Results for “pollution” 205 found
Emergent Ventures India, fourth cohort
Here is the latest EV India cohort, and I am delighted to see more applications from young women and teenagers. I note also that a lot of the applicants for EV India are increasingly from smaller towns, or were raised in small towns before moving to larger cities for their projects.
EV India now has 75 winners! And I met most of them in Udaipur this last weekend. Here is the list of new winners:
Siddharth Kanungo is a chemical engineer by training and founder of Primer, an interactive conversational learning platform. Primer is designed for self-learners to learn subjects like mathematics, physics, computer science, that are usually offered in a university-level setting.
Keertana Subramani is a 23-year-old educator and social entrepreneur who wants to provide high-quality, accessible learning experiences. She received her EV grant to build SUVY Classes, a platform that vets and trains tutors for quality, and offers engaging, live classes for any learning need, and at twenty cents a day.
Arun Iyyanarappan is a 28-year-old electrical and software engineer passionate about creating alternate systems for electric power consumption. He received his EV grant to build a cost-effective solar powered house to show proof of concept for electrifying homes in rural areas at low-cost.
Gowtham Tummeda is a 21-year-old student interested in biology and programming and views biology as a software problem. He received his EV grant to build an end-to-end AI platform for biological data analysis. His larger ambition is to use the platform to model, design and simulate changes to strands of DNA at protein level using Deep Mind’s Alpha Fold.
Tejas Sidnal is an architect and researcher from Mumbai. He is the founder of CarbonCraft, a design and material innovation startup converting carbon emissions into building materials by fusing material knowledge of clean technologies with traditional techniques. He received an EV grant to reduce the curing process for Carbon Tiles from 28 days to under four hours for tiles that store captured carbon.
Hiya Jain is an 18-year-old interested in using EdTech to make education equitable. She received her EV grant to travel to San Francisco and better understand the EdTech space. She is currently working on UnMold, a project connecting high-school students in developing countries to PhD students running high information, low pressure, cohort-based courses to inject inspiration into a system.
Shruti Karandikar is a 16-year-old high school student from Bangalore. She has started ‘Screens for the Unscreened’ to collect phones, tablets, and laptops and donate them to underprivileged students. This is being converted into a non-governmental organization called ‘Mobilize’.
Sainadh Chityala is a 22-year-old engineering student. He received the EV grant to develop software to power self-driving cars in unpredictable and chaotic driving environments in urban India.
Samarth Bansal is a 28-year-old independent journalist and programmer in India. His reporting has appeared in Indian and foreign press like the The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Mint, and HuffPost, etc. He writes The Interval, a fortnightly newsletter. He received his EV grant to merge his two interests – developing AI platforms for journalism and serve the news at higher speed and lower cost.
Apurwa Masook is a 23-year-old structural engineer who graduated and cofounded and spearheaded India’s first Indigenous Student Rocketry Mission. He is the founder of Space Fields, a team of hustlers, engineers and space aficionados working towards affordable access to space. He received his EV grant to support Space Fields’s efforts in developing a low-cost high-performance green compositepellant to power next generation of Launch Vehicles.
Snigdha Poonam is a 38-year-old journalist and author from Delhi. She has written about identity politics, income inequality, tech culture, and crime. Her first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World, won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction. She received an EV grant to travel across India to for her investigative work on scams and fraud in the contemporary Indian political economy.
Aniruddha Kenge is a 20-year-old student of industrial design with an interest in carbon-based materials, especially graphene. He is working towards decarbonizing plastics and making their use, reuse, and production sustainable, swiftly. He received his EV grant to develop hemp fiber-based bio-composites in India that can replace multi-use plastics.
Keya Krishna is a 16-year-old high school student in Washington DC interested in the intersection of science, technology, and public policy. She received her EV grant to measure pollution exposures at a hyper-local level with a high level of spatial and temporal granularity, specifically focusing on the pollution exposure of school-going youth.
Abhilash Mishra is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of EquiTech Futures. He trained as a physicist and holds an M.Phys from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Astrophysics from Caltech. EquiTech Futures is a network of innovators from around the world using data science and AI to tackle societal challenges. Abhilash received his EV grant to develop and scale cohort-based courses, research residencies, and educational networking, through their programs EquiTech Scholars, EquiTech Residency, and EquiTech Institutes.
Reuben Abraham is the founding CEO of Artha Global, a new Mumbai and London based policy research and consulting organization that provides the scaffolding for efforts aimed at building state capacity. He was named ‘Think Tanker of the Year 2022’ by Prospect Magazine for putting together a large platform that enabled inter-disciplinary work to tackle the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Zi Cheng “Sam” Huang is a 26-year-old ethnographic researcher interested in elite spaces and cultural replication. Currently, they are assisting on a project about the beliefs of AI researchers. In their free time, they coach Peking University in competitive debating, effective altruism, and started a fellowship for talented young debaters to engage in effective altruism. With their EV grant, they seek to understand scaling education programs in India especially IITs.
Mohammad Ruhul Kader is an entrepreneur and writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure: A short guide to living an entrepreneurial life. He received his EV grant to scale Future Startup into a leading destination to learn about entrepreneurship, tech, and business in Bangladesh.
Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy (21) and Benjamin Hoffner-Brodsky (22) are data scientists from Chennai and Davis with backgrounds in computational social science research and government. They founded Jhana, a Bangalore-based artificial intelligence lab, and are interested in simplifying and democratizing legal processes and information, and in building alignment and ethics tools for back-checking deployed AI systems. They are building a state-of-the-art, automatic legal search interface for lawyers and students.
Tushar Khandelwal (24), is a former investment banker turned social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Sigma91 – a career accelerator for ambitious teens, and has built a community of over 400 highly talented teenagers.
Akash Kulgod is a 22-year-old researcher, writer, and techno-optimist from Belagavi, with a degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley. He is the founder of Dogluk — a startup-DAO aiming to augment the ability of dogs to detect disease by transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities into digital and multidimensional signatures. He is also a team member of the Rajalakshmi Children Foundation. You can follow his substack for his writing and podcasts about Dogluk, effective altruism, and the psychedelic revival.
Raghav Gupta is a 24-year-old industrial engineer and the founder of EquiDEI, a crypto-fintech startup. EquiDEI is a blockchain based protocol designed to monetize unbanked supply chain assets of small and medium sized enterprises in India, to provide low risk liquidity options. His ambition is to use his startup to generate wealth and liquidity and jobs for the SME ecosystem.
SealXX is a bioplastic solution to replace single-use plastics based on the concept of biomimicry, and it is founded and run by five teenagers across the world. At SealXX, they want to make the everyday products by mimicking protein-based natural processes by reducing the need for plastic reliance. Chandhana, Nithi, Roy, Nathan, and Elly, cofounders of SealXX were awarded an EV grant to develop and scale their biomimicry process.
- Chandhana Sathishkumar is a 17-year-old Neuroscience and BCI researcher, an author, TED-Ed Speaker, NFT artist, and Guinness world record holder. She has experience working alongside Walmart; with Brains@Play to develop Accessify (a brain-controlled browser extension); and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to research fetal brains.
- Nithi Byreddy is a 17-year-old innovator and author researching the applications of carbon capture in climate science. She has worked on creating a blockchain-based solution to reduce people’s carbon footprint and has worked with IKEA to create sustainable innovations to reduce their carbon emissions.
- Roy Kim is a 16-year-old innovator and environmentalist interested in mimicking the mechanisms and designs of nature to create sustainable environments, mainly cities. In addition to working alongside Walmart, he is currently developing a theoretical ecological urban utopia and further exploring the applications of biomimicry in our society.
- Nathan Park is a 17-year-old entrepreneur who is interested in economics and business management. He is currently doing research on the economics of the housing market, and running a student-led, scientific publication called MIND Magazines that seeks to make science universally accessible to everyone.
Nexteen is an innovation accelerator program for 13-19 years-old students with programs aimed at exposing students to exponential tech to work on global challenges. Here are some of their ambitious students:
- Vedanth Nath,16, is is a high schooler, football enthusiast, and the creative engine at Nexteen. Prior to Nexteen, ran Media House, and has worked in in the WASH Sector. He also leads Tech and Youth at LooCafe helping them become the largest Toilet-WASH Company in the country.
- Karthik Nagapuri, 22, is an innovator, Defi developer, and student getting his completing the last year of his undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. At Nexteen, he’s building the tech infrastructure that would be useful for innovators who are part of the program. He also worked on Safe Block, a crypto wallet nominee system. He is also the winner of a separate EV grant for building open API framework and tech for LooCafe.
- Ayush Srivastava,19, is a serial entrepreneur who likes to work on operations of new startups to help them grow. He has helped operationalize several startups before Nexteen.
- Anvitha Kollipara,16, is an entrepreneur. She works on scaling, bringing international accreditation, and acquiring partnerships with companies such as Adobe for the non-profits she founded. She was named one of the top three teen change-makers by Forbes for her work with CareGood Foundation.
- Harsh Vardhan Shukla,19, is a YouTuber turned entrepreneur, completing his undergraduate degree in business development while working on the side on nanotech projects. He works on content production (videos) and podcasts.
Emergent Ventures India is now large enough for top-up grants and repeat winners! Some familiar names below:
- Nilay Kulkarni, a 22-year-old software developer from Nashik, for his fintech start up.
- Swasthik Padma to scale his start-up TrashTrap to scale Plascrete – a high strength building material made by converting non-recyclable plastic waste – for commercial use.
- Chandra Bhan Prasad to continue his excellent scholarship on Dalit capitalism and Dalit dignity.
- Naman Pushp, co-founder of Airbound, for his early efforts to explore sustainable on-ground mobility.
- Onkar Singh to continue developing his open-source CubeSat.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort and third cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
There is No Such Thing as Development Economics
I used to think there was such a thing as development economics. There are still richer and poorer countries, of course, but is there a “development economics,” a special type of economics for poor countries? I don’t think so. Maybe there once was. In the twentieth century, divergence in per-capita GDP increased big time and it was a burning question why poor countries weren’t on the same development path as the developed nations. Starting around 1990-2000, however, we have seen convergence. Most countries are now on the same path. Poorer countries and richer countries are becoming more alike, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. I tweeted the following news headline recently:
Notice the commentary on NYC infrastructure but also the man bites dog angle. In Pakistan people on social media are apparently sharing videos of flooding in the New York subway to complain about the poor state of infrastructure in Pakistan!
My own anecdote fit the pattern. This week I am in Delhi and due to a series of unfortunate supply chain shocks at my house-build in the US, for the first time in 3 weeks I have running hot water and reliable internet access! Not only that but although India has sadly fallen for the paper straw nonsense the top hotels remain free from flow constrictors so the water gushes out of the shower with elan just as God intended. Civilization is truly moving back east.
More generally, poorer and richer countries face many of the same problems today: infrastructure, low-skill workers and technological change, climate adaption and so forth. Is the latest paper on cash transfers, pollution, or corruption about a poor country or a rich country? It’s hard to tell. Poor countries still have their own unique problems, of course, but those problems are best analyzed by country rather than by income category. India is not the same as Thailand or Peru. I see little that unites poor countries under the rubric development economics.
Sunday assorted links
2. When do ideas get easier to find? Hard to excerpt, but important piece.
3. The economics of stadium names.
4. Pollution from car tire wear.
5. The Swedish history of not feeding other people’s children.
6. The 1993 ferry sinking off the coast of Jeremie, Haiti had a high death toll — some sources say over one thousand (does anyone know the proper final toll?). Yet the incident doesn’t seem to have its own Wikipedia page.
Tuesday assorted links
1. New CBA for the child allowance, showing basically a 10x benefit to cost ratio.
2. New survey of the non-health effects of air pollution.
3. The importance of teaching frontier knowledge.
4. Marcus Rediker’s tips for historical writing, excellent and also of more general interest.
5. The current state of nuclear brinksmanship (NYT).
6. “Companies are marketing polygenic risk scores as part of IVF…” And more here.
Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Why do frozen turkeys explode when deep fried?
2. “Former South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan has died at age 90. This means all living former South Korean Presidents are currently in jail.” Tweet link here.
3. David Wallace-Wells on the tragedy of regular ol’ air pollution.
4. The case against the Trump-Biden tariffs (NYT).
5. New dating terms.
6. Walmart “cancels” children’s toy that swears and sings in Polish about doing cocaine.
7. Georgia politician stands by giant topiary chicken that got him ousted as mayor.
Yglesias on CRT
Matt Yglesias has an excellent post on schooling and politics emphasizing three points. First, there is a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) nonsense which the schools are using to train teachers and administrators. Second, at the same time the school administrators/teacher’s unions are generally ignoring the very real cost to children and parents of the school closures, including the costs of a widening racial gap. Third, the schools are stigmatizing testing under the guise of promoting equity but in reality because the teacher’s unions know that when you test children you learn that not all teachers are equally capable.
[The DC Public Schools] also recommend that people read a bunch of Robin DiAngelo books and brag that “more than 2,000 DCPS staff have participated in Courageous Conversation training.” But is Courageous Conversation training a good idea? This NYT Magazine profile of the company and its founder made it sound pretty bad:
Singleton, who holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, and who did stints in advertising and college admissions before founding what’s now known as Courageous Conversation in 1992, talks about white culture in similar ways. There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.” He spoke about how the ancient Egyptians had “ideas about how humanity works that never had that scientific-hypothesis construction” and so aren’t recognized. “This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?” For Singleton, society’s primary intellectual values are bound up with this marginalization.
I don’t think Frankfurt School Marxists are going to take over society by injecting these ideas into K-12 schools or anything like that. What I so think is that time and money is being wasted on initiatives that are run by people who are somewhere between stupid and fraudulent.
And it’s important to take that seriously, not just because someone somewhere may take these goofy ideas seriously (see prior commentary about Tema Okun), but because fiscal tradeoffs are real. Dollars spent on DEI trainings that come with zero proof of efficacy are dollars that can’t be invested in things like D.C.’s successful teacher bonus pay program, updating school air conditioning, improving school lunches, reducing kids’ exposure to air pollution and lead poisoning, or any of the other various interventions that have decent evidence behind them.
Of course when I say that investing in higher quality school lunches is good for kids’ learning, what I mean is that it’s good as measured on standardized tests.
Standardized testing has become a weird discourse flashpoint, but I think everyone agrees that you can, in principle, assess someone’s competence in a given subject area with a test. And if you want to compare different people, you need to give them the same test. It’s only by making comparisons across classrooms and across time that we are able to persuasively demonstrate that particulates are bad for school performance, healthy meals are good for school performance, and air conditioning improves school performance in the summer.
All this would be uncontroversial, I think, except teachers’ unions don’t like the idea of assessing teachers based on their job performance.
Read the whole thing and subscribe to Slow Boring.
How the game of *Life* evolved
The game underwent numerous updates over the years. The early emphasis on money to determine the winner had been “indicative of what sold in that era,” George Burtch, the former vice president of marketing for Hasbro, which acquired Milton Bradley in 1984, said in a phone interview.
As times changed, so did the game, with players encountering midlife crises and being rewarded for good deeds, like recycling the trash and helping homeless people.
“Reuben was very receptive to the changes — in fact he was often the impetus for them — because he was a businessman,” Mr. Burtch said.
“He understood that the Game of Life was not just the game that he invented; it was a brand,” he added. “And for a brand to remain viable, it has to evolve. It has to reflect the market conditions of the time.”
But as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2007, the redesign teams always had a hard time addressing the fundamental criticism of the game — that the only way to reward a player for virtuous acts was with money: “Save an Endangered Species: Collect $200,000. Solution to Pollution: $250,000. Open Health-Food Chain: $100,000.”
And so the company’s 2007 overhaul, the Game of Life: Twists & Turns, was almost existential. Instead of putting players on a fixed path, it provided multiple ways to start out in life — but nowhere to finish. “This is actually the game’s selling point; it has no goal,” Ms. Lepore wrote. “Life is … aimless.”
That is from an excellent NYT obituary of Reuben Klamer, who invented the game of Life, in addition to numerous other achievements.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Mike Makowsky good career advice for those economists (and others?) coming out of non-elite schools.
2. Bryan Caplan on his home schooling experience.
3. BBC covers EV India winner and his fight against air pollution.
4. Why young Koreans are doing so well in classical music.
5. Art Blakey and Lee Morgan in concert.
6. Guardian Fall books preview. And Vulture Fall books preview.
What should we regulate *more*?
Since the Biden team does not seem too favorably disposed to deregulation, perhaps it is worth asking in which areas we should be pushing for additional regulation. Here are a few possible picks, leaving pandemic-related issues aside, noting that I am throwing these ideas out and in each case it will depend greatly on the details:
1. Air pollution. No need to go through this whole topic again, carbon and otherwise. Remember the “weird early libertarian days” when all air pollution was considered an act of intolerable aggression?
2. Noise pollution. There is good evidence of cognitive effects here, but what exactly are we supposed to do? Can’t opt for NIMBY now can we!?
3. Something around chemicals? How about more studies at least?
4. Housing production. You can look at this as more or less regulation depending on your point of view. But perhaps cities of a certain size should be required by the state government to maintain sufficient affordability.
5. Mandates for standardized reporting of data? For example, the NIH requires that scientists report various genomic data in standardized ways, and this is a huge positive for science. What else might work in this regard?
6. Federal occupational licensing, in lieu of state and local.
7. Software as a service from China?
8. Animal welfare and meat production.
9. Is there a useful way to regulate to move toward less antibiotic use?
10. Should we have more regulation of AI that measures human emotions? How about facial and gait surveillance in public spaces?
11. How about regulating regulation itself?
What else?
I thank an MR reader for some useful suggestions behind this post.
A Foreign Policy Disaster in the Making
NYTimes: A lethal, fast-paced second wave of the coronavirus pandemic has brought India’s health care systems to the verge of collapse and is putting millions of lives and livelihoods at risk.
On Sunday and Monday, the country recorded more than 270,000 and 259,000 cases, respectively, of Covid-19, a staggering increase from about 11,000 cases per day in the second week of February. Reported coronavirus infections shot up from about 20,000 per day in mid-March to more than 200,000 by mid-April.
The newspapers and social media are scrolls of horror and failure of the health system. There are reports of lines of ambulances with patients waiting outside the largest Covid facility in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat because ventilator beds and oxygen had run out.
On Friday in the northern city of Lucknow, Vinay Srivastava, a 65-year-old journalist, shared his falling oxygen levels on Twitter, tagging government authorities for help. Overburdened hospitals and laboratories wouldn’t take calls from his family. The last tweet from Mr. Srivastava’s handle described his oxygen saturation level at 52, way below the 95 percent, which is considered normal. Nobody helped. He died on Saturday.
When I left India in February of 2020 I feared that COVID would rip through its dense, urban populations which were already under stress from some of the world’s worst air and water pollution. I feared that COVID would overwhelm India’s weak public health care system and leave its low-capacity state flailing. As it happened, I should have worried more about America’s poorly cared for nursing home populations, its high obesity rate, and its low state-capacity. It was the US state that ended up flailing, as it and the public became absorbed by media spectacles, impeachments and scandals du jour even as thousands died daily. The virus mocks us all.
All of this will require some rethinking. Today, however, I want to point to a foreign policy disaster in the making. America’s role as the guarantor of a globalized, mostly peaceful, and orderly world–already deeply hurt by four years of “America First,”–is now under further threat by an increasing perception that we are vaccine hoarders. Conspiracy theories are running wild in India on WhatsApp and elsewhere that we have hundreds of millions of spare doses. It isn’t true, of course. We ordered more doses than we needed because we didn’t know which vaccine would work and so we smartly placed multiple bets. Our advance-purchases from Pfizer and big investments in Moderna and related parts of the vaccine supply chain have paid off big time. As the US is vaccinated, our investments will benefit the entire world. Our investments in Novavax, AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson were also smart investments but those bets have yet to pay off in a big way. We don’t have hundreds of millions of doses stockpiled but maybe tens of millions of some AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines.
We have, however, used the Defense Production Act to prioritize American vaccine manufacturing at potentially great cost to India. As The Economist reports:
Production lines in India, making at least 160m doses of covid vaccine a month, will come to a halt in the coming weeks unless America supplies 37 critical items.
A shutdown of vaccine production in India would be a disaster for India and also for the United States. Our image in Asia will be tarnished at a time when we want to be making allies to counter Chinese influence. Moreover, the US benefits tremendously from a globalized world. Indeed, the US cannot supply its own vaccine needs without inputs from the rest of the world so flouting the rules will boomerang, leaving us and everyone else worse off. Autarchy is very bad for vaccine production.
The Biden Administration has some leeway. We have over 60 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on hand and more arriving every day. We do not need to pause our own vaccination efforts to help others. We can donate what AstraZeneca stockpiles remain at no cost to us. A I said in my testimony to Congress, forget being humanitarians, there are health, economic and political reasons to vaccinate the world.
So let’s make it clear that we have an American plan to vaccinate the world before perceptions solidify that we are the villain and not the hero of the story.
Green energy vs. green jobs
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opening bit:
One of the most disturbing trends in recent economic thought is the view that green energy should be viewed as a source of good jobs. Such attitudes are bad for our polity and for our economy.
To be clear, the need for greener energy policies is imperative. Honest observers may disagree about the best paths forward, but a simple example illustrates the point about jobs.
Let’s say America’s energy supply was composed primarily of solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power, mostly automated with a few workers for oversight and a dog to guard the factory gate.
The biggest obstacle to green energy is not that American voters love pollution and carbon emissions, but rather people do not wish to pay more for their gasoline and their home heating bills. If we insist that green energy create a lot of good jobs, in essence we are insisting that it have high labor costs, and thus we are producing a version of it that will meet consumer and also voter resistance.
That would be close to ideal, even if it involved fewer jobs on net than the current energy infrastructure. Ideally, we should be striving for an energy network that hardly provides any jobs at all. That would be a sign that we truly have produced affordable and indeed very cheap alternatives to energy produced by fossil fuels.
The issue of cost is all the more urgent because climate change is a global problem, not just a national one. We could make North America entirely green, but climate change would proceed apace, due to carbon emissions from other countries, most of all China and eventually India.
So what we need to produce are very cheap renewable technologies, ones so cheap that the poorer countries of the world will adopt them as well. If we insist on packing a lot of labor costs (“good jobs”) into our energy technologies, we will not come close to achieving that end.
And I suspect my colleague Don Boudreaux would remind us all of Bastiat’s excellent Candlemakers’ Petition to the Sun, relevant here in its very specifics.
I really have not seen Democratic economists pushing back against the Biden administration on this point. #thegreatforgetting
Saturday assorted links
1. Suicide rates aren’t really up.
2. Eight (!) different ways to register for a vaccine in Montgomery County, Maryland.
3. Steven Johnson has a new project on the history of life expectancy gains. Book and TV show to follow.
4. When your spinach emails you something is wrong.
The age of polarization ended some while ago
The coronavirus-relief bill racing through Congress contains a fair amount of economic relief as well as a wide array of unrelated measures that were thrown into the bill with little or no public debate. Included in the latter category is something shocking: a huge package of energy reforms that will result in major greenhouse-gas reductions.
How big a deal are the climate provisions? The World Resources Institute has called the bill “one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation that Congress has passed in its history.” Grant Carlisle, a senior policy adviser at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, “This is perhaps the most significant climate legislation Congress has ever passed.”
To be sure, the “most significant climate legislation Congress has ever passed” designation is a little bit misleading. Congress hasn’t passed much climate legislation. The climate provisions in the coronavirus-relief bill might add up to more than President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, which included $90 billion in green-energy subsidies and helped seed the boom in wind, solar, batteries, and other tech over the past decade. They likely won’t be as significant as the 1970 Clean Air Act, which created the regulatory authority that does most of the heavy lifting in reducing carbon pollution.
But the amount of good climate policy in this bill is shocking, especially given the fact that it is about to be signed by Donald J. Trump. The major provisions include: a $35 billion investment in new zero-emission energy technology (including solar, wind, nuclear, and carbon-capture storage); an extension of tax credits for wind and solar energy, which were set to expire; and, most significantly, a plan for phasing out hydrofluorocarbons, a small but extremely potent greenhouse gas used as a coolant.
The rhetoric, however, will continue. That article is from Jonathan Chait. And here is my March 2019 Bloomberg column on polarization:
If I had to describe 2019 so far, I would characterize it as The Year Political Polarization Started to Erode. I know that sounds counterintuitive — aren’t partisans at each other’s throats on social media all the time? — but bear with me.
There is some data to support my point. A recent poll about regulating the tech industry, an issue which could prove to be one of the most important of our time, asked: “Do you agree or disagree that tech companies have too much power and should be more regulated?” Some 16 percent of Republicans said they “strongly agree,” while 13 percent of Democrats did. And combining those who “strongly agree” and “somewhat agree” gives an identical figure for both parties — 46 percent. This is the near-opposite of polarization.
More generally, both parties also seem to have converged in thinking that fiscal deficits are fine and more government spending is a good thing.
Ahem.
Progress on Nuclear Power
In the last year two new nuclear reactor designs have been approved, the first time this has happened in a generation. In September, the NRC approved NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) and a few days ago they approved GE-Hitachi’s SMR. The Trump administration has also invested billions in nuclear power research and in 2018 passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act.
President Donald Trump signed into a law new legislation that will speed up the development of advanced reactors in the United States.
The Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (NEICA) eliminates some of the financial and technological barriers standing in the way of nuclear innovation.
It also represents a strong commitment by the government to support the commercial nuclear sector, ensuring that the U.S. maintains its leadership around the globe.
Nuclear pairs extremely well with hydrogen, a carbon-free near pollution-free fuel, and nuclear also works great with solar (to smooth out capacity).
Will President Trump be remembered as the environmental president? Probably not. You can read dozens of pieces on Trump’s environmental policies (“rollbacks,” “reversals”) including this long Wikipedia article that never once mention nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear remains a leading technology for making progress on climate change.
Can we have an Operation Warp Speed for green energy?
Probably not, as I argue in my Bloomberg column. One problem is that advance market commitments work best when the output is well-defined, more or less homogeneous, and to be distributed according to very clear principles (one shot in the arm for everybody!). You can’t quite hand out green batteries or small nuclear reactors on the same basis. There is a case for subsidizing those, but not necessarily through advance purchase methods. Here is another part of the column:
Operation Warp Speed was also made easier by the internalization of vaccine research within companies or alliances of companies. The pre-purchase agreement limits risk, and within that framework the companies face strong competitive incentives to create a successful product. In the meantime, the work is removed from the public eye and debate, and at the end there is a definitive yes or no decision from the FDA. It is hardly simple, but it could be a lot more complicated.
In contrast, building a new energy infrastructure requires the cooperation of many companies and institutions, including local governments and regulators. One company can’t simply do everything (recall that the attempts of Alphabet to redesign part of Toronto as a new tech-based city met with local resistance and were ultimately put aside). The greater the number of institutions involved, the slower things get. Note that most of those institutions will not be getting pre-purchase funds from the federal government and they will face their usual bureaucratic and obstructionist incentives. When it comes to green energy policy, there are still too many veto points.
A striking feature of vaccine development is just how few social goals are involved. A vaccine should be safe, effective and easy to distribute. In broadly similar fashion, the highly successful Manhattan Project of the 1940s also had a small number of goals, namely a working and deliverable atomic bomb. When it comes to energy, there are already too many goals, and additional ones are often added: job creation, better design and community aesthetics, reductions in secondary pollution, regional economic benefits, and so on.
When I explain Fast Grants to people, and how it worked, it is always striking to me which part of the explanation they understand least. Everybody gets “we had a preexisting team in place, ready to handle accounting, recordkeeping, and payments.” Hardly anyone understands — really understands — “the program has two goals: supporting quality research projects that will feed into stopping Covid, and speed.” On one hand, it sounds self-evident to them, but on the other hand I don’t think they realize how much the intellectual infrastructure of the project really is defined by those goals and no others. Nothing about meeting payroll, or pursuing other meritorious social goals, or getting grant or donor renewal, or raising the stature of the program in the biomedical community, or…? What you choose not to pursue is one of the most radical steps you can take, and often it is so radical that other people don’t even grasp or notice it. They just don’t see you “not doing something.” That can be a good way to innovate!