Weekend Digest #8

A Curated Assortment of Scrolls

Arthur Shukali-Weiss

It’s Saturday.

Let’s get after it.

Housekeeping

1. RTO No! Ft. Meredith Angwin. ICYMI I talked to one of my energy heroes, Meredith Angwin. I doing this episode. She has so much wisdom to share about energy issues in America.

News

1. Nuclear Bans Tumble as Once-Skeptical States Seek Carbon Cuts. Some good news. States are rolling back their nuke bans to build reactors—usually advanced SMRs. People love the new car smell. West Virginia, Wyoming, Montana, and a few others have either this year, or within the last few years done away with their bans. News like this puts a smile on my face.

2. Irreconcilable conflict? Lessons from the Central Maine Power transmission corridor debacle. Renewaphiles, and thus the majority of environmentalists, have a problem: they want loads of renewables on the grid. But they also hate the land-use problems that come with it and end up frustrating their own ambitions by putting the kibosh on things like transmission build-outs. Robert Bryce has covered this extensively. I’m guessing greens will keep doing this histrionic moral climate panic thing, demand more renewables, and keep fragilizing the grid. Eventually, most normal people are going to feel lorded over by a bunch of zealots who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t have their best interests in mind. And they’ll be right. I sense an incipient backlash.

3. Europe’s Energy Crisis Is About to Get Worse as Winter Arrives. Ungood. We’ll see some prisoner’s dilemma energy issues around gas this winter, I’m guessing. That could also set off pre-existing tensions in the Eurozone. I don’t know enough to say which or what, and I’m certainly no Nostradamus. But crises like this tend to aggravate aggravations.

   

4. Diesel crisis threatens to crash supply chain. Black Cascade in Australia. Thanks to The Gordliocks Zone, who put me onto this. Basically, environmental demands on the nature of diesel fuel in Australia have made it harder and more expensive to produce. And now their trucking industry is suffering. In our containerized world, it’s all about trucking. So here we are.

5. ‘Cannot Power The World With Solar Panels And Wind Turbines Alone’: Bipartisan Lawmakers Advocate For Increased Nuclear Energy. I love watching Barrasso and Manchin hold court on the Energy committee. I think they really embody the ideal of expertise that committees were meant to create (for more on that history of that, check out the latest episode of Constitutionally Speaking with Jay Cost and Luke Thompson.) Plus, they’re both pro-nuclear as this article in the Daily Caller mentions. Here’s this from the Republican Senator from Wyoming: “The reality is that you cannot power the world with solar panels and wind turbines alone,” Barrasso said during his remarks. “The demands for energy worldwide are going to continue to increase. Not just in the United States, you’re gonna see that worldwide.” That’s right.

Commentary

I attended my first consumer liaison group (CLG) for an ISO, this one was for New England, and found it a weird experience. Meredith Angwin was in attendance as well and told me this was not so bad. (Here’s the deck from the opening presentations). I attended mostly because Chairwoman Clements of FERC was on the docket to give a brief talk. I wanted to hear what she had to say because, from what I’ve gathered, she’s very pro-renewables and does not share the same anxiety about reliability and renewables that other FERC chairs have.

I noticed that she’s convinced that climate change will create crises of weather, but also believes we should make our electricity reliant on weather. Clements stressed that FERC’s job isn’t to promote one energy source over the other. Nor is it FERC’s job to override states. But then her frankness about the alleged inevitability of the “energy transition” to renewables made me question her commitment to energy portfolio neutrality. And her note that climate change “changes everything” made me wonder whether or not climate change will create yet more administration creep.

Before he became the celebrity philosopher of the COVID era, Giorgio Agamben was drawing off the work of Carl Schmitt to understand how “states of exception” play out in politics. Climate change would likely qualify as a “state of exception” wherein a permanent emergency is declared and the constitutional order is suspended to accommodate greater administrative fiat power. This also comes with greater regulation of human life. Clements speech at this CLG meeting has made me think it might be worth writing a piece on how Agamben can help us understand the threat climate apocalypticism poses for how our infrastructure gets managed.