The good news: US greenhouse-gas emissions are on track to fall 9% this year, marking the lowest levels of climate pollution in at least three decades, according to the research group BloombergNEF.
The bad news: The dramatic decline is almost entirely attributable to the pandemic-driven economic downturn, not to any fundamental and lasting shifts in our policies, behaviors, and practices.
BNEF estimates that without covid-19, emissions would have been just 1% lower in 2020, primarily due to the continuing shift away from coal use. That suggests emissions will sharply rebound after the pandemic passes and the economy recovers.
The biggest decline was in the transportation sector, which fell by 14%, the report found. Climate pollution from the power sector and industry declined 11% and 7%, respectively.
The added wrinkle in 2020 is that the massive fires across the American West released nearly 200 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide than fires did in 2019. Adding that into the equation shrinks the US’s emissions reduction to 6.4% this year, BNEF estimates.
Some have highlighted the decline in emissions this year as a positive sign for our collective ability to rapidly change behaviors and practices in ways that could reduce the risks of climate change. But a big part of the reduction is due to our inability to freely move around for work, to see friends and family members, or to visit different parts of the world. Few of us would want to give that up forever.
Other reasons for the decrease in emissions include people losing jobs, income, and wealth; cutting back spending on food and other necessities; or getting sick and dying.
The clearer takeaway: We don’t want to solve climate change by constraining consumption or banking on human suffering. We need to do it by cleaning up the ways we generate energy, produce food, and move people and products around. And the BNEF numbers show we’ve still barely begun to make those transformations.
The US National Science Foundation has just announced it is going to begin decommissioning the famous Arecibo Observatory, the 1,000-meter-long, 900-ton radio telescope located in Puerto Rico. It’s a huge blow to the astronomy community, which used Arecibo for 57 years to conduct an enormous amount of space and atmospheric research.
What happened: Arecibo has withstood decades of wear and tear from various storms and other natural disasters, including damage by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and a few earthquakes in January. But in August, a support cable slipped out of its socket and caused a 100-meter-long tear in the dish. Engineers deemed the problem stable and reparable, but a second cable outright snapped on November 6. This new cable had been connected to the same tower as the previous one: after dealing with the extra weight on its own for several months, it finally broke.
Engineer evaluations of the damage found that the structure is “in danger of a catastrophic failure” and the telescope could collapse at any moment. The NSF (which oversees the telescope) decided trying to repair Arecibo would be too dangerous for construction workers and staff. Even if the repairs were successful, there would be no way to guarantee long-term stability.
Legacy cut short: For most of its life, Arecibo was the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world (a status surpassed in 2016 with the completion of China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST). For decades, Arecibo was uniquely capable of studying the atmosphere and objects in space in ways no other instruments could, especially when it came to making radar observations of distant planets, moons, and near-Earth asteroids. Arecibo is one of the few facilities on the planet that can blast radar beams to objects in the solar system and successfully pick up a bounce back that could be used to ascertain the structure and movement of those objects.
It also played a huge role in popularizing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In 1974, scientists used Arecibo to fire off the Arecibo message, a 1,679-bit interstellar radio message directed toward globular star cluster M13 (21,000 light-years away) to communicate with any intelligent life that might be there.
What’s next: To be fair, Arecibo’s significance has waned in recent years with the rise of newer facilities, especially FAST. Its decommission will create a hole in radio astronomy, but many other instruments should be able to pick up where Arecibo left off. And the NSF’s decommissioning plan only extends to the 1,000-meter telescope. Other parts of the observatory will remain intact, such as the lidar facility that’s important to studying space weather and magnetosphere interactions.
President-elect Joe Biden won the US election in part by running on an ambitious climate platform promising to invest heavily to avert climate catastrophe while creating millions of well-paying jobs. But the question of how Biden’s proposed nearly $2 trillion in green investment will get spent, and what other measures the government will take to put the green economy on the fast track, is still up for debate.
Some politicians are now championing industrial policy as the way forward. Under industrial policy, the government makes investments that the private sector is unwilling or unable to make, and which will help the country achieve certain socially desirable goals. In short, industrial policy is a form of government planning to create or support strategic industries. It was most prominent during WWII and again in the early 1980s, and today has become a central pillar of the Green New Deal.
Central to the debate has been the role of the government in bearing and hedging risk through programs such as loan guarantees, a new public bank, and direct support from the Federal Reserve to maintain low interest rates to ease the transition.
However, critics invariably bring up “the Solyndra mess,” an instance in 2011 when a California-based solar manufacturer defaulted on a $535 million federal loan guaranteed by the Obama Administration as part of its stimulus efforts. The failure of the clean energy company gave rise to a “backlash against federal support for energy projects.”
It’s true, the US government backed a loser. Does this mean the government should stay away from industrial policy, and instead allow the invisible hand of the market, through private equity and banks, to pick winners and losers?
No. In fact, we need more Solyndras.
Risk and reward
Policymakers are scrambling to find the right mix of tools to put the country on the path to a green economy. The price of inaction is astronomical. Over a billion people could be displaced by climate change. Entire cities and nations would fall. Conflicts would intensify.
Taking action, however, requires us to substantially alter the economy. To avert catastrophic levels of warming, we have to make “far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This means investing in rooftop solar and large clean-energy projects on a massive scale, decarbonizing buildings from coast to coast, overhauling the transportation system, and supporting startups and infant industries that will develop brand new technologies to ease the transition.
President Donald Trump’s disdain for active environmental policy drove many short-sighted developments of the past four years, including the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, his termination of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and his rollback of environmental protections. And as Trump has made his antipathy for government support of clean industries well known, his administration has wielded government power to prop up the fledgling oil and gas industries with bailouts while opening new lands for fossil fuel extraction.
Biden, by contrast, has made climate change one of four priorities in his “Build Back Better” transition documents. In the ambitious plan, the new administration commits to revitalizing infrastructure, improving public transit, installing electrical charging stations, strengthening fuel efficiency mandates for automakers, and supporting research into new battery technology. In short, it screams of industrial policy.
Estimates as to how much investment is actuallyneeded to build the carbon neutral economy range from 2 to 5% of GDP per year; that’s about $400 billion to $1 trillion annually for the next 10 years. Thus, Biden’s proposed $2 trillion will only be the down payment. These investments will require significant up-front public funds even as the economy continues to struggle well below full capacity. While these investments could create millions of jobs in the immediate future, a portion of the payoff would be spread over a long period. There will be more jobs and cleaner air today, and a more livable climate for centuries to come.
Not all funding for the green transition must come from the government, of course—the private sector has a big role to play. However, companies have systematically underinvested in green energy and technology relative to the amount that would be required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. That’s primarily because of the sizable spending required, the public nature of many of the benefits, and the potential uncertainty of such investments.
Green tech firms struggle to find financing for their ideas, which is a major barrier to tackling our growing climate problem. The finance industry, which in many respects serves as the nation’s economic planners, hasn’t shown up. Why? Finance likes to channel funds into projects with relatively low risks and high, fast private payoffs. But green investments provide the bulk of their benefits to the public and to future generations.
Venture capitalists are more accustomed to funding high-risk companies, but work hard to protect their share of future profits. Climate mitigation requires an inverse approach: the unicorns of climate innovation will generate incalculable benefit for the common good, rather than for a few investors.
General welfare
America has been here before. The government has repeatedly used industrial policy to spur innovation and direct economic transformation, especially in times of peril. In fact, Alexander Hamilton made the case that the US government should guide investments in the name of the “general welfare.” Hamilton believed the economy needed government to be the guiding hand of the market, and at times to create new markets from the ground up.
Mobilizing the country for WWII is perhaps the most telling example of this approach, and one often referred to by climate advocates. As FDR called for the “arsenal of democracy” to be activated, the government used industrial policy—loan guarantees, subsidies, and procurement policy—to rapidly scale up wartime industries and create new markets.
“It’s time to come to terms with an uncomfortable fact: Solyndra was part of a successful program.”
The US government hasn’t deployed this approach only during times of crisis, though. It has continuously funded programs and agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Innovation Research program, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA in particular has led to huge technological breakthroughs including the internet, GPS, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
More recently, we can look to the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), and green programs incorporated in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In fact, it was a renewable-energy loan guarantee program included in that stimulus bill that financed the high-profile “failure” of Solyndra.
While Solyndra’s downfall received a lot of spilled ink in the media, Solyndra was actually one of only two failures. The other 22 companies repaid their loans, resulting in a profitable program overall that helped accelerate multiple green industries in the US. And one recipient is now a wildly successful electric automaker: Tesla.
The process of industrial development takes time. Winners, like Tesla, and losers, like Solyndra, inevitably emerge. In the early stages of any industry’s development, firms with good ideas and good products may fail for a host of reasons.
We know the economic and environmental costs of continuing to burn fossil fuels will be devastating. Federal support for green technology can help the industry past the hurdles of early market failures and the speedbumps that inevitably come with introducing new products and ways of doing things.
The Solyndra story
Solyndra ultimately failed because of global industrial changes that few could have foreseen. Solyndra aimed to produce solar panels without silicon. But technology, driven by industrial policies abroad, led to a subsequent boom in the global production of silicon, which lowered the cost of panels produced by Solyndra’s competitors. At the same time, the Chinese government began subsidizing solar production by Chinese firms, which were able to sell panels at lower prices than US firms could.
The failure of one firm, due largely to changes outside of its control, while more than 20 others succeeded under the same program, is precisely the mark of a successful industrial policy. The federal program that supported Solyndra took chances and funded projects at scales that the finance industry and venture capitalists were simply unable or unwilling to. In the end, these bets overwhelmingly paid off, providing a vital boost to the domestic solar, wind, and EV industries.
Over the past 40 years, solar panel prices have fallen by roughly 99%. How can that be? Well-crafted public policies. Even after Solyndra’s failure, sustained public investments in solar R&D built the industry into a robust alternative to fossil fuels. And tax credits helped lower the cost of producing and installing them as the industry developed. Industrial policies in China, in particular, funded solar energy research and supported manufacturers as they scaled up.
Today, wind turbine technicians and solar panel installers represent the first and third fastest-growing occupations in the country. Both pay well above the median wage earned across the US.
Such examples show that when the government leads, the private sector will follow. Smart industrial policy that channels national resources toward scaling green investments and supporting research and development in hard to abate sectors, such as heavy industry, where we do not have all the climate solutions, will fill the gap left by private institutions’ unwillingness to fund the green economy we desperately need.
It’s time to come to terms with an uncomfortable fact: Solyndra was part of a successful program. If no government-backed firms failed, it’d be a clear sign that the government was being too conservative. These investments include risk and benefits that don’t necessarily align perfectly with industry titans. That’s precisely why it’s the government’s job to step in and correct these market failures.
Bold industrial policy is a critical component of any successful crash decarbonization program. It will require both scaling up existing programs and deploying new ones to invest in and lend directly to green companies. Such a program would guarantee green loans and facilitate private lending for initiatives that would improve environmental and industrial development. It would also put equity and an increasing share of public ownership at the center.
That might mean, for example, expanding ARPA-E’s mandate to cover sectors such as agriculture, industry, and heavy-transport while increasing funding by 50 to 100 times today’s levels; creating a new green bank to direct credit toward decarbonization efforts; building green social housing; and directly purchasing green products from new firms and industries through government procurement policy.
Given the divided Congress that President-elect Biden is likely to face, these are daunting challenges. But there is still a great deal Biden could get done withoutlegislation, especially by appointing climate champions to key agencies including the Federal Reserve, Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury.
For far too long, finance has fueled inequality and planetary destruction. It’s time to harness finance and direct it to preserve our planet.
Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at New College of Florida. Nina Eichacker is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island.
On May 20, Super Cyclone Amphan was expected to make landfall in the Indian state of West Bengal. That morning, as the wind picked up, Mitali Mondol and her husband, Animesh, fled their house, leaving behind everything they owned.
The Mondols live in Gosaba, an island in the Sundarbans, an archipelago that is home to the world’s largest mangrove forest. They knew of only one flood shelter. It was far away. As they reached higher ground, they ducked into a restaurant. The restaurant quickly filled up—with family and friends, some of whom brought their goats and hens. Standing as close to the windows as they dared, the villagers watched as the waves climbed to 15 feet high. Then the water broke the embankments. Trees fell, power lines collapsed, and roads vanished.
The region has witnessed 15 major cyclones in recent years, of which Amphan was the latest. Cyclone Sidr, which ripped through the islands in 2007, killed at least 3,000 people; only two years later, Cyclone Aila killed nearly 200. Cyclone Fani, in 2019, killed another 81 people, and caused over $8 billion in damage. It was the strongest pre-monsoon storm on record in the region, until it was surpassed by Amphan. According to Climate Nexus, an advocacy group, “Back-to-back years of major cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, that rapidly intensify over unusually warm sea surface temperatures, are consistent with trends showing an increase in cyclone intensity in the region due to human-caused climate change.”
Flooded areas after the landfall of cyclone Amphan. Thousands of shrimp enclosures were washed away, while numerous thatched houses, trees, electricity and telephone poles, dykes and croplands were damaged, and many villages were submerged by the tidal surge.
ZABED HASNAIN CHOWDHURY / SOPA /SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES
When Amphan hit land, the winds were over 160 miles per hour. The storm surge reached four meters in places and was the principal cause of damage, according to a paper by researchers from the University of Bristol made available as a preprint by the Lancet in October. Under several realistic scenarios for sea-level rise, the researchers predict that—damaging as Amphan was—the impact of a similar future storm on the Indian side of the Sundarbans might be twice as bad.
The Sundarbans span 4,000 square miles (10,000 square kilometers) in India and Bangladesh and are home to around 7.5 million people. About a third of the 4.6 million people on the Indian side live in extreme poverty, which the World Bank defines as living on less than $1.90 per day. (In Bangladesh this figure is even higher.) Many have started to migrate from the Indian Sundarbans to mainland West Bengal. If the trend continues, it will constitute the largest movement of climate migrants in Asia and, indeed, one of the largest in the world.
Cyclone Amphan killed over a hundred people. Some died when trees fell on them, others were electrocuted by downed wires, and yet others were trapped inside buildings that collapsed.
Mitali Mondol and her husband survived unharmed. Their house was also miraculously untouched. But water had flooded their rice paddy, destroying the harvest. The salt in the water had rendered the land useless for the next three or four years. For a while the state government came through with supplies, bringing in rice and lentils by boat. But West Bengal had one of the highest rates of covid-19 in India—today, the death toll stands at more than 7,000. With the government fighting on multiple fronts, there were days when supplies ran out or didn’t show up. The Mondols sometimes went to bed hungry.
With no land to cultivate, and no jobs available, Animesh has taken to fishing in the network of freshwater creeks that swirl through the delta’s jungles. The fish are plentiful, but there are also venomous snakes, crocodiles, and even man-eating tigers. The situation has left the newly married couple deeply anxious for their future. “If there’s another cyclone like Amphan,” Mitali Mondol says. “We will die. All of us in the Sundarbans will die.”
Triple whammy
The Indian islands, which are located off the coast of West Bengal, plunge into the Bay of Bengal like dozens of bright green fingers, taking their color from the sundari, as the dominant local species of mangrove is known. The trees thrive in the delta’s slushy mud flats and are the first line of defense against storms. Because they have a dense network of roots that can survive both above and below the waterline, the mangroves reduce wave force and capture sediments. But they are under constant threat from illegal logging. They are also vulnerable to crown death, a disease that has already killed millions of mangroves.
The mangroves are “mobile,” says Susmita Dasgupta, an economist at the World Bank: they move back and forth to avoid getting overwhelmed by the water. But dense human settlements have reduced the amount of free space available to them.
The triple whammy—deforestation, crown death, and overpopulation—is proving too much for the trees. Because they’re an essential component of the Sundarbans, any change to them automatically affects people with forest-based livelihoods—fishers, crab and honey collectors, and those who rely on the forest for fodder and fuel.
Almost 70% of the surface area of the island of Ghoramara, pictured in 2016, has disappeared in recent years. The island may soon disappear entirely.
SUSHAVAN NANDY
Now, the mangroves are facing one more threat: climate-related sea-level rise. The rising tides pour salt water into the mud flats, killing the trees. The salt water then moves from the mud flats towards the embankments, which it breaches during heavy storms. From there it enters arable land, gobbling roads, crops, animals, and houses.
Already, at least four islands have been fully submerged. More than 40,000 people have been forced to relocate from a fifth. In all, soil erosion will cause at least eight islands, seven of them in India, to simply vanish, displacing tens of thousands of people.
When the people of the vanished islands first moved, around 15 years ago, it was to Sagar, a bustling cluster of villages about 100 kilometers from Kolkata, the provincial capital. The state government set them up in refugee camps. At the time, it followed national government policy, which refuses to pay compensation for damage related to climate change. Although some people received financial assistance, others were forced to remain in the camps where, 15 years later, they still live.
These camps started to swell in size. Their continued presence is now stoking tensions between the incoming islanders and longtime residents of Sagar, says Pradip Saha, a filmmaker who has made a documentary on the impact of climate change in the Sundarbans.
Similar conflicts are playing out the world over. Apart from India, the highest absolute numbers of disaster displacements in 2018 took place in the Philippines, China, and the United States, according to the latest World Migration Report. More than 10 million people in just these four countries were forced to leave their homes. But the lack of government oversight in the Sundarbans make for an especially troubling case. When excess heat, humidity, and floods caused by climate change drive people elsewhere in India out of their homes, they can expect similar treatment.
Moving to a bigger, better-off island isn’t the ideal solution for another, obvious reason: change is everywhere. Tuhin Ghosh, director of the School of Oceanographic Studies at the University of Jadavpur, has been visiting the delta for more than three decades. Over the years he’s observed how the rainfall pattern has changed—there’s more rain, he says, but fewer rainy days. It’s much hotter and there are more thunderstorms. Numerous plants and trees have died. Even the fish available in the bazaar, a staple of the local diet, is changing—there are fewer freshwater fish and more brackish-water fish on sale.
A 12-year-old boy on Mousuni is enmeshed in a fishing net as he gets ready to go to sea with his uncle and father.
SUSHAVAN NANDY
A neighbor of the Mondols, Tarun Mondol (no relation), agrees. He says the extreme heat has forced him to move the prayer meetings he leads as pastor of Gosaba’s Assembly of God church to after sunset. The heat has also brought storms of locusts, migratory pests that are infamous for destroying crops. Then there are the snakes. The reptiles are visibly abundant—in the jungles and in ponds and even on the roads. Now they have started entering homes in search of shade, leaving families fearful. Meanwhile, the delta’s tigers are becoming more aggressive because of the changing climate, Mondol says. Members of his congregation have told him that they no longer want to enter the jungle because tiger attacks have increased.
A study published in 2019 in the journal Science of the Total Environment warned that the delta may not be a favorable habitat for Bengal tigers, an already endangered species, for very much longer. Though there aren’t many of them, the tigers of the delta are one of the largest wild populations in the world. There are an estimated 96 in the Indian portion, and 114 on the Bangladeshi side. But sea-level rise alone will shrink suitable habitat by nearly half, says the study.
Nowhere to go
All told, environmental factors are responsible for 3,800 premature deaths and 1.9 million cases of illness every year across the delta in both India and Bangladesh, according to the World Bank, mainly among young children and women.
Whereas some climate refugees on the Indian side move to higher ground, away from the shore, and others change islands altogether, many more feel they have no choice but to sever their ties with the delta. Toma Das, a physical education teacher in a public school in Gosaba, requested a transfer to Habra, a city on the mainland, in 2018. Das had survived cyclone Aila in 2009, and the experience had left a lasting impression. “There was water everywhere,” she recalls, and it was filled with the corpses of animals. They rotted and started to stink. “I didn’t want my children to grow up there,” she says.
But Das is one of the lucky ones. Most people from the delta don’t have the professional skills or the resources to find well-paying jobs. Often, they sell their land and relocate to the mainland only to realize that they can’t afford much more than a shack. They survive as loaders, hauling fruits and vegetables, or pull rickshaws. They may go farther afield, to better-off states like Kerala, in the south, to work on construction sites and factory floors, but even so, their eventual circumstances are often more tenuous than those they left behind before the storms.
“These are people who understand the forests and rivers, wind and sea,” says Megnaa Mehtta, an environmental anthropologist at the University of Sheffield. “One day they are living alongside snakes and experiencing cyclones; the next they’re in a shanty in Kerala doing something that has nothing in common with the context of their life. These new places may not get submerged, but for the villagers, they are equally toxic.”
Some parts of the world facing similar challenges have responded with “managed retreat.” Thousands have already left the Pacific islands of Vanuatu and Tuvalu for New Zealand. And last year Indonesia announced plans to build a new capital city after it was established that parts of the current capital, Jakarta, are sinking by up to 15 centimeters a year. Almost half the city is already below sea level.
But mainland India is already densely populated, with high rates of poverty and homelessness. And the same politicians who don’t recognize climate refugees, and don’t take stringent steps to prevent human activity in tiger habitats, also don’t have a good track record on relocation.
In 2008 a plan was budgeted at 70 billion rupees (about $1 billion) to move people out of the Jharia coalfields, in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, to a specially built township around 15 kilometers away. But so far only 3,000 families have been moved, out of an originally planned 79,000, according to the environmental news platform Mongabay. The population that requires moving has since nearly doubled, to around 140,000 families. Until they move, they are expected to somehow survive amid the sinkholes, coal fires, and toxic gases that have made Jharia perhaps the most apocalyptic landscape in India.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, environmental protection laws have been severely undermined. India is home to more than half of the 50 most polluted cities in the world; its air and water quality rank at the bottom of global indices. Still, Modi has encouraged more coal production. Under cover of the pandemic, and the excuse of India’s cratered economy, he continues to favor big business interests over the environment. In August, his government gave the go-ahead to open 40 new coalfields, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of acres of protected forest land in four states, including West Bengal.
This picture washed ashore on Mousuni on an August morning in 2019. The identity of the person in the photograph is unknown.
SUSHAVAN NANDY
Mass relocation of people living in the Sundarbans is not a serious option; the political will does not exist. The West Bengal state government hasn’t even brought it up. Regional experts are convinced that there are other ways to protect the delta from climate-related changes, even if the changes themselves can no longer be prevented.
According to Dasgupta, the World Bank economist, one way forward is a combination of “green and gray infrastructure.” The delta’s mangrove belt must always be maintained as the first line of defense, she says. Its power to absorb the shock of storms, prevent flooding, and trap salt is unmatched. But to do its work, it has to be protected from deforestation and must be regularly replenished. Mangroves are also less effective in densely populated areas, and here, says Dasgupta, embankments should be built and maintained scrupulously as a second line of defense.
Although some experts differ over whether the traditional mud embankments, which the villagers build by hand, should be replaced with concrete structures overseen by outside contractors from the mainland, everyone is in agreement that embankments save lives. And yet, according to news reports, a plan to construct 1,000 kilometers of embankment in the Sundarbans is still unfinished, more than a decade after the funds were sanctioned by the national government. Only a tenth of that was ready when Cyclone Amphan made landfall earlier this year.
Facebook has released the latest version of its Community Standards Enforcement Report, which now includes a specific section on the prevalence of hate speech.
