Free Joey Chestnut. A few thoughts on Sustainability

Joey Chestnut barred from Nathan’s hot dog contest over Impossible Foods deal. “Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, widely considered the greatest professional eater in history, won’t be allowed to compete at the Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest after signing an endorsement deal with plant-based company Impossible Foods.”

That was a bad move on a couple of fronts. First, it’s a free market - Joey Chestnut, Takeru Kobayashi to compete in Netflix hot dog eating competition – and, second, this looks to me like Nathan’s providing a lot of free advertising to Impossible Foods rather than a big deal for plant-based foods and it does have hints on panic about it, perhaps hitting on the ‘attack’ portion of Nicholas Klein's famous quote: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

We’re a very long way from monuments being built for plant-based meat producers but Cows aren’t getting any better at turning plants into meat so it’s worth reviewing a recent state-of-play that provides some hope that they can grind their way out of the doldrums.  Worries include that products are ultra-processed (not helped by the efforts of some corporate-backed advocacy group that had been involved in defending the tobacco industry), price (still significant premiums to meat), and taste. Those roadblocks will gradually be worn down – although ultra-processed plant-based meats are still significantly better for you (and the environment) than beef, the price gap to meat continues to narrow as scale grows (albeit more slowly than initially hoped), and on the taste front it appears to be more perception than reality (something which I’d agree – both Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger tastes good to me certainly relative to what you’ll find at the average QSR).

It’s the nature of thermodynamics and entropy that we’re going to get waste heat as we use energy to do mechanical work but the 64% we’re seeing in the US energy system right now seems like a pretty high number. The good news is that Tesla’s master plan sees a route to getting that down to 11% (albeit losing around 30% through curtailed renewables). Although the pathways are pretty familiar, for anyone thinking about the transition away from fossil fuels, using entropy as the vector to explain it is interesting. Tesla's Master Plan Part 3: Sustainable Energy for All of the Earth. “a proposed path to reach a sustainable global energy economy through end-use electrification and sustainable electricity generation and storage.

A milestone in price parity “The electric vehicle transition has entered a fiercely competitive phase, one that’s producing an intriguing result for US car buyers: the first long-range EVs that are cheaper than the average gas-powered car.  At least three manufacturers — Tesla, Hyundai-Kia and General Motors — now offer EVs with more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) of range for less than the cost of the average new vehicle sold in the US, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Green. The most affordable is Hyundai’s 2024 Ioniq 6, which comes with 361 miles of range and a price tag that’s 25% below the national average of roughly $47,000.”

That’s nice but, with all the talk of a partisan divide on EVs, is it really going to matter? Republicans make Biden’s EV push an election-year issue as Democrats take a more nuanced approach. EVs, like everything else, are political. “The working paper, from UC Berkeley's Energy Institute at Haas, explores county-level new car registrations from 2012-2022 and compares them to voting records in presidential races. "During our time period about half of all EVs went to the 10% most Democratic counties, and about one-third went to the top 5%," the study found."

I appreciate that it’s easy to default into political partisanship (and a Presidential election year isn’t the best of times for ‘reaching across the aisle optics’) but the data doesn’t seem to support the Democrat/Republican divide on EVs. Unlike that Berkeley study, which looks at county level EV registrations, a more granular study by the EDF focused on individual voter registration (where available) and matches them to EVs via insurance & repair records found that “in nine of the 31 states and DC that register voters by party, for example, more Republicans voters are linked to records of electric vehicles – including insurance and repair records – than Democrats. Republicans, independents and third-party voters associated with electric vehicles also exceed Democrats in 24 of those states.” Is electric vehicle ownership partisan? “The research by the Environmental Defense Fund Action, which acquired the voter and vehicle data from L2, a political firm that analyzes and sells voter registration and consumer records, suggests that despite common perceptions, not all electric vehicle owners are Democrats. In nine of the 31 states and DC that register voters by party, for example, more Republicans voters are linked to records of electric vehicles – including insurance and repair records – than Democrats. Republicans, independents and third-party voters associated with electric vehicles also exceed Democrats in 24 of those states. This data contradicts the idea that electric vehicles are “only popular with coastal elites and liberals,” said David Kieve, president of the Environmental Defense Fund Action. Recent polling has supported that idea as well. The group’s findings, which still paint an incomplete picture of the market, show that former President Donald Trump won six states where registered Republicans were associated with more than half of the electric vehicles on the roads.”

The conclusion then from the EDF is that “essentially, there is a mix of market factors, such as consumer awareness, infrastructure, incentives and availability, that drive sales. States that have more of those things, such as California, have more consumer interest. But evidence suggests other states are catching up. “Some of the markets that had the richest soup of those ingredients got an early start,” Williams said. “We’re also seeing that things are really changing over time… That speaks to the fact that the economic and pollution benefits of electric vehicles don’t obey political boundaries.””

Although I can fairly be accused of confirmation bias as I desperately search for positives on US politics & climate, I thought this was an interesting development: a Western US electricity market makes a lot of sense but has historically been resisted by red states – with a straw proposal being accepted that would see California share authority over a future West-wide energy market, that might be starting to change.  A Western US energy market would boost clean energy. Will it happen? “Utilities, policymakers, and clean energy advocates across the U.S. West have long agreed that a region-wide electricity trading market would be a win-win. It would dramatically expand clean energy capacity — allowing California solar to shine in other places and wind from inland states to blow into power-hungry California — while also reducing power costs for utility customers. But the idea has struggled to get off the ground after more than a decade of effort, as the stakeholders involved have failed to find a market structure that makes everybody happy. The sticking point? How to incorporate California, with its massive demand for electricity and its gigawatts of clean power resources, in a region where only some states share its clean energy goals — and where few utilities are eager to let the Golden State’s grid operator dictate how they do business. Late last month, the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative, a group supported by Western utilities and state regulators, approved a plan that could overcome an initial obstacle toward the creation of a shared regional electricity market that includes California. The ​“straw proposal” approved last month is just a first step in a longer plan created by the group, which was launched last year with support from utility regulators in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington state. In simple terms, it provides the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which manages the transmission grid and energy markets in most of its home state, a pathway to share authority over a future West-wide energy market… But the initiative doesn’t yet have buy-in from across the West. In particular, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming have different priorities than the other Western states. Each has significant potential for renewable energy growth, though their lawmakers are fighting state and federal efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels to generate power… Western utilities outside of CAISO don’t have an RTO, however. Instead, the utilities and other entities that make up the 38 ​“balancing authorities” that control different parts of the region’s transmission network rely on bilateral arrangements to buy and sell power — an inefficient way to optimize power flows across a massive and interconnected grid

While I’ve got a bit of a ‘Feel Good Friday’ vibe going, here’s a reminder of just how effective the Montreal Protocol was at reducing the rate of HCFC emissions. Yes, 1987 pre-dated the worst of Merchants of Doubt impacts on the US climate change discussion but Montreal has still been massively impactful with a recent work showing it is even greater than expected: A decrease in radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Western et al. 2024. “Here we show that the radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons has decreased from 61.75 mW m⁻² and 321.69 ppt, respectively, since 2021, 5 years before the most recent projected decrease. This important milestone demonstrates the benefits of the Protocol for mitigating climate change and stratospheric ozone layer loss.”

I was commenting last week on the tactile measures of climate change beyond temperature that we get in multiple ways - insurance costs, electrical bills, cancelled flights, and brutal turbulence – but, for me, the most illustrative one is always precipitation. The Clausius–Clapeyron relation just means that “as the climate warms, water-holding capacity increases with higher temperatures”.  The most obvious outcomes of that are more intense precipitation events while it then takes more time for the atmosphere to recharge with water vapor resulting in increased risks of drought and floods (the 'it never rains but it pours' syndrome). That's amplified by an ‘upped ante’ situation for precipitation to occur meaning it takes more instability to trigger convection.  Changes in precipitation with climate change. Trenberth (2011).

Florida is showing us the way this week with today to mark “yet another drenching day for South Florida and multiple cities could see more than 2 feet of rain Tuesday through Friday” while “In Sarasota… nearly four inches of rain fell in an hour, a new record for the area, with total rainfall reaching about 10 inches on Tuesday. The downpour was a one-in-1,000-year event. “

With that, as flagged last week, comes pollution and health risks from septic tanks…  Rising waters plague septic tanks, threatening pollution and health risks . “Millions of them dot the American South, a region grappling with some of the planet’s fastest-rising seas, according to a Washington Post analysis… These are ticking time bombs under the ground that, when they fail, will pollute””

… but it’s also a reminder that, not only is Florida running a financial risk from increasingly acting  ‘insurer of last resort’ of many of those impacted by flooding… the average premium is expected to hit $2,522 this year, up 6% from 2023 and following a 20% increase over the past two years. The priciest premiums — $12,000 on average — are in Florida.” That number is striking in Florida because that’s despite the state-backed insurer of last resort increasingly stepping into the gap. Some interesting research by First Street which concludes that “we’ve built up a climate debt that hasn’t been paid yet.” 

… that’s coming with financial stress at the Federal level too as we’re running into what’s expected to be a severe hurricane season with FEMA facing a $1.3bn shortfall before the end of the Summer. Why this summer’s forecast is bad news for the US after an exceptionally disastrous start to the year. “The United States has been rocked by an extraordinary number of tornadoes and devastating storms this year that have already left a staggering price tag. Now heading into what forecasters say will be an extreme summer – from punishing heat waves to severe weather and hurricanes – the nation’s disaster relief agency is expected to run out of money before it’s even over… That is worrying news for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose major disaster relief fund could slip into the red by the end of summer – a more than $1.3 billion shortfall in August, according to a May report… “Without additional funding, FEMA will take steps prior to funding exhaustion to ensure resources are available to support ongoing lifesaving and life sustaining activities,” the spokesperson said. In the event of a major catastrophe like a hurricane, the agency would have a funding reserve set aside for initial response and recovery operations.”

Meanwhile, the alarming rise in ‘self insurance’ for homeowners continues. I didn’t pay enough attention in English class to know whether ‘self insurance’ in this context is a misnomer or a euphemism but, if you can’t afford to pay for home insurance, you certainly can’t afford to rebuild your house if it gets hit by a fire or flood. Home insurance was once a ‘must.’ Now more homeowners are going without. “After she saw a story about the insurer pulling out of Santa Cruz County, her longtime home, she called her agent to confirm that her plan would lapse — setting off a desperate search for a replacement policy that is ongoing. “Our first quote came in at over $10,000 a year, and that was bare bones coverage,” she said. “And then I kept pressing, contacting other brokers … contacting all these weird companies you’ve never heard of.” But those quotes were even higher, coming in between $17,000 and $25,000, she said…. One 2023 estimate, released by the industry group Insurance Information Institute, concluded that 12 percent of homeowners had no insurance in 2022, up from just 5 percent in 2019.”

Let’s see what comes of this … Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack, Whistleblower Says. “The product, which was used by millions of people to log on to their work computers, contained a flaw that could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through victims’ “crown jewels” — national security secrets, corporate intellectual property, embarrassing personal emails — all without tripping alarms. To Harris, who had previously spent nearly seven years working for the Defense Department, it was a security nightmare. Anyone using the software was exposed, regardless of whether they used Microsoft or another cloud provider such as Amazon. But Harris was most concerned about the federal government and the implications of his discovery for national security. He flagged the issue to his colleagues. They saw it differently, Harris said. The federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him. The financial consequences were enormous. Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing… Within months, his fears became reality. U.S. officials confirmed reports that a state-sponsored team of Russian hackers had carried out SolarWinds, one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history. They used the flaw Harris had identified to vacuum up sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including, ProPublica has learned, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile, and the National Institutes of Health, which at the time was engaged in COVID-19 research and vaccine distribution.”

… but given the scale of the impact from the SolarWinds hack, it’s a very serious allegation. As some background: SolarWinds: The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack. The Justice Department and Volexity had stumbled onto one of the most sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of the decade. The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet… Cowen, Meyers, and the others couldn’t help but pause to admire the tradecraft. They’d never before seen a build process get compromised. “Sheer elegance,” Plesco called it. But then they realized something else: Nearly every other software maker in the world was vulnerable. Few had built-in defenses to prevent this type of attack. For all they knew, the hackers might have already infiltrated other popular software products. “It was this moment of fear among all of us,” Plesco says.

The interest rate-driven pressures on new renewable development in the US are pretty obvious already from both private market modeling and brutal share price performance of listed equities the last few years. However, the discipline of levelized cost of electricity analysis (LCOE) enabling a comparison of lifetime costs across technologies is always a helpful touchstone and the annual Lazard LCOE  work is out. For renewables, the high-end of costs are still coming down but the low-end has actually ticked up for the first time ever. “Despite high end LCOE declines for selected renewable energy technologies, the low ends of our LCOE have increased for the first time ever, driven by the persistence of certain cost pressures (e.g., high interest rates, etc.). These two phenomena result in tighter LCOE ranges (offsetting the significant range expansion observed last year) and relatively stable LCOE averages year-over-year. The persistence of elevated costs continues to reinforce the central theme noted above—sizable and well-capitalized companies that can take advantage of supply chain and other economies of scale, and that have strong balance sheet support to weather fluctuations in the macro environment, will continue leading the build-out of new renewable energy assets.”

I flagged recently that Minnesota was leading the way with dynamic line rating pilot projects -  Better real-time data for the country’s congested transmission lines – and now they’re making further progress on electricity transmission with right of ways: Minnesota takes rare step to allow power lines alongside highways. “Here are two key facts about transmission lines: The U.S. needs a lot more of them to transition away from fossil fuels; they’re also incredibly difficult to build. A big part of the challenge is negotiating permits for the power lines — which typically cross hundreds of miles of land — from the numerous jurisdictions and hundreds of private landowners along the planned route. This is a very slow process — too slow at its current pace for the U.S. to build enough power lines to meet its climate goals. For the past half decade, bipartisan groups have been pushing federal and state lawmakers and transportation agencies to clear the way for a potential shortcut: siting power lines alongside highways.”

Dengue surges in Europe thanks to climate change. “The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) found there were 130 locally acquired cases of dengue in the EU/EEA last year, compared with just 71 in the ten-year period between 2010 and 2021. Dengue symptoms include a high fever, headache, body aches, nausea and rash. There were also 713 locally acquired human cases of West Nile virus and 67 deaths, from nine EU countries in 2023, including in many regions where infections had never been seen before. While this was lower than the previous year (1,133 cases), the ECDC is concerned at the wide geographical circulation of the virus.”

That follows on from warnings last year that Dengue will 'take off' in southern Europe, US, Africa this decade. If you missed it last year, a reminder of the 2023 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change.  It featured a section on rising “climate suitability for infectious disease transmission… (with)  the transmission potential for dengue by Ae aegypti and Ae albopictus (the mosquitoes that are the main vector for dengue) increased by 28·6% and 27·7%, respectively”. Specifically in the US, this got lost in the COVID19 epidemic but there was a serious outbreak of dengue in the Florida Keys (see here) – dengue is not yet endemic in the Keys but it feels like that is just a matter of time.