• Public support for action on climate change is broad, but people are disinclined to be personally inconvenienced for the sake of the issue.
• Even if progressive jurisdictions ban new natural gas hookups, people will still be buying new gas appliances 15-20 years from now and those appliances will still be running 30-40 years from now.
• California is planning to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine cars in 2035, but ICE cars will still be on the road in 2050.
• Carbon capture technology exists at a small scale, but it is too expensive to solve the huge problems.
• The Inflation Reduction Act created financial incentives to deploy carbon capture technology, but the EPA needs to move on licensing Class VI wells or creating more state primacy deals.
• Carbon capture has been controversial for years in the environmental community, but it is important to keep in mind that lower-income Democrats were very upset about rising energy costs last year.
• Carbon capture could be used to make natural gas + carbon capture a cost-effective means of generating zero-carbon electricity.
• There is no perfect way to make electricity, and all energy sources have their own costs and benefits.
• Solar and wind power are not necessarily more virtuous than other sources such as carbon capture, nuclear, and geothermal.
• To make renewables work at a large scale, we need to build lots more transmission lines, batteries, and lithium mines.
• Even if we had an all-renewables grid, we would still need solutions for agriculture, industry, aviation, and maritime shipping.
• Carbon capture may be the solution to these problems, but we need to have the infrastructure in place to take advantage of it.ement on nature.
Published January 19, 2023
Visit Slow Boring to read Matthew Yglesias’s original post America needs more Class VI wells