NPR’s Planet Money takes on the Discount Rate, and attempts to explain how it fundamentally changes our valuation of the future. At a 7% discount rate (the OMB’s suggested discount rate), we could put away $0.20 today and have $100,000,000,000,000 (that’s $100 trillion) with which to address the costs of climate change in 500 years. Of course, that won’t matter if we’ve ended civilization in the meantime. Riiight.
Tag: economics
How top executives lived in 1955
An archival post from Fortune Magazine, looking at how top executives lived in 1955. Much of it is juxtaposed with wistful memories of the Gilded Age 25 years earlier, before the war, at the beginning of the Depression. It’s a bizarrely fascinating portrait, and makes it clear that today’s world is far similar to 1929 than 1955.
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
Bill McKibben looks at Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math via three numbers. The problem at hand: if we want to limit warming to 2°C, we can only (globally) put about 565 more gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the fossil fuel industry already has about 2800 gigatons worth of reserves on their balance sheets. If we are to avoid profound alteration of the climate, all those reserves will have to be written off and taken as a loss. This will, of course, bankrupt the entire industry. That’s the goal. It’s them, or the atmosphere.
The Next Wave of Urban Growth
Where the Next Wave of Urban Growth Will Come From, the Harvard Business Review looks at a study from McKinsey, detailing the economic centrality of cities, vs. national economies. Large cities and modest countries are now of the same scale, and cities are growing much much faster, economically. If you’re going where the market is, most likely, it’s in a bunch of towns you’ve never heard of, each with a population of several million. Mad change.
Discounting Fuels
It’s often been said that “time is money,” and it turns out to be more than an aphorism.
I’m going to try and tell you a story about discounting, which is one of the ways that we convert between time and money. The story has broad implications for the energy investments we choose. It’s not entirely straightforward, and if it’s going to make sense there are some background pieces you’re going to need. The background is important because the ending depends not only on understanding what is being done, but why. This story happens to be about Xcel Energy and Colorado, but the same thing happens in other places, with other companies, and in other contexts too.
To greens my argument may seem circumspect. I’m not going to challenge the doctrine of Everlasting Economic Growth. I’m not going to look at the large externalized costs of burning fossil fuels. I’m not going to argue against the monopoly electrical utility model. Those are important discussions to have — they’re just not the one I’m having here. What I’m trying to do is show that a minor change in the way we calculate the cost of future energy can drastically alter what kind of power we decide to invest in for the next century, even if we only look at the decision in selfish financial terms.
To the finance geeks among you, much of the background will be familiar, but the situation may seem strange unless you’re familiar with how regulated monopolies work. I haven’t been able to find anyone familiar with energy finance who thinks what we’re currently doing makes sense, but if you’ve got a thoughtful rebuttal, I’m genuinely interested to hear it.
The Diverging Diamond
Strong Towns takes on The Diverging Diamond and suburban traffic engineers everywhere. It’s nice to see someone on the conservative end of the spectrum also arguing passionately for livable density and good urban spaces. He comes to it from an economic point of view — we don’t have anywhere near the pile of cash required to maintain the infrastructure we’ve built (and we never will, because it’s expensive and does not come close to paying for itself in terms of economic benefits) so we need to let it crumble or actively remove it, and go back to a network of roads connecting places, which are filled with streets — networks that facilitate local activity, especially economic activity, and which are cheaper to maintain as well. And better for pedestrians, and kids, and biking, and sidewalk cafes too.
He’s got a good TEDx talk too, up here:
How Google’s Driving Costs Misses the Train
A fun critique of the estimated driving costs that you get from Google Maps, from Alex Steffen. The costs of driving are largely (mostly?) systemic, and external to the individual, and predicated on an assumption of car ownership, and a mile-for-mile interchangeability between driving trips and walking/biking/transit trips, which is empirically wrong. People who don’t rely on cars for transportation do the same things in far fewer miles (3 to 9 times fewer, depending on the urban fabric they are embedded within).
Think Again: Drugs
A great roundup of the myths surrounding the Drug War, and the cogent arguments against continuing our ridiculous, harmful, and expensive policy of ideological prohibition.
Between the Lines
Yet another article about the Shoupistas, this time in Los Angeles magazine. Have we reached some kind of cognitive tipping point? Will urban parking policy start changing? Will our downtown business districts be transformed? We can hope…
Is an Energy Transformation Afoot?
Almost immediately after we empowered Boulder to form a utility, a spate of articles appeared in the national press talking about the relative costs of coal and renewables, and the trends in those costs. There was Krugman’s Here Comes Solar Energy Op-Ed in the NY Times, making the case that solar PV is already cheaper than coal-fired power once you remove all the subsidies we provide to both of them, and calling for the Feds to fix regulation to make that clear. Boulder’s own RMI had a bit of commentary on Krugman’s opinion: it’d be nice if Federal regulations were saner, but even without that fix, it makes sense to build this stuff now, and will only make more sense as time goes on and the balance of system costs (which currently make up 50% or more of the cost of a PV installation) are reduced through best practices, standardization and mass production.
From the industry side, GE’s Jeff Immelt also said that federal regulation was a little beside the point now… and that even without government support GE was going all-in, expecting something like 200GW of solar to be built in China and India by the end of the decade. That’d be a non-trivial amount of generation, on the order of 10 Three Gorges dams, or as much power as the entire US nuclear generation fleet. Meanwhile NRG Energy, a nationwide and largely traditional fossil-fuel based independent power producer is planning to spend the overwhelming majority of its capital investment funds over the next few years on solar, mostly small utility projects (20-100MW) and distributed rooftop generation.
In the same vein, Xcel Energy’s recently filed 2011 Electric Resource Plan foresees essentially no new generation facilities being built until close to the end of the decade. Some of this is attributable to the soft economy, but many people are saying it’s just as much a consequence of energy efficiency, demand side management, and increasing distributed (behind-the-meter) generation coming on line. Unfortunately, Xcel added a gigawatt of coal generation to its grid last year, and this lack of demand for more energy means the company is now walking away from the transmission lines that would have enabled large-scale solar-thermal with storage in the San Luis Valley. This means that the only way to shift Xcel’s power mix in the near future will be to accelerate the retirement of existing coal-fired generation, making room for more efficiency, wind, and solar.
The optimistic narrative that falls out of the articles above — that our energy systems are undergoing a transformation — seems plausible, and I hope that it’s true. Certainly it’s the one that the Boulder Light and Power effort is going to be built around. It’s comforting to see that we’re not alone on the world stage, and less daunting to imagine our job as facilitating an ongoing transformation, rather than starting one from scratch.