Are heterodox climate solutions just too cheap for their own good?

On the upside-down economics of climate repair

AI slop courtesy of ImageFX

You walk into an appliance shop and ask about two washing machines. A clerk tells you they’re pretty similar, really, only one uses a new technology that some people think might damage your clothes in the long run.

“Not that there’s any reason to think it will damage anything,” the clerk adds, “just that it’s new, so you can’t rule it out.”

“Great,” you say, “how about prices?”

”Well, the old model is $999.95. The new one goes for 99 cents.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, 99 cents. Well a buck and ten cents after tax.”

Hearing this would be…disorienting, don’t you think?

Especially if you then jumped online and found thousands of reviews of the old model, complete with passionate fans and bitter foes, and hundreds of press articles about it, but then found really almost nothing about the new model.

How…how would you even process all this?

This is the paradoxical situation heterodox climate solutions find themselves in.

A huge international machine is afoot pushing an old approach that, if we’re honest, is wildly unaffordable. Meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees this century would cost an insane amount of money — tens of trillions of dollars, at least. Nobody can give you an exact number.

Governments that make a serious attempt to decarbonize the orthodox way end up facing voter revolts. Because attempts to mitigate our way to the Paris goals work themselves out through higher energy prices and/or higher taxes. And voters hate both of those things.

Nobody who tracks the issue seriously believes we’re on track to reach Net Zero emissions by 2050: the scale of investment necessary is just out of reach for any contemporary economy. As a result, we’re now virtually certain to miss the targets, leaving us in a situation one researcher likens to “playing Russian Roulette, with the gun pointed at our children.”

Is this really the only way? Not at all. We have options. They carry some notional risks, to be sure. But unlike what we’re doing, they might actually work. And unlike what we’re doing, there’s some chance we will actually implement them. Because they’re radically affordable: a thousand times less expensive than mainstream mitigation alternatives.

And yet of these solutions we will not speak.

It’s crazy. Super crazy. Absolutely nuts. So bizarre that the more you think about it, the less explicable it seems.

I’ve mulled this situation a long time and I’m not sure I can account for it. Ignorance is one explanation, yes. The sacralization of nature is another. People’s general inability to think rationally at very large scales is a third. The anti-capitalist agendas hiding behind every other green slogans might be a fourth.

But there’s a fifth explanation that I find myself mulling more and more, without quite knowing if I can believe it.

Could it be that climate repair is too damn cheap for its own good?

There are two levels on which this might be true.

On the one hand, it’s just human nature to be suspicious of things that seem too good to be true. You wouldn’t trust a 99 cent washing machine because it’s too cheap. We’re conditioned to see price as a proxy for quality. We expect things that are suspiciously cheap to be bad somehow. Radical affordability ends up working against climate repair because it trips all of our too-good-to-be-true alarm bells.

The second level works in conjunction with the first: saying that decarbonization will cost tens of trillions is just another way of saying decarbonization is a business opportunity worth tens of trillions.

It’s a huge market, big enough to sustain thousands of companies and mobilize huge resources. The €520 billion in Energiewende subsidies for the German electricity sector has probably paid for a good many Porsches. And how many yachts are going to get paid for with the $1.2 trillion dollars the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act is making available for green energy tax credits?

Of course, to the very powerful institutions now building business plans on the basis of decarbonization initiatives, the idea that a few ships spraying salt particles into the clouds or sprinkling iron into the sea can have the same effect for one THOUSAND times less money can’t be welcome news. Can it?

Or is this wrong? Is it too conspiratorial to think radically cheaper fixes can’t get political traction because they’d put an end to this orgy of rent-seeking? That’s a genuine question, actually: I’m not sure if this argument is convincing.

What do you think?