How Not to Act in an Emergency

Forget AI--we need some human intelligence

We’re getting right to the nub now.

Yesterday the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet:

Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was now “sounding the red alert to the world”.

The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.

Last year’s spike was so scary that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt—Jim Hansen’s heir as keeper of NASA’s climate record—wrote in Nature this week that it raised the most profound possible implications. Please read his words slowly and carefully:

It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behavior is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time.

And now, with equal care, read the words of the biggest oil producer on earth, the CEO of Saudi Aramco, who was in Houston last week for the annual hydrocarbon festival known as CERAWeek.

“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions.”

That is to say, the powers that be want to abandon what the World Meteorological Organization, in their ‘red alert’ report called the “one glimmer of hope”: that renewable energy installations rose fifty percent last year.

Understand that the battle is fully joined. The fossil fuel industry—as Exxon CEO Darren Woods helpfully explained—is in an all-out fight to derail anything green, because it won’t return “above average profits.” They have plenty of allies: everyone noted Donald Trump threatening a “bloodbath” last week, but fewer noted the actual target of his wrath: electric vehicles. The Biden administration, after listening to the rhetoric at the Houston conference, backed EVs in a straightforward and earnest way today, announcing new rules that attempt to spur the rapid growth of a crucial climate-fighting technology. But of course that produced the requisite reaction: as the Times reported,

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying organization, has started what it says is a “seven figure” campaign of advertising, phone calls and text messages against what it falsely calls “Biden’s E.P.A. car ban” in the swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, as well as in Ohio, Montana and the Washington, D.C., market.

So, like it or not, the climate crisis is going to be a key part of this election campaign. The November outcome may hinge on whether Americans can imagine making even this small change in the face of the gravest crisis our species has ever wandered into: replacing the gas tank in a car with a battery. That doesn’t seem like much to ask?

It won’t solve the climate crisis, of course—nothing will solve it. But accelerating momentum towards green energy is the likeliest card we have to play in a world where people seem unwilling to moderate their demands for mobility, and indeed for consumption of any kind.

One particularly depressing set of statistics about that ever-increasing demand for more emerged last week, as the energy implications of artificial intelligence started to become clearer. Here’s what Bloomberg reported earlier today:

John Ketchum, CEO of utility NextEra Energy Inc., told attendees that US power demand, which has been relatively flat for years, is poised to increase by 81% over the next five years. Toby Rice, chief of the largest US natural gas driller, EQT Corp., cited a prediction that AI will gobble up more power domestically than households by 2030.

As Elizabeth Kolbert explained in the New Yorker a few days ago, this “obscene” power demand comes because when you ask AI to, say, help you with your bracket for the NCAA tournament, it has to sort through all human knowledge ever. As even AI apostle Sam Altman explained at Davos this year

“I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, “without a breakthrough.” He added, “We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”

The truth is, there’s no way we can build out renewable energy fast enough to meet this kind of extra demand—it’s going to be at the bleeding edge of the technically and politically possible to power the things we already do, live drive cars and heat homes. And so, in a rational world, faced with an emergency, we would put off scaling AI for now. The irony, of course, is that’s it’s often been touted as a tool to help solve climate change. But we have the tools we need—plain old intelligence gave us cheap solar panels.

With the able technological assistance of my wife, I asked Anthropic’s AI bot Claude to comment. It was amazing how much he sounded like a pr man; after spinning a lot of jargon-filled guff about how “responsible AI can likely be part of the solution to environmental challenges,” he allowed as how he had no idea how much energy he was using. “In general, the electricity usage of large language models like myself is a relevant consideration from an environmental perspective, but quantifying the exact amount would require additional information I don’t have access to.”

Whatever. What we need is not more intelligence. We need more wisdom, to guide us through this pinchpoint in the human experiment. Including the wisdom to say no to some things, at least until the emergency subsides.

In other climate and energy news:

+Randall Morton, the stalwart founder of Houston’s Progressive Forum, had an excellent oped in the local paper last week trying to explain why it was a losing bet—for the city and the industry it calls home—to keep sticking with fossil fuel:

The GHP’s risky strategy, called the “Energy Transition Initiative,” is focused on two technologies: hydrogen and carbon capture. Both are bets on fading fossil fuels. Today, 95% of hydrogen in the U.S. is made from natural gas processing. If an industry ever develops for hydrogen, it would sell as a commodity in an intensely competitive market. Commodity profit margins are notoriously ultra-slim, so hydrogen isn’t a likely platform for robust prosperity or high-paying employment growth. 

Carbon capture is disguised as a climate solution, promoted as a way to produce “low carbon” oil and gas. It’s a failing technology and unfit as a prospect for regional growth. There is little evidence to show any project has demonstrated meaningful effectiveness. A typical example is the world’s largest carbon capture system, Chevron’s Gorgon LNG Project in Western Australia. Designed to deploy one of the most familiar technologies of stripping carbon dioxide from a well’s gas flow and injecting it underground, the system has not managed to operate above a third of its design capacity in seven years, according to leading Australia news source, WAToday.

+Warmer winters are apparently producing more feral cats (and hence fewer birds…). Grist reports

Across the United States, summer is the height of “kitten season,” typically defined as the warm-weather months between spring and fall during which a cat becomes most fertile. For over a decade, animal shelters across the country have noted kitten season starting earlier and lasting longer. Some experts say the effects of climate change, such as milder winters and an earlier start to spring, may be to blame for the uptick in feline birth rates.

This past February, Dunn’s shelter held a clinic for spaying and neutering outdoor cats. Although kitten season in Northern California doesn’t typically kick off until May, organizers found that over half of the female cats were already pregnant. “It’s terrifying,” Dunn said. “It just keeps getting earlier and going later.”

+Writing in Nature, Daniel Grossman profiles some of the scientists now getting arrested for climate protests. While talking about her experience getting arrested for holding a banner at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, an act that got her fired, Rose Abramoff

welled up and wiped away a tear. It’s the third time in eight months that a climate scientist or climate negotiator has choked up during an interview with me, something I haven’t witnessed before in my 25 years of climate reporting.

After working on the IPCC report, Abramoff decided that she needed to take more concrete action. On 6 April 2022, she chained herself to the White House fences during a climate protest. She was arrested on the same day that fellow scientist Peter Kalmus was arrested on the other side of the continent. There were news stories, with pictures of her dressed in a white lab coat. She draws on her background as a performer during protests. “The types of things that get media attention are a little theatrical and visually interesting.”

Since her arrest two years ago, Abramoff has blockaded banks and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, glued herself to a fence at a private jet terminal, occupied a state Capitol building and tried to shut down the construction of a natural-gas pipeline. Seven of her 14 actions have led to arrests.

+The always-interesting Zeke Hausfather has an essay on the difficulties of figuring out if forestry schemes are actually saving carbon

The world has already reached peak pasture, and global population is expected to peak and decline over the next 60 years. This will reduce the demand for agricultural land, and other regions may follow the lead of the US Southeast with natural afforestation.

For reforestation to permanently remove carbon requires proving that forests never regrow in the absence of human intervention. Otherwise projects are just capturing the time delta between when the forest regrows due to human intervention and when vegetation would have naturally recover.

However, the very areas that are usually targeted for reforestation are the most likely to naturally recover given the absence of more economically viable utilization options (which would kill the economics of reforestation in many cases).

+Don’t miss the new in-depth podcast series on LNG and the Gulf Coast from WWNO in New Orleans. All Gassed Up

And if you’re on the West Coast don’t miss the chance to come to a workshop on how to use the crucial En-ROADS interactive climate simulator. This is among the most important tools we have for understanding how to plot a workable future.

+From the redoubtable Abe Streep, a wonderfully reported piece on how—just as we need them most—low pay and lousy management are driving wildland foresters away from the job.

In the past three years, according to the Forest Service’s own assessments, it has suffered an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent employees. Many people inside and outside the fire service believe this represents one of the worst crises in its history. Last spring, as the 2023 fire season was getting started, I asked Grant Beebe, a former smokejumper who now heads the Bureau of Land Management’s fire program, if there had been an exodus of wildland firefighters. He initially hesitated. “‘Exodus’ is a pretty strong word,” he said. But then he reconsidered. “I’ll say yeah. Yeah.”

Although nobody could provide precise numbers, leaders like Beebe are especially concerned that the attrition has been particularly acute among those with extensive experience. It takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a wildland firefighter capable of overseeing the numerous resources — engines, helicopters, smokejumpers — that are deployed on large fires. As Beebe put it, “You can’t just hire some person off the street into one of our higher-level management jobs.”

The reasons for the exodus are many, but fundamentally it reflects an inattentive bureaucracy and a culture that suppresses internal criticism. Only in 2022 did the fire service acknowledge an explicit link between cancer and wildland firefighters, even though officials have long expressed concern about the connection. And it was only last year that the fire service held its first conference on mental health, even though officials have been aware for decades of the high incidence of substance abuse and divorce among wildland firefighters.

+Friends of the Earth is doing its best to rally Democratic Senators against new Biden picks for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The latest nomination, David Rosner, has deep ties to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Pollution). “David Rosner was a paid cheerleader for the LNG boom before it was fashionable,” said Lukas Ross, Climate and Energy Deputy Director at FOE. “We’re calling on Democrats not named Manchin to reject this nomination.”