A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Ernest Moniz | Isaac Brekken/Getty |
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When political appointees leave office, they often take lucrative private sector jobs until their party is back in power. It’s known as the “revolving door”: cycling between regulating certain industries and being on their payroll. This creates some perverse incentives. We can’t expect bureaucrats to be permanently sequestered Rapunzels in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: A certain level of shoulder-rubbing with industry executives may always come with the job. And some once-and-future regulators manage to interact with industry executives without climbing into bed with them. People can do this in theory. Ernest Moniz is not one of those people. Moniz, for those who missed Kate Aronoff’s essential recap last fall, is an MIT physics professor emeritus who served as energy secretary in the Obama administration, where he was vital in promoting the natural gas development that has helped lead to a global spike in methane emissions. After leaving office, he founded the Energy Futures Initiative at MIT, which is supported by oil money. As energy secretary, he helped direct $407 million in DOE financing to Southern Company for a “clean coal” plant that was never built, then went on to the company’s board of directors, and received “$486,668 worth of fees and stock awards from the company in 2018 and 2019,” Kate noted. (Southern sued the Obama EPA over the Clean Power Plan and has also funded several climate denial campaigns.) Moniz has since served on BP’s Technology Advisory Council and founded a for-profit energy consulting firm that partners with “a gas export company that Moniz’s Energy Department authorized to export natural gas for 30 years in 2015.” |
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This week, Canadian climate blog DeSmog reported that Moniz’s Energy Futures Initiative is now championing a $170–$230 billion pipeline network to carry captured carbon as part of a nationwide carbon sequestration scheme. And apparently the idea is “quietly gaining momentum” in Biden’s Energy Department. “The proposed CO2 pipeline network,” Sharon Kelly wrote, “would be used to offer a lifeline to existing fossil fuel power plants. In Appalachia, for example, 90 percent of the carbon emissions the plan seeks to capture would come from existing coal-fired power plants in the Ohio River Valley. Those plants, none of which are currently outfitted with the costly upgrades needed [to] capture carbon, are already facing difficult questions about their ability to compete economically with wind and solar energy.” This, as Kate has repeatedly written, is the main issue with carbon capture: It’s necessary to get us to crucial emissions targets. But it’s not super effective or scalable yet, and it’s frequently advanced by fossil fuel interests as a way of prolonging unsustainable, high-emissions activities. Mere hours after DeSmog published its article Sunday night, Bloomberg reported that the biggest carbon capture project in the world has fallen tremendously short of its target. Chevron’s carbon capture program at the Gorgon liquefied natural gas export plant in Australia was supposed to capture 80 percent of the CO2 generated by the plant. Since 2016, it has captured about 30 percent. Not a great endorsement for spending over $200 billion on a new pipeline network.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who famously paid no income taxes in 2007 and 2011 and whose company surveils workers’ “time off task” to the point that they are allegedly forced to pee in bottles, boarded a rocket Tuesday morning and was shot into space for a few minutes to the tune of $5.5 billion. He then thanked Amazon customers and the workers whose unionization drive he helped crush for paying “for all this.” He also told NBC News the experience had taught him that “we need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space.” As TNR’s Kate Aronoff has previously pointed out, Amazon’s carbon emissions are roughly comparable to that of the country of Sweden (Amazon contacted TNR to object to this comparison post-publication, writing that “country emissions are an inaccurate comparison to companies”). Its business model “depends on fueling demand for cheap, planet-wrecking junk.” Bezos has advertised his space company as a kind of escape hatch from Earth, under the assumption that business will continue as usual until we’re thoroughly screwed. The $5.5 billion spent on Bezos’s seven-minute phallic joyride could have been used to make a serious dent in homelessness and hunger, or build 2,200 one-megawatt solar farms. Instead, it served to advertise a currently impossible and forever impractical plan to manufacture cement on the Moon. |
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| Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special summer offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
| —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s the percentage of food grown worldwide that goes uneaten, according to a new estimate this week. That means food waste could account for 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
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| Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic has a nice piece on the troubled history of the carbon tax, a policy that seems like a great way to reduce emissions but in practice is a lot more complicated. The fossil fuel industry has frequently championed carbon taxes, supporting the unpassable proposal as a way to avoid more aggressive regulation. A paragraph outlining one of the fundamental issues that’s dogged the policy for decades: |
| Carbon prices save dollars, these researchers admit. But they expend an even scarcer resource: political capital. Because a carbon price affects all of society, it increases costs for every energy consumer, without providing an immediate alternative. Because most industries interact with the energy system only as consumers, that takes a cohort that wouldn’t care about climate policy in the abstract and turns it into a foe. |
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