A Little Bit Less

The right moment for remembering conservation

Fall is at its glorious peak in Vermont this week—the hills all russet and crimson and scarlet and traffic-cone orange. Which is a reminder, among other things, that winter is coming. And with it the chance to help the whole earth, and the brave people of Ukraine, simply by twisting your thermostat a click or two to the left and putting on a sweater.

It’s true that the main reason we need to stop burning fossil fuel is because we are destroying the planet’s climate system. (A new study this week found that global warming made this past summer’s droughts across the northern hemisphere 20 times more likely).

But it’s not the only reason. Because fossil fuel is concentrated in a few places on the planet, the people who control those places end up with too much power. For instance, the Koch Brothers, our biggest oil and gas barons, who have used their pipeline and refinery wealth to defrom our democracy. Or Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine is funded by his oil and gas wells (which account for 60% of Russia’s export earnings). Or Saudi Arabia, which yesterday decided to side with Putin (Russia is a member of OPEC Plus) and raise the price of oil around the world. That’s obviously a blow to President Biden, as he leads the Democrats into the midterm elections where the price of gas could decide half a dozen close races, and the White House reacted angrily, calling it “short-sighted”—a gift to the Kremlin even as it threatens nuclear war.

The administration plans to release more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and perhaps to take on OPEC more directly (the NOPEC legislation that would declare the organization a cartel subject to antitrust regulation is finding new life in Congress).

But Biden could also do something a little daring, which is ask Americans to conserve, just a little.

The Department of Energy calculates that for every eight hours you turn the thermostat down a degree, you burn one percent less fuel. If you turn it down 7 degrees at night, you can save ten percent. Across a nation or a continent, that’s a lot—since oil is the classic example of marginal pricing, it’s probably enough to keep the cost of gas affordable for those who haven’t yet been able to switch to an EV.

And how much of a hardship is it? It means a sweater, an extra blanket. It means a little more cuddling with your significant other. (Dogs count).

Were I president (not a good idea), I’d say: “The Saudis are not our friends, and they’ve done us wrong again. But we can show them. If we save a little energy this winter, that’s money out of their pocket and Putin’s—which means it’s a straightforward way to show some solidarity with people in Ukraine. We’ve been sending them weapons and they’ve been using them well; they’re going to have a hard winter and we can send them another gift by conserving some energy. Vladimir Putin wants your house overheated; Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy would be grateful if you showered together.”

Our biggest task, of course, is converting off fossil fuel, so we can tap the power of the sun directly. The IRA gets us started down that path (and maybe even more powerfully than the first estimates showed—check out Robinson Meyer’s hopeful account in the Atlantic). But it will be much easier to build a clean energy world if we’re using less enrgy to start with. And anyway, the buildout of solar panels and wind turbines that the IRA will fund won’t happen in a month. Right now, it’s time to act as if we’re in an emergency, both because of the climate climate and the political climate.

Biden, I think, hasn’t said “Conservation” because politicians of his vintage remember too well the other C word—Carter. Since the fateful election of 1980 it’s been unshakable political wisdom that asking Americans to sacrifice in any way leads inevitably to defeat; I’m not sure any president has ever dared to don a cardigan since. But surely there’s a way to sell the idea: polling shows people willing to pay a price to help support Ukrainians. That willingess doesn’t extend all the way to the right—for some hours last week the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) had a tweet up lauding Putin for taking back “Ukraine-occupied” territory, and though they later retracted it, Don Jr. called for ending all aid to Ukraine until every Floridian was “back in their home.” But surely most of us remain patriotic enough to dial things down just a little.

The best temperature for sleeping, by the way, is 60 to 64 degrees. Too warm and you get nightmares, like the one about a ruthless dictator threatening to blow up the planet.

In other climate and energy news:

+With its usual methodological rigor, The Onion has calculated that Americans need a new natural disaster every six minutes to keep them focused on the climate crisis.

“Roughly seven minutes following a climate disaster, ambivalence sets in and Americans forget why these natural disasters have increased so dramatically in recent years. The good news, however, is that in the five minutes directly after losing a loved one in a hurricane, participants were much more likely to consider reducing their carbon footprint by taking public transit rather than driving.”

+I am feeling enormous gratitude for all of you who joined in the Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom campaign—as you know, the Biden administration took our advice last spring, making a Defense Production Act authorization. And yesterday they opened it up for bids—a quarter of a billion dollars, thanks to y’all

+A truly remarkable chronicle in the Times about the successes of energy and social policy in Uruguay:

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Often called the Great Exception for its relative wealth and stability in the region, it enjoys a poverty rate around 10 percent and a middle class encompassing more than half the population. It ranks first in South America for political rights and civil liberties.

+From Jim Hansen, the latest update on global temperatures, including a suggestion that a strong El Nino could send us past the 1.5 degree C mark by 2024

+Agrovoltaics! The Washington Post has a nifty story about the ways that farmers are learning to coexist with solar panels. “We harvest the sun twice,” says Brad Heins, professor of animal science at the University of Minnesota

The sun’s energy feeds grazing fodder and crops side-by-side with solar panels. “For farmers, it’s a two-income stream,” Heins said. That might mean planting crops that thrive in the shade cast by the panels. Or, in Heins case, it can mean cooling cows in the panels’ shade rather than resorting to expensive fans in a barn.

+For anyone heading to the COP in Egypt next month, Naomi Klein is hosting an important conservation later today on ways to use those two weeks to help free some of the warehouses full of Egyptian political prisoners.