TLP Weekend Edition (February 8-9, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
👓 “The Case for IRA Reform,” by Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath. Nordhaus and Trembath of The Breakthrough Institute provide a lucid overview of the IRA and why just defending it tooth and nail is not the right approach. There is a need for a new approach that includes reforming the IRA and going beyond it in a way that is effective both as policy and politics.
Twenty years ago, Breakthrough helped launch the first effort to accelerate climate mitigation through large-scale federal investment in low carbon technology. At the time, the idea that public investment, not carbon regulations or pricing, would be the long pole in the decarbonization tent was controversial, indeed, "contrarian." Today it has become conventional wisdom among Democrats, progressives, and most of the center left, culminating in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
But there was always a misunderstanding among many, both proponents and critics of this approach, about what "make clean energy cheap," a term that we coined, actually entailed. For a lot of proponents, it simply meant subsidizing clean energy, mostly wind and solar, basically forever. Critics saw it the same way and rightly pointed out that maintaining subsidies as clean tech began to scale would become incredibly expensive, inefficient, and—particularly with variable renewables—would distort electricity markets in ways that would likely raise overall costs even with substantial subsidies.
But the point of “making clean energy cheap” was not to do so via perpetual subsidy but to invest in innovation and early stage commercialization of clean technologies to “cut the Gordian Knot” that created the zero-sum tradeoff between the cost of energy and carbon emissions, as we wrote in one early policy review. So long as clean energy was substantially more expensive than fossil fuels, efforts to mitigate climate change would impose substantial economic costs on consumers and businesses that were, in the best case, challenging to sustain politically and, in the worst case, damaging economically.
Making clean energy cheap in real, unsubsidized terms remains the right approach today and, in our view, the only plausible way to assure either US energy security or significant global decarbonization in the long term. With the Trump Administration now in power and Republican majorities in Congress vowing to repeal the IRA, we published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last month arguing that the incoming Trump Administration should reform but not repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. We argued that with US electricity demand set to increase substantially alongside major expansion of US natural gas export capacity, making clean energy cheap will likely be necessary to assure that all energy in the United States remains cheap.
📚 The Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft. You think things are really getting bad? Well, it could be worse. “Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928. It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance. It is written in a documentary style, with three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative.”
🗾 Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, by Jorge Almazán and Joe McReynolds. Any fan of urban planning or the world’s largest city will love this book which examines in graphic detail five cool aspects of the Tokyo cityscape: yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods.
🏈 Super Bowl LIX, from the Superdome in New Orleans. In a rematch of the Super Bowl two years ago, the Kansas City Chiefs will face off against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday. Kansas City, the NFL's newest budding dynasty, is seeking to become the first-ever team to win three Super Bowls in a row, while Philly will be looking for revenge after a controversial late call essentially iced the previous matchup for the Chiefs. The Eagles hope their new offensive weapon, Saquon Barkley—who is coming off of a historic season that earned him Offensive Player of the Year honors—will be the difference-maker this year for them, while the Chiefs will look to ride their dominant defensive unit to victory once again. Kick-off is at 6:30 pm ET on Fox.
🎸 Red Album and Blue Record, by Baroness. Unless you’re in the UK, you probably can’t make Black Sabbath’s insane final show ever at Villa Park in Birmingham this summer. Instead, hit your local club stateside this May to see the Savannah heavy metal greats Baroness play tunes from their fantastic first two albums. Winding jams, thick riffs, thumping drums, stop-and-start tempos—it should be glorious. Looking forward to seeing “Isak” at the Metro in Baltimore.
Clean energy isn't. The obsessive focus on the tailpipe masks all the other environmental damage caused by mining, production, transport and disposal/recycling of the components, covering the deserts of the West with components, grid expansion, water resource depletion, bird mincing and other issues. Outsourcing some of these functions to other countries, say China, probably puts more carbon in the air than just using fossil fuels. American and Europeans are all NIMBYs so this is pretty much inevitable. Nuclear energy is clean but the environmentalists have terrified everyone about that.
I would have been somewhat more supportive of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act if it had been honestly named the Energy Transition Act.
I support a gradual transition away from fossil fuels, but one which relies primarily on market forces rather than politically attractive but economically foolish subsidies for favored forms of so-called “green energy.”