Volts

Earlier this year, I stumbled on the news videos from the team at Some More News. They are like The Daily Show, but longer, smarter, more in-depth, more profane, and free of Jon Stewart’s unfortunate navel-gazing centrism. But still funny as hell!In other words: they might as well be targeted directly at me. I’ve been gorging on them for months. (You could start with this one on critical race theory.) Anyway, imagine my delight when I discovered that Some More News also has a podcast, Even More News, and they wanted me to come on it! So that’s what today’s episode of Volts is: an episode of Even More News that the team has graciously allowed me to send to you on the Volts channel. We talk about IPCC stuff briefly, but I also got to let loose on Joe Manchin, lament Dems’ general media fecklessness, and heap scorn on Elon Musk’s Twitter moves. It was fun to get away from the wonky stuff for a while and just riff. It’s a different side of Dr. Volts! You can decide for yourself whether it’s better or worse. You should definitely subscribe to Some More News and support the team via Patreon. The left needs much more of this kind of thing — new ways of reaching people where they are. Also! Last week I was on PBS Newshour to discuss the new IPCC report and the state of clean-energy technology. You can watch here:I always underestimate the reach of PBS — it’s wild how many people saw this and contacted me! And how many saw it and contacted my parents. Love you, PBS. Back later this week with some nerdy pods of my own! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Economist Noah Smith runs the excellent substack Noahpinion, where he writes and podcasts about … pretty much everything. Economics. Politics. The war. Housing. Technology. On and on. The guy is ludicrously productive. This week, he interviewed me! We talked about the new IPCC reports, the state of technology, some dumb tweets of mine, and NIMBYs, among other things. It was a fun and wide-ranging conversation. Check it out! (And subscribe to Noahpinion.)The video is below. The audio is posted as a podcast above. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, activists Matthew Metz and Janelle London discuss their new report on gasoline “superusers” — the subset of drivers who drive long distances each year — and the policy recommendations around EV subsidies that it contains. It's a clever idea I haven't been able to stop thinking about. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, activists and entrepreneurs Audrey Schulman and Zeyneb Magavi discuss their audacious plan to replace the nation's natural gas distribution infrastructure with a series of networked geothermal heat pumps. Basically, neighborhoods would be heated by warm water rather than natural gas. It would be the most efficient collective heating option available in the world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, entrepreneur Rob Harmon discusses his new method for tracking and monetizing energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Traditionally, efficiency policy has consisted in subsidizing equipment up front. Harmon explains how to get reliable numbers about actual performance and begin to build a market around them. Surprisingly fascinating. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

(Hey y’all — I’m attempting to dictate this post rather than type it, so please forgive any sins of grammar or structure.)My family and I own two extremely old cars, a 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan and a 2009 Toyota Prius hybrid. The van is literally falling apart, so we have been looking around lately for a new vehicle. Obviously, we would prefer an EV.A representative from Ford saw me musing about it on Twitter, contacted me, and offered to loan me a Ford Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle for a week. I've been driving it for a few days and I thought I would report my early impressions, along with some larger reservations.Holy s*** EVs are fun to driveI should note up top that I’m not a car guy. I don’t know much about them, don’t much like them, and don’t much like driving them. I never learned to drive a stick shift or change the oil. I don’t drool over muscle cars or know what “hemi” means. Truth be told, I kind of hate car culture.I should also note that I have only ever driven two EVs in my life. The first was the Kia EV6, which I test-drove last week. The second is this Ford. I can say very little about the fine differences in EV driving experience.In short, I am the least qualified car reviewer on the planet.As I said, both of my current cars are extremely old, so I am easily impressed by modern vehicular technology. I still get a kick out of remote key fobs. With this car, when you approach, it lights up, unlocks, and projects a picture of a Mustang on the ground next to the vehicle.There are heated seats, a heated steering wheel, a wireless phone-charging pad, and a giant touch screen with about 50 menus. It all feels like a spaceship to me.The first thing anyone notices when they drive an EV for the first time is the acceleration. With either of my gasoline vehicles — even the Prius when it’s driving in electric mode — there is a lag between pressing the accelerator and speeding up. You are always thinking a second or two ahead, about what speed you'll need to be going, and trying to anticipate. With the EV, acceleration is instant. You are going the speed you want to go the second you want to go it. It is wild.And when you use one-pedal driving mode, when you let off on the accelerator, you immediately slow. It’s difficult to put in words, but it adds up to a sense of much more precise control.I was driving home from a restaurant on Tuesday evening and fiddling with the Spotify menu when I drifted slightly onto the middle line between lanes. With a tiny little push — boomp — the car nudged me back into my lane, as though it were semi-sentient. I hadn’t even thought about the driver-assist features before that, but my one experience with them so far was reassuring, albeit faintly creepy.I’m one of those old guys who resists getting a Tesla because I don’t want to be forced to do every-dang-thing with a touch screen. Give me something physical, with feedback that goes beyond a haptic buzz. I like knobs! Ford’s screen has one giant knob toward the bottom, for volume — it’s better than nothing. In general, Ford has done a pretty good job with its screens and interface. Crucially, unlike in the Tesla, there’s a second screen just under eye level with key information like speed and range. On the bigger center screen, finding the basic stuff is painless. And there are some cool things if you poke around — you can save different profiles (mirror and seat positions, music playlists) that attach to different key fobs. Or you can use your phone as a key fob. I haven’t used any of these features enough to know how they’ll age, but it’s all pretty dazzling. The ride is smooth and quiet, the stereo system kicks ass, and that heated steering wheel … I mean, I’ve found nothing to complain about. And I’m pretty good at complaining. Car & Driver named the Ford Mach-E its EV of the year in 2021 and far be it from me to disagree.It’s not clear Americans can handle this kind of powerHowever! As I was driving home, hands blissfully warm, thinking I might take the long way so I could drive more, I started feeling some reservations. I started thinking about what it would mean for EVs to become dominant, the default choice, with most people driving them.For one thing, they make driving much more fun, even for someone like me who has a deep-seated antipathy toward cars and has never enjoyed driving. All the electric gizmos and screens and features, combined with the unbelievable torque and acceleration, make driving feel like a game in which you’ve just leveled up. It's difficult to believe that if driving is more fun … people won't do it more. And electric or not, less driving is better.The other thing is, the acceleration puts an enormous amount of power in your hands. For someone like me, who drives fairly carefully and pays attention, it can feel more precise and controlled, and thus safer. But it's not difficult to see how this kind of power could be misused. These cars can leap across intersections, going from standing still to 20 or 30 miles an hour in a second or two. If drivers aren't paying attention, it's a lot easier for an idle mistake to grow more consequential, involving more speed. And the constantly available torque is an invitation to try crazy passing maneuvers on the highway. The US already has notoriously pedestrian-hostile infrastructure. If that stays the same, if nothing else changes, more torque and power in everyone's hands is going to lead to more collisions.Driver-assist features might offset this somewhat. I do feel safer knowing that my car will keep me in my lane in normal driving conditions. But there's only so much software can do in the face of bad infrastructure. Lacking much data, we are all going on our guesses and impressions and priors, but my gut feeling is that putting tons more power in drivers’ hands without changing anything else is going to lead to an even more hostile environment for everyone not driving.Ultimately, my fondest wish is that I lived somewhere where I didn't want or need a car at all. I hate cars. I hate driving. I really hate other people's driving, and other people's cars. EVs are such an enormous leap forward in environmental terms that it feels somewhat perverse to question them, but nonetheless, despite all the hype, despite all the fun, it's worth remembering that the top priority — not just for climate hawks but for humanists of all sorts — should be reducing the need for, and number of, cars.The top priority should be making land use and planning choices that encourage walkable communities, with amenities mixed in, so people can get out of cars and get onto their feet or bicycles. EVs are fun to drive. But no kind of driving is better than walking in the fresh air, getting exercise and mixing with your neighbors. I hope EVs don't pull our attention away from that fact. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Hey, y’all, just a short note to catch you up on my current situation and my plans for the coming weeks.Long story short: I have tendonitis in both arms. I’ve had problems with pain in my forearms for years, but it always faded or went away after a while and was manageable. A few months after quarantine started, in 2020, it started getting worse, to the point I had to give up playing bass guitar — my one non-computer hobby. Then, a few months ago, it started getting a lot worse, quickly. I have been to see two physical therapists, done stretches and exercises, received regular therapeutic massage, bought a split keyboard and a vertical mouse, worn compression sleeves during the day and braces at night, iced both arms every day, taken a bunch of goofball supplements (hoping for some placebo effect at least), and even ordered one of these widgets. Nothing has worked, at least not yet; it’s just gotten worse and worse. It feels like a boulder rolling downhill. Nothing slows its momentum. (And don’t bother suggesting resentment and self-pity — I’ve tried those too.)One result is that typing has become a chore. I can get through about a paragraph before my wrists and forearms start to ache and I have to take a break. What’s worse, it has messed up my thinking. Over many years of writing, the act of laying my hands on a keyboard has become a somatic cue that triggers my thinking; I can not write without it. But now it involves pain, and the pain is clouding the thinking. This has made it difficult to write the next piece in my minerals series. It’s made it difficult to write anything. Just contemplating writing makes my arms ache. Of all the advice I’ve gotten, one bit seems reliably true: the only thing that fixes this problem is rest. I’ve got to stop doing the repetitive motions that damaged the tissues. In my case, that means I need to cut way back on holding my phone and typing. I’m told these things take from four to six months to heal.Four to six months of no typing obviously presents something of a challenge for someone who makes his living with a newsletter. Quite a challenge indeed. [eye twitches]So, just to be fully transparent about it, here’s my plan:Next week, I’m taking the week off. It’s winter break and my 16-year-old and I are heading down to Bend, Oregon, to see friends and do some snowboarding/skiing on Mt. Bachelor (where it hasn’t snowed in weeks, sigh). I’m going to endeavor to get through the week with a minimum of screens.After that, I am going to shift — at least temporarily — to doing more podcasting and less writing. This pains me. As much as I make writing a misery for myself, I love it. But working my way into a permanent state of diminished capacity is not something I’m ready for at the tender young age of almost 50. Six months of no typing sounds bad; 20 years of no typing (and no bass playing) sounds way worse. I’m also going to have a go at dictation software; if I can’t type, I can always speak. I admit this fills me with horror. I hate Siri. I hate Alexa. I hate talking to computers. It’s … demeaning. This has been one of my stalwart Dad Things for years; it’s a running joke in my house. But I’m going to bite the bullet. (By the way, Dragon no longer makes dictation software for Mac and apparently nothing else is as good. Let me know if you’ve heard of alternatives. I’m aware that Mac has built-in dictation, but trust me, it sucks.)I’m also going to start doing hot yoga again. I did it regularly for years and it was a blessing. It cured my lifelong back pain and generally warded off the decay of my aging body. I stopped doing it early in the pandemic, and it feels like, in the last year or so, all that aging I held off for those many years has found me at once.Hopefully I can recapture some of the magic. Or at least keep from puking or passing out in my first class back. So, that’s what I’m thinking, at least for now. I don’t know how this will ultimately impact Volts and I’m somewhat reluctant to make any promises at this point — this thing could get worse or it could get better. I need to put my health first. If any of this, now or going forward, affects anyone’s subscription decisions, no worries, I get it. We here at Volts management apologize for any inconvenience.With that said, I’m going to sign off, pack for my trip, and try to forget about my arms for a while. I hope you have a pleasant week and that when I return, the climate parts of Build Back Better will have passed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Gerald Butts and Catherine McKenna discuss their experiences passing a carbon tax in Canada, as advisor to prime minister Justin Trudeau and minister of the environment respectively. In particular, we focus on a key feature of the Canadian tax: all the revenue collected goes back to the province from which it was collected, mostly as per-capita dividends. Butts and McKenna believe that feature was central to selling the public on the policy.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Gerald Butts and Catherine McKenna, February 16, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:In 2015, after nearly a decade of conservative rule, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party won a majority of seats in the Canadian parliament and control of the federal government. Part of Trudeau’s election platform was a carbon tax.The proposed tax had a few key features. First, it would only be imposed on provinces that did not have their own pricing system that met a few minimum requirements. And second, all the money collected from a province would be returned to that province as carbon dividends.After years of vigorous advocacy and negotiations, Trudeau’s liberals got the tax passed through parliament. It was implemented in early 2019, just before another federal election that became widely seen as a national referendum on the tax.Liberals won again. The carbon tax was affirmed. It’s going to stick — and rise to a whopping $170 a ton by 2030. This is a startling success story for climate policy that was largely overlooked in the US. We, uh, had some other stuff going on. But it’s worth taking a closer look at how Canada pulled it off.Two people at the core of the tax pitch were Gerald Butts, who was principal secretary to the prime minister from 2015 to 2019 and Trudeau’s closest personal advisor, and Catherine McKenna, who was the minister of environment and climate change during the same period.Butts and McKenna were in the trenches and they have the scars to show for it. Both of them noticed the piece I published on Volts in January on carbon tax refunds — and they objected to the conclusion that dividends did not make the carbon tax more popular in Canada.So I had them on the pod! We talked about how the carbon tax was conceived, what enabled it to secure majority support (yes, they say, refunds were important), and where the politics of carbon pricing stand as we move into the 2020s. Not only were my spirits lifted — it’s nice to know there’s a sane country out there somewhere — I learned an enormous amount. I think you will too. Without further ado, Catherine McKenna and Gerald Butts, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Catherine McKenna:Very happy to be on.Gerald Butts:  It's great to be here.David Roberts:   When Justin Trudeau announced his candidacy [for prime minister of Canada] in 2015, the carbon tax was part of his initial pitch. How far back does the carbon tax idea go? Who got it in Trudeau’s ear? How long had it been bouncing around up there before it made its debut on the national stage? Gerald Butts:  The first time it was a real issue in Canada was during the federal election campaign in 2008. Important for the context of the story, for reasons I'll go into later, is that the Liberal Party proposed something called the Green Shift, which was an elaborate take on a carbon tax, under the leadership of Stéphane Dion. But it was easily caricatured as a regional wealth redistribution program, because the revenue from the tax was paid into the consolidated revenue fund at the federal government, and it was redistributed by the federal government to programs of its own choosing, not all of which were environmentally related. To me, there were a lot of reasons beyond the Green Shift that the Liberal Party lost the election in 2008, but that was the fundamental flaw in the policy.David Roberts:   The idea is that you're just taking wealth from carbon-intensive provinces and redistributing it elsewhere.Gerald Butts:  Absolutely. That, of course, has a history in this country that goes back to when the current Prime Minister Trudeau’s father was prime minister and he created the National Energy Program. The conservative government in 2008, under Stephen Harper — which, to be diplomatic, was not inclined to climate action — easily caricatured this as the second coming of the National Energy Program in Western Canada in particular, and made it out to be that the Liberal Party was after Western money to pay for Eastern programs, which is always death in politics in Canada. When we designed our program, there were lots of people within the party who thought we should stay a million miles away from it, because they were convinced that they lost the election in 2008 because of carbon taxes. We were very careful to make sure that any of the revenue collected went back to the province from which it originated. That, I think, was what unlocked the political constituency for carbon pricing in Canada.David Roberts:   So that design — money goes back to the province from which it is gathered — was there from the very beginning, as you were working it out. Catherine McKenna:  I came in as first minister of climate change and was given this mandate, and it was very clear that was going to be the hardest thing to land as part of our climate plan. For the first time ever, we went to Paris, we worked really hard to get an ambitious Paris agreement, but then we had to go home and do the work. I was stuck with the unenviable task of meeting with provinces and territories all the time and going through interminable discussion on carbon pricing. There was not a lot of appetite, and everyone would bring all the reasons not to do it. We needed to think hard about how we were going to land it. It's important to know there were some provinces that had pricing. At that time, Alberta had a progressive government that had brought in a price on pollution. Quebec was in a cap-and-trade system with California, as was Ontario, and BC had a direct price carbon tax. So we came to the table with that. Gerry and I spent a lot of time talking about the design. There were a lot of people who at first shied away, didn't want to do it, but when they decided maybe we could do it, they still thought it was okay to take the money and distribute it as the government saw fit. And I knew I couldn't land it, I knew there was no way. As liberals, as progressives, people believe the worst — that you're going to take this money and you're going to have your special things you want to do, which might be really dumb in the perspective of others. It was pretty clear, but it was a fight internally, too. Saying all the money was going to go back in a transparent way was just critically important to me. I knew I couldn't land it otherwise. It was still very hard, we had to do good comms, but it was critically important that we could talk to people and say, “you're going to get more money back.”David Roberts:   How did it play in the 2015 election, Trudeau’s big triumph? I'm curious how central the carbon tax was in his campaign and in the election generally.Gerald Butts:  There were bigger forces in 2015, to be brutally honest. The cornerpiece of our 2015 election campaign was something called the Canada child benefit, which was a progressive benefit given according to family income to people directly in cash. That's what we ran on in 2015: the middle class has been screwed by 25 years of supply-side economics and we're going to do something about it because we know you're hurting. Everything else built out from there. In 2015, climate helped us consolidate a progressive community behind the Liberal Party. This is an important piece of the context in Canada. There are a variety of options on the left, one of which is the center left, one of which is the Green Party, which has diminished its political viability over time as the Liberal Party has absorbed progressive environmental policy. Everybody wanted to get rid of Stephen Harper in 2015, and there was a debate over whether it was going to be us or the NDP. We put a more progressive policy platform together than they had, and climate was a huge part of that. I have no doubt that it helped consolidate the progressive community and has kept it there through some difficult times. David Roberts:   The Canadian carbon tax is designed as a backstop, which means provinces with their own carbon pricing systems that meet certain minimum thresholds are left alone, and only provinces that don't have a sufficient price have this imposed on them. Was that structure also part of it from the very beginning?Gerald Butts:  Definitely. There are two things that Americans can be forgiven for not thinking deeply about when it comes to Canadian politics — probably more than two, but for the purposes of this discussion, there are two. One of them is, all of the revenue collected from the carbon price in Canada goes back to the provinces. None of it is spent on federal programming. There were lots of provincial governments who opposed it on ideological grounds but said they were in favor of it in public. But that's that's what we did, and some people, as Catherine said, were not in favor of it. That's the first thing. The second thing is, we were coming into power at a time when the four largest provinces already had carbon pricing schemes in place. They were acting in the absence of federal leadership during the Harper years. Had there been no carbon pricing anywhere in Canada, it would have been easy to put a uniform system in place. But we had to create this concept of equivalency, because we didn't want to punish the governments that had led on climate action at the subnational level in Canada. Those two things are really important contextual pieces of the Canadian politics of the time to understand.David Roberts:   Was there a lot of debate over what the backstop levels are? Because what you choose as your bottom line effectively chooses which provinces are going to get overridden. What was that process like? What are the minimums?Gerald Butts:  Catherine could speak to that better than I can. But from my perspective, conceptually, this is why a carbon price was important in the first place, because there would have been nothing to use as a benchmark and nothing to uniformly compare across the country as equivalency. When we say equivalency, what we really mean is an equivalent carbon price through some mix of policy measures at the provincial level.David Roberts:   Catherine, how was that hashed out? If you're putting together a baseline that provinces have to meet, you can imagine a baseline being quite elaborate and complicated, or you can imagine a very simple one. Was that done in dialogue with the provinces?Catherine McKenna:  At the end of the day, hard things are hard. I sat in so many meetings and we went nowhere. We didn't know where the four provinces that had a price were at. Cabinet ultimately decided we're going to start at $10, because that meant the system that existed would be acceptable for the four provinces. Now, two of those provinces changed governments, so we lost the pricing that they had, but it showed resilience. This is the way we decided it made sense. It was a lot of design work. This is an across-the-board carbon price with all these different jurisdictions, and then we have an output-based pricing system for major emitters as the backstop, and also there's a benchmark on that. Environmentalists would probably love us to go into details. I won't go into details of the design, but in the end, one day, you have to just announce it. You have to do it. The provinces were trying to delay. This was in 2016. In 2015, Paris Agreement; 2016, we have some major challenges with you folks, and we're trying to land carbon pricing, but it was clear it wasn't going to happen. Gerry and I had a conversation and I said, “I can't land this on my own. I need the prime minister to be totally with me on this.” I was at a meeting of my provincial and territorial counterparts. It was quite a useless discussion, going around the table again, people restating their positions like they do,  negotiations are maybe going backwards. And I said, “you know what, it's been a great discussion, you might want to tune in to the House of Commons because the prime minister is just announcing now that there's going to be a price across the country and it’s starting at $10 and going to $50 in 2022.” (Obviously, I'd talked to some of the key provinces to reassure them that their system was going to be acceptable as long as they continued to go up. Stringency is really important.)A number of people stormed off. All hell broke loose at the table. It was quite a lot of drama. But that's when it got real. We had many discussions, but suddenly, front page of newspapers: “there's going to be a carbon tax across Canada.” That’s the interesting part of this article, which suggests that even giving all the money back can't save a carbon tax. We've been through two elections, and it's held. In the last election, the Conservative Party, which has been extremely difficult, even brought in a weird system that was a fig leaf, maybe, of a carbon tax. In 2019, the majority of Canadians supported a party that had a price on pollution. So we were able to land it, but there was a lot of drama between 2016, when it was announced, and getting it done in 2019. There was talk about “technocratic dreams” and “policies can't transcend politics” — but what's missing in that is people. Actually, people are reasonable. We have a prime minister who said this, Jean Chrétien: “Canadians are reasonable, so be reasonable.”David Roberts:   The structure of the tax is that 90 percent of the revenue goes straight back to households in the province from which the tax was collected. What about the other 10 percent?Catherine McKenna:  That goes to business, indigenous communities, and other organizations, but in a transparent way.David Roberts:   For those of us who are not up on Canadian politics, what does it take to pass a law in Canada? Presumably Trudeau can't just stand up and say, “we're doing this now.” It has to be an act of the legislature. Is that just a single majority vote in parliament, or is there more to it than that?Gerald Butts: The situation is much more straightforward if you have a majority government, which we did. We’re a parliamentary democracy, derivative of the British parliamentary system. If there's a majority party in the House of Commons that forms the government, generally they can rely upon passing their own legislation. Our Senate is not elected and therefore doesn't have the democratic authority to question the central purpose of any legislation — so essentially, if it passes through Parliament, it makes it. The big caveat is, anybody can litigate any piece of legislation that goes through Parliament in the courts.David Roberts:   Just to be clear: not a supermajority in the parliament — you just have more votes for than votes against, and the law passes. Any American listening will be incredulous.Was there ever a realistic chance that enough members of parliament from your own coalition would rebel against this? Was there ever real doubt that if Trudeau put up a real bill it would pass?Gerald Butts:  No. There was doubt that we could manage the politics internally to get a real bill tabled, and that had to do with the federal-provincial dynamics at the time. But it also had to do with the internal management of caucus and cabinet — generally, the disagreements are behind the scenes. People were jumpy. David Roberts:   I bet they weren't making arguments against their own party in the Wall Street Journal, though. Gerald Butts:  No, they were not. David Roberts:   The reason I emphasize this is that, in terms of setting a political context, something that is a fait accompli, definitely going to happen, brings out a different dynamic than something that you might be able to block. Gerald Butts:  Once it's tabled, David. This is a really important distinction. Canada is not this lovely, magical land of unicorns where everything is easy and progressive. That's not the way it works up here. A lot of hard work was done behind the scenes. Remember the context: we had come from third place, in an almost extinction-level event for the Liberal Party of Canada, and gone on to form a government for the first time in the country's history. It had never happened before. There were lots of people in that caucus who were veterans of the 2008 election, and members of staff in senior roles who were like, “do we really have to do this?”Frankly, it was Catherine's leadership, along with the finance minister at the time, Bill Morneau. Finance tends to be the place where people gather to make things not happen; it's like our own Congress within the federal government. Bill was clear from the get-go that he 100 percent stood behind what Catherine wanted to do, and we were going to make it happen come hell or high water. Of course, it goes without saying the prime minister was behind it too. David Roberts:   If you go to a provincial official and say, “all the tax we collect from your province will be returned directly to the people of your province, and most of them will come out ahead financially,” that sounds like a political home run to a sensible person. So what was all the jumpiness? What were the objections and counter-arguments?Catherine McKenna:  I should make a distinction. Caucus was jumpy; provinces were angry. They were just … conservatives. It was the weirdest thing, because I designed — with the support of Gerry, Bill Morneau, the Finance Committee, and a bunch of officials — the most small-c conservative policy you could do. I remember meeting George Shultz, and that came up; there are obviously Republicans who supported fee and dividend. I wanted to get the politics right, so I gave these folks an opportunity. I said, “go fill your boots, design your own policy.” To be clear, if the provinces that didn't already have a pricing system designed their own, they could keep the revenues. They didn't even have to give it back to the people. They could decide they were going to take the money and put it to their pet projects, that wasn't going to be our problem.David Roberts:   If you're going to reject that, you're going to reject any carbon price. You can't get more flexible than that.Gerald Butts:  You put your finger right on it. That was precisely our objective. Political context at the time: there were a bunch of conservatives running around Canada saying, “we believe that climate change is happening and it's a bad thing and we should do something about it … but not a tax.” Our objective was to take all of the objections that have been leveled against previous attempts — be it regional redistribution, tax grab by the government, some nefarious global plot sponsored by the left and George Soros, whatever nutbar theory people wanted to level at it — and say, “no, this is a simple thing. We're going to collect the revenue, and we're going to give it back. If you're against that, you're against everything.”David Roberts:   To my question, then, what were their purported objections to this seemingly very reasonable policy?Catherine McKenna:  Well, they just lied. It's not a very nice thing to say, but they did. They were so opposed to liberals that they just said it was a cash grab. I looked at your article and I said, “this is not the narrative.” It was so important to deal with the lies, to spend a lot of time selling that all the money was going back. Take Ontario — very important province politically, it's the largest province by population. To be able to say, “this is the amount of money that the average family's going to get back, which is more than you're going to pay” was super important. It was decisive. David Roberts:   In terms of public opinion, you mean?Gerald Butts:  Part of my objection to the article is the definition of public opinion. If you ask someone their views on something in a poll, and it's a theoretical prospect, they're going to have one opinion of it. But when they go to decide which political tribe they belong to at the ballot box, that's where the rubber hits the road. I never like to have fights with environmentalists, especially in public, but this is a really important thing — the authors of the study were looking at publicly available data. I can tell you from what we were doing internally, within the government, that there was a 25-point difference among voters in support for a carbon tax and a carbon tax with a rebate. Twenty-five points. David Roberts:   Let me back up one second. These conservatives are saying in public, “it's a cash grab, it's going to hurt families, blah blah blah,” all the predictable things conservatives say. But presumably, they're not dumb, they knew what you were telling them, that they're going to get all the money back. So what are they saying to you in private? Catherine McKenna:  They're saying the same things. I couldn’t even believe it. I would say that to them and then they immediately go to a microphone and they're like, “I just told the minister that this is a cash grab.” It was not super fun, because it was a fight a minute. It ended up becoming a real security issue for me, because people hear things from politicians, and you can inflame people if they think you're going to take money and people are just trying to pay the bills. So I'd have to rush to the mic, too, because they didn't care. I remember, in a conservative province where they have a provincial sales tax and generally people don't like taxes, I got someone to do the math for the premier. I said, “you could get rid of your provincial sales tax; you can bring this in. Here's your sales pitch!” And he was still against it.This is why it's so important, us telling this side of the story. They thought it was a winner to rile people up and lie, saying “you're going to pay more money and you can't understand this anyway.” They would have ministers go fill up their tank and take a picture of them at the gas station, then say, “this is going to cost an average family this much by 2022,” but they wouldn't talk about how you're going to get more money back. It literally was a comms war. We would be on the airwaves, I had to be out getting pounded.David Roberts:   You became the face of the whole thing for a while. I imagine that was unpleasant.Catherine McKenna:  I'm Irish, I’m a competitive swimmer, I can take it. I didn't love it, that's for sure, but I believed in it. I believed that we needed to take serious climate action, and I felt like I could not lose it. I felt personal responsibility, which was a heavy weight, and I was very worried.We had this output-based pricing system, which is very complex, because you have to look at particular sectors — cement, aluminum — and design in a way that you're not sending these companies offshore. It took a while; we literally brought it in in 2019, which is the year of the election. The reality is, to paraphrase David Axelrod, hard things are hard, and you're always going to take flak, so go do the really hard things that matter. We could have done a crappy, wimpier version, and they didn't care — these guys were going to be out there. (And by the way, it was all guys, a bunch of guys calling themselves the resistance to Justin Trudeau. And Catherine McKenna, I suppose.)It was a fight worth fighting, but we had to enlist people, and not just environmentalists. (I will give a shout out to our good friend Kat. We all are big fans of Katharine Hayhoe.) Of course we had environmentalists putting out the message. But we got young people, and it was good because at that time you had Greta, and young people marching in the streets. We got doctors, there was a whole campaign of doctors to support us. I got Arnold Schwarzenegger to do a video — as a Republican, he brought this in in a bipartisan way. We were just doing whatever we could so that Canadians could hear the message. There was some emphasis on how Canadians didn't know exactly how much money they're getting back. That doesn't matter. Like Gerry said, the fact that you asked them, “do you know exactly how much money you got back?” — that wasn't the thing. In the end, we were able to make carbon pricing a necessary part of a serious climate plan where it wasn't the exact amount you got back that mattered. David Roberts:   One thing I really despair about in the States is our abysmal media situation. Basically, our right wing has captured a large portion of the population and facts don't penetrate at all. I know you have some terrible Murdoch-sponsored media up there, too, but do you feel like when you put a coordinated effort into it you were able to get over the heads of that media machine and reach the public?Catherine McKenna:  We have media that fought this the whole time, but it actually goes to our broader strategy. We had to get to real people. As many op-eds as you put in the papers, how many people are reading them? We did them, but I didn't wake up every day thinking about op-eds. I spent a lot of time looking for clips for social media. In the election, the Liberal Party did a lot of social media to reach regular people. A really interesting thing happened that was surprising to me, but important. I had pushed to have a check back every month. I wanted someone to arrive at your door and hand you a big fat check. That would be the best, but we couldn't do it. But helpfully, we got a lot of free advertising from accountants, because at tax time they would literally advertise “come get your climate action incentive.” (We put a lot of effort into “climate action incentive,” what we wanted to call this thing you’re getting back. It had to be about climate, it definitely couldn't say tax rebate!) So you had all of these accountants and accounting firms saying, “We’ll do your taxes, get your climate action incentive, you're going to get this much back in the province.” I would go there and do events, we had local members of parliament doing events to promote it. At tax time people like money back. So that's the good news. I spent all my time trying to think about who I could get to sell it.Gerald Butts:  Again, we are not the land of unicorns up here. Two-thirds of our daily newspapers are owned by an American hedge fund, the same one that owns American media, i.e. the National Enquirer. They had no shame in how they opposed the carbon price — they printed lie after lie after lie about it. But it didn't work, because one thing we do have going for us in this country, at least so far, is that we're not tribal when it comes to our partisan affiliation. Most Canadians have voted for different parties at different points in their lives. Some people even vote for different parties at different orders of government simultaneously. I think that's a good thing. Partisan adhesion is not as sticky in Canada as it is in many places.David Roberts:   Do you explain that just by reference to the fact that it's a parliamentary system and there are multiple parties, so there's not this constant binary forced on everything?Gerald Butts:  No. It's part of it, for sure. What explains it more is that we have more or less built and maintained an excellent public education system that 93 percent of Canadians send their kids to. You're looking for the secret sauce in Canadian policy and why everything from immigration to climate action is possible here? It's because of that basic fact that everybody goes to school together.David Roberts:   Carbon pricing was run on in 2015, passed in 2018, and then elections in 2019, so there was no getting around this being at the heart of the election. I was just reading an account of the 2019 election which basically said the big winner was the carbon tax. Two-thirds of voters voted for a party that supported the carbon tax. If you’re a liberal and a fan of the carbon tax and involved in doing it, you have incentive to play up the extent to which the election was a referendum on the carbon tax, but was it really? Were there other bigger forces, or was it really mainly about the tax this time?Gerald Butts:  It was the showdown at the OK Corral about climate in Canada, for sure. There were other things, some of which it's still too soon for me to remember. You may remember a certain story that came out about the prime minister in the middle of the campaign — that took over the news cycle for a few days. The conservatives had been elected in major provinces (not that there are any minor provinces, coming from Nova Scotia) — they had the governments of Ontario, Alberta, more or less Quebec. And everybody, including of course the leadership of the Conservative Party federally, was saying “we are going to scrap the tax.” There were probably two or three things that decided the 2019 election, but there's no doubt in my mind that that was number one.Greta Thunberg drew I can't remember how many hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in the middle of Montreal, literally in the middle of the campaign. The prime minister marched in the rally. And more importantly for this discussion, there's no way we win that fight without the rebate.David Roberts:   So the fact that the money goes back to citizens did play a big role in the debate.Gerald Butts:  It was decisive.Catherine McKenna:  It was key. You could call it out. It was a reasonable policy. They could just say it was a tax grab, and the response had to be, “it's not, and by the way, this is what you get back.” In a way it's kind of good in elections when you have one issue — it doesn't feel good, at the time I was very nervous — but it was good, it focused the mind. Carbon pricing also became, like, do you want to act on climate? Because the conservatives were so against it.David Roberts:   To what extent was public support about the details of this policy, and to what extent did it just become a proxy battle of, “we care about climate change and they don't?”Gerald Butts:  It's a great question, David, because this wasn't a detail of the policy — this was the policy, the price and rebate. The difference of one side saying “it's a tax grab” and the other side having to say, “well, look at all the things we're going to spend the money on,” and one side saying “it's a tax grab,” and the other side saying “they're lying to you” — when it's a live-action, kinetic political battle, one of those arguments is winnable, and the other one is not.David Roberts:   I feel the need to insert here, just to make myself feel better: not that there's anything wrong with the federal government taxing people and spending money on public purposes.Gerald Butts:  Absolutely. Our universal public healthcare system and the public education system that I just alluded to would be impossible without those things.David Roberts:   So you win in 2019 on the carbon tax. Is the feeling in Canadian politics now that the main issue is settled, we're just arguing over the details? Or are your right wingers like our right wingers here in the US, that never give up? Are they still after it, or is this a settled question in Canadian politics? Catherine McKenna:  I think the Canadian public bought into a price on pollution — that's what we call it, not the carbon tax. But the conservatives apparently are going to kill themselves over this again. It's kind of funny, the number of stories that have been written about the conservatives tying themselves in knots over this, and conservatives themselves, the more reasonable ones who want to get elected, saying “you do this again, you're going to lose again, can you learn some lessons?” It's going to happen, but I don't think that means it's a lost policy. I think that the conservatives are a lost cause. Having said that, you always have to be vigilant. You can’t take it for granted. As the price goes up, you have to continuously emphasize you're getting more money back, but you also need to do the other things: make sure that your economy is growing and you're creating jobs and you're showing that you're taking real climate action. It's part of a bigger piece. Gerald Butts:  Yeah, I don't think it's settled. I had hoped it would be settled in the last election. The conservatives had a weird policy that nobody believed they would ever really implement, that they would go to a first ministers’ meeting and say, ”hey, we tried, and now we're going to get rid of the old plan.” I don't think they ever had any intention of implementing it. It was, by my view as someone who has spent a lot of time in government in this country, unimplementable. But that's for them to answer. You mentioned the forces of the right wing in the United States — they're the same forces. Catherine and I are both phoning into this lovely discussion from Ottawa where we have MAGA flags and Confederate flags flying on Parliament Hill.David Roberts:   I want to hit on the Supreme Court case. Several provinces sued over the tax; the substance of the lawsuit was that this is an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government over things that ought to be provincial, and the Supreme Court ruled in March of last year that, no, it's constitutional. Pretty much settled that. How nervous were you about that? Was that case a big deal, or was it a frivolous lawsuit? Gerald Butts:  It was a pretty huge deal.Catherine McKenna:  We definitely needed to win or else it was going to be really bad. We are a federation, so we had to demonstrate the reasonableness that the environment is joint jurisdiction between the federal government and the provinces. By saying, “you can do a direct price or you can do cap and trade and design it how you want but you have to meet the benchmark,” we knew that was going to be important, legally. We didn't just say, “okay everyone, too bad, whatever your system is, we're getting rid of it” or “you have to design it just like this.” We were reasonable. That was important. But also, the Supreme Court said climate change is a threat of the highest order to the country and indeed to the world. That was critically important, because it was going to be ridiculous at the most basic level if the federal government couldn't attack greenhouse gas emissions within the country. How are you going to have a climate plan? We couldn't comply with the Paris Agreement! If you have a target and you can’t actually reduce emissions because provinces get to do whatever they want and they can continue to slowly [increase emissions], that was going to be a huge problem. But the Supreme Court was very reasonable and they actually recognized that pollution doesn't know any borders. We had tailored it in a way that it was narrow, and that was important because they did look at, is the federal government going to come in? This was some of the arguments by conservative provinces, that we're going to regulate everything. We'd have these conservative premiers saying, “they're going to regulate how often you can drive your car.” We had to be careful. It was also a very important decision because it does now make it clear that the federal government can take action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in potentially broader areas where it's in the national interest. I didn't really think we had a chance of losing. David Roberts:   You were pretty confident in the case and in the court itself. What's the situation with partisanship on the Supreme Court in Canada? Catherine McKenna:  It's not a thing. Stephen Harper probably tried to put people that might have been conservative. But the legal profession is different here. How we appoint judges is different. David Roberts:   And the court is trusted by the public as a neutral arbiter. That must be nice.Gerald Butts:  As the prime minister said many, many moons ago when he kicked off his leadership campaign in 2012, this country did not happen by accident, and it will not continue without effort. It is a constant struggle, David.Catherine McKenna:  The Supreme Court — I wouldn't overstate it. Which sounds like a funny thing to say, it was obviously critically important that it be found constitutional. But at the end of the day, a new government can always change policy. That’s why you can't get distracted in some ways by some things. That was really important, because otherwise, you'd have to go back to the drawing table, or win a majority, or get new legislation. But end of the day, you have to convince regular people. Maybe 2019 was unusual, because it was such a significant issue, though fought on a variety of different fronts. But I actually think Canadians have come a long way, not just on carbon pricing, but on climate. The town of Lytton literally exploded, it just burned down. We're seeing massive floods, forest fires, droughts, our Arctic is thawing. That doesn't mean that a particular policy will be resilient, but if you talk about it as a reasonable person, and it is well designed — it has to be well-designed policy, you can’t sell something that sucks to the regular person — but we are in a different place from where Canadians were at in 2015.Gerald Butts:  And we're at a different place than where Canadians were in 2011. Canada did not look much different on climate change; in fact, in some ways, the Obama administration looked way better than the Harper administration did on climate change. I guess that's the point, David, of this whole discussion, and why it raised our Canadian version of Irish when we read this study. People can change things in democracies. Sometimes the cards are stacked against you, and sometimes it feels like nothing good can ever happen, but if people put their whole heart and soul into it, they can make change happen. That is possible. It's still possible.David Roberts:   Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree about that. When people talk about the difference between the US and Canada on this issue, there's a lot of hand-waving about public opinion and who's sensible and who’s not, but to me, in the end, it all comes back to structures and procedures. You [Canadians] can have a majority that wants a policy, and that will result in the policy passing. We [Americans] have a majority that wants a policy, and we have a situation where 30 percent of the population can elect senators that can go literally block anything. So I think it's less the intangible stuff and more prosaic: we have really stupid rules, and kind of a stupid Constitution. I don't know how you get around that. We've done the work trying to change public opinion, it has changed, and we've come up with good policies — we did all the things we’re supposed to do, and now we're facing a situation where one dude from West Virginia, who partly owns coal plants, is literally deciding what and whether we do anything at all on climate change. It’s absolutely absurd.Gerald Butts:  That, to me, is one of the central differences between the Canadian and American political systems: the centrality of money. It's insane to me how much money — I remember David Axelrod asked me how much money we were going to spend in the 2015 campaign, and I said “it's probably going to be around $35-40 million.” It ended up being $42 million, in the longest election campaign in modern Canadian history. David said, “I spent more than that in the Democratic primary in Florida.”David Roberts:   One of the things that fee and dividend proponents are constantly saying is that it's very important that the rebates be visible, that people know they're getting them. They all are advocating this idea of sending the big Ed McMahon check to the door every month. But Canada went with a tax rebate that, unless you're pretty on the ball, would be very easy to not notice. That's the research that was written up in that paper — lots of people just aren't noticing it. So why bury it in tax rebates? What prompted the decision to shift this summer to mailing checks? Do you anticipate mailing checks to make a big difference?Catherine McKenna:  I don’t know why we weren't allowed to. I actually said, “I'll deliver it. I'll go to every Canadian and bring it.” For whatever reason, the bureaucratic system could not do these mailed-out checks. We weren't able to win that. We’ve won it now, in the sense that we recognize that this is important.Some of it was that people didn't know how much they got. Half of the people didn't know they got a check. To the extent people cared, they would be able to hear the conservatives say, “it's a tax grab,” and then they'd hear me and others saying “actually you’re going to get more money back.” It was very important, I can't emphasize enough. We could not have won if we had said, “actually, you know what, we put it into general revenue and we're going to do this green thing where we're going to give it to green stuff in different places, and I don't know what your provinces get.” That's not sellable. I don't want to be too depressed about the situation in the United States because we did live under Donald Trump — being the environment minister, it was hard for us. I actually went to Miami and Houston and hung out with the mayors there and did videos for Canadians to say, “but look, these guys are doing stuff on climate!” You’ll always have the states and cities and businesses that are acting. You’ve got to be crafty. We could have done the easy thing. It didn't really occur to me, because I wasn't going to back down on it, but people did want us to not do this, including internally. Some people will just wait out the clock. But we were crafty. I know it's much harder in the United States. Comms matters, designing things in a way that can uphold a constitutional challenge matters. I get your Supreme Court, you have challenges, working with states, litigating everything and knowing that it's going to be in place while it's litigated. You have to be crafty, too. I'm hopeful that the US is able to land things.I'm going to be at Columbia with Jason Bordoff, working on carbon pricing and border carbon adjustments. Maybe the enticement of border carbon adjustments will help on the pricing. The IMF is working on a minimum price floor. So there's action. I'm a realistic optimist or an optimistic realist some days, but I don't want to give up on you guys doing things.David Roberts:   One of the things that's not publicly appreciated in these discussions about carbon taxes, because they're so big politically, is that, especially at the level that they're being talked about, they're macroeconomically not that big a deal. If you look at macroeconomic assessments, it's like 1 percent GDP one way or the other, with a lot of uncertainty.I can understand completely why dividends serve as a great political argument, and also that people in practice maybe aren't that aware of them, because the amount you're paying in tax is not yet very big and the amount you're getting back is not yet very big. The actual amount of money, as opposed to the political symbolism of it all, is relatively modest. That said, the tax is about to go way up, to the point that we’ll pretty soon be at levels that Canadians will start noticing the costs, and maybe start noticing the checks back, too. The amounts on both ends are going to get bigger. Is there a next test of the tax?Gerald Butts:  I think there’s going to be an annual test. You're right that people are going to feel $170 a ton a lot more than they feel $50. There's no way you'd maintain a political consensus for it if that money weren't being rebated to people, because while you're right at even $170 a ton, at the maybe $3 trillion the Canadian economy will be at the time, it is not that much. But for individual families, it is a lot. David Roberts:   Are you pretty confident that the checks will increase the salience of the dividends? Has there been any testing or polling on that, or is it just gut common sense?Gerald Butts:  I can't speak to that, because that policy was announced after I joined the private sector, but I suspect that was the reasoning. There's no reason to believe it won't be the case, but it's going to require a continuous commitment to communication. Of course, 2030 is sooner than it used to be. But it's still a couple of election cycles away, and anything can happen.David Roberts:   Well, thank you guys so much for doing this thing in the first place, which, despite your admonitions, still has unicorn vibes to me. Catherine, I wish you all the best in joining the fight down here in the US; we could use some new energy and optimism. Thanks to you both for coming on today. It was really fun. Catherine McKenna:It was great.Gerald Butts:  It was  a real pleasure. This is a public episode. 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In this episode, Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks Foundation, offers a comprehensive overview of the problems of industrial decarbonization, the most promising technological solutions in steel, cement, and chemicals, and the kinds of policies that could accelerate progress. Incredibly informative.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Rebecca Dell, February 11, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:For most of the carbon-intensive sectors of the economy — electricity, transportation, buildings — we have a pretty good sense of how to eliminate carbon emissions. None of those sectors will be easy to decarbonize. Every one is an enormous practical challenge. But in each case, the basic path to zero is clear, and it mostly involves switching out fossil-fueled machines with machines that generate or run on clean electricity. Then there’s that other wedge on the pie chart, the one that gets less attention: industry. Manufacturing, mining, construction, and waste processing are responsible for about a third of global carbon emissions (about a quarter of US emissions).The path to zero emissions in heavy industry is much murkier than it is for other sectors. Low-carbon alternatives are early in development and commercialization; in some cases, there are no alternatives except to capture and bury the carbon when it’s emitted.In future pods, I might get deeper into some specific industries (like steel). But for this one, I wanted to attempt a broad overview: What You Need to Know About Decarbonizing Industry.Nobody knows the sector and its challenges better than Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks Foundation. Dell previously worked at the Department of Energy, where she helped coordinate Obama’s climate action plan, and before that was a research scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She’s a researcher, author, and, as more attention turns to industry, an increasingly frequent podcast guest. (She was on Canary’s Catalyst pod last month.) It takes a while — okay, almost two hours — but Dell and I manage to cover all the big industrial sectors, why they emit so much, prospects for reducing emissions, and the policies that could make it happen. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shopping primer on industry and climate, this is for you. Without further ado, Rebecca Dell, welcome to Volts.Rebecca Dell:  Thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.David Roberts:I'm excited for this. We are going to attempt to cover a lot of ground. I want to try to give a 30,000-foot overview of industry and decarbonization; obviously any of the subtopics could be podcasts of their own. Among the Volts audience, people are probably basically familiar with the famous Energy Information Administration pie chart of where US greenhouse gases come from. There are wedges for transportation, electricity, buildings, agriculture — I think people mostly have their heads around how to decarbonize those. Then there's that big wedge that just says “industry.” My sense is that, to a lot of people, that is a bit of a black box — it’s not clear what's in it or how to approach decarbonizing it. Historically, that has been the neglected stepchild of the decarbonization conversation. But am I right in saying that attention on that little wedge has rapidly increased in recent years?Rebecca Dell:  Yes, and for people who work on this area, it's been exciting to see how much new interest has come in the last year or two. David Roberts:Do you have an explanation for why?Rebecca Dell:The phenomenon that is more in need of explanation is why so few people were looking at this area until the last year or so, considering that the industrial sector globally, under the most parsimonious accounting, is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and under a broader definition, it's responsible for more than a third.David Roberts:   Does that roughly echo the US pie chart? Or is the US different because we have deindustrialized a little bit?Rebecca Dell:  The US is a little lower in terms of the portion of our emissions that come from the industrial sector. But if you add back in the greenhouse gas emissions that come from manufacturing products in other countries that will be consumed in the United States — you can think of those as our imported emissions — then you get back to something pretty close to the global average.David Roberts:   So let's say about a third — that's a lot of emissions to neglect for this long. When we say industry, what do we mean by that? What does that category inclue? What are the boundaries? And what, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, are the top line items?Rebecca Dell:  That's a really important question, because when we talk about “industry” in the climate community, it’s a piece of stealth jargon. It’s the worst kind of jargon: it's a word that sounds like a normal word, but it actually is a jargon word. Basically, what we're talking about when we talk about industry is everything that's not agriculture or energy, which is to say, it's the material economy. It’s mining, manufacturing, construction, waste processing. It's physical stuff, as opposed to energy. As you might imagine, there are a lot of fields of human endeavor that are included in that very broad set of activities. It's a very heterogeneous sector. But for all of the millions of different types of activities that are included in the industrial sector, there's an astonishingly short list that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the greenhouse gas emissions.David Roberts:   That's very useful for our podcast purposes.Rebecca Dell:  It is. It allows one to simplify one's focus considerably. There are three real standouts here: steel, cement, and commodity chemicals. The chemical industry itself is, again, varied and heterogeneous; they produce a lot of different products. But there are about 10 chemicals that are basically the precursors for two products — plastic and fertilizer — that dominate those emissions. You can think of this in four product categories: cement, steel, plastic, and fertilizer. Just making those materials is responsible for two-thirds of all the greenhouse gas emissions from the entire industrial sector.David Roberts:   Insofar as you figure out how to decarbonize those, will those lessons be transferable to all those other varied applications? Or are they so heterogenous that you have to do it one by one?Rebecca Dell:  The sources of greenhouse gas emissions are different in other areas. For example, a lot of the emissions in the waste processing area are what's called landfill gas: anaerobic digestion of poorly sorted solid waste trash leads to methane emissions. So that's in the one-third that's not accounted for. But a lot of it is manufacturing. It’s from lighter manufacturing activities: lower temperature processes, electric drive processes, cooling, motors, that sort of thing. A lot of that will be taken care of as the grid gets cleaner and as things that are relatively easy to electrify become more electrified.David Roberts:   If tomorrow, by magic, all electricity became clean, how much of that one-third of emissions would vanish?Rebecca Dell:  That's pretty much the difference between the one-quarter and the one-third numbers that I cited. For the one-quarter, the more parsimonious definition is “we are only looking at greenhouse gases that are coming out of smokestacks at factories,” what are called direct emissions. If you add in the greenhouse gas emissions from generating electricity that is consumed at industrial facilities, that gets you from a quarter up to over a third.David Roberts:   In terms of that quarter, how much of industry is devoted to fossil fuels themselves: mining, drilling, processing, transporting, refining, etc.? If we shift away from fossil fuels over time, how much of a chunk does that take out of the industry pie?Rebecca Dell:  None. The numbers I cited to you, the quarter and the third, those are global numbers. Here in the United States, we have a very unusual convention of including the fossil-fuel extraction industries as industrial activities. In the whole rest of the world, when people are doing their greenhouse gas inventories, they don't count that as an industrial activity; they count that as an energy transformation activity, so they lump those emissions in with power generation. If you look at that pie chart from EIA, or EPA — if you look at a strictly US source — that will include your refining and fossil-fuel extraction emissions, but global numbers don't include any.David Roberts:   That seems like a complication in comparing across countries, doesn't it? It's kind of a big chunk to have misfiled in one place or the other.Rebecca Dell:  Yeah, but we're America, and we like to do things our way.David Roberts:   Why do steel, cement, plastic, and fertilizer produce so many GHGs? Rebecca Dell:  First, because we make them in larger quantities than we make anything else. These are the materials that we make other things out of. We make steel and cement in increments of billions of tons per year. We make commodity chemicals in increments of hundreds of millions of tons per year. These are the only products that we make in those volumes, so of course these are the products that have the biggest greenhouse gas impact. Second, all of these industries are a variation on the following theme: you dig something out of the ground and the first thing you do with it transforms a raw material into a useful molecule; everything that's downstream of that in your supply chain is arranging your useful molecules in different combinations and sizes and ratios. But all of that rearranging takes a lot less energy and emits a lot less greenhouse gas than making the useful molecule in the first place.All of these industries are what we call primary commodity processing industries. In fact, if the big three that we talked about — steel, cement, chemicals — are the highest emitting industries, four through seven or eight are also primary commodity processing, just smaller ones. They're things like aluminum.David Roberts:   Let's look at those four: steel, cement, plastic, and fertilizer. Why does making steel specifically produce so much greenhouse gas? What is the traditional steel-making process?Rebecca Dell:  Steel emissions are so big because we make 2 billion tons of it per year. That's the best part of a thousand pounds of steel for every human being on Earth, every year. It sounds insane until you look at a suspension bridge, or a runway, or anything in our built environment. Then you have to think, oh yeah, I guess we do use an incredibly large amount of steel. We make everything out of it.David Roberts:   What is the raw material, and what is the processing that sends off so much greenhouse gas?Rebecca Dell:  With steel, we start with iron ore. Iron ore is iron oxide — iron atoms chemically bonded to oxygen atoms. Your audience may be more familiar with iron oxide by its common name, which is rust. Everybody knows that rust does not have the valuable material properties that steel has, so what we're doing when we make steel is stripping off those oxygen atoms and turning it into metallic iron, with a little bit of other elements mixed in to improve its properties. Steel is almost all iron by weight.The main way we do that chemical reaction today is to use coal. We combine the iron ore and the coal together in a reactor called a blast furnace. We use metallurgical coal, which is also called coking coal. It's a special kind of coal, but it's still a lump of carbon. In the blast furnace, part of the coal gets burned for thermal energy to help the reaction go faster. All of those carbon atoms are a more attractive place for the oxygen atoms to go, so the oxygen atoms move from the iron oxide over to the carbon, and we get carbon dioxide. So we're getting carbon dioxide from two different sources. This is another theme that we'll see throughout the industrial sector: you have the energy emissions — the coal that you burn to get your reactor hot to make the chemical reaction go — but you also have a set of chemical reactions that are going on in there that are not combustion reactions. They're a different kind of chemical reaction that's also producing greenhouse gases. That’s what we call process emissions: any greenhouse gas emission that comes from doing anything except combustion.David Roberts:   My intuition tells me that energy emissions are going to be the easier ones to eliminate, because we have alternative sources of energy that don't emit greenhouse gases. Is that accurate?Rebecca Dell:  In many cases, yes.It would be useful at this point to give a typology of solutions that applies across industries. There are a few buckets of decarbonization pathways that we can use across all of these industries. Bucket number one is material efficiency. We can just use less of this material in order to make the products and deliver the services that we want. David Roberts:   Traditionally that's the cheapest, right? It's just changing your behavior, changing your processes, changing design.Rebecca Dell:  Yeah, that's a big one. The barriers there are typically not technical. They're barriers that have to do with incentives and social systems and cultural norms. That's very important, and we should definitely do it. Bucket number two, carbon capture and storage. You keep doing pretty much what you're doing now, but you figure out a way to collect all the carbon dioxide and put it underground. You don't have to like it, but you have to acknowledge that it exists and is a possibility.David Roberts:   I'm very familiar with capturing carbon dioxide off of combustion; that's the standard CCS model. Is capturing the carbon dioxide off of process emissions notably different or more difficult?Rebecca Dell:  There's a dumb version of carbon capture where you just take your flue gases at the end of the pipe and put them through some scrubbers and then put them through some amine sorbents, and you can do that on any flue gas. You could imagine doing that on the end of almost any pipe, but each industry has its own version of smarter carbon capture that is engineered to optimize for this industrial process. That varies a lot. Bucket three is hydrogen. As your recent guest Panama Bartholomy said, it is the answer to every question in energy before it has even been asked. Bucket number four is direct electrification. Bucket number five is bioenergy. Those are your five buckets across all of these industries.David Roberts:   Is there significance to the order you put them in?Rebecca Dell:  No. Well, I suppose I put bioenergy last because bioenergy cannot ever be more than a small part of the solution. There’s no way to provide enough biomass to do a large portion of the decarbonization in these industries. The IEA estimates that our current total biomass available for energy use on Earth is something like 55 or 60 exajoules of energy. The chemical industry today uses almost 50 exajoules of energy. The steel industry uses another 30 exajoules of energy. There’s just not enough to go around. Bioenergy might show up here or there, but it can't be the bulk solution, because there just aren’t enough joules there.David Roberts:   Bucket number one, material efficiency, applied to steel: I can imagine us using less steel. Rebecca Dell:  One point on that: in the United States and in other high-income countries, we already use less steel. As countries get richer, their demand for steel tends to tail off. The reason for that is that as you become a middle-income country, that's when you build out an electric transmission and distribution system that actually gets to every house; you move your entire population into modern housing; people start having private vehicles for the first time in significant numbers; you build sanitation systems and aqueducts that bring clean water and public health to people. Once you've done that, your demand for steel is largely a function of population growth and replacing things as they wear out. We in high-income countries might have a lot of opportunities to reduce our demand for steel in order to be more material-efficient in our use of it, but there's this huge latent demand for more steel that is represented by the couple billion people on Earth who are still in poverty and have an entirely legitimate desire to have modern housing and sanitation and all of those things.The other thing about steel, though, is that it's quite recyclable. As you have a lot of stuff for a long time, you develop a stock of steel that you can recycle. If current trends continue, all of the additional demand for steel that's going to come from countries emerging out of poverty can probably be met with recycled steel. The current volume of new steel production probably doesn't have to go up in order to continue to meet global needs, but it probably doesn't have to go down either.David Roberts:   Are we currently on a trajectory to hold it steady?Rebecca Dell:  If current trends continue. But I don't think I've actually said out loud yet in this interview how much greenhouse gas is emitted by the global steel industry. It’s 3.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. It's more greenhouse gases than are emitted by any entire nation except the United States and China. Even if we're just holding current production constant, that's still an enormous problem to solve.David Roberts:By the same token, if you reduce it by even a small fraction, you are reducing a lot of tons.Rebecca Dell:Yes.David Roberts:What does smart carbon capture look like in steel? Rebecca Dell:Frankly, there's not a lot of interest in steel CCS around the world right now. I'm happy to explain how it might work and why it would be hard. David Roberts:   My attitude toward CCS is, don't do it unless you have to. If you're telling me you don't have to, I'm happy to put it out of my mind. Rebecca Dell:  I think we can confidently walk past. Let’s move on to hydrogen. Hydrogen is where a lot of the excitement in the steel industry is right now. In my mind, the best argument for hydrogen is that making steel using hydrogen is the smallest increment of technology that we need to get to zero-greenhouse-gas steel.David Roberts:   Can you just substitute hydrogen into existing refining processes, or there's more to it than that?Rebecca Dell:  No. Today, more than 90 percent of what we call primary steel — steel that's made from iron ore, not recycled — is made with a blast furnace using coal. There's not a lot you can do about the blast furnace on the hydrogen front. But about 7 percent is made with an alternative process called direct reduction that uses methane instead of coal. We think that the hydrogen process might be quite similar to direct reduction and use quite similar equipment, so we don't have to start from zero. This direct reduction process is only 7 percent of global production, but that still makes this a fully commercial, mature technology. You can call up the Midrex Corporation and say, “hello, I would like to buy a shaft furnace,” and they will make you one. Basically what we're talking about is reengineering this existing technology of the shaft furnace to use only hydrogen instead of what it currently uses, which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. If we're going to do that as our main route, we're going to have to build a lot more shaft furnaces. So the next option — direct electrification.David Roberts:   My favorite.Rebecca Dell:  There are a few different ways to do this. The one that's most advanced is something called molten oxide electrolysis, which is pretty much what it sounds like. You take your oxide (iron ore), you heat it up enough to melt it, you put a giant electric field across it, and the electric field is strong enough that it pulls apart the iron and the oxygen. This is pretty similar to how we currently make aluminum, so it's not crazy. It's a thing that should be able to be made to work. It's a pre-commercial technology, though — it's not ready for primetime yet. There are some companies that are working on it, it might be ready soon.David Roberts:   Are we to a demonstration project yet? Is it happening somewhere?Rebecca Dell:  Give it a year and there may be something exciting to announce.David Roberts:   Is that the cheapest form of direct electrification, or the most practical?Rebecca Dell:  That’s the one that’s closest to being ready to do. People are also thinking about low-temperature forms of electrolysis that you can do without having to melt the iron oxide first, but the one that I just described is the most mature. The biggest advantage of the hydrogen route is that it is the smallest increment of technology to get us to truly green steel. The biggest advantage of the direct electrification route is that it will require the least energy. If you are using green hydrogen — taking electricity and converting that into hydrogen — and then using that hydrogen to convert your iron ore into iron, you lose a lot of energy in that extra conversion. If you can just use the electricity directly, you get to keep another third of the energy.The amount of energy that's involved is enormous. This industry uses a similar amount of global energy to its portion of global greenhouse gases, which is 7 or 8 percent.David Roberts:   None of these, except for carbon capture, seem to address existing blast furnace steel production facilities.Rebecca Dell:  Yeah, and this is incredibly important for the politics. In the steel industry, as in a lot of these industries, the reason why the facilities that we have today were built in the places that they were built is because they had the best access to raw materials and energy. Why did we put the steel mill there? Because we could get metallurgical coal to that place really cheaply. Also like a lot of these industries, most of the production is done at a relatively small number of very large facilities. I've visited a lot of steel mills over the years, and it's not unusual for a steel mill to have 10,000 employees. The biggest one I ever went to had 48,000 employees at one facility. It's the size of a city. David Roberts:   So these are not things that you can move around easily. Switching geographies is not practical.Rebecca Dell:  It creates a lot of problems and a lot of social dislocation. The steel industry might not be a huge part of the total US economy today, but for the communities and even the states that are hosting these facilities, one facility is a really important part of your employment. People will fight really hard to keep these facilities, because they're so concentrated and the local community is so dependent on them. If you're moving from a coal-based process to an electricity-based process, frankly, the places that have the best access to metallurgical coal are not typically the same as the places that have the best access to cheap electricity.David Roberts:   So CCS is something you can offer these communities and these facilities to say, “you don't have to change anything fundamental, you don't have to move, you can continue to exist here and just bolt this thing onto your facility.”Rebecca Dell:  You can potentially maintain existing industrial economies, but it's not easy. One of the reasons why CCS is tough in the steel industry is that at what are called integrated steel mills, the traditional type of steel mills that have blast furnaces at them, typically you'll have three or four really big carbon dioxide sources — your blast furnace, some other major process furnaces, and things like that. Together, you have a lot of carbon dioxide coming out in one place, so you can see how it could be cost-effective to collect it all. But all of that together is often only half or maybe 60 percent of the carbon dioxide that's coming out of the facility overall. The rest of it is all these small sources — little process heaters here and there — that are distributed by the dozens all over a facility that's the size of a town. Thinking about how you would collect all of the carbon dioxide from all those distributed sources and do that cost effectively is really hard.David Roberts:   I came into this interview riding on a wave of green-steel hype, and nothing I'm hearing you say is justifying any of it.  What is all the excitement around steel? It sounds to me like we have no good options. Rebecca Dell:  I didn't say anything nasty about hydrogen, did I?David Roberts:   I mean, it's going to substitute for that 7 percent with a special kind of furnace, right? Which is not nothing, but blast furnaces are most of the furnaces. Rebecca Dell:  All of them are going to have to be retired.David Roberts:   That sounds like a brutal social and political process.Rebecca Dell:  I'm not going to claim that it will be straightforward, but we do have 30 years. Industrial equipment doesn't typically last longer than that. We don't have to do this all at once. But I have never seen a good idea for how we have a climate-safe blast furnace. We are in a process of closing most, if not all, of the coal-fired electricity stations around the world, and we all accept that this type of industrial equipment, this particular coal-fired type of furnace, is just not consistent with a climate-safe future. That is also true of blast furnaces.David Roberts:   So insofar as there's an elevator-pitch answer in steel, it is shutting down blast furnaces and building new facilities that either can work with hydrogen shaft furnaces or are some directly electrified process that we don't quite have worked out yet.Rebecca Dell:  We're getting close, though. That's probably how it's going to go. There are some interesting reports that came out in the last few months looking at pathways to steel decarbonization. Several different organizations have done this kind of analysis over the course of the last year, with different methodologies and approaches, and all of them basically come to the same conclusion: no new blast furnaces, and we're going to have to start shutting down the existing blast furnaces in pretty short order.David Roberts:   I'm guessing these new, less standardized and commodified processes are more expensive. What kind of delta are we talking about?Rebecca Dell:  This is a great question, and there are two answers. First, yes, we do expect that green steel and other green commodities will be more expensive than existing dirty means of producing them. Depending on who you ask, and depending on exactly which process you're talking about, those price premiums range from 20 percent up to 200 percent. That's okay — we pay for environmental performance all the time. Cars with catalytic converters are more expensive than cars without catalytic converters; we still think it's a good idea to put catalytic converters in our cars.David Roberts:   But if you're telling a country that's emerging out of poverty that it's going to be 200 percent more expensive for them to do so, that's not nothing.Rebecca Dell:  This leads me to the second point, which is that these industries — steel, cement, commodity chemicals — are incredibly valuable. The whole rest of the economy relies on the material that these industries produce. However, from an economic perspective, they are extremely low-value-added industries. They have very tight margins. These are your classic commodity industries. The cost of these materials represents a very small part of the cost of the finished goods that are made out of them. From the perspective of the guy who owns the steel mill or chemical plant or cement kiln — sometimes it’s a girl, but usually a guy — he's like, “I have commodity-sized margins here. There is no room in my margin to pay for any kind of decarbonization.”I would encourage you, however, to look at this through the other end of the telescope. Don't look from the perspective of the guy who owns the steel mill; look at it from the perspective of the person who's buying a car made out of steel. Even at a relatively high additional cost for decarbonization, that's only going to add a couple hundred bucks to the cost of your car. The average new car in the United States costs $37,000; $37,200 looks a lot more manageable.David Roberts:   This must have political economy consequences, too, right? If the steel mill owners can't get the car buyers on their side to rebel against this, how much power do they have on their own to politically resist these sorts of things? Rebecca Dell:  The real political and economic problem here is not, “how do we afford to pay for decarbonization?” We can 100 percent afford to pay for decarbonization of steel and all of these other industries. The problem is, how do we pass the costs efficiently through the supply chain so that the place they land, the final consumer, is the person in the supply chain who can actually afford to pay.David Roberts:   They’re more dispersed the more you pass them down the chain too; less concentrated on any one constituency that might rebel against it.Rebecca Dell:  Yes. The policy challenge here is about how you pass those costs through. Ways that you can do that are things like product standards. Why do we have catalytic converters in our cars? In a practical sense, it's because you're not allowed to buy a car that doesn't have one. If you want to make sure that the costs of decarbonization get passed all the way through the supply chain, one way to do that is to have standards that require that products use clean materials.David Roberts:   Of course government procurement is always a huge piece of this too. Government can start that process. Rebecca Dell:  Yes, the government can start by applying the standards to itself.David Roberts:   That's basically end users voluntarily taking on the cost, right? Rebecca Dell:  I don’t think there's anything voluntary about my catalytic converter.David Roberts:   Well, policymakers deliberately choosing to put the costs on the final user so that it's less concentrated. The steel mill owners are all equally affected; none of them are being priced out relative to the others.Rebecca Dell:  To be philosophical for a second, there are only two pots of money in society: consumer dollars and taxpayer dollars. The question is, what ratio of consumer dollars to taxpayer dollars do we wish to use? That is going to change depending on circumstances, but that's the question.David Roberts:   This helps me have a more realistic view on steel, although it’s slightly dimmed my enthusiasm.Rebecca Dell:  I don't want to give you the impression that nothing's happening on steel. The Swedes have a project called HYBRIT, a hydrogen reduction steel project, which is the most advanced in the world. They recently announced that they made one of their mining vehicles entirely out of green steel — the first vehicle in the history of the world to be made out of green steel. It’s only one vehicle, but the distance between one vehicle and two vehicles is a lot smaller than the distance between zero vehicles and one vehicle, and that distance keeps getting smaller over time. We're making real progress. We're not there yet — it's definitely at an earlier stage than our colleagues who are working on power or transportation — but we're making progress.David Roberts: Let’s move on to cement. What is the raw material and what is the basic processing?Rebecca Dell:  The raw material is the main constituent of limestone. Limestone is a very common kind of rock; you can find it pretty much in any country. The main constituent of limestone is something called calcium carbonate. The main ingredient in cement is something called calcium oxide. You can hear right in the words — there is carbon in the limestone, there is no carbon in the cement. You dig up the rocks and cook them at 1,500℃, roughly 2,600℉. About 40 percent of your greenhouse gas emissions come from burning fuel to get your rocks that hot, and the other 60 percent, on average, is from burning off the carbon that was in the rock. The carbon coming out of the rock is your process emissions.David Roberts:   Once again, it's fairly easy to imagine the energy coming from a different low-carbon source, but the problem comes down to process emissions. When the carbon comes off the limestone and is released, is there some way of capturing it? Is there some way of doing this without releasing the carbon? What are the green cement options?Rebecca Dell:  Even if we decide that we don't want to use CCS in any other part of our economy, the place that we are most likely to end up relying on CCS as our primary decarbonization pathway is in the cement industry.David Roberts:   Are the emission sources more concentrated in cement than they are in steel?Rebecca Dell:  A cement kiln is a much simpler place than a steel mill. We were talking about steel mills with thousands of employees; if you go to a cement kiln, the typical number of guys on shift is maybe 25. You just have one big pipe in a cement kiln, so CCS is a lot more straightforward there. People do have ideas for alternative raw materials or alternative cement chemistries that might be able to address this process emissions problem without CCS, but it's probably going to be CCS. Part of that is my assessment of what the technical alternatives are, but an even more important reason is that cement and the thing we like to make out of it, concrete, are foundational to our buildings. It is literally the thing we make foundations out of. Almost every structure in our society relies on concrete, and the type of cement that we use, which is called ordinary portland cement, was first patented in 1824. We're coming up on its 200-year anniversary.This is a material we feel very comfortable with. We know its material properties really well. And for obvious reasons, the construction industry is incredibly risk-averse about the structural properties of the things that it's building. Even if you have great ideas for alternative cement chemistries, the likelihood that the global construction industry would feel comfortable wholesale shifting over to them in 30 years time is a pretty tall order.David Roberts:   I can't imagine the process you would have to go through to demonstrate that your concrete would hold up buildings in every conceivable situation. Rebecca Dell:  We do have performance-based standards for concretes and ways that we test different types. I don't want to say that there's nothing to be done here. The main ingredient in cement is something called clinker, and we already use a big range of different clinker factor — that's the percentage of clinker — in different cements around the world. Almost all the carbon dioxide comes from making the clinker. A lot of cement is 95 percent clinker, but it's also very common to use 65 percent clinker cements. You can cut 30 percent off your greenhouse gas emissions by using low-clinker cements, and those things are already technically mature and well-demonstrated — there are big structures made out of them that you can go and visit around the world. So there’s an opportunity to make at least 30 percent greenhouse gas emissions reductions, on average, just by going to the lowest clinker factor that's appropriate for whatever you're using. There's no technical barrier. It usually is cheaper. We should do it tomorrow — there's no reason not to. But a 30 percent emissions reduction still leaves you with 70 percent.David Roberts:   What about bucket one, using less? Is there a practical way to use a lot less cement? Rebecca Dell:  Oh my god, we are so wasteful in the way that we use concrete. People have gone out to actual commercial and multifamily residential buildings and looked at how much structural material, primarily concrete, these buildings are using compared to how much structural material would be needed to support all the loads. They typically find that there is something in the neighborhood of twice as much structural material as is needed to comply with the very safety-protective building codes. Almost all of the studies that I've seen have been in Europe or the United States, so it's mostly in high-income countries that these numbers come from. We think the situation is probably even worse in developing countries. I live in the San Francisco Bay area. For a commercial or multifamily construction site in this area, certainly it's more expensive here than in other parts of the country, but it's not radically different. Depending on the size of the building, the typical payroll for one of these construction sites might be $5,000-$10,000 an hour. To get one of those mixer trucks full of concrete delivered to your construction site — we're not talking about fancy concrete here, just normal commodity concrete — that's about $1,000. So if you can save five or 10 minutes of time on your job site by wasting a truck full of concrete, you just saved money. This goes back to what I was saying about looking through the other end of the telescope. Why would you use materials efficiently when they are so cheap? For private construction here in the United States, the average amount of a construction project that is represented by the cost of the cement is less than 0.5 percent.David Roberts:   So cement is so cheap that people overuse it to save time, to save soft costs …Rebecca Dell:  To save anything. Everything is more expensive than cement. If you take an 18-wheeler and you fill it up to the statutory maximum weight for driving on an interstate highway in the United States, it will have approximately $2,600 worth of cement in it. It will have a one nice laptop worth of cement.David Roberts:   This does seem like an area where markets could work well. You want to put a higher price signal on it and then trust people to figure out how to eliminate some of it. Is that right?Rebecca Dell:  It's a good news / bad news situation. Because cement and all of these materials are so cheap, it is very hard to persuade people to use them efficiently. It is very hard to persuade people to value them in terms of the actual value that they provide to their lives. It's a little bit like water or electricity that way. However, because they're so cheap, the good news is that even if the green version is a little bit more expensive, or even a lot more expensive, than the dirty version, that doesn't actually make the products that these materials are made out of more expensive.If we go back to this commercial building I was talking about, 0.5 percent of its costs are cement. Let's say we mandate dumb end-of-pipe CCS, the most expensive, worst engineering option that we can think of, for our cement decarbonization. We involve only lazy engineers in our project. Even under that circumstance, maybe we'll double the cost of the cement — that only adds 0.5 percent to the cost of the building. In fact, it adds less than 0.5 percent to the cost of the building, because all of the construction costs that I've been citing don't include the cost of the land, which is often the most expensive thing.David Roberts:   So I was precisely wrong — it's probably going to be difficult to put a pure price signal high enough to make the market work. But you can get away with mandates, because it's not going to affect consumers much.Rebecca Dell:  Yes. This is part of what I was saying earlier — these industries are incredibly valuable, but because they're low-value-added, compared to the prices that consumers actually face, these materials are not typically an important line item.David Roberts:   Let's talk about chemicals. I know it's a varied category. Are there simple things to say about why chemical processing produces so much greenhouse gas, or does it vary a lot also?Rebecca Dell:  The chemical industry is very diverse. I remember talking to a colleague who was a senior sustainability person at BASF, the German chemical giant, and she told me that BASF has an 80/20 problem when it comes to their greenhouse gases. BASF makes approximately 100,000 products. Eighty percent of their greenhouse gases come from not 20 percent of their products, but from 20 products. Again, these are the basic materials that are the ingredients for all their other products — mostly fertilizer and plastic. For fertilizer, primarily we're talking about nitrogen fertilizer, so making that cleanly is mostly about making hydrogen cleanly. People do have some ideas for how to make nitrogen fertilizer that's not made out of ammonia, but the main idea is, if you want to make clean ammonia, you just need to start with clean hydrogen.David Roberts:   If you solve the green hydrogen problem, you solve the fertilizer problem downstream?Rebecca Dell:  Yep. There's not a whole lot to making fertilizer besides making hydrogen.David Roberts:   That's convenient. Plastics, I assume, are more difficult.Rebecca Dell:  Yes. With plastics, you have the same buckets of solutions we were talking about earlier. We could use less, and definitely we should. Plastics are interesting, because they’re carbon-based molecules; they're made out of a carbon-based material. When we make plastics out of fossil fuels, some of the fossil fuels are burned to provide energy, but for more than half of the fossil fuels that we use in plastics production, we're actually taking the carbon atoms and the hydrogen atoms that are in the fossil fuels and we're putting them into the plastic product. We're making the product out of the fossil fuels.David Roberts:   So every piece of plastic is, in some sense, carbon sequestration.Rebecca Dell:  You know, Shell says that all the time.David Roberts:   I take it back. Does it release the carbon when it breaks down?Rebecca Dell:  There is a scenario in which, if you collected all the plastic at the end of its life, and you made sure that it was clean and dry and well-segregated, and you put it in a nicely lined hole in the ground, it would be inert in that hole for a very long time and technically you could call that carbon storage. But that's not actually what we do with plastic at the end of its life, and the way that we actually treat plastic at the end of its life leads to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.David Roberts:   What do we do? Do we burn it?Rebecca Dell:  Some of it we burn. That's like burning fossil fuels directly, and that's a very popular option around the world. Here in the United States we mostly put it into mixed garbage. When you have plastic and organic material mixed together in your garbage, the organic material, food waste, will decompose anaerobically. All the carbon atoms that were in that organic material will then leak out as methane instead of as carbon dioxide. Methane, depending on the timeline you're looking at, is somewhere between 30 and 85 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that you would get if you properly composted your organics. So even if the carbon atoms in the plastic are not decomposing quickly and turning into carbon dioxide, they are leading to methane emissions from trash, which are an important source of overall greenhouse gas emissions.David Roberts:   It seems like here, bucket one is the lowest-hanging fruit by far. We're so wasteful. Plastic is so gross and overused.Rebecca Dell:  In the United States, the EPA estimates that only 8 or 9 percent of plastic is even collected for recycling, and of that, only about half is actually recycled in any form at all. Almost always, the recycling process is that you have a wide variety of mixed plastic, you melt it down, and when you lump all of these different materials together you get very, very low-quality plastic, radically downcycling. Most of the plastics we use are, in theory, infinitely recyclable. If you have a high-purity waste stream, you can melt it down and get new, first-quality products that are just like the old ones. But we don't do that. We need to use less plastic, but we also need to have tight regulations on exactly what types of plastic can be used, so that there are only a few types out there and all plastic packaging is the same couple of types, so they can be easily segregated and meaningfully recycled. David Roberts:   We can change the way we design plastic products and the types of plastic we make to encourage more recycling, but obviously you're never going to get to zero that way. Is there a way to avoid, bucket two, or are we stuck with CCS here? Are there real alternatives on the horizon to carbon plastic?Rebecca Dell:  Bioplastics are real. I occasionally will encounter a PLA fork or something like that. They're not a meaningful portion of current plastic production. And as we were talking about before, there's just not enough biomass to go around to make large quantities of plastic out of biomass, so that's going to be a niche item forever. We can take carbon atoms out of carbon dioxide and turn them into plastic; it requires an eye-watering amount of energy. This is important for carbon-utilization conversations generally: imagine we started with these big, exciting, highly energy-dense fossil fuel molecules; we had a combustion reaction, where we took out all of the energy that was stored in those molecules; and what we were left with was carbon dioxide, which was a combustion product. It's what's left over after you take out all of the energy. If you want to turn it back into one of these big exciting molecules, you have to put more energy back in than you got out in the first place from burning it. The chemicals industry is the most energy-consuming industry of any industry in the world. It's only the third-most greenhouse gas emitting, because a lot of that energy is stored in the product and doesn't go directly into carbon dioxide.A couple of years back, the big pan-European chemicals industry trade association published this fantastic report where they said, “okay, you guys want us to decarbonize, let's get serious about what that actually would be. Let's go through one process at a time and talk about the energy and feedstock requirements for the green alternatives in every case.” What they found was that to produce the basket of chemicals that they were currently producing and to do it using carbon dioxide as their primary source of carbon would require something like 1,900 terawatt-hours per year of clean electricity. The IEA estimates that in their Paris compliance scenario in 2050, the total amount of electricity that is generated and used for all purposes on the continent of Europe is only about 3,400 terawatt hours per year. More than half of all the electricity would have to go to the chemicals industry if you wanted to make all of your carbon-based chemicals out of carbon dioxide. So, it can be done, but we are really in too-cheap-to-meter territory with our electricity if we're doing that.David Roberts:   None of those sound like good options. What's your favorite for plastics? Rebecca Dell:  It's got to be using less, material efficiency. I have seen no scenarios where you can get 1.5℃ or even 2℃-consistent reductions in emissions from the chemicals industry without dramatically reducing the amount of plastic that we use and dramatically increasing the quantity and quality of recycled plastic.David Roberts:   With steel, you mentioned that when you're developing as a country there are a lot of big one-time uses and then your usage tails off. Is there an arc for plastics?Rebecca Dell:  Not that we’ve been able to find. It’s just up and up and up. Since 2015, the rate at which total global plastic production is increasing has stopped accelerating.David Roberts:   I guess that's good news?Rebecca Dell:  The problem is not getting worse faster. It's just getting worse at the same very rapid rate that it was previously getting worse at. That's the nicest thing I can say about the trend for plastic production volumes.David Roberts:   I do want to touch on some policy options. It sounds like if we're looking big picture, at industry decarbonizing by 2030, the most difficult area is plastics. Is that roughly accurate, or they're all difficult?Rebecca Dell:  I don't like to think of any of them as difficult. I find that framing both unhelpful and inaccurate, because people just started noticing the importance of the industrial sector about a year ago. I often tell people that where we are in our decarbonization progress in these sectors is similar to maybe where the power sector was in the late 90s. I don't know, I was a kid then, but I'm assuming that in the 90s the concept of completely decarbonizing the power sector probably felt pretty hard to people who were out there trying to get solar panels installed and being called silly hippies. We have 20 or 25 years of progress that we've made since then. It's not going to be easy, it's not going to happen by itself, but we have a line of sight to where we're going. We see how it's going to happen.The situation in the industrial sector is not that it's somehow inherently harder. We're just at a much earlier stage in our decarbonization journey.David Roberts:   We waited a long time to get started, though. We do have to go faster in it than we did in electricity, arguably.Rebecca Dell:  That is true. We did take our sweet time to get started.David Roberts:   You're closely in touch with political and policy angles on this — do you see urgency around this commensurate with the scale and speed necessary to do it? Rebecca Dell:  I mean, obviously not. Even the parts of the climate challenge that we're doing the best at we're not on track, and this is not one of the parts that we are doing the best at.It is very clear to me that what we need to do to decarbonize these industries is entirely within our capacities here in the United States and also globally. Please don't interpret what I'm saying as any disrespect to the efforts of the Biden administration. The people who are doing this work in the Biden administration are very, very clear about what the scale of the challenge is, and they are attempting to move as fast as they possibly can. But they would probably be the first people to tell you, “what we're doing is not enough.”David Roberts:   Let's look at what we are doing, then. We had executive actions early on, we had the Recovery Act, then we got the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Are there big pieces of good policy on this that have already been passed? Secondly, are there good pieces of policy on this in Build Back Better that we, like everyone else, are sitting around waiting forever for action on? Rebecca Dell:  The biggest thing that was in the bipartisan infrastructure law is a serious pile of money for commercializing and demonstrating clean industrial technologies. Most of that is going through the Department of Energy, and the way that the money was allocated is pretty flexible. The DOE currently has a lot of discretion about exactly how they spend that money, and there are a few different pots of it, so it's hard for me to give you a dollar amount that will go to the industrial sector, but it will be somewhere between half a billion and a few billion dollars. That's a serious amount of money.David Roberts:   It does sound like in some of these markets or sub-markets we are at that point where a visibly successful demonstration project could be triggering, could unleash things.Rebecca Dell:  It’s a thing we need really badly, and it's a thing that absolutely requires public money. There's a certain amount of technology risk that the private sector in these industries, in particular, is simply not going to pay for. David Roberts:   What about Build Back Better? Is there some pot of gold at the end of that?Rebecca Dell:  It’s a much larger pot of money in Build Back Better. We go from a minimum amount of industrial decarbonization demonstration projects of $0.5 billion currently up to a minimum amount of $4 billion if Build Back Better gets passed. Then the upper limit, depending on how you count it, goes up commensurately. The other important thing is that Biden issued an executive order last month on federal sustainability which included for the first time direct instructions for the federal government to buy low-greenhouse gas building materials — read: steel and cement — when it builds stuff with federal money.David Roberts:   That’s not a small thing. That's a very big customer, right? Rebecca Dell:  We call the family of policies where the government buys low-greenhouse gas building materials “Buy Clean.” If you look across all levels of government — federal, state, and local — almost half of all the cement in the United States is purchased with taxpayer dollars.David Roberts:   In other words, Buy Clean government policy could do a lot.Rebecca Dell:  If it's well-structured and aggressively implemented, it could make a huge difference. Build Back Better, in addition to demonstration, has a bunch of money in it to facilitate the implementation of Buy Clean.David Roberts:   Just at the federal level, or helping states or cities too? Presumably, government at any level could do a little bit of this.Rebecca Dell:  There are a lot of spillover benefits. If the federal government says, “we're going to do this,” that makes it much cheaper and easier for state and local governments to do it, even without direct federal subsidies. For example, the federal government has to put in place the measuring and reporting frameworks for the greenhouse gas intensity of different products; they have to make sure that the low-carbon products are available wherever federal construction is happening. All of the fixed costs of getting the system up and running can be accepted by the federal government.David Roberts:   All of which makes it easier for the next person to do it.Rebecca Dell:  There's also a lot of exciting stuff happening at the state level. California was the first state to pass a Buy Clean law, but since then, five other states have passed Buy Clean laws of one type or another.David Roberts:   Mostly cement and steel?Rebecca Dell:  The specific set of materials that's covered varies from state to state. Some states it's cement only; some states have steel, cement, and other things; in California, unfortunately, it's everything except cement. The cement industry had good lobbyists.David Roberts:   Is this the sort of thing where if enough states get in on this, they're eventually going to force a sea change?Rebecca Dell:  These are concepts that need to be proved out. If you can have a state policy that leads to widespread use of comparatively very low-greenhouse gas building materials, it becomes a lot easier for the EPA to start regulating related issues. The goal here is to create a virtuous circle of greenhouse gas ambition.David Roberts:   On one side you have investment for demonstration projects and setting up these systems; on the other side, for demand-pull, you have Buy Clean. Are there other big-ticket policy items that have not yet been tackled?Rebecca Dell:  There are a lot of different ways to structure the investment side. You can do credit subsidies; you can do direct subsidies; you can also do direct federal investment, which we have done a lot of in years past and in fact, the Defense Production Act allows us to do an almost unlimited amount of, if we wanted to. There are a lot of good arguments to be made for direct federal investment in clean production. All of those things are really important. There are also some important governance issues. A lot of these industries and markets have had pretty poor enforcement of existing regulations, both around non-greenhouse gas pollution and around labor standards. We have some pretty good rules on the books that are very poorly enforced. If we want the energy transition and the clean transition across the economy to be sustainable politically, we have to be showing people real, direct benefits in their lives and their family's health. That has to be an important part of this conversation. Also in the governance bucket, the United States is very bad at industrial policy. It was not always true, but for the last 40 years or so, we've had this weird fantasy that we don't do industrial policy. We definitely do industrial policy, but it's incoherent and easy to be captured by the covered industries because we’re pretending that we're not doing it. One of the consequences of this is that we have entirely hollowed out the expertise and the governance infrastructure of industrial policy, particularly at the federal level. There's hardly anybody whose job it is to think about these things in the federal government, compared to other countries whose manufacturing sectors we would like to emulate.David Roberts:   Look at Germany. It's all very explicit. It's right up front. They're very clear about what they want to do and how they're going to do it. It's so much more sensible.Rebecca Dell:  And they spend a lot of money on it. The main applied R&D in the manufacturing sector that's from the German government is a system of things called the Fraunhofer Institutes. They spend almost 3 billion euros a year on the Fraunhofer Institutes.The analogous thing in the US government is the Advanced Manufacturing Office, which has an annual budget of $400 million. Our economy is five times larger than Germany's, so compared to the overall size of our economy, we are spending less than 5 percent of what they are spending on applied R&D. And that's the piece of industrial policy that we feel most comfortable with!David Roberts:   That cuts across every sector, right? We constantly talk about goals and targets, but the capacity to do things on purpose with our economy has been hollowed out. Rebecca Dell:  This is particularly true in the manufacturing sectors.David Roberts:   Is that largely because we exported so much of it? Rebecca Dell:  I might make the causal relationship go in the other direction. One of the reasons why we had a lot of deindustrialization was that we didn't have a concerted effort to maintain a vibrant industrial economy. For example, Germany still has most of its steel mills.David Roberts:   If anything, we deliberately accelerated the reverse process with trade deals and things like that. That seems like a long-term project, reversing that process. Rebecca Dell:  And an important part of that is rebuilding our governance capacity. It blows my mind that the highest-ranking person in the federal government whose job it is to think about the future of the US manufacturing sector — the head of the Advanced Manufacturing Office at DOE — has the rank of Office Director. There isn't a single Assistant Secretary anywhere, in any department, on this beat. That is wild. There are 20 million Americans employed in this sector.David Roberts:   The final piece I want to look at is international trade. Presumably either we or other countries are going to start using trade deals as an instrument of decarbonization in industry. Is that something we're trying to do, or that people are talking about?Rebecca Dell:  It is. You may recall that Donald Trump, when he was president, put tariffs on steel and aluminum, just because he felt like it. Late last year, around the same time as the big climate meeting that happened in Scotland, the US and EU made an announcement about how they are working together on a deal to transform those tariffs into something that is mutual and linked to greenhouse gases. There's definitely a lot of work happening in this space. We have not yet settled on what the best policy tools are to promote decarbonization. For solar panels, some people say “we should have free trade in solar panels so that there are cheap solar panels and everybody can have the cheapest possible clean electricity.” Other people say “no, if we want to decarbonize we should have high tariffs on solar panels so that countries can have employment and manufacturing and broader social benefits, which will make the whole country more supportive of solar power.”We still have a lot of work to do to figure out what a truly climate-safe vision for trade policy is. There's a relatively narrow set of policies that are traditional trade policies. In most cases, for things like tariffs, that's often less important than, what are the international reverberations? What are the trade consequences of purely domestic policies like subsidies and procurement policies? David Roberts:   In terms of stimulating global movement toward industrial decarbonization, our biggest tools are probably still domestic. Doing it as fast as we can and making those products cheaper, rationalizing the industry, etc., is probably going to be a bigger deal than any tariffs we put on.Rebecca Dell:  Our goal is usually not that the trade policy itself will promote decarbonization, but that we can put in place trade policies that will prevent international trade from undermining our purely domestic policies, so different countries can push their industries to decarbonize faster without having to worry that dirty production from overseas will flood into the market.David Roberts:   How do you prevent industry from just moving, or shifting production? Rebecca Dell:  This is one of the reasons why things like procurement policy are so fantastic, because when the regulation is on the product, not on the facility, there's no incentive to move the facility. The market-creation policies allow you to sidestep some of these difficult questions. People talk a lot about how businesses hate regulations. Businesses don't hate regulations; businesses hate regulations that they have to comply with, but their competitors don't. David Roberts:   Well, I can not thank you enough. I know 10 times more about this now than I did when we started, so I really appreciate you taking all the time. Maybe someday we'll drill down a little deeper into one of these many, many rabbit holes that we tripped so lightly over in this conversation.Rebecca Dell:  I would be more than happy to talk in greater detail in the future. As you can probably tell, talking about this is one of my favorite things to do.David Roberts:   It's so fun. Thanks so much, Rebecca. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In a previous post, I offered a broad overview of the problems related to minerals needed for the clean-energy transition. To recap: * clean-energy technologies are more minerals-intensive to build than their fossil-fuel counterparts; * the growth of clean energy will rapidly raise demand for a set of key minerals;* mining and processing of those minerals is geographically concentrated, often in countries with weak labor and environmental protections;* mineral mines and processing facilities often pollute water, scar landscapes, and impoverish communities;* production may not be able to expand fast enough to keep up with demand, which could cause supply constrictions and price fluctuations and slow the transition away from fossil fuels.That’s the big picture. In today’s post, I want to take a take a closer look at some of the biggest clean-energy technologies and the minerals required to build them. Specifically, I’ll cover batteries, solar PV, wind, geothermal, concentrated solar, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). I’m not going to get too deep into any one of these — just a quick tour.I’ll be drawing heavily on a 2020 World Bank report that projects demand for key minerals under rapid decarbonization scenarios from the International Energy Agency (IEA) — specifically the RTS (reference technology scenario, or current policy), 2DS (2-degree scenario), and B2DS (beyond 2-degree scenario, aiming for 1.5). (The World Bank and IEA use the word minerals to refer to the mineral and metal value chain, and I do the same in this post.)This tour will reveal which minerals are expected to be most in demand — which ones are certain to be needed and which depend on the direction taken by particular technologies. It will help focus attention on possible supply stress points. It will also reveal that there is enormous uncertainty about the pace and scale of demand growth for specific minerals and minerals generally. Much depends on unpredictable developments in technology, policy, and politics. Epistemic humility is called for, along with policy focused on resilience. (More on policy in the next post.)One fact that is certain: the more ambitious the world’s decarbonization efforts, the higher mineral demand will rise. Here’s an overview table of energy sources and technologies and the key minerals they use:Let’s start the tour with the 800-pound gorilla of minerals demand: batteries.Batteries are the biggest growth sector for minerals demandOf all the clean-energy technologies set to boom in coming decades, none will put a strain on minerals supply like batteries, shown as energy storage in the chart above. They account for about half of the projected growth in minerals demand over the next two decades in a rapid decarbonization scenario.In large part, this has to do with the expected rise in battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs), which represent 90 percent of battery demand growth; the other 10 percent will come from growth in stationary storage, used to balance out wind and solar on the grid. If the world targets 2°, minerals demand from energy storage will double from the baseline scenario; if the world targets 1.5°, it will more than double again.Batteries, readers of my battery series will recall, are composed of two electrodes, a cathode and an anode, and an electrolyte through which they exchange ions. (The outlier is redox flow batteries, which pump a liquid electrolyte past electrodes.)Depending on what those three parts are made of, batteries require different minerals. Many EVs still use lead-acid batteries, which use lead and sulfuric acid, but lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are expected to rapidly take over the market, so demand for lead-acid batteries won’t grow much.As for LIBs, most use graphite as the anode, which means graphite will be the most sought-after mineral in energy storage. Cathodes vary more widely. The most common use nickel, with various mixes of cobalt, lithium, and manganese also common. (It should be noted that lithium is used across all LIBs, not just for the cathode.)It should be noted that these projections out to 2050 are to a large extent guesses, just an extension of the “average” LIB into the future. In fact, LIB technology could evolve a number of different ways, and other storage technologies could play bigger roles in subsequent decades. “The assumption that Li-ion batteries dominate both the mobile and stationary market for the next decade is conservative,” the World Bank writes. “Post-2030, the scale of uncertainty is much greater, with a wide range of options in both markets.”Consider the options for LIBs. For cathodes, NMC111 batteries use one part nickel, one part manganese, and one part cobalt, while newer NMC811 batteries use much more nickel and less cobalt. Tesla and other automakers are trying to eventually eliminate cobalt from their batteries; it’s too early to say how far they’ll get.Right now, almost all anodes are graphite (a market dominated by China) but there is active development of zinc-air batteries that use air as the anode, sodium-ion batteries that use hard carbon as a anode, and solid-state batteries (which replace a liquid electrolyte with a solid one) that use lithium as an anode. What mix of technologies will triumph is still an open question, which means the precise trajectory of graphite demand is tough to predict.If manufacturers seek to minimize cobalt, demand for nickel will rise. If solid-state batteries catch on, they could reduce demand for graphite. If zinc-air batteries catch on, they could dent demand for lithium, graphite, nickel, and manganese.Post-2030, other storage technologies like flow batteries or a wide array of long-duration storage techs could become competitive. It depends on the evolution of policy and the electricity mix. Also worth noting: the practice of using second-life EV batteries as a form of grid storage could take off, which would trim total demand for new batteries.)Finally, LIBs have made substantial advances in materials efficiency and those will likely continue, which could effect how sharply demand rises. (Read this RMI report for a bullish take on improvements in LIBs’ energy density.)In terms of how geopolitically concentrated and environmentally destructive they are, the big minerals to watch here are graphite, nickel, lithium, and cobalt, but it’s impossible to know their precise mix in advance.Solar voltaics love aluminum and copperSolar is another technology that we are confident is going to grow like mad in coming decades, but it’s difficult to predict the exact trajectory of minerals demand. The World Bank paper looks at four common PV technologies: crystalline silicon (crystal Si), which makes up about 85 percent of the current market, and three different “thin film” technologies that can be printed on flat sheets: copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), cadmium telluride (CdTe), and amorphous silicon (amorphous Si). All four are made primarily with aluminum, copper, and silver, with different additional minerals contributing to different technologies. In terms of overall size, aluminum and copper are the biggies:In the comparison below, the World Bank includes two scenarios from the International Renewable Energy Agency, which tends to be more bullish on PV and batteries than IEA — a renewable energy roadmap (rapid decarbonization) scenario and a reference scenario. In IRENA’s roadmap scenario, demand for both minerals rises 350 percent from baseline through 2050. Depending on which scenario you favor, demand for aluminum and copper from PV is either going to grow a boatload or a mega-boatload.Aluminum — not itself a raw mineral, but a product of bauxite reduction that produces alumina, which is then smelted — plays a role in almost all energy technologies, but solar is the biggest source of demand in the energy sector, by far. When it comes to copper, clean-energy technologies — batteries and solar, but also transmission and distribution systems — are the fastest growing source of demand. In a 2-degree scenario, clean energy’s share of total copper demand will rise from today’s 24 percent to 45 percent. It’s going to drive a lot of new copper mining. Demand for aluminum and copper will likely be robust no matter which way solar PV evolves, but for some minerals, the direction the technology takes has bigger consequences. For example, almost all (97 percent) of the indium used in the energy sector is for solar PV — specifically, thin-film solar PV. “The current literature expects this subtechnology to grow, and in the model, the three thin film subtechnologies — CIGS, CdTe, and amorphous silicon — are assumed to grow from 20 percent to 50 percent of solar panels,” writes the World Bank. If that doesn’t happen, if old-fashioned crystal-Si panels continue to get ludicrously cheaper and crush all competition, it could cut energy sector demand for indium to very little. Other minerals like silicon, gallium, and tellurium are also sensitive to the direction of PV markets. Anyway, in PV, aluminum and copper are the biggies, but several rare earth elements are in play too, depending on future technology choices.Wind turbines are big on steel Wind turbines are made mostly of steel for the turbines (the manufacture of which, depending on the details, can involve nickel, molybdenum, titanium, manganese, vanadium, or cobalt), with lots of copper for cabling and iron for other parts. Most of those materials are common in other clean-energy technologies. The one mineral for which wind is the primary demand is zinc; wind would boost demand at least 80 percent in a 2-degree scenario. Most onshore wind farms use geared turbines, which “use a gearbox to convert the relatively low rotational speed of the turbine rotor (12–18 rpm) to a much higher speed (1,500 rpm) for input to a generator,” the World Bank writes. Around 80 percent of current global wind capacity is geared turbines, attached to generators that use lots of iron and copper. In direct-drive turbines, the generator is affixed to the rotor and turns at the same speed. These are more common in offshore installations, due to their lower maintenance requirements. They often use permanent magnets with rare earth elements.Some minerals will be greatly affected by the ultimate balance of onshore and offshore turbines, like neodymium, a rare earth element used only in permanent magnet direct-drive turbines. A 2-degree scenario in which offshore wind grows faster than expected could spike demand for neodymium almost 50 percent relative to the base case; if onshore grows faster, it could sink neodymium demand by almost 70 percent. (Read this piece for the bullish case on direct-drive turbines. Another big unknown is the possible penetration of “switched reluctance motors,” which are both cheaper than current induction and synchronous motors and don’t need a gearbox or rare earth elements for a magnet. See here for more on that.) So for wind: lots more steel, zinc, iron, copper, and, depending on the evolution of turbine technology, a few rare earth elements. Geothermal, concentrated solar, and CCS are small mineral playersGeothermal power is a relatively tiny portion of global electricity capacity and is likely to remain so even under optimistic growth scenarios. As it grows, it will demand special steel alloys designed to resist heat and corrosion, which involve several rare earth elements. It also requires nickel, chromium, copper molybdenum, manganese, and titanium.The only mineral for which geothermal is likely to be a significant chunk of demand is titanium; it is the main user in the energy sector. In a 2-degree scenario, demand for titanium for geothermal will rise 80 percent or more.Concentrated solar power remains a fairly niche technology — more expensive and geography-dependent than PV — and is expected to grow, but not much. The only minerals of note that it uses are copper and silver, and it is not likely to represent a substantial portion of demand for either. Carbon capture and storage uses chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, molybdenum, and nickel, but no one is sure which CCS technology will win out or how much will be built, so it’s anybody’s guess how much.The big pictureThe World Bank’s figures “demonstrate an overall increase in demand for as many as 11 minerals used across a variety of energy technologies, with iron and aluminum showing the highest absolute increase, followed by copper and zinc.”Here’s a graphic that shows relative increase in demand for a variety of minerals (on the left) and absolute increase in demand on the right.As you can see, graphite grows by the largest percentage and by the second largest total amount — as a key component of batteries, it is key to the transition.For some minerals, though demand does not increase a huge amount in absolute terms, they are starting from a small base and markets will grow by close to 500 percent, including lithium and cobalt, or around 200 percent, like indium and vanadium. Those could be stress points. Some minerals will grow substantially in absolute terms, but relatively little in percentage terms, like copper and zinc, which are used widely outside the energy sector. (Although note: the World Bank analysis does not include copper for transmission lines, which could be a big source of growth.)And then there’s nickel, somewhere in the middle.To try to get all this information in one place, the World Bank created a risk matrix for minerals under a 2-degree scenario. Importantly, the matrix doesn’t capture risks related to environmental dangers or possible supply constraints. It only captures demand dynamics.The horizontal axis — “weighted coverage-concentration index” — measures how cross-cutting a mineral is. To the left are minerals used in fewer energy technologies, whose fates are tied closely to the fate of those technologies; to the right are minerals common to many technologies, for which demand is likely to rise no matter which technologies win out. The vertical axis — “2018-2050 production-demand index” — is a weighted measure combining relative and absolute demand growth. It captures, roughly, how much demand for the mineral is expected to grow. On the top are minerals that will experience large demand growth; on bottom, less growth. The four quadrants of this matrix provide a way of categorizing minerals and their demand risks. Quadrant one contains medium-impact minerals. They are used in a small number of clean-energy technologies and their overall growth will be modest. These include zinc, silver, titanium, and several rare earth elements. Quadrant two contains high-impact minerals. They are only used in a handful of technologies (principally batteries), but demand is expected to increase rapidly and substantially. These are graphite, lithium, and cobalt — which are among the most environmentally nasty of the bunch in terms of mining and processing.Quadrant three contains the highest-impact minerals, which are both crucial to a wide array of technologies and expected to grow quickly. For now, that only describes aluminum. It comes from bauxite mines, which are not great (no mines are really great), but it is one of the most recyclable and recycled materials in existence. Almost 75 percent of the aluminum made in history is still in use.Quadrant four contains cross-cutting minerals, which won’t see dramatically rising demand like quadrants two and three but are vital to a broad array of technologies, which means growth in demand is quite certain and predictable. Copper is the big one here, used in pretty much every clean-energy technology, but nickel is going to grow even more. Lead, chromium, molybdenum, and manganese also qualify. So that’s the risk matrix. It points to which minerals will be most in demand.It turns out, as we saw in the previous post, that some of the most important minerals to the clean energy future are geographically concentrated and mined under socially and environmentally dubious circumstances. Processing is almost entirely dominated by China. What should we do about that? More on that in the next post. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe