3. I'm no expert on it (and maybe I'm just a biased Catholic), but distributism seems like something that a variety of people from different parts of the political spectrum could get behind.
I agree. The outcome that reduces the economic power of large corporations and increases that of small businesses seems like it would be a large boost to technical innovation.
Large corporations are efficient at making money (which is why they naturally emerge from the current economic state) but tend to be sluggish at changing the technical status quo. It is why the FAANGs buy small businesses with new IP, rather than generating much internally.
I mean, distributism boils down to "everyone should own their means of production".* No disagreement here, but the whole point of the branding seems to be signaling you're a good, reliable religious conservative instead of some kind of radical commie revolutionary aiming to overthrow traditional society. (Which, come to think of it, would probably be a good thing for my fellow socialists to signal.)
*That's a vast simplification, I know. I don't mean to say it literally does not differ from other currents of socialist thinking, just that it fits perfectly among them by unambiguously sharing their defining ideological demand.
Distributists lose me when they start talking about guilds. I'm not super interested in letting the people who already have jobs using the government to suppress their future competitors, and it's a bit baffling to me that people could look at the socio-governmental landscape today and think, "yep, we need some more of that".
Interesting to see your take on Shellenberger, but you're incorrect on his stance re: Suboxone. I assume you got his stance on Suboxone from the chronicle hit piece, but they got it wrong.
also, calling CalPsyc "mass" incarceration of the mentally ill is a stretch. Perhaps if you think of Portugal's handling of homeless addicts as mass incarceration then you're at least consistent.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and wish to simply rest your head on your keyboard, I suggest stepping away from the computer entirely. A long walk outside, a conversation with a friend, or even a book can help alleviate stress.
Resting one’s frontal lobe on a precision machined cherry MX key is no way to deal with stress.
Leroux's "Pro-life Plus" seems pretty reasonable, per her website it's just Pro-life with funding for supporting single mothers with affordable childcare, remote education, employment opportunities etc.
Tony Fanara's Lower-48 aqueduct system sounds great if you're a coastal state importing water, but not so great if you're a midwestern state whos water is being stolen by coastal elites.
Presumably we would pay for the water we import; would idaho mind some of their excess water being diverted out of full reservoirs in return for money to pay for <whatever it is idahoans like>?
Probably yes very much so. Water is a very contentious issue even within Cali already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars) , and frankly nobody outside of Cali likes Californians much at all. Any plan to export water would (rightfully in my opinion) be viewed as a plot by blue states to steal scarce resources, heritage etc. from red states. I doubt a pipe could be planned and built, it would face tremendous local opposition. Beyond that I highly doubt it could survive without being repeatedly damaged under mysterious circumstances.
Conservationists don't want to harm native ecosystems, conservatives don't trust or want to help California. I challenge you to find a politician that will say their constituency has "excess water", the mayor of Atlantis probably wouldn't say it.
I think the real problem is that a pipeline barely pencils out when you're talking about a pipeline to ship something like petroleum, that sells for dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of dollars a barrel. Meanwhile, literally the most expensive municipal water in the United States sells for under $1 a barrel: https://www.publicwaternow.org/most_expensive_water
California has some big aqueducts that ship water a few hundred miles from the Sierras, and so do some other parts of the world. But very few of these try to cross mountains or do anything else expensive. Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
>Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
I have to disagree, it is “so” important. The price we have become accustomed to paying for it is an entirely separate issue. In other words, when supplies shrink I don’t think it’s going to have much effect on the demand.
I think it will have a huge effect on demand, given that most current urban demand is for landscaping and exterior washing, which are not actually highly valued activities. No one will pay $1 a gallon for a lawn or for exterior washing. There are other uses that will also disappear long before we hit the core inelastic demand.
And long before water reaches $1 a gallon, residents will leave and drop demand that way too. Water is not going to be globally scarce - just scarce in some localities.
There’s going to be a threshold, where there will be a wildfire in some location and there won’t be enough water available in nearby reservoirs to fight it. Something like that would be a big eye-opener. Some rivers already run dry in the summer.
Then I really think whoever has put the time and engineering into designing ways to capture & use iceberg water will basically become king.
Things don’t pencil out yet but I think they will, sadly.
Water is a more complicated market than it might seem. People buying bottles of drinking water at a grocery store are unlike farmers using water by the acre-foot.
For the kind of water that comes through pipes, to simplify you could think of it as cities versus farmers. Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale, but often it isn't.
I was just making the point that it’s a pretty essential commodity and the less of it there is to go around the uglier things will get. People aren’t going to give up water, when push comes to shove. Time to watch Chinatown again.
It would be a funny twist in the culture war if all kinds of people in the southwest had to move to all those states that have a lot of water. Perhaps they would be referred to as drybacks.
> Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale
Depends if they want to eat or not.
I'm not claiming to understand the laws of water markets; I know enough to know I don't.
But left to a free market, either the city people pay enough to the farmer to cover his water bill or they don't have food to eat, and city people are weird but they still like to eat.
Very few? Southern California gets almost all of its water either through the LA Aqueduct or the Colorado River Aqueduct, both of which cross significant mountain ranges by various combinations of tunnels and siphons.
You can just ignore the potential solution by not even looking at it and dismissing it as impossible while not actually examining the facts if you like. I won't try to stop you.
But no, by "throwing fresh water into the ocean" I meant exactly what I said.
This problem is entirely man-made, primarily through inaction, and mostly due to the fact that the majority of the people who run things in California care way more about the delta smelt and chinook salmon than people. Which, given that they're in charge of Californians, I suppose I can empathize with that.
I'll be polite enough to not put words in **your** mouth, and assert that what you really "mean" is that you hate humans in favor of random smelt, but you **do** have to actually decide which one you're going to support.
And as a practical matter, if you choose to go with the current status quo, you are picking the smelt and salmon. Which **isn't even actually accomplishing the (declared) intended result**. So the **only** thing that's actually being accomplished is making life in California more difficult for the people that live there.
I suppose there probably **is** an "ineffective anti-altruism" movement, but they kinda sound like jerks.
Everyone agrees that rivers and fish have some value. Everyone agrees that lawns and car washes have some value. Everyone agrees that drinking water and agricultural crops have some value. The question is just how much value each has, and therefore how much water to devote to each.
Those are generally derailed to political concerns or environmental ones, people hating big companies or worried about oil leaks. Harmless seawater used to refill a lake is not an issue there, and pipe building itself is not the challenge
I agree, but any project on that scale seems to have a very difficult problem of overcoming a zillion landowners and local governments who could potentially veto the project for any or no reason. I also wouldn't be surprised if California delayed such a project for decades with environmental litigation.
I mean, sure, but hopefully Biden wouldn't veto a water pipeline too.
As for a response to your second point, well, yeah. I definitely meant to imply that I consider this to be mostly the fault of the California government. ;)
As someone who lives in Idaho I can confirm there would be absolutely no chance of that. I'm not sure Californians realize that the exact same drought they are suffering is widespread through the West; although the North Rocky Mountain ecoregion is experiencing it to a less significant degree than Utah, California, and the Southwest, it still exists. Idaho is absolutely suffering from a precipitation shortage.
Also, everyone here seems to hate California, so there's another obstacle.
Canada gets a say too based on a treaty signed in 2005, and that say is emphatically not in favor of piping any Great Lakes water 2,000 miles southwest.
Shellenberger is aggressively mendacious. I like the "Apocalypse Never" idea but he's like a high school debate club in human form. He says stuff that he's smart enough to know isn't true, because he thinks YOU'RE not smart enough to notice. If you could desalinate water with smug you could plug him straight into the grid.
Interesting. I read that same book and came the to exact opposite conclusion on his substantiveness. Let me pull it off my bookshelf and see what I can find.
Re:Africa. The argument here is that deaths from extreme weather are orders of magnitude lower in the rich world than the developing world, and so if you had the choice between growing at 2% per person per year with +3 degrees of warming vs growing at 1% per person per year with +1.5 degrees of warming, the faster+hotter path would likely have fewer deaths from extreme weather and almost certainly have higher overall quality of life (since increased wealth reduces deaths from lots of things).
Other examples:
Deforestation. The planet is net-adding greenery, based on NASA satellite imagery over time. Yes, we are still losing rainforest so the forests that are replacing the rainforest are of net lower ecological value in terms of biodiversity, still the trendline on greenery is genuinely surprising relative to standard rhetoric.
Energy use in the Congo. Locals burning wood for energy uses a lot of land and degrades a lot of high-biodiversity rainforest. Replacing this biofuel use with ANYTHING would be a big improvement, even if that thing were fossil fuels (ideally it would be hydropower / wind / solar).
Sweatshops. All across the world people voluntarily leave family farms and travel hundreds of miles to work in sweatshops if the opportunity is available, because subsistence low-tech agriculture sucks and all of civilization is an elaborate scheme to get away from it.
Whales. The summary of the history of the whaling industry, and the importance of the "more ethical" replacement being both available in unlimited quantity and cheaper, was both interesting and instructive.
Nuclear. He is correct that Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a disastrous decision that burnt a lot of extra coal. His information on actual cancer cases caused by various nuclear disasters was interesting would be would be hard to independently verify. His information on the Vermont nuclear plant being mostly replaced by natural gas burning was new to me.
Energy storage component for renewables. The $23 trillion figure for the cost to have adequeate battery storage for the US if the grid was entirely wind+solar lines up decently with back-of-the-envelope math that I've done for myself using Googleable prices of batteries & similar factors, and demonstrates that there is a massive gap between current energy storage technology and what would be needed for a reliable renewable grid.
Malthus: continues to be wrong, and the 20th century chapters of the story are really embarrassing for Paul Erhlich in particular.
The deaths from extreme weather is a useful skeleton key that unlocks the understanding that projected damage from global warming *by the IPCC* is quite low relative to (for example) the difference global GDP in 2100 being $X per person or $1.6X per person. Adding together crop failures, extreme weather deaths, coastal relocation, increasing spending on mitigation + hardening measures, migration flows etc produces only a 5% impact on global GDP and a small number of additional deaths.
Given that the current "only acceptable" solution to climate change (no new nuclear, just wind+solar+batteries) currently seems like it would cost 1 order of magnitude more in $, that is quite suggestive that people dogmatically insisting that "this is the only acceptable course of action because the alternative is mass death" are full of it.
Now, one can make the case that the IPCC is underestimating the potential damage from climate change, but then at that point one must abandon appeals to authority and get down in the mud with every single other person waving around their own personal custom climate model.
As an italian i find it very funny how much people are critical of germany while my country does the exact same things and manage to completely avoid international criticism
To at least some extent the most recent round of condemnations is focused on Germany because it was NS2 that is at least often referenced as having held such a significant role in the way things played out, and that runs straight from Russia to Germany. If it went through Italy instead, I bet you guys would get more flak.
As far as relative levels of oppobrium specifically regarding the climate change question, I cannot speculate.
Only counting the land footprint of a fossil fuel power plant ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, which is both massive and also destructive. But he doesn't actually care about the issue of land use and environmental preservation, he just wants to win the argument.
Eh. We use a lot more space *using* energy vs producing it. And it's not like wind turbine blades or solar panels are birthed whole from the forehead of Zeus, neither.
The land required to run an electrical grid on fossil fuels requires both the land to operate the plants & also the land to extract the fossil fuels, yes.
But oil extraction+power plants are still a smaller footprint than generating an equivalent amount of energy through solar+wind+batteries+mines for lithium and rare earths. I'd need to go looking for sources to pin down exactly how much smaller, but my Fermi estimate of it would still be 2x to 10x?
I bring this up not to open this up for debate because I think the whole thing is utterly silly. It's an example of a very smart person knowingly using bait-and-switch argumentation.
So Shellenberger ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, while almost every pro renewable argument I've read ignores the land footprint of copper, cobalt, coltan, etc. mines. Also, Shellenberger isn't pro coal; he's pro nuclear, which has a much smaller mining footprint. So Shellenberger is not particularly mendacious by the standards of the energy debate.
Both renewables and conventional plants obviously require materials to build the physical plant, copper for transmission, etc. IN ADDITION, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants need a constant stream of mined fuel to generate power. It's their defining feature. Renewables do not; they just sit where you put them and generate power from ambient energy. Ignoring that is enough for me to write him off as a person worth listening to, on energy or frankly any other topic.
There's plenty of studies on land use by power source that include extraction of fuel and raw materials needed for that power source, and Shellenberger is correct that solar requires more land than coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear or geothermal.
But it's not 300-400x the amount, no idea where he's getting those figures - it's more like 2-20x depending on the "normal power plant" he's comparing it to.
The specific fuel in question is important. Nat-gas wells...even the dreaded fracking wells have a pretty tiny footprint; not more than an acre or so, at least in my experience. Whereas strip-mining coal or mountain-top removal mining creates big scars on the landscape, and they don't seem to go away quickly, either. The difference between the two fuel sources would be large, and so merging these together into some kind of average land use statistic for a conventional power plant would seem to me to be pretty misleading in its own right, because I'll bet Shellenberger isn't advocating building more coal fired power plants fueled with strip-mined coal.
Individual uranium mines are pretty big, but uranium is extremely efficient and a handful of mines suffice to supply the entire world, so the footprint per power plant is small.
This is a very good way of putting something I've noticed about him too—I agree with him on the merits on a ton of issues, especially around energy, but he seems like a guy who just has no problem lying if he thinks it's for "good reasons." Reminds me of, like, Nathan Robinson in that way.
If I were a Californian I might vote for him anyway, but I wouldn't feel great about it.
Shellenberger sounds pretty good to me. I get that he's not perfect, but the status quo in California seems so dysfunctional that I think he'd be a big improvement on housing (he's a YIMBY), crime, homelessness, and climate change (pro-nuclear).
If he's a YIMBY in regards to housing he hides it extremely well - never talking about obviously needed zoning reform, and he's relentless about denying the obvious link between housing costs and homelessness.
But then again so do most people running for governor, so...
> I started out thinking you struck your enemies with the Action Rod directly, but now I believe it probably attaches to a gun and makes the gun more powerful somehow. Further research is needed.
Research has continued! I believe this is a gun disassembly tool, which allows you to remove/detach AR-15 interior components via the barrel without the need to fully disassemble the gun (i.e an internal component that would normally need 50 other parts removed can be accessed directly via this).
Oh, that would be smart! I watched a video about the action rod and still had no idea what it was for or how you use it. I know nothing about guns, so I'm not the person for this.
Action Rod is a fantastic name though, and it really should be some kind of truncheon you use Batman-style on your enemies.
It's so you can install barrels to the AR15 upper without having to clamp the upper in a vise. The barrel is tightened to 30 to 80 ft-lbs of torque (using a torque wrench) and aligning the gas tube through the appropriate hole (the gas tube captures escaping gas from the barrel and uses it to cycle the AR).
To get the ~45 ft-lbs of torque you've really got to clamp the upper down, and of course, this can break/damage the upper (especially on light weight uppers), so a bunch of devices exist to luck the upper in place for barrel installation without damage to the upper.
I was surprised how you didn't address Mercuri's opposition to "goy shutdowns" and "goy gay in newsom" but I eventually figured out his "v" looks weird
Writing "Gov. Shut Downs" right above "Gov. Gavin Newsom" in the "Against" column makes it sound like the candidate opposes two Governors, named Gavin Newsom and Shut Downs.
I can't tell if you're joking about Gavin Newsom's name - Gavin's a pretty common name here in the UK, but in the US it does seem to be very rare among people born before the mid-90s: https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/m/gavin
People loved making fun of Sarah Palin's childrens' names, but this is the first I've heard of Gavin Newsom's.
Calling your kid "Brooklynn" (or for that matter Montana) seems like a definite lower-middle class move, but Gavin Newsom is nothing if not not lower middle class.
I agree that Newsom is going to be the governor and none of these people have a chance. But this one made me laugh (not in a mean way, because the only person you were remotely mean about was Newsom and he can handle that), and I badly needed a laugh today.
God bless California and all who re-invent themselves who live there!
I'm a power engineer. I promise not to evaluate Shellenberger's policy positions on mental health if you'll promise not to evaluate his policy positions on nuclear power.
How likely is it that a person who is both unqualified to set mental health policy and unqualified to design an energy system would get one of them wrong and the other right? One in three? Is that how rationalists choose their thought leaders? Why do apparently smart people give Shellenberger any credence at all?
What renaissance men have been leading us that wield policy mastery in all areas under their supervision? Electing a political leader is as much art as science; you must trust in them to use their judgment to effect their vision.
In the establishment of trust, one will of course weigh their own knowledge and what appears to be that of the candidate.
As someone who makes their living in and amongst technical experts, I am incredibly suspicious of those who claim to be such. What Shellenberger argues for regarding energy policy and addiction treatment makes a lot of sense to me. Renewables are important, but are (mostly) intermittent and there has to be baseline capacity. Baseline capacity that produces no CO2 or other regulated air pollutants, at the cost of a small amount of nuclear waste (small in context of US nuclear arms maintenance) makes sense to me because that is technology that is here today and achieves reduced CO2 emissions goals.
I wouldn't blame you for thinking he's anti-renewable, but if you actually listen to any sort of long form discussion with him (I haven't read his work, so can't comment there), what he actually is is anti-renewable-optimism-verging-on-delusion. Delusion because of the cold hard reality of engineering constraints; foot print, energy density, build times, etc. His strident discussion of renewables is a case of his rhetorical pendulum swinging too far to the right in service of correcting it's outward swing on the left, so it's understandable that you could have this impression. FWIW, I'm getting my take on his stance re: renewables from his appearance on Rogan.
Regarding addiction treatment, he makes compelling cases regarding the need to incentivize and ultimately compel if it requires it. I think this discussion is often framed around "homeless", but we're really talking about a small subset of homeless that are severely addicted to narcotics with complications from untreated mental illness. To paraphrase Shellenberger, we (the US) do a good job with the single mom who finds herself without shelter and a dependent. We get those people off the street very quickly. It's when mental illness and addiction are added into the mix that you get the encampments seen in SF, LA, Austin, etc. I've seen Michael do "man on the street" style discussions with SF's homeless where they make it very clear they are there because of the ease of servicing their addiction.
Shellenberger makes it clear that much lauded programs like Portugal's are misunderstood and/or mischaracterized by housing advocacy groups in the US as offering shelter first, and de-criminalization. But that's not the full picture, it is illegal to consume drugs in public in Portugal, and there is the equivalent of drug court with the option for incarceration for forced treatment if people are not able to work through the non-compulsion avenues offered to them to get clean.
All that is to say, this seems imminently reasonable. I don't bring strong ideological convictions regarding energy or addiction policy to my evaluation of Shellenberger, and I find his proposed solutions contain enough merit that I can evaluate them, and now offer my rhetorical support.
He's doing what so many in public life have lost the ability to do: make persuasive arguments using data, rather than assertions and appeals to authority.
I used to know a public health nurse most of whose job was keeping track of tuberculosis patients: she showed up at their location every day and administered their medication. If we deployed suboxone and methadone this way we’d make progress- bringing it to them at their dwelling, shelter, tent etc. Due to the combination of restrictions on who can prescribe & distribute it, and dismal transportation networks, we have people in the US who are addicts who get prescribed suboxone and then can’t get the ride an hour each way to the clinic.
Shellenberger is saying some good things. I don’t live in CA anymore but I think he has a chance.
yeah I mean wouldn’t really cheap utility scale solar make way more sense for water desalinization? it’s the perfect application for somewhat unreliable cheap power
I looked up some facts - I reckon it would cost about $20 billion to build enough desalination capacity to replace California’s average share of Colorado river water. The total amortized cost of the energy needed to run that would be about $500 million per year using grid scale solar and about $2.3 billion per year using nuclear (assuming new plants for each case).
I'm curious about the fine print on the $500MM for grid-scale solar. The big selling point for fission over solar is that fission plants can run at full capacity, all day, every day, whereas solar production is highly variable depending on weather, season, and time of day. So for desalinization, where you presumably want your desal plants to be able to run around the clock (since the desalination capacity costs 8x-40x the additional power generation capacity by your figures, so it wouldn't really make sense to idle the plants at night), you either need very large scale power storage or you need a dispatchable power source to fill in the gaps when solar production is low or nonexistent. Power storage is expensive and probably not included in the $500MM, and building new natural gas plants to run at night and in the winter is neither free nor carbon-neutral.
Usually, solar cost per capacity is quoted either at theoretical peak production or with some kind of "capacity factor" adjustment that bakes in assumptions about the ability of the grid to fill in the gaps of a marginal addition to solar capacity.
Shows that the LCOE of utility solar can be as cheap as $28 per MWh and nuclear $131.
The Colorado river allocation to California is about 4.3 mega acre feet per year.
You are correct that it might make sense to spend more on energy to recover the capital costs of the desalination plants more quickly. I suspect new tech and truly large desalination plants might be able to have new economies of scale.
The $20 bil estimate comes from the original $250 mil estimate for the Carlsbad plant before unions and environmentalists got ahold of it.
To me the sad part is that it is obvious the California water problem is completely solvable with desalination using existing tech and for not all that much money (Cal state budget is $300 bil). But I guess environmentalists would prefer to drown hetch hetchy instead of making the ocean a bit saltier in local places.
So your calculation ignores that you would need to overbuild the desalination plant by 5x in the solar case.
(A) Nuclear
1 GW plant ($X) runs 24/7 produces 24 GWh per day for desal plant ($Y) produces let’s say 100 m3 of water.
(B) Solar
5 GW plant ($0.2X by your numbers) produces 24 GWh per day (because ~0.2 capacity factor) for desal plant. However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
Given that Y is much higher than X, the solar case doesn’t look so good.
> However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
I'm pro-nuclear but this seems an unnecessarily stupid way to build a plant for desalination from solar. Desalination is a perfect use for intermittent power.
Maybe. Most of that water is probably used for agriculture anyway, so the water demand pattern is also seasonal.
There are also more scalable desalination methods like distilling that might use less energy.
To me the important point is that desalination is totally doable, but there are many tradeoffs. Solar PV might not be economic for some use cases, it might work for others.
Instead of total replacement, think of it as diversifying your water sources to avoid depending too much on a single source. San Diego has a big desalination plant, but they're increasing the size of a reservoir too.
Some people are really anti nuclear. I was banned from r/energy after just 4 posts for suggesting that Germany had shot itself in the foot by closing down its nuclear power stations, and that they had in fact increased their gas production recently compared to coal (as gas is easier to ramp up when the wind isn’t blowing). I sourced these arguments as well, and was banned for mis-information.
Ah, I confused you with the person Scott replied to, so I was wondering why you were coming out in support of his positions here. In my defense your profiles pictures have a the same color map and you both have somewhat generic white guy names.
I wonder if the anti-nuclear activists have become even more rabid recently because they have been pressed into defending the indefensible (the policy of shutting down perfectly workable nuke plants in Germany in the midst of this historically grave energy crisis in 2022)
We can have a productive debate over whether it is a good idea to shut down existing, operational nuclear plants, if they have a good safety record and no obvious deficits.
But Shellenberger wants to build more and more and more of them, and he declares this with the blithe self-assurance of somebody who won't actually be doing the work, dismissing the complexity and scale of such an undertaking, as if all we needed to do was just decide to do it.
Yes, there are lots of plants on the drawing board, but very few new plants are actually being built; we are barely maintaining the inventory, even taking into account planned builds. In Europe, three are/were under construction: the EPRs at Flamanville and Oikiluoto, and Hinkley Point C.
Hinkley Point C is too early in its construction for it to be late. But the budget has already been adjusted upward.
Olkiluoto 3 went online in March 2022, although it won't go to full production until September 2022. It is 13 years late and 7 billion euros overbudget. TVO (the operator) has already decided there will not be an Olkiluoto 4.
The EPR is the most advanced civilian reactor design now in use. As we get better at things, they are supposed to be delivered faster and at lower cost. In nuclear, the opposite has been true. Please, tell me, what observable evidence do we have that suggests this trend will reverse?
Shellenberger's plans are all based on some combination of the following assumptions and assertions:
- we need to generate as much electricity per capita now as we have been, plus some large delta (typically 30%)
- building new nuclear plants is or will be straightforward, fast and inexpensive
- the risks and consequences of doing so are accurately quantifiable, generally overstated by opponents and will be resolved in some as yet unknown way by our descendants
To take just the question of risk for example: The reinsurance companies, whose business and survival depend on reliable risk assessment, have found that the risks are not reliably quantifiable and hence useless for an insurance risk model. Nuclear power plants are uninsurable. When they do get built, it's only because governments assume the ultimate liability (whether they are actually in a position to bear them is another question; most governments have decided they are not).
I am deeply skeptical of simplified claims about complex systems, no matter where and whom they come from. The biggest strike against Shellenberger is that he repeatedly claims things that are demonstrably untrue, and fills the room with so much nonsense so quickly that one doesn't know where to begin correcting it.
For somebody who works in the sector, that is really exhausting! That is the reason that no serious researcher or subject matter specialist is willing to appear with him publicly anymore. They see that he lacks competence in the subject areas he holds forth on and seems uninterested in honest discussion. We are all too busy to be wasting our time on endless dead-horse debates with people who cannot even acknowledge or agree on the basic facts (it was painful for me to write this, as I do have better things to do; but I also understand that communicating these things is part of my professional responsibility, so here we are.)
Shellenberger is, at best, a kind of human version of a _Journal of Hypotheses_. At worst, he is querulous, irritating, and a dangerous distraction. Perhaps he is entertaining. Joe Rogan, at least, seems to think so.
Viewed that way, I suppose he is right at home in your list of California gubernatorial candidates.
I don't get the impression Shellenberger suggests building nukes would be trivial or quite cheap, my impression is that he thinks it's a better idea than hoping some miracle storage solution comes along to make solar/wind viable, or just keep shifting by default to natural gas.
I'm pretty willing to give that idea a hearing. I've been here all through the solar/wind enthusiasm, and I see the results as an unqualified disaster. Electricity is far more expensive and noticeably less reliable than it was 20 years ago. At this point, I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say, and I'd rather have more nukes than more fossil fuel plants. I'm sure it will be expensive, but having your electric grid go tits up is even more expensive.
I wish these comments could be made without insults. I read the phrase "I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say" as indicating that you've already made up your mind about a complicated debate, having categorized the opposing viewpoint as the outgroup. I think this is an interesting debate that could be more productive without that thinking.
Why is it an insult? I didn't say they were rat bastards, I simply said I don't believe them. If not believing someone is to be classified as a personal insult, I don't see how any discussion at all is possible -- so I would classify your desired framework as way more constraining and illiberal than any I have expressed.
And, yes, I have indeed made up my mind about part of the debate, which is that I cannot be persuaded by solar/wind enthusiasts by themselves. They'd have to bring along some more neutral party to make their case, if there is a case to be made. Perhaps that seems "premature" to you, perhaps because the argument is new and interesting, but I have been paying attention to this debate for more than 30 years, and I'd say three decades is a very reasonable degree of patience. If someone has something *new* to say -- something I didn't first hear in 1975 -- then I'm happy to listen.
You don't think calling people 'groupies' for a particular policy position impugns them?
I believe that you do, and you're being wilfully obtuse. And even more dishonestly, you've moved the goalposts to whether 'not believing someone' is an insult, rather than 'not believing a word they say'. The latter clearly implies that they are liars, which you might recognise as an insult.
Of course there is stuff you didn't first hear in 1975. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened after that. If you've irrevocably made up your mind about literally anything with an empirical grounding then you're being deeply irrational, no matter how many decades you've "paid attention" for. If you've not heard anything new about it since 1975, though, then I'm not sure you have been paying attention.
Olkiluoto is interesting that it is the only thing that can save Finland now from getting cut off from Russian gas.
Nuclear seems to be expensive but with gas prices now raising 3 or 4 times in Europe, what choice do we really have?
I have an impression that regulations are too strict on nuclear thus making it more expensive and believed that low gas prices will continue forever. The war in Ukraine changed this view and I believe that Russia/Belarus developed nuclear themselves with the aim to profit from raising oil/gas prices. If Belarus could build Astravets cheaply, why not others? Maybe the war in Europe will change the political and technical incentives?
Compromise: governator/governatorial?
3. I'm no expert on it (and maybe I'm just a biased Catholic), but distributism seems like something that a variety of people from different parts of the political spectrum could get behind.
I'm not Catholic, and I only found out what distributionism is today, but it strikes me as a good idea.
I agree. The outcome that reduces the economic power of large corporations and increases that of small businesses seems like it would be a large boost to technical innovation.
Large corporations are efficient at making money (which is why they naturally emerge from the current economic state) but tend to be sluggish at changing the technical status quo. It is why the FAANGs buy small businesses with new IP, rather than generating much internally.
I mean, distributism boils down to "everyone should own their means of production".* No disagreement here, but the whole point of the branding seems to be signaling you're a good, reliable religious conservative instead of some kind of radical commie revolutionary aiming to overthrow traditional society. (Which, come to think of it, would probably be a good thing for my fellow socialists to signal.)
*That's a vast simplification, I know. I don't mean to say it literally does not differ from other currents of socialist thinking, just that it fits perfectly among them by unambiguously sharing their defining ideological demand.
Distributists lose me when they start talking about guilds. I'm not super interested in letting the people who already have jobs using the government to suppress their future competitors, and it's a bit baffling to me that people could look at the socio-governmental landscape today and think, "yep, we need some more of that".
Interesting to see your take on Shellenberger, but you're incorrect on his stance re: Suboxone. I assume you got his stance on Suboxone from the chronicle hit piece, but they got it wrong.
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1525928377151959040
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1490703152244428805
also, calling CalPsyc "mass" incarceration of the mentally ill is a stretch. Perhaps if you think of Portugal's handling of homeless addicts as mass incarceration then you're at least consistent.
Hi Catherine,
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and wish to simply rest your head on your keyboard, I suggest stepping away from the computer entirely. A long walk outside, a conversation with a friend, or even a book can help alleviate stress.
Resting one’s frontal lobe on a precision machined cherry MX key is no way to deal with stress.
Thanks, corrected.
I can't tell whether Catherine is having a bad day or a very, very good day.
Leroux's "Pro-life Plus" seems pretty reasonable, per her website it's just Pro-life with funding for supporting single mothers with affordable childcare, remote education, employment opportunities etc.
Tony Fanara's Lower-48 aqueduct system sounds great if you're a coastal state importing water, but not so great if you're a midwestern state whos water is being stolen by coastal elites.
Presumably we would pay for the water we import; would idaho mind some of their excess water being diverted out of full reservoirs in return for money to pay for <whatever it is idahoans like>?
Probably yes very much so. Water is a very contentious issue even within Cali already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars) , and frankly nobody outside of Cali likes Californians much at all. Any plan to export water would (rightfully in my opinion) be viewed as a plot by blue states to steal scarce resources, heritage etc. from red states. I doubt a pipe could be planned and built, it would face tremendous local opposition. Beyond that I highly doubt it could survive without being repeatedly damaged under mysterious circumstances.
Conservationists don't want to harm native ecosystems, conservatives don't trust or want to help California. I challenge you to find a politician that will say their constituency has "excess water", the mayor of Atlantis probably wouldn't say it.
I think the real problem is that a pipeline barely pencils out when you're talking about a pipeline to ship something like petroleum, that sells for dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of dollars a barrel. Meanwhile, literally the most expensive municipal water in the United States sells for under $1 a barrel: https://www.publicwaternow.org/most_expensive_water
California has some big aqueducts that ship water a few hundred miles from the Sierras, and so do some other parts of the world. But very few of these try to cross mountains or do anything else expensive. Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
>Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
I have to disagree, it is “so” important. The price we have become accustomed to paying for it is an entirely separate issue. In other words, when supplies shrink I don’t think it’s going to have much effect on the demand.
I think it will have a huge effect on demand, given that most current urban demand is for landscaping and exterior washing, which are not actually highly valued activities. No one will pay $1 a gallon for a lawn or for exterior washing. There are other uses that will also disappear long before we hit the core inelastic demand.
And long before water reaches $1 a gallon, residents will leave and drop demand that way too. Water is not going to be globally scarce - just scarce in some localities.
That’s probably true.
There’s going to be a threshold, where there will be a wildfire in some location and there won’t be enough water available in nearby reservoirs to fight it. Something like that would be a big eye-opener. Some rivers already run dry in the summer.
Then I really think whoever has put the time and engineering into designing ways to capture & use iceberg water will basically become king.
Things don’t pencil out yet but I think they will, sadly.
Water is a more complicated market than it might seem. People buying bottles of drinking water at a grocery store are unlike farmers using water by the acre-foot.
For the kind of water that comes through pipes, to simplify you could think of it as cities versus farmers. Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale, but often it isn't.
Yeah, that all makes sense, I get it.
I was just making the point that it’s a pretty essential commodity and the less of it there is to go around the uglier things will get. People aren’t going to give up water, when push comes to shove. Time to watch Chinatown again.
It would be a funny twist in the culture war if all kinds of people in the southwest had to move to all those states that have a lot of water. Perhaps they would be referred to as drybacks.
Canada will have to build a wall.
> Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale
Depends if they want to eat or not.
I'm not claiming to understand the laws of water markets; I know enough to know I don't.
But left to a free market, either the city people pay enough to the farmer to cover his water bill or they don't have food to eat, and city people are weird but they still like to eat.
Very few? Southern California gets almost all of its water either through the LA Aqueduct or the Colorado River Aqueduct, both of which cross significant mountain ranges by various combinations of tunnels and siphons.
If California cared about their fresh water supplies they'd stop throwing so much of it into the ocean.
Note that by “throwing fresh water into the ocean” you mean “allowing rivers to exist”.
You can just ignore the potential solution by not even looking at it and dismissing it as impossible while not actually examining the facts if you like. I won't try to stop you.
But no, by "throwing fresh water into the ocean" I meant exactly what I said.
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/ca-reservoirs-filled-to-top-in-2019-being-drained-by-state/
And last year: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-releasing-water-from-reservoirs-claiming-drought-conditions/
And the 20 years before that.
This problem is entirely man-made, primarily through inaction, and mostly due to the fact that the majority of the people who run things in California care way more about the delta smelt and chinook salmon than people. Which, given that they're in charge of Californians, I suppose I can empathize with that.
I'll be polite enough to not put words in **your** mouth, and assert that what you really "mean" is that you hate humans in favor of random smelt, but you **do** have to actually decide which one you're going to support.
And as a practical matter, if you choose to go with the current status quo, you are picking the smelt and salmon. Which **isn't even actually accomplishing the (declared) intended result**. So the **only** thing that's actually being accomplished is making life in California more difficult for the people that live there.
I suppose there probably **is** an "ineffective anti-altruism" movement, but they kinda sound like jerks.
Everyone agrees that rivers and fish have some value. Everyone agrees that lawns and car washes have some value. Everyone agrees that drinking water and agricultural crops have some value. The question is just how much value each has, and therefore how much water to devote to each.
We can barely even get long-distance oil pipelines built, even though oil is 2.5 orders of magnitude more valuable than water per unit volume.
Those are generally derailed to political concerns or environmental ones, people hating big companies or worried about oil leaks. Harmless seawater used to refill a lake is not an issue there, and pipe building itself is not the challenge
I agree, but any project on that scale seems to have a very difficult problem of overcoming a zillion landowners and local governments who could potentially veto the project for any or no reason. I also wouldn't be surprised if California delayed such a project for decades with environmental litigation.
Not a fan of Californians
I mean, sure, but hopefully Biden wouldn't veto a water pipeline too.
As for a response to your second point, well, yeah. I definitely meant to imply that I consider this to be mostly the fault of the California government. ;)
As someone who lives in Idaho I can confirm there would be absolutely no chance of that. I'm not sure Californians realize that the exact same drought they are suffering is widespread through the West; although the North Rocky Mountain ecoregion is experiencing it to a less significant degree than Utah, California, and the Southwest, it still exists. Idaho is absolutely suffering from a precipitation shortage.
Also, everyone here seems to hate California, so there's another obstacle.
Indeed. In fact the Great Lakes states passed an interstate agreement (enshrined also in federal law) specifically to pre-empt such notions.
https://greatlakes.org/campaigns/defending-the-great-lakes-compact/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
Canada gets a say too based on a treaty signed in 2005, and that say is emphatically not in favor of piping any Great Lakes water 2,000 miles southwest.
Shellenberger is aggressively mendacious. I like the "Apocalypse Never" idea but he's like a high school debate club in human form. He says stuff that he's smart enough to know isn't true, because he thinks YOU'RE not smart enough to notice. If you could desalinate water with smug you could plug him straight into the grid.
Interesting. I read that same book and came the to exact opposite conclusion on his substantiveness. Let me pull it off my bookshelf and see what I can find.
Re:Africa. The argument here is that deaths from extreme weather are orders of magnitude lower in the rich world than the developing world, and so if you had the choice between growing at 2% per person per year with +3 degrees of warming vs growing at 1% per person per year with +1.5 degrees of warming, the faster+hotter path would likely have fewer deaths from extreme weather and almost certainly have higher overall quality of life (since increased wealth reduces deaths from lots of things).
Other examples:
Deforestation. The planet is net-adding greenery, based on NASA satellite imagery over time. Yes, we are still losing rainforest so the forests that are replacing the rainforest are of net lower ecological value in terms of biodiversity, still the trendline on greenery is genuinely surprising relative to standard rhetoric.
Energy use in the Congo. Locals burning wood for energy uses a lot of land and degrades a lot of high-biodiversity rainforest. Replacing this biofuel use with ANYTHING would be a big improvement, even if that thing were fossil fuels (ideally it would be hydropower / wind / solar).
Sweatshops. All across the world people voluntarily leave family farms and travel hundreds of miles to work in sweatshops if the opportunity is available, because subsistence low-tech agriculture sucks and all of civilization is an elaborate scheme to get away from it.
Whales. The summary of the history of the whaling industry, and the importance of the "more ethical" replacement being both available in unlimited quantity and cheaper, was both interesting and instructive.
Nuclear. He is correct that Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a disastrous decision that burnt a lot of extra coal. His information on actual cancer cases caused by various nuclear disasters was interesting would be would be hard to independently verify. His information on the Vermont nuclear plant being mostly replaced by natural gas burning was new to me.
Energy storage component for renewables. The $23 trillion figure for the cost to have adequeate battery storage for the US if the grid was entirely wind+solar lines up decently with back-of-the-envelope math that I've done for myself using Googleable prices of batteries & similar factors, and demonstrates that there is a massive gap between current energy storage technology and what would be needed for a reliable renewable grid.
Malthus: continues to be wrong, and the 20th century chapters of the story are really embarrassing for Paul Erhlich in particular.
Etc.
> but that 1% vs. 3% example is just made up.
So is Global Cooling.
Oh, sorry, Global Warming.
No, wait. Climate Change. There we go.
The deaths from extreme weather is a useful skeleton key that unlocks the understanding that projected damage from global warming *by the IPCC* is quite low relative to (for example) the difference global GDP in 2100 being $X per person or $1.6X per person. Adding together crop failures, extreme weather deaths, coastal relocation, increasing spending on mitigation + hardening measures, migration flows etc produces only a 5% impact on global GDP and a small number of additional deaths.
Given that the current "only acceptable" solution to climate change (no new nuclear, just wind+solar+batteries) currently seems like it would cost 1 order of magnitude more in $, that is quite suggestive that people dogmatically insisting that "this is the only acceptable course of action because the alternative is mass death" are full of it.
Now, one can make the case that the IPCC is underestimating the potential damage from climate change, but then at that point one must abandon appeals to authority and get down in the mud with every single other person waving around their own personal custom climate model.
> Nuclear. He is correct that Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a disastrous decision that burnt a lot of extra coal.
And hasn't exactly done the local area a lot of good *this* year in particular.
As an italian i find it very funny how much people are critical of germany while my country does the exact same things and manage to completely avoid international criticism
To at least some extent the most recent round of condemnations is focused on Germany because it was NS2 that is at least often referenced as having held such a significant role in the way things played out, and that runs straight from Russia to Germany. If it went through Italy instead, I bet you guys would get more flak.
As far as relative levels of oppobrium specifically regarding the climate change question, I cannot speculate.
I see what you mean, but also since that start of the sanctions we increased our import of russian oil. And by A LOT.
https://www.ft.com/content/83fa3e90-e36d-463a-a4db-9ea24f22964f
And we still are managing to avoid international backlash
Give an example?
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1511821114128752643?t=jG1n4i4Au9G1EQDzHSA7lg&s=09
Here's a good example. An aggressively manipulative half-truth.
What's the half truth? That they can be built on desert and that land isn't valuable anyway?
Only counting the land footprint of a fossil fuel power plant ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, which is both massive and also destructive. But he doesn't actually care about the issue of land use and environmental preservation, he just wants to win the argument.
Edit: In case you're interested, this is what the land footprint of a normal powerplant looks like: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/6-wyoming-coal-mine-jim-west.jpg
Eh. We use a lot more space *using* energy vs producing it. And it's not like wind turbine blades or solar panels are birthed whole from the forehead of Zeus, neither.
The land required to run an electrical grid on fossil fuels requires both the land to operate the plants & also the land to extract the fossil fuels, yes.
But oil extraction+power plants are still a smaller footprint than generating an equivalent amount of energy through solar+wind+batteries+mines for lithium and rare earths. I'd need to go looking for sources to pin down exactly how much smaller, but my Fermi estimate of it would still be 2x to 10x?
I bring this up not to open this up for debate because I think the whole thing is utterly silly. It's an example of a very smart person knowingly using bait-and-switch argumentation.
So Shellenberger ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, while almost every pro renewable argument I've read ignores the land footprint of copper, cobalt, coltan, etc. mines. Also, Shellenberger isn't pro coal; he's pro nuclear, which has a much smaller mining footprint. So Shellenberger is not particularly mendacious by the standards of the energy debate.
Both renewables and conventional plants obviously require materials to build the physical plant, copper for transmission, etc. IN ADDITION, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants need a constant stream of mined fuel to generate power. It's their defining feature. Renewables do not; they just sit where you put them and generate power from ambient energy. Ignoring that is enough for me to write him off as a person worth listening to, on energy or frankly any other topic.
That still looks a lot smaller than the solar panel covered hills, though.
There's plenty of studies on land use by power source that include extraction of fuel and raw materials needed for that power source, and Shellenberger is correct that solar requires more land than coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear or geothermal.
But it's not 300-400x the amount, no idea where he's getting those figures - it's more like 2-20x depending on the "normal power plant" he's comparing it to.
The specific fuel in question is important. Nat-gas wells...even the dreaded fracking wells have a pretty tiny footprint; not more than an acre or so, at least in my experience. Whereas strip-mining coal or mountain-top removal mining creates big scars on the landscape, and they don't seem to go away quickly, either. The difference between the two fuel sources would be large, and so merging these together into some kind of average land use statistic for a conventional power plant would seem to me to be pretty misleading in its own right, because I'll bet Shellenberger isn't advocating building more coal fired power plants fueled with strip-mined coal.
You seem to think he's pro-fossil fuel. As Scott's post made clear, he's actually very pro-nuclear. What's the footprint of uranium mines?
Individual uranium mines are pretty big, but uranium is extremely efficient and a handful of mines suffice to supply the entire world, so the footprint per power plant is small.
Not very big. Uranium is highly energy dense and so the total volume of material produced is quite small.
This is a very good way of putting something I've noticed about him too—I agree with him on the merits on a ton of issues, especially around energy, but he seems like a guy who just has no problem lying if he thinks it's for "good reasons." Reminds me of, like, Nathan Robinson in that way.
If I were a Californian I might vote for him anyway, but I wouldn't feel great about it.
Don't say this stuff unless you're going to substantiate it with examples. Otherwise it's a bunch of meaningless words.
Shellenberger sounds pretty good to me. I get that he's not perfect, but the status quo in California seems so dysfunctional that I think he'd be a big improvement on housing (he's a YIMBY), crime, homelessness, and climate change (pro-nuclear).
If he's a YIMBY in regards to housing he hides it extremely well - never talking about obviously needed zoning reform, and he's relentless about denying the obvious link between housing costs and homelessness.
But then again so do most people running for governor, so...
The state government is already kind of YIMBY. There's that law requiring residential areas to allow duplexes. Local governments are fighting it:
https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/04/duplex-housing-resistance/
Gavin Newsom looks too much like Gavin Belson.
> I started out thinking you struck your enemies with the Action Rod directly, but now I believe it probably attaches to a gun and makes the gun more powerful somehow. Further research is needed.
Research has continued! I believe this is a gun disassembly tool, which allows you to remove/detach AR-15 interior components via the barrel without the need to fully disassemble the gun (i.e an internal component that would normally need 50 other parts removed can be accessed directly via this).
Oh, that would be smart! I watched a video about the action rod and still had no idea what it was for or how you use it. I know nothing about guns, so I'm not the person for this.
Action Rod is a fantastic name though, and it really should be some kind of truncheon you use Batman-style on your enemies.
It's so you can install barrels to the AR15 upper without having to clamp the upper in a vise. The barrel is tightened to 30 to 80 ft-lbs of torque (using a torque wrench) and aligning the gas tube through the appropriate hole (the gas tube captures escaping gas from the barrel and uses it to cycle the AR).
To get the ~45 ft-lbs of torque you've really got to clamp the upper down, and of course, this can break/damage the upper (especially on light weight uppers), so a bunch of devices exist to luck the upper in place for barrel installation without damage to the upper.
Interesting, thank you for the explanation!
Hilarious post.
I was surprised how you didn't address Mercuri's opposition to "goy shutdowns" and "goy gay in newsom" but I eventually figured out his "v" looks weird
I read it this way too initially!
Writing "Gov. Shut Downs" right above "Gov. Gavin Newsom" in the "Against" column makes it sound like the candidate opposes two Governors, named Gavin Newsom and Shut Downs.
I can't tell if you're joking about Gavin Newsom's name - Gavin's a pretty common name here in the UK, but in the US it does seem to be very rare among people born before the mid-90s: https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/m/gavin
As much as London Breed?
Oh, now you are showing your true colours. :)
It’s short for Gavinor Newsom
Gavirnator*
The name thing is weird, isn't it. I couldn't get over how often they give their children dog's names.
People loved making fun of Sarah Palin's childrens' names, but this is the first I've heard of Gavin Newsom's.
Calling your kid "Brooklynn" (or for that matter Montana) seems like a definite lower-middle class move, but Gavin Newsom is nothing if not not lower middle class.
The fact that you can inject so much wry humor, Scott, into your description of this motley crew of wannabe public servants is truly masterful.
Just commenting to say that this post made me feel warm and happy.
Agreed. I really liked it too
I agree that Newsom is going to be the governor and none of these people have a chance. But this one made me laugh (not in a mean way, because the only person you were remotely mean about was Newsom and he can handle that), and I badly needed a laugh today.
God bless California and all who re-invent themselves who live there!
I'm a power engineer. I promise not to evaluate Shellenberger's policy positions on mental health if you'll promise not to evaluate his policy positions on nuclear power.
Sadly, most Californians have not been, are not and will not be Governors - yet for some reason, they still hold this election!
How likely is it that a person who is both unqualified to set mental health policy and unqualified to design an energy system would get one of them wrong and the other right? One in three? Is that how rationalists choose their thought leaders? Why do apparently smart people give Shellenberger any credence at all?
What renaissance men have been leading us that wield policy mastery in all areas under their supervision? Electing a political leader is as much art as science; you must trust in them to use their judgment to effect their vision.
In the establishment of trust, one will of course weigh their own knowledge and what appears to be that of the candidate.
As someone who makes their living in and amongst technical experts, I am incredibly suspicious of those who claim to be such. What Shellenberger argues for regarding energy policy and addiction treatment makes a lot of sense to me. Renewables are important, but are (mostly) intermittent and there has to be baseline capacity. Baseline capacity that produces no CO2 or other regulated air pollutants, at the cost of a small amount of nuclear waste (small in context of US nuclear arms maintenance) makes sense to me because that is technology that is here today and achieves reduced CO2 emissions goals.
I wouldn't blame you for thinking he's anti-renewable, but if you actually listen to any sort of long form discussion with him (I haven't read his work, so can't comment there), what he actually is is anti-renewable-optimism-verging-on-delusion. Delusion because of the cold hard reality of engineering constraints; foot print, energy density, build times, etc. His strident discussion of renewables is a case of his rhetorical pendulum swinging too far to the right in service of correcting it's outward swing on the left, so it's understandable that you could have this impression. FWIW, I'm getting my take on his stance re: renewables from his appearance on Rogan.
Regarding addiction treatment, he makes compelling cases regarding the need to incentivize and ultimately compel if it requires it. I think this discussion is often framed around "homeless", but we're really talking about a small subset of homeless that are severely addicted to narcotics with complications from untreated mental illness. To paraphrase Shellenberger, we (the US) do a good job with the single mom who finds herself without shelter and a dependent. We get those people off the street very quickly. It's when mental illness and addiction are added into the mix that you get the encampments seen in SF, LA, Austin, etc. I've seen Michael do "man on the street" style discussions with SF's homeless where they make it very clear they are there because of the ease of servicing their addiction.
Shellenberger makes it clear that much lauded programs like Portugal's are misunderstood and/or mischaracterized by housing advocacy groups in the US as offering shelter first, and de-criminalization. But that's not the full picture, it is illegal to consume drugs in public in Portugal, and there is the equivalent of drug court with the option for incarceration for forced treatment if people are not able to work through the non-compulsion avenues offered to them to get clean.
All that is to say, this seems imminently reasonable. I don't bring strong ideological convictions regarding energy or addiction policy to my evaluation of Shellenberger, and I find his proposed solutions contain enough merit that I can evaluate them, and now offer my rhetorical support.
He's doing what so many in public life have lost the ability to do: make persuasive arguments using data, rather than assertions and appeals to authority.
I used to know a public health nurse most of whose job was keeping track of tuberculosis patients: she showed up at their location every day and administered their medication. If we deployed suboxone and methadone this way we’d make progress- bringing it to them at their dwelling, shelter, tent etc. Due to the combination of restrictions on who can prescribe & distribute it, and dismal transportation networks, we have people in the US who are addicts who get prescribed suboxone and then can’t get the ride an hour each way to the clinic.
Shellenberger is saying some good things. I don’t live in CA anymore but I think he has a chance.
yeah I mean wouldn’t really cheap utility scale solar make way more sense for water desalinization? it’s the perfect application for somewhat unreliable cheap power
I looked up some facts - I reckon it would cost about $20 billion to build enough desalination capacity to replace California’s average share of Colorado river water. The total amortized cost of the energy needed to run that would be about $500 million per year using grid scale solar and about $2.3 billion per year using nuclear (assuming new plants for each case).
I'm curious about the fine print on the $500MM for grid-scale solar. The big selling point for fission over solar is that fission plants can run at full capacity, all day, every day, whereas solar production is highly variable depending on weather, season, and time of day. So for desalinization, where you presumably want your desal plants to be able to run around the clock (since the desalination capacity costs 8x-40x the additional power generation capacity by your figures, so it wouldn't really make sense to idle the plants at night), you either need very large scale power storage or you need a dispatchable power source to fill in the gaps when solar production is low or nonexistent. Power storage is expensive and probably not included in the $500MM, and building new natural gas plants to run at night and in the winter is neither free nor carbon-neutral.
Usually, solar cost per capacity is quoted either at theoretical peak production or with some kind of "capacity factor" adjustment that bakes in assumptions about the ability of the grid to fill in the gaps of a marginal addition to solar capacity.
The fine print is thus:
https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/uploads/1/0/0/4/100463770/energy-minimization-and-ghg-reduction-plan-052308.pdf pg 14 says the carlsbad plant uses 4.4 MWh per acre foot produced.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/17/utility-scale-solar-reaches-lcoe-range-between-2-4¢-per-kwh-in-the-usa-record-low/
Shows that the LCOE of utility solar can be as cheap as $28 per MWh and nuclear $131.
The Colorado river allocation to California is about 4.3 mega acre feet per year.
You are correct that it might make sense to spend more on energy to recover the capital costs of the desalination plants more quickly. I suspect new tech and truly large desalination plants might be able to have new economies of scale.
The $20 bil estimate comes from the original $250 mil estimate for the Carlsbad plant before unions and environmentalists got ahold of it.
To me the sad part is that it is obvious the California water problem is completely solvable with desalination using existing tech and for not all that much money (Cal state budget is $300 bil). But I guess environmentalists would prefer to drown hetch hetchy instead of making the ocean a bit saltier in local places.
So your calculation ignores that you would need to overbuild the desalination plant by 5x in the solar case.
(A) Nuclear
1 GW plant ($X) runs 24/7 produces 24 GWh per day for desal plant ($Y) produces let’s say 100 m3 of water.
(B) Solar
5 GW plant ($0.2X by your numbers) produces 24 GWh per day (because ~0.2 capacity factor) for desal plant. However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
Given that Y is much higher than X, the solar case doesn’t look so good.
> However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
I'm pro-nuclear but this seems an unnecessarily stupid way to build a plant for desalination from solar. Desalination is a perfect use for intermittent power.
Maybe. Most of that water is probably used for agriculture anyway, so the water demand pattern is also seasonal.
There are also more scalable desalination methods like distilling that might use less energy.
To me the important point is that desalination is totally doable, but there are many tradeoffs. Solar PV might not be economic for some use cases, it might work for others.
Instead of total replacement, think of it as diversifying your water sources to avoid depending too much on a single source. San Diego has a big desalination plant, but they're increasing the size of a reservoir too.
What's wrong with his policy positions on nuclear power?
Some people are really anti nuclear. I was banned from r/energy after just 4 posts for suggesting that Germany had shot itself in the foot by closing down its nuclear power stations, and that they had in fact increased their gas production recently compared to coal (as gas is easier to ramp up when the wind isn’t blowing). I sourced these arguments as well, and was banned for mis-information.
This comment makes it sounds like you believe his stance on nuclear is good but unpopular. Do I have that right?
Yeh. I mean I was criticising Germany for shutting down nuclear plants.
Ah, I confused you with the person Scott replied to, so I was wondering why you were coming out in support of his positions here. In my defense your profiles pictures have a the same color map and you both have somewhat generic white guy names.
My actual white guy name is probably unpronounceable to you. We do have similar profile color though.
I wonder if the anti-nuclear activists have become even more rabid recently because they have been pressed into defending the indefensible (the policy of shutting down perfectly workable nuke plants in Germany in the midst of this historically grave energy crisis in 2022)
We can have a productive debate over whether it is a good idea to shut down existing, operational nuclear plants, if they have a good safety record and no obvious deficits.
But Shellenberger wants to build more and more and more of them, and he declares this with the blithe self-assurance of somebody who won't actually be doing the work, dismissing the complexity and scale of such an undertaking, as if all we needed to do was just decide to do it.
Yes, there are lots of plants on the drawing board, but very few new plants are actually being built; we are barely maintaining the inventory, even taking into account planned builds. In Europe, three are/were under construction: the EPRs at Flamanville and Oikiluoto, and Hinkley Point C.
Hinkley Point C is too early in its construction for it to be late. But the budget has already been adjusted upward.
Olkiluoto 3 went online in March 2022, although it won't go to full production until September 2022. It is 13 years late and 7 billion euros overbudget. TVO (the operator) has already decided there will not be an Olkiluoto 4.
The EPR is the most advanced civilian reactor design now in use. As we get better at things, they are supposed to be delivered faster and at lower cost. In nuclear, the opposite has been true. Please, tell me, what observable evidence do we have that suggests this trend will reverse?
Shellenberger's plans are all based on some combination of the following assumptions and assertions:
- we need to generate as much electricity per capita now as we have been, plus some large delta (typically 30%)
- building new nuclear plants is or will be straightforward, fast and inexpensive
- the risks and consequences of doing so are accurately quantifiable, generally overstated by opponents and will be resolved in some as yet unknown way by our descendants
To take just the question of risk for example: The reinsurance companies, whose business and survival depend on reliable risk assessment, have found that the risks are not reliably quantifiable and hence useless for an insurance risk model. Nuclear power plants are uninsurable. When they do get built, it's only because governments assume the ultimate liability (whether they are actually in a position to bear them is another question; most governments have decided they are not).
I am deeply skeptical of simplified claims about complex systems, no matter where and whom they come from. The biggest strike against Shellenberger is that he repeatedly claims things that are demonstrably untrue, and fills the room with so much nonsense so quickly that one doesn't know where to begin correcting it.
For somebody who works in the sector, that is really exhausting! That is the reason that no serious researcher or subject matter specialist is willing to appear with him publicly anymore. They see that he lacks competence in the subject areas he holds forth on and seems uninterested in honest discussion. We are all too busy to be wasting our time on endless dead-horse debates with people who cannot even acknowledge or agree on the basic facts (it was painful for me to write this, as I do have better things to do; but I also understand that communicating these things is part of my professional responsibility, so here we are.)
Shellenberger is, at best, a kind of human version of a _Journal of Hypotheses_. At worst, he is querulous, irritating, and a dangerous distraction. Perhaps he is entertaining. Joe Rogan, at least, seems to think so.
Viewed that way, I suppose he is right at home in your list of California gubernatorial candidates.
I don't get the impression Shellenberger suggests building nukes would be trivial or quite cheap, my impression is that he thinks it's a better idea than hoping some miracle storage solution comes along to make solar/wind viable, or just keep shifting by default to natural gas.
I'm pretty willing to give that idea a hearing. I've been here all through the solar/wind enthusiasm, and I see the results as an unqualified disaster. Electricity is far more expensive and noticeably less reliable than it was 20 years ago. At this point, I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say, and I'd rather have more nukes than more fossil fuel plants. I'm sure it will be expensive, but having your electric grid go tits up is even more expensive.
I wish these comments could be made without insults. I read the phrase "I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say" as indicating that you've already made up your mind about a complicated debate, having categorized the opposing viewpoint as the outgroup. I think this is an interesting debate that could be more productive without that thinking.
Why is it an insult? I didn't say they were rat bastards, I simply said I don't believe them. If not believing someone is to be classified as a personal insult, I don't see how any discussion at all is possible -- so I would classify your desired framework as way more constraining and illiberal than any I have expressed.
And, yes, I have indeed made up my mind about part of the debate, which is that I cannot be persuaded by solar/wind enthusiasts by themselves. They'd have to bring along some more neutral party to make their case, if there is a case to be made. Perhaps that seems "premature" to you, perhaps because the argument is new and interesting, but I have been paying attention to this debate for more than 30 years, and I'd say three decades is a very reasonable degree of patience. If someone has something *new* to say -- something I didn't first hear in 1975 -- then I'm happy to listen.
You don't think calling people 'groupies' for a particular policy position impugns them?
I believe that you do, and you're being wilfully obtuse. And even more dishonestly, you've moved the goalposts to whether 'not believing someone' is an insult, rather than 'not believing a word they say'. The latter clearly implies that they are liars, which you might recognise as an insult.
Of course there is stuff you didn't first hear in 1975. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened after that. If you've irrevocably made up your mind about literally anything with an empirical grounding then you're being deeply irrational, no matter how many decades you've "paid attention" for. If you've not heard anything new about it since 1975, though, then I'm not sure you have been paying attention.
Olkiluoto is interesting that it is the only thing that can save Finland now from getting cut off from Russian gas.
Nuclear seems to be expensive but with gas prices now raising 3 or 4 times in Europe, what choice do we really have?
I have an impression that regulations are too strict on nuclear thus making it more expensive and believed that low gas prices will continue forever. The war in Ukraine changed this view and I believe that Russia/Belarus developed nuclear themselves with the aim to profit from raising oil/gas prices. If Belarus could build Astravets cheaply, why not others? Maybe the war in Europe will change the political and technical incentives?
Which claims that are demonstrably untrue has he made?