model in Europe is anything to go by, this will absolutely completely fall flat. That’s kind of just talking about the principle behind the theory of it is that it would, in theory, prevent carbon leakage without ruining the European economy that would have higher environmental regulations.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I agree with that 100%. And if you can design a system that is, there are where there are zero loopholes, which as far as I can tell, has never been designed in the history of politics anywhere in the world, then you could prevent leakage. But I don’t know if that’s even feasible, hypothetically or in reality. Holly, what about you? Any thoughts?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I don’t know how you would really decarbonize industry without something like this, because you’re asking, you know, Steel producers to produce green steel and retrofit plants and build new facilities and it’ll probably cost more. And I’ve just been thinking about the transition in the context of the decimation of the US steel industry in the past decades and all the jobs and the economic pain. And like, how do we not repeat that? I mean, we have to be smart about things like this leakage issue.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, well, it’ll definitely be interesting to see how they roll it out, what ends up being any sort of exception, because it could be a model moving forward if they do it right, or it could be kind of like what I think at least Chris and I both agree is a failed model, which is how cap and trade has been rolled out in this country. And cap and trade inadvertently created actually more environmental justice issues And I could see a carbon tax of this sort also inadvertently causing more environmental justice issues by shipping all the dirty manufacturing, quote unquote, to third world and second world countries and then finishing in another country and shipping it in.
So I’m sure people much smarter than I am are thinking about these things over in the European Union. So hopefully they roll something out that is better than what I am currently thinking it’s going to be. So as always, I feel like this is sort of a biweekly conversation, but let’s talk a little about what’s going on in the oil and gas world, because I was reading today a little bit about the clean electricity standards. So maybe Holly, as my oil and gas guru, I’ll ask you to talk a little bit about it and give your thoughts.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. I mean, the idea is pretty simple, right? The government sets a standard for how much clean electricity it wants to see on the grid. And then there’s a credit system for utilities and penalties if they’re not doing it. And so, I mean, this would be a way to get to Biden’s promise of having 100% clean electricity by 2035.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Why isn’t it popular though? Like it’s not gaining traction from everything I can, as a currently written, so.
Holly Jean Buck: I think it’s relatively popular. But it’s hard to get excited about something that’s fairly wonky, right? I mean, you hear a standard that’s not like an idea that you or me the average person can innately connect to. And so Matt Huber published a critique in Jacobin recently that talks a bit about the clean energy standard as being kind of beloved of this climate professional class. You know, not having mass appeal. So there’s a kind of Marxist left critique in there that this is kind of a technocratic approach, but there’s a lot of smart people in favor of it too.
Go ahead, Chris.
Chris Barnard: There are actually some Republicans that are working on some electricity standard proposals. There is McKinley from West Virginia, I believe. Who’s kind of a coal country Republican. He himself has proposed a 10 year innovation investment, followed by a clean electricity standard. So he would spend until 2030 on like put a bunch of money into research and design and kind of get a lot of these technologies to be more marketable and ready to go. And then implement a clean energy electricity standard to make sure that they are gently weaned into the market.
And that’s coming from a Republican from West Virginia, which I find a very interesting concept. I think one of my issues with the clean electricity standard discussion is that very often it doesn’t include nuclear power, which I think is, I mean, when it comes to Climate change, I hesitate to be hyperbolic, but it comes across as downright criminal that we would just ignore nuclear in that conversation. And then also like there’s a question is to what extent should natural gas be a part of it or at least the first few years, because the main culprit still is coal and even just going from the remaining amount of coal in the US or And indeed around the world to natural gas and then from natural gas to clean energies would vastly reduce emissions already.
And so it seems if the whole point of a clean electricity standard is to decarbonize, then we should be looking at solutions like natural gas So one final point about the clean electricity standard is obviously it tackles only electricity, which is Good for obviously homes and that kind of stuff. But there’s a lot of areas where such a standard wouldn’t tackle at all. Heavy industry being a major one. Transport, which is kind of over a third of emissions. It would be just doing this would not mean that all a sudden we’d not have emissions from transport, especially aviation and kind of buses and big ones, which are harder to decarbonize.
But even for electric cars, there’s a lot more that needs to be done just beyond having clean electricity. So I think it’s not necessarily kind of a silver bullet solution. It’s quite targeted to just a particular area, I think.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I agree with you 100% that it’s fairly narrow. I mean, it’s significant. It’s, don’t get me wrong, but it is narrow. There are huge parts of the economy that wouldn’t even be impacted. But Holly, I was curious about something that Chris just brought up, the natural gas debate, right? There are incrementalists who kind of believe that we should include natural gas and it would get kind of half the credit, right, that over... Pure clean energy because natural gas has lower emissions but is not emission free. And then there are people who argue that you should just get rid of natural gas and coal at the same time because you don’t want, you know, it’s the moral hazard argument basically in a way.
So I was wondering what your opinion was on that, how you would approach it.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, when I think about gas phase out, I think about, you know, how do we make sure that people know about and want and can get heat pumps in their houses and You know, what are the possibilities to ban gas and new homes and that kind of supply side and also cutting the demand parts of it. So, I mean, the natural gas, is it a bridge? Is it a bridge to nowhere? I think most people probably already know how they feel about that question because the debate has been going on for so long and yet it’s not going to go away.
I think this is going to be like one of the key battles of the 2020s is moving past gas. So, I mean, my personal opinion is that, yeah, it shouldn’t really be a part, but if I think about what’s politically possible, probably you need some Temporary use of gas, but how do you make sure it’s actually temporary?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, the devil is always in those details, those timelines. But yet, even as we’re talking about this, we’re still approving massive oil projects in Alaska. So, well, maybe not approving, but moving forward. Willow is a project to produce more than 100,000 additional barrels of oil a day for the next 30 years. So, Kind of, to me, strange messaging. It’s a project that’s being driven by ConocoPhillips in Alaska, as I mentioned, right next to Anwar. So I don’t know what to say about this. I was just struck by the weird tension between that and the fact that Joe Biden is trying to stop leasing in Anwar this week.
But right next door, he’s letting a huge project move forward. Any thoughts on that from either one of you?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, it is a tension and Biden is, he doesn’t have that many allies that can get him across the finish line in the Senate. And one of the main Democrats he needs is Joe Manchin from coal producing West Virginia. Probably the most likely bipartisan senator from the Republican side is Lisa Murkowski from Alaska. Obviously, where Anwar is and the oil drilling there. And so I think he’s just making a political calculation that if he alienates either of those, he’s unable to do any of his other things in the Senate. And it’s really difficult to do that.
So I think there’s just kind of a tension there between the political reality and what would be ideal from his perspective in terms of policy.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Kind of was wondering what would be ideal is that the court shut it down so he could look like he was being bipartisan, but then The courts would say oh no we’re not going to let this willow project go through because it is currently stymied in litigation wonder if it was a calculated risk I don’t know we’ll see. The court certainly weren’t on his side when it came to the on war, you know stopping the leases that Louisiana judge basically put forth a nationwide injunction on. The review of the leases that the Biden administration put forth very early, I think maybe the first day of the presidency.
Chris, I was kind of curious about your opinion about this because it seemed like a very big judicial decision, right? Because they hadn’t stopped all the leases across the country, but they were saying states that weren’t even impacted like Louisiana were going to have irreparable damage. So What were you thinking about that? A broad judicial overreach isn’t something generally conservatives like to see, but it felt pretty broad.
Chris Barnard: I mean, I would argue it was probably an overreach purely in response to another overreach from Biden trying to ban those leases. I mean, so just to put it into context, right now you have kind of federal lands around the country and for a long time they’ve been leased out to oil and gas drilling companies and the vast majority of the royalties from that drilling and from that oil and gas goes back towards the conservation of those lands to start with. And there’s been a lot of local economies and kind of And conservation groups that have been worried by the fact that all of a sudden, if that stays that way, there will be no more funding for the conservation projects that are not only important to the local environment, but also to their local economies and all that.
So that’s kind of an interesting, probably unintended consequence of stopping those leases. The other thing is that Well, so obviously a lot of that is natural gas. And as I kind of was talking a little bit about earlier, natural gas is, I think, still a very important part of the energy mix, especially as we transition to clean energy away from coal. And so I’m a little skeptical about just all of a sudden stopping that and then potentially relying on imports of fossil fuels from elsewhere to make sure that we meet our energy demands, which would not be ideal either.
Those are my main thoughts on that topic.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I don’t know how I feel about it, to be honest. Holly, any thoughts from you?
Holly Jean Buck: To me, it just highlights what happens if you have an unmanaged decline or all this uncertainty. Back to the clean energy, clean electricity standard, one of the arguments for that is that It’s a framework with policy stability that people can use to make investment decisions, right? So what we have with oil and gas now is not investing in production coming online, but nothing to really make sure demand is cut. Then in a few years, you’re in a situation where Supply is tightened and prices go up. And then there’s like an incentive to drill in some of these more far-flung places because it’s worth more.
And it’s just a mess without a coherent framework that has enough buy-in from enough actors that people understand that this is the plan. Yeah.
Chris Barnard: One other interesting thing I’ll add on the leasing is that up until, well, pretty much the entirety of this leasing, Mechanism that we’ve had for federal lands. It’s been purely for kind of energy development and drilling and things like that. And it’s actually been interesting that conservation groups have been entirely left out of that bidding process. So in an ideal world, from my perspective, you would have conservation groups able to bid on particular tracts of land that the federal government is putting up for lease. Because if in kind of a market driven world, if they put enough premium on that particular land not being drilled, they should be allowed to compete with the people wanting to drill.
And they’ve been actively not allowed to do that by the government, whereas conservation groups have a lot of money in this country. And a lot of that money now goes into litigation. I’d rather see that go into fighting For the leases for conservation if that’s really where they want to put their money so I think that’s there’s like an interesting government barrier that’s been imposed on conservation groups there that I would like to see removed.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, I love that idea. I did not have any idea that was going on, but it also fits very beautifully into the 30 by 30 strategy that Joe Biden has put forth where 30% of US lands and water are conserved by 2030. So it seems like a pretty easy rule fix that shouldn’t cause too much consternation, but we will see. So finally, because our time is running out, I might’ve tried to pack too much into today’s episode, but I couldn’t help myself because I saw this article about Texas and them having a nuclear plant offline.
So, you know, point one of Chris’s favorite conversation points and two, the Texas grid asking people to, you know, conserve. It’s either too hot or too cold in Texas. It’s never just right. So Chris, I mean, what do you say to that?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, it’s a tough one, partly because it seems that, again, it doesn’t really matter what the energy system is and what the market looks like. It’s just one of those extreme weather things, again, that’s tackling the very Heavily monopolized energy market in California, as well as a deregulated one in Texas. And so, I mean, I fear that this will again become one of those things. Monopolies are better than deregulated markets. Deregulated markets suck or monopoly markets suck like a kind of political fight again, whereas it just seems that Extreme weather is bad for a grid, no matter what that grid, what the political context for that grid is.
And so I think it really is that there is a need for continued innovation in, for example, battery storage, weatherization, things like that. Although I will say that the track record historically of the Texas grid in the summer has been a lot better than a California one. Who knows whether that might be because for a long time, California had a lot of renewables that Texas didn’t. And as it’s unloading those into the grid, obviously that creates problems where the grid has to adapt and it’s not going to adapt overnight. And so that’s one of those things that ERCOT is probably struggling with right now to see how they fit all those different energy sources into one grid.
But yeah, I hope it doesn’t become like another political finger pointing exercise.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and I hope it doesn’t become a story about how renewables don’t work either, right? I mean, that could be the other way it goes. Holly, any thoughts from your perspective in not-so-hot New York?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, the Wall Street Journal just published either an editorial or opinion piece about how this was just another indication about how renewables don’t work and You know, people will seize on any kind of opportunity to make that narrative. So it’s frustrating. I’m sad about it. That’s all I have to say.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I think it actually goes a lot to your earlier point about managing how we are still learning how to manage our transition out of oil and gas to renewables. And being in a startup and knowing that as you learn, you of course make mistakes and you figure things out. Hope you’re wrong, Holly, that people seize on this and realize that this is just part of a learning curve as you bring new energy sources into a grid and it’s going to take some time and it’s not going to be perfect, but if you can get through it and get better, that’s really the ultimate goal.
Chris Barnard: One quick thing about the nuclear plans. This is why I really don’t want it to devolve into political finger pointing exercises because the reason that the nuclear plant was shut down had nothing to do with the actual weather. It was purely an unexpected fire in one of the operating rooms, which was extinguished within 20 minutes, but it’s been closed ever since because they’re trying to investigate. And so that might actually be an example of over caution that They maybe shouldn’t burden the entire grid and risk another kind of blackout situation because they need to invest and make sure that these things are safe.
But I feel like these combined nuclear plants provide 11% of ERCOT’s electricity or energy. So I feel like there’s a risk, of course, to prolonging that investigation too long and potentially crippling the grid as a result.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yep, definitely. I mean, it’s a hard balance. And like we talked about last week, nuclear just sort of instinctively, I think, scares people. So there’s always the urge to be extra cautious, which might in the end cause more pain than they anticipated. So with just a few minutes left, it’s my week to talk about something that makes me happy in the environment. And of course, I’m back to the national parks because for whatever reason, I apparently am obsessed. So I was very happy to hear that the Tongass National Park, they are revealing or replacing a Trump era rule that will not allow the 9 million acre or more forest to have logging and road construction.
It’s out in Alaska. It’s one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. It’s got trees that are 800 years old. I’m happy that we might be limiting access to that and just protecting a beautiful natural environment. And also we are returning some of the national monument boundaries that were narrowed in the previous administration, both in Utah and in the Atlantic Ocean, the first marine monument actually in the Atlantic Ocean. And so I’m just happy that we are returning some of these lands and Judah people for them to enjoy and not for exploration for oil and gas or anything else.
And with that, thank you all for listening to us. And we look forward to talking to you next week. Have a great weekend, everybody. And I will see you both in a week.
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