Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[WolfStock1]

29 minutes ago, chubbs said:

The chart I posted has global numbers. The US is lagging. We have large import duties on solar, and EVs from China making our costs higher than the rest of the world.

Import duties on Chinese EVs are irrelevant - they are not legal to drive in the US.

Electricity prices in the US are amongst the lowest in the world, so it's not that.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/?srsltid=AfmBOoqfk-WgVGYRIpGDuUwvfazUcrDxpPwXNEyFvUDUiI8qOR-Dq7J8

China does indeed have lower electricity prices; with many factors including that allowing them to have continued growth in EV sales (though it appears to be slowing there some as well).   Amongst that is that they don't have as much low-hanging fruit of fossil as we do (oil), extremely low wages (about 1/3 of US), and a regime that generally doesn't care about environmental or social conditions; instead with a "build at all costs" policy.   Do we really want that in the US?

Germany is probably a good example of policy gone bad, with their aggressive push towards solar and wind.   This has resulted in extremely high electricity prices, and stalled EV sales (though there appears to be an uptick this year at least).

 

 

Gemany generally has about 2.8M car sales per year, so they've topped out at roughly 30% being electric.   They've picked the low-hanging fruit.

Keep in mind that these to-date numbers are in a policy regime where EV sales have been heavily subsidized.   (that includes China BTW)

 

[chubbs]

e 

9 minutes ago, WolfStock1 said:

Import duties on Chinese EVs are irrelevant - they are not legal to drive in the US.

Electricity prices in the US are amongst the lowest in the world, so it's not that.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/?srsltid=AfmBOoqfk-WgVGYRIpGDuUwvfazUcrDxpPwXNEyFvUDUiI8qOR-Dq7J8

China does indeed have lower electricity prices; with many factors including that allowing them to have continued growth in EV sales (though it appears to be slowing there some as well).   Amongst that is that they don't have as much low-hanging fruit of fossil as we do (oil), extremely low wages (about 1/3 of US), and a regime that generally doesn't care about environmental or social conditions; instead with a "build at all costs" policy.   Do we really want that in the US?

Germany is probably a good example of policy gone bad, with their aggressive push towards solar and wind.   This has resulted in extremely high electricity prices, and stalled EV sales (though there appears to be an uptick this year at least).

 

 

Gemany generally has about 2.8M car sales per year, so they've topped out at roughly 30% being electric.   They've picked the low-hanging fruit.

Keep in mind that these to-date numbers are in a policy regime where EV sales have been heavily subsidized.   (that includes China BTW)

 

Its not surprising that EV use is progressing unevenly. Transition costs for charging and other infrastructure is high. Subsidization varies. The key for EVs is battery technology which is proceeding rapidly: different lithium chemistries, sodium, and solid state. These new technologies have: lower cost, better safety, faster charging, longer battery life etc. EVs are getting better and cheaper. Now that EVs are becoming as cheap as combustion cars subsidies are becoming less important. The genie is out of the bottle. With the withdrawal of policy suppport, the US will lag; but, global penetration will continue to ramp quickly. EVs are very attractive to countries that import oil.

[WolfStock1]

A pretty devastating article in WSJ today on the negative effects of the renewable energy push on the European economy:

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/europes-green-energy-rush-slashed-emissionsand-crippled-the-economy-e65a1a07

While the existence of warming is undeniable (e.g. see new record low Arctic ice extent in other thread), this illustrates how hard of a problem this is to solve.

[frontranger8]

Nature Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll - The New York Times https://share.google/xRSyFAwbx54BMddiW

[chubbs]

4 hours ago, frontranger8 said:

Nature Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll - The New York Times https://share.google/xRSyFAwbx54BMddiW

Below are a press release and a Q+A on the retracted paper. The problems with the original paper have been addressed and a new paper has been submitted.

How do the results in the corrected version compare to the original:

"The revisions did not significantly alter the central estimates, but did increase the uncertainty range they sat within.

Correcting the underlying data for Uzbekistan and introducing additional controls to make the model more robust to outlier data and anomalies resulting from the transition between data sources changed the global median income loss from 19% (18.8%) to 17% (17.4%).

Accounting for spatial correlation using ‘Conley standard errors’ did not affect the median, but did increase the uncertainty ranges, with the likely range of damages by mid-century increasing from 11-29% to 6-31%."

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/authors-retract-nature-study-on-economic-damages-from-climate-change-will-resubmit-for-peer-review

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/questions-and-answers-nature-study

[WolfStock1]

1 hour ago, chubbs said:

Below are a press release and a Q+A on the retracted paper. The problems with the original paper have been addressed and a new paper has been submitted.

How do the results in the corrected version compare to the original:

"The revisions did not significantly alter the central estimates, but did increase the uncertainty range they sat within.

Correcting the underlying data for Uzbekistan and introducing additional controls to make the model more robust to outlier data and anomalies resulting from the transition between data sources changed the global median income loss from 19% (18.8%) to 17% (17.4%).

Accounting for spatial correlation using ‘Conley standard errors’ did not affect the median, but did increase the uncertainty ranges, with the likely range of damages by mid-century increasing from 11-29% to 6-31%."

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/authors-retract-nature-study-on-economic-damages-from-climate-change-will-resubmit-for-peer-review

https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/questions-and-answers-nature-study

 

Thought this bit was kind of odd:

"The revised analysis shows economic damages from climate change till mid-century are substantial and outweigh the costs of mitigation"

It seems the relationship of the costs shouldn't necessarily be 1:1 or anything like that.    Every dollar spent on mitigation doesn't lessen the costs of CC by a dollar - it may be much less or it may be much more; and you may actually want one or the other.

E.g. say the costs due to CC (generally storms - wind and flooding) end up being $500 billion in a given area over the next 25 years, if no mitigation was done.    You could spend say twice that - say $1 trillion - on sea walls, stricter building codes, river flood mitigation (drainage and walls), and lessen the resulting damage costs from $500B to say $300B.    Was it bad to spend the $1 trillion, since the net loss is $700B?   Maybe, but maybe not if you consider that there are also lives involved; presumably less lives lost in the do-mitigate case.

Looking from a strictly financial standpoint - it seems like you generally would *want* your mitigation costs to be less than the damage costs, right?   This is due to the unpredictable nature of storms.   If you spend more money to mitigate then the delta between the two is by definition wasted money - generally.   That said - there's probably some low-hanging fruit that is worthwhile.   E.g. the US built a series of flood-control dams after the big Ohio river flood in 1937; this likely ended up saving money in the long run, so that might be a case where the cost of mitigation reduced the likely cost of non-mitigation damages.   Same is true for flood walls in various places - usually it's money well spent.   But it's rarely a 1:1 tradeoff though; so comparing the two sets of figures seems odd.