Climate-Watching: A Collision of Economics and History: In Pennsylvania, the Debate over Climate Is a Bitter One

The state has both a long history of environmental action and a longstanding dependence on fossil fuels.

[from Inside Climate News, by David Shribman, July 17, 2022]

This is a state where natural gas production reached a record 7.1 trillion cubic feet in 2020, the most of any state outside Texas and more than the energy supplied by the state’s nuclear power plants. It’s a state that has 49 underground gas storage sites, more than any other in the nation.  Its coal production ranks behind only Wyoming and West Virginia, and only Wyoming and Texas export more total energy to other parts of the country.

This is also a state where voters will select a new governor and a new senator in November. No state has more vital elections this year; no state has a more complicated and more contentious political culture; and no state provides a better test case for environmental issues and for the future of the climate-change debate.

Welcome to Pennsylvania.

Don’t pack a sweater: the average temperature in the state has risen by 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the first Earth Day, in 1970, a bigger increase than the national average.

Don’t breathe deeply: the state’s two major cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, are among the nation’s worst 25 metropolitan areas for annual particulate air pollution

And don’t fail to note the irony—of a state whose economy and lifestyle are unusually dependent on fossil fuels but whose history is unusually rich in the love of nature and the protection of the environment. It is this collision of economics and history that makes environmental issues so emotional, the debate so bitter, the outcome so vital.

Pennsylvania was the home of John J. Audubon, who cultivated in Americans a love of bird life; Rachel Carson, whose clarion call about the environment jolted the country and shook the Kennedy administration; John Chapman, known to school children nationwide as Johnny Appleseed; J. Horace McFarland, a photographer and conservationist celebrated as the Father of the National Park Service; Harold L. Ickes, the pathfinding Secretary of the Interior during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years who shored up perhaps the least effective and most corrupt arm of government while elevating the standards and practices of the National Park Service; and Jerome Rodale, the publisher whose books gave voice to the ethos of sustainable agriculture. And it was the adopted home of William Penn, the founder of the colony that would bear his name and the author of a conservation edict requiring that 20 percent of the land in the Province of Pennsylvania be preserved as wooded. It is no surprise that Pennsylvania was one of the first states to adopt an Environmental Bill of Rights.

But Pennsylvania also was the setting for environmental milestones of an entirely different type. In Donora, a 1948 smog episode killed 20 people and saddled some 40 percent of the town’s population with respiratory disease. A third of a century later, the partial meltdown of Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Dauphin County spewed radioactivity into the Harrisburg area. 

The state has had multiple mine disasters and the subsequent contamination of nearby fields and streams. As early as 1883, the explorer and adventure travel writer Willard Glazer wrote that Pittsburgh’s industry was “rendered possible by the coal which abounds in measureless quantity in the immediate neighborhood of the city”—and which contributed to the poisoning of many of the area’s waterways and the despoiling of the air. As late as 1940, 81 percent of the city’s dwellings burned coal. The emissions from the steel mills that helped the country win two world wars and build a robust mass-consumer economy only added to the environmental distress.

This duality is part of, defines all of, Pennsylvania’s natural and political history.  It is embedded in the origin story of Pennsylvania and reinforced in contemporary history. In the WPA Guide to Pennsylvania, the writers of the New Deal-era product of the Federal Writers Project spoke in 1940 of how the main plant of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in Ford City, Pennsylvania, “extends for a mile along Third Avenue in a series of long squat units composed of red brick,” and how the state’s Red Hills were exceeded only in Belgium as “the finest farm section in the world.” Precisely three-quarters of a century ago, in his classic 1947 book, Inside U.S.A., the journalist John Gunther wrote, “To a degree the story of Pennsylvania is the story of iron, coal, and steel. Yet of its 26 million acres, almost half is forest!”

A state known for producing metals and fouling the air is also a state known for hunting grouse, pheasant, deer and bear. A state teeming with factory workers is a state loaded with farmers. A state with two major power centers, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, is a state where elections often are decided in the agricultural “T” between the two. A state known for building belching steel plants is also a state where, this spring, the owners of Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, announced that they would install solar panels on the iconic house to offset the power used at the site on Bear Run in Fayette County. And when it comes to environmental issues, Pennsylvania is a state where manufacturing and banking interests have enormous influence in the stately Capitol in Harrisburg, and also a state full of climate activists determined to hold industry in check and battle climate change.

“It is particularly difficult in Pennsylvania to come to any agreement on environmental issues because coal and natural gas have countervailing pressure against attempts to deal with climate change,” said Joel A. Tarr, a Carnegie Mellon University historian who studies the effect of technology on the urban environment. “When you tell people that we have a problem with air quality here, their response is that it used to be much worse. This is a place where we won’t have a water-quality solution until we have a cholera epidemic and we won’t address climate change until we have a major catastrophe that brings it home to Pennsylvania.”

Not that there haven’t been efforts. “A generalized good always takes a back seat to a specific interest,” Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, told me in an interview for this article. “We all benefit from a healthy environment, but there are specific interests that are specifically harmed if we do the right thing. Those specific interests have a lot of power in places like Harrisburg.”

The frequent result of these countervailing impulses and competing interests: paralysis on environmental matters, even as the latest United Nations report, published in April, warned that the world was on a path to a rate of global warming more than double the 2.7-degrees Fahrenheit set as the preferred global goal in 2015 in Paris.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned that the result would be “unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals,” adding, “This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies.”

 A City (and State) in Crisis

As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.

Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring

In many ways, Pittsburgh—once smoky, still gritty, now proud of its “eds-and-meds” economy, its edgy youth culture and yeasty locavore restaurant scene—stands as a symbol of Pennsylvania’s environmental and climate crisis.

In the past half century, the city’s average temperature has risen by 2.8 degrees, according to figures compiled by Climate Central—a jarring result for a city where the local political grandees like to emphasize how the area has moved beyond its heavy-manufacturing past. Even with the dramatic decline in the steel industry, Pittsburgh remains the 10th worst city in the country in terms of the presence of short-term particulate matter, and the Breathe Meter indicator that monitors the area’s air has found that 88.5 percent of metro areas in the country have cleaner air. Moreover, a study by Community Partners in Asthma Care found that the rate of asthma in Pittsburgh-area school children is nearly three times the national average.

For generations, no essay on the environment of Pennsylvania was complete without citing Charles Dickens’ characterization of mid-19th century Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid lifted,” or Lincoln Steffens’ complaint about the city’s “smoky gloom” and the “volcanic light upon the cloud of mist and smoke” that appeared with the periodic opening of the blast furnaces. When my wife and I bought a house in Pittsburgh two decades ago—when almost the entire steel industry had closed down in the area—we paid thousands of dollars to have a century’s worth of soot blasted from the brick facade.

All of that before the word “fracking” was introduced into the lexicon of the Pennsylvania debate.

“There is gas in the ground and people have been taking it out of the ground since before I was governor,” Wolf said in the interview. “If I could snap my fingers, we would go completely to wind and solar. I haven’t figured out how to do this. The job is to manage the transition to that energy future.”

Republicans in recent years have sought to deregulate the natural gas industry, expand drilling, ease stipulations for gas permits, open state parklands for energy extraction and open new opportunities for gas pipelines, having the state subsidize them.

“These things were not always Republican goals,” said David Hess, who was secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection under Republican Governors Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker. “Republicans once had environmental issues as a pretty high priority. Only recently have Republicans changed their approach. This issue is no longer bipartisan, and that applies especially to climate change. But the only way we can break the loop we are on is to do something different, and yet industry and their Republican allies want more and more. Putting all the stuff in the air from fossil fuels cannot be good, especially when we have clean alternatives.”

And yet the Keystone State has not been entirely a conscientious objector to environmental initiatives.

At a time when there was so much soot in the air that Pittsburgh kept its street lights on all day long and businessmen were forced to change their soiled shirts after returning from a walk to a lunch appointment, Mayor David Lawrence undertook a dramatic anti-smoke campaign in 1946 that greatly improved the air quality in the city. “I am convinced that our people want clean air,” the mayor said in his first inaugural address. “There is no other single thing which will so dramatically improve the appearance, the health, the pride, the spirit of the city.”

Lawrence was not alone. “The advocates of the Pittsburgh Renaissance conceived of decreased pollution as a means of assisting the transition of the city from a heavy-industry to a service economy by improving, modernizing, and reconstructing its central business district,” Stefano Laconi, who teaches the history of the Americas at the University of Florence, wrote in a 1999 essay in the journal Pennsylvania History. He argued that the initiative provided Lawrence “not only with the foundation of a public-private partnership but also with the basis of a bipartisan political coalition with local Republican moguls like Richard King Mellon.”

Years later, Republican Gov. Ridge, with Democratic support, began his administration with an initiative to clean up and redevelop brownfield sites. At the same time, the legislature won national attention by reorganizing the state’s approach to these issues, creating separate departments of Environmental Protection, which concentrates on protecting the air, water and land from pollution, and Conservation and Natural Resources, focused on state parks and state forests.

“At the beginning of my administration, I issued a challenge to Pennsylvania to become a national leader in finding new ways to protect our environment while promoting economic progress, to provide for the needs of the present without compromising the ability for future generations to meet needs of their own, and to think in terms of sustainability, with both the economy and our environment,” Ridge told me.  

The governor was fond of quoting the adage, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” As governor, he said that,“I would often remind myself that the air we breathe and the water we drink should never be taken for granted.”

Much to be Done and an Election That Matters

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.

Jonathan Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed

Ordinarily, the multi-interest collision of jobs and climate, energy and environment, might be top-shelf issues in a state that ranks second only to Texas in energy production and that had the largest increase in natural-gas production in the last decade. But that collision is a side show rather than the main event.

“All of these candidates need to speak up and tell us what they would do about the energy situation and the climate crisis that is growing more critical by the minute,” said Larry Schweiger, a former president of the National Wildlife Federation, PennFuture and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. “It is very frustrating to see candidates for governor and the Senate not making an effort to say how they would address these urgent issues. Both parties are guilty of  this, and it is a big omission and a big problem.”

Now Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Republican state Sen. Douglas Mastriano are facing off for governor and Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz are fighting for the U.S. Senate seat being relinquished by GOP Sen. Patrick Toomey

The four will face questions about their commitment to climate change with new urgency—and new stakes. And the pressure may well come from a newly critical group of voters: young people.

A Harris Poll survey conducted with 4-H found just fewer than half of teenagers believe political and global leaders are taking meaningful action to protect the environment. There is reason to believe that the top tier of teenagers, eligible to vote, and their older brothers and sisters will be motivated and perhaps mobilized by these issues.

“There’s no question that environmental issues are far more critical for younger voters,” said Steven Farnsworth, the political scientist who is director of University of Mary Washington’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies in Virginia. “This has been going on since the first Earth Day. It has to do with the fact that younger people are going to be on this planet longer than older people.”

The approach that these four nominees bring to these matters is important. “It’s not about issues, it’s about values,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics and the author of the newly published How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America. “And the degree to which candidates can connect climate change into values, and display that they are thinking about the future, they could affect the turnout of young people and how they do vote.”

There is much to be done. Pennsylvania ranks 19th among the states in the rate of growth for wind power, according to the PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center, and 23rd among the states in the rate of growth for solar power. The potential is great; if solar units were placed on the roofs of Pennsylvania’s big-box stores, for example, the result could be the annual production of more than 3,000 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity. There are bills in the legislature to require the state’s suppliers of electricity to generate nearly a third of their energy from renewable sources by 2030 and to put the state on a course to having 100 percent of its energy needs provided by wind and solar energy and other sources by the middle of the century.

Much of the emphasis will be on the state level, which is why the gubernatorial race between Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general, and GOP state Sen. Mastriano is so critical.

Shapiro speaks easily about clean energy, says he believes that more electric-vehicle infrastructure investments must be made, and pledges strict monitoring of the state’s utility companies. But he has broken with Gov. Wolf over whether the state should join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, known as RGGI, which puts a price and descending cap on carbon emissions. With an eye toward the power of the state’s building trades, he believes RGGI will be ineffective and will cause hardship among the state’s energy workers and companies.

As the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Lt. Gov. Fetterman speaks of the climate issue as an “existential crisis” and argues that the jobs-versus-environment calculus represents a false choice. “We still need to make stuff in this country, you know?” A onetime advocate of a moratorium on new fracking sites, he now sees a rationale for a limited, perhaps temporary, expansion. “I have been steadfastly talking about how important it is that we retain the manufacturing jobs and the energy jobs in Pennsylvania that currently provide our energy security,” he said at a debate at Carnegie Mellon University, but added, “We also must acknowledge and recognize that we have to trend …. away from these.”

The Republican candidates in these two high-profile races take substantially different positions from their Democratic rivals. Oz, the Senate candidate, has abandoned his onetime advocacy of strict environmental regulation and calls for the “freedom to frack.” Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, has argued that Wolf’s RGGI plan would “do far more harm than good” and this spring he submitted legislation to ban the federal government from regulating coal and gas extraction in Pennsylvania and to exempt the state’s industrial plants from the federal wastewater and air pollution rules. “We’re going to open up our energy sector like you’ve never seen,” Mastriano said at his victory celebration after he won the GOP primary.

A Monumental Figure

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

Gifford Pinchot

If there is one symbol of the tensions, perspectives, history and impulses of Pennsylvania in environmental matters it is not the gentle Audubon, who nurtured a love of birds in the heart and mind of the nation, nor the hard-faced leaders of power plants and coal mines. It is not the passionate Carson nor the resolute lobbyists who besiege the legislative chambers in Harrisburg. All are part of the Keystone State culture, but none of them personifies the colliding interests in this vital and emotional area of political conflict.

Only one person does, and that is Gifford Pinchot.

Today, Pinchot is largely a forgotten figure, overshadowed as a conservationist by John Muir, eclipsed as a visionary by Theodore Roosevelt. Today, Gaylord Nelson, the late senator from Wisconsin and the founder of Earth Day, is regarded as the political magus of the conservation movement, a title once plausibly claimed by Pinchot. Today the world regards Wangari Maath, the Kenyan activist who founded the Green Belt Movement and won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, as the most celebrated troubadour and warrior for the environment.

All these titles once belonged to Pinchot, a monumental figure who was the 28th governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served two terms in the Capitol and lived in a family home named Grey Towers, just outside the tourist town of Milford, Pennsylvania. The home is now a National Historic Site and home to the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, dedicated to fashioning innovative responses to conservation and environmental challenges.

Pinchot, who died in 1946, went to his grave with a green-plated resume: First chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry. Head of the Pennsylvania forestry division. At one time, the term “Pinchotism” was derided in Congress by business interests the way “Reaganomics” was criticized by early 1980s Democrats—until Pinchotism, like Reagonomics, was redeemed in the public eye.

And yet Pinchot does not wear an unblemished hero’s halo in history. Until recent damaging disclosures, that belonged to his chief rival, John Muir, his one-time ally and patron, though the shine on Muir was darkened in 2020, when Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club that Muir helped found in 1892, cited him for having “made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life.”

But in the long-ago conflict between Muir and Pinchot that spanned the period 1908 to 1913 and spilled over into later years is a story that captures the conflict at the heart of the environmental issue in the nation—and in Pinchot’s home state.

In the perspective of today, Pinchot had an ability, in the phrasing of his biographer, Char Miller, “to maintain what might seem like contradictory impulses—the desire to live simultaneously and within nature, to exult in its splendors while exploring its resources.” But in his titanic clash with Muir, Pinchot was cast as the bête noire of the movement he plausibly could claim to have helped create.

Muir was all about preservation and Pinchot was about wise or multiple uses of the land,” Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian who wrote about the PinchotMuir conflict in his 2010 The Wilderness Warrior, said in an interview. “The dispute was over what was conservation. Muir became a folk hero through the long shadow of the Sierra Club but Pinchot never had a legacy organization group.”

The venue of the clash was the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, but its implications extended nationwide and the forces at play continue to collide in Pennsylvania. Pinchot, a close advisor and friend to Theodore Roosevelt, was caught in the vise created by the moral passion of conservationists and the physical thirst of Californians. San Francisco wanted water, early environmentalists worshiped wilderness. There was no middle ground, though Pinchot was caught in the middle of the struggle.

It was, as the Library of Congress would characterize it a century later, “a division between those committed to preserving the wilderness and those more interested in efficient management of its use.” The two combatants had conflicting profiles: Pinchot was an insider, Muir was an outsider. Thus Muir claimed the moral high ground as the protector of the outdoors. The battle between the two men had its origins in Muir’s evolution to a view that, as Miller characterized it in his monumental 2001 Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, “the practice of forestry and the preservation of wilderness were incompatible, a tentative conclusion that would harden into conviction in the first years of the new century.” The result was temporarily to place Pinchot, politically if not emotionally—and supremely awkwardly—in the same camp as his traditional opponents, business executives with a lust for land and lucre.

Pinchot saw this issue as a struggle between “the extreme desirability of preserving the Hetch Hetchy in its original beauty” against the legitimate water needs of San Francisco and other communities in the Bay area. Muir, in a letter to Pinchot, said the proposal to flood the valley to provide water for “the dear people” was “full of graft,” later characterizing it as a moral outrage and a mortal threat to wilderness values. It was a classic confrontation between a master of the political world and a mystic of the natural world.

The struggle wore on for years. Later Pinchot would tell a congressional hearing that “injury to Hetch Hetchy by substituting a lake for the present swampy shore of the valley…is altogether unimportant when compared with the benefits to be derived from its use from a reservoir.”

In the end, Hetch Hetchy was flooded and, though Pinchot remained prominent in conservation circles—he was advising Franklin Delano Roosevelt on these matters as they related to the future United Nations as late as the World War II years—his reputation was no longer unsullied.

The crosswinds of the Hetch Hetchy controversy—the issues it raised, the passions it ignited, the arguments it prompted—now blow as a gale through Pinchot’s home state. They are the prevailing winds of Pennsylvania.

A Step in the Right Direction

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

John J. Audubon

Coal once accounted for 60 percent of all electricity generated in Pennsylvania, a rate that has declined by more than half; today only a handful of large grid-connected coal-fired electric plants operate in the state. That represents a steep decline, though Homer City Generation said this spring that it would not follow through with tentative plans to deactivate its units in Indiana County. “This decreasing dependence on these sorts of plants shows we are going in the right direction in reducing climate-changing emissions from coal-fired plants,” said Hess, the former GOP environmental commissioner. “But it is mostly because of the competition between natural gas and coal. The problem is that we are now getting down to the point in the power sector that we can’t get additional big emission reductions. There aren’t more plants to close to give us those reductions. So we have to adopt other kinds of strategies.”

Pennsylvania has more than 86,000 miles of streams, more than any state in the lower 48. The miles of these waterways that can support brook trout are dwindling, in part because of climate change and in part because the invasion of the hemlock wooly adelgid insect has infected the shoreline hemlock trees that otherwise would provide shade for the streams.

This is only the latest incarnation of the centuries-long decline in the health of the state’s waterways. In the 18th century, the British army captain Harry Gordon pronounced the site of the confluence of Pittsburgh’s three rivers as “the most healthy, the most pleasant, the most commodious, the most fertile spot of Earth known to European people.” A century later, another British observer said that in Pittsburgh, “Man befouled the streams, bedraggled their banks, ripped up the cliffs, hacked down the trees, and dumped refuse in their stead.”

But the environmental crisis is not confined to western Pennsylvania. To take a random reading of air pollution in the state, Pennsylvania’s worst air quality on April 5 was in Mechanicsburg, outside Harrisburg, in the center of the state, followed by New Bloomfield, 23 miles away, according to IQ Air real-time figures. At the same time, Wilkes-Barre, with an average increased temperature of 3.3 degrees since 1970, substantially beats the average national rate of 2.6 degrees. So does State College, at an increase of 3 degrees.

Over the decades, the emphasis has changed from “conservation” to “stopping climate change,” with the threat of neighborhood contamination (the late 1970s), acid rain (the early 1980s), and the ozone hole (the mid 1980s) joined by global warming, a term introduced into the scientific and then the political lexicon when James Hansen, a NASA atmospheric expert warned a Congressional committee in 1988 that he and a set of climate modelers believed they could “confidently state that major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty.” He told the lawmakers that “the global warming predicted in the next 20 years will make the Earth warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years.”

Opposition from an Unusual Coalition

To contemplate nature, magnificently garbed as it is in this country, is to restore peace to the mind, even if it does make one realize how small and petty and futile the human individual really is.

Harold Ickes

Many of the political tensions in Pennsylvania were visible in the debate that began last year—and became even more bitter this year—over RGGI. Gov. Wolf made becoming a part of the alliance of 10 New England and Middle Atlantic states—and, as a result reducing Pennsylvania’s greenhouse gas emissions by as many as 227 million tons by 2030—one of the top priorities of his final year in office.

The result was opposition by an unusual coalition of Republicans and labor unions, who argued that the governor’s plan would reduce jobs in the state.

“The ‘jobs-versus-environment’ framework is almost always part of these debates,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. “Environmental laws are for the public good—to protect the health and well being of individuals—so it is hard to argue against that. So what do you use as your argument? Jobs. It is sometimes a false choice, and often the environmentally sensitive approach can be a good economic choice. But politically, it is very powerful argument even if the reality isn’t the case.”

Last December, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a resolution that would halt the governor’s effort to join RGGI. The governor then exercised his veto, citing technicalities in the resolution and arguing that joining the group “is a vital step for Pennsylvania to reduce carbon emissions and achieve our climate goals.” When a stay issued by the Commonwealth Court expired in late April, the Wolf administration went ahead and published the regulation, and in less than a day the odd-couple coalition of coal unions and coal companies went to court to fight the order, which required operators of power plants fired by coal and natural gas to buy allowances for every ton of carbon dioxide they emitted.

“I want to give $150 million a year to a board headed by organized labor,” the governor, referring to a trust fund to aid individuals displaced by the transition to sustainable energy sources, told Inside Climate News as the controversy raged. “What don’t they like about this?”

In a separate interview, state Sen. Wayne Fontana, the chairman of the chamber’s Democratic Caucus and a member of the Game and Fisheries Committee, described the resistance mounted by Republicans in the legislature as “a wedge to use against the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the fall.” He said the state has taken substantial steps to address environmental threats, arguing, “We have done a lot with lead in the water, we have beaten up air and water polluters.”

A Lack of Urgency

And so we live in a time when change comes rapidly—a time when much of that change is, at least for long periods, irrevocable. This is what makes our own task so urgent. It is not often that a generation is challenged, as we today are challenged. For what we fail to do—what we let go by default, can perhaps never be done.

Rachel Carson, accepting the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society in 1963

Now the challenge is global warming, which dwarfs the threat from 19th century industrial pollution and 20th century acid rain.

This past year did not have a silent spring when it came to the climate change issue. Indeed, the reports were more dire, the warnings more urgent, the lack of substantial attention more dangerous. The world, and Pennsylvania, face dramatic alternative outcomes from their actions or inaction. One choice might redound to cities underwater or lower energy consumption as a result of the creation of, in the characterization of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of  “compact, walkable cities.” Another might be a continued reliance on private, gasoline-powered automobiles, trucks and buses or the “electrification of transport in combination with low-emission energy sources, and enhanced carbon uptake and storage using nature.”

The April report of the IPCC, the United Nations group that assesses science in relation to global warming, was sobering if not chilling. The bottom line: Net emissions are continuing to rise. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C [2.7°F] without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of the working group that produced the latest report, “it will be impossible.”

That will require what the IPCC working group co-chair Priyadarshi Shukla described as “the right policies, infrastructure and technology…to enable changes to our lifestyles and behavior.” And it will require a combination of policies and planning.

“We are opposed to long-term planning here in Pennsylvania,” said Professor Tarr of Carnegie Mellon University. “We react to crises, and we do so inadequately. People here generally have no sense of urgency about these kinds of issues.”

David Shribman served as editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 16 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on American political culture as Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe. He now writes a nationally syndicated column, contributes a separate column to The Globe and Mail in Canada, and teaches American politics at both McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and Carnegie Mellon University.

World-Watching: Global Energy Tracker

[from the Council on Foreign Relations]

by Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca

The Global Energy Tracker allows you to gauge trends in energy use across the globe through time.

The charts on the tracker page compile data on energy-consumption trends in seventy-nine countries going back to 1990. Each chart shows how much energy a given country consumes from nine different sources.

The charts display each country’s consumption data for each energy source by the amount of exajoules consumed, by exajoules consumed per capita, and as a share of that country’s total energy consumption. (Exajoules are a measure of energy; one exajoule is roughly equivalent to California’s annual electricity use.)

As the legend indicates, five energy sources covered by the trackercoal, oil, natural gas, biofuels, and other (unclassified)—emit high levels of carbon dioxide. Four others—solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric—are low-carbon emitters.

Together, the charts reveal significant trends in global energy usage. They show, for example, that high-carbon energy sources—especially oil—are the world’s dominant source of power. On average, 83 percent of tracker countries’ energy comes from high-carbon sources, and 37 percent specifically from oil.

Low-carbon sources, however, are on the rise, particularly in developed countries. Since 2010, the United States’ low-carbon consumption share climbed from 12 to 16 percent, the United Kingdom’s from 10 to 19 percent, and Germany’s from 14 to 19 percent. China, the world’s largest energy consumer, saw its low-carbon share rise from 9 to 15 percent. Rapid cost declines for low-carbon sources such as wind and solar, beneficiaries of technological innovation, explain much of the change. Still, low-carbon power’s share has actually declined in some rich countries, such as Japan—where it has fallen from 18 to 11 percent.

Some tracker countries rely highly on low-carbon energy. Twenty-five percent of Canada’s energy and 29 percent of Brazil’s, for example, comes from hydroelectric—compared with 9 percent for tracker countries on average. France derives over a third of its energy from nuclear. Other countries remain heavy users of higher-carbon sources. China derives 56 percent of its power from coal—although that figure is down from 70 percent a decade ago.

View the Global Energy Tracker.

Bruegel Publication Alert: The EU-Russia-China Energy Triangle

Policy Contribution

(from Bruegel)

By Georg Zachmann

Concern is growing in the European Union that a rapprochement between Russia and China could have negative implications for the EU.

We argue that energy relations between the EU and Russia and between China and Russia influence each other. We analyze their interactions in terms of four areas: oil and gas trading, electricity exchanges, energy technology exports and energy investments.

We discuss five key hypotheses that describe the likely developments in these four areas in the next decade and their potential impact on Europe:

  1. There is no direct competition between the EU and China for Russian oil and gas.
  2. China and the EU both have an interest in curbing excessive Russian energy rents.
  3. The EU, Russia and China compete on the global energy technology market, but specialize in different technologies.
  4. Intercontinental electricity exchange is unlikely.
  5. Russia seems more worried about Chinese energy investments with strategic/political goals than about EU investments.

Read the full report [Archived PDF].

Essay 83: Press Release: World Energy Outlook 2019 Highlights Deep Disparities in the Global Energy System

Rapid and widespread changes across all parts of the energy system are needed to put the world on a path to a secure and sustainable energy future

Deep disparities define today’s energy world. The dissonance between well-supplied oil markets and growing geopolitical tensions and uncertainties. The gap between the ever-higher amounts of greenhouse gas emissions being produced and the insufficiency of stated policies to curb those emissions in line with international climate targets. The gap between the promise of energy for all and the lack of electricity access for 850 million people around the world.

The World Energy Outlook 2019, the International Energy Agency’s flagship publication, explores these widening fractures in detail. It explains the impact of today’s decisions on tomorrow’s energy systems, and describes a pathway that enables the world to meet climate, energy access and air quality goals while maintaining a strong focus on the reliability and affordability of energy for a growing global population.

As ever, decisions made by governments remain critical for the future of the energy system. This is evident in the divergences between WEO scenarios that map out different routes the world could follow over the coming decades, depending on the policies, investments, technologies and other choices that decision makers pursue today. Together, these scenarios seek to address a fundamental issue – how to get from where we are now to where we want to go.

The path the world is on right now is shown by the Current Policies Scenario, which provides a baseline picture of how global energy systems would evolve if governments make no changes to their existing policies. In this scenario, energy demand rises by 1.3% a year to 2040, resulting in strains across all aspects of energy markets and a continued strong upward march in energy-related emissions.

The Stated Policies Scenario, formerly known as the New Policies Scenario, incorporates today’s policy intentions and targets in addition to existing measures. The aim is to hold up a mirror to today’s plans and illustrate their consequences. The future outlined in this scenario is still well off track from the aim of a secure and sustainable energy future. It describes a world in 2040 where hundreds of millions of people still go without access to electricity, where pollution-related premature deaths remain around today’s elevated levels, and where CO2 emissions would lock in severe impacts from climate change.

The Sustainable Development Scenario indicates what needs to be done differently to fully achieve climate and other energy goals that policy makers around the world have set themselves. Achieving this scenario – a path fully aligned with the Paris Agreement aim of holding the rise in global temperatures to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C – requires rapid and widespread changes across all parts of the energy system. Sharp emission cuts are achieved thanks to multiple fuels and technologies providing efficient and cost-effective energy services for all.

“What comes through with crystal clarity in this year’s World Energy Outlook is there is no single or simple solution to transforming global energy systems,” said Dr. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s Executive Director. “Many technologies and fuels have a part to play across all sectors of the economy. For this to happen, we need strong leadership from policy makers, as governments hold the clearest responsibility to act and have the greatest scope to shape the future.”

In the Stated Policies Scenario, energy demand increases by 1% per year to 2040. Low-carbon sources, led by solar PV, supply more than half of this growth, and natural gas accounts for another third. Oil demand flattens out in the 2030s, and coal use edges lower. Some parts of the energy sector, led by electricity, undergo rapid transformations. Some countries, notably those with “net zero” aspirations, go far in reshaping all aspects of their supply and consumption.

However, the momentum behind clean energy is insufficient to offset the effects of an expanding global economy and growing population. The rise in emissions slows but does not peak before 2040.

Shale output from the United States is set to stay higher for longer than previously projected, reshaping global markets, trade flows and security. In the Stated Policies Scenario, annual U.S. production growth slows from the breakneck pace seen in recent years, but the United States still accounts for 85% of the increase in global oil production to 2030, and for 30% of the increase in gas. By 2025, total U.S. shale output (oil and gas) overtakes total oil and gas production from Russia.

“The shale revolution highlights that rapid change in the energy system is possible when an initial push to develop new technologies is complemented by strong market incentives and large-scale investment,” said Dr. Birol. “The effects have been striking, with U.S. shale now acting as a strong counterweight to efforts to manage oil markets.”

The higher U.S. output pushes down the share of OPEC members and Russia in total oil production, which drops to 47% in 2030, from 55% in the mid-2000s. But whichever pathway the energy system follows, the world is set to rely heavily on oil supply from the Middle East for years to come.

Alongside the immense task of putting emissions on a sustainable trajectory, energy security remains paramount for governments around the globe. Traditional risks have not gone away, and new hazards such as cybersecurity and extreme weather require constant vigilance. Meanwhile, the continued transformation of the electricity sector requires policy makers to move fast to keep pace with technological change and the rising need for the flexible operation of power systems.

“The world urgently needs to put a laser-like focus on bringing down global emissions. This calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is committed to tackling climate change,” said Dr. Birol. “Our Sustainable Development Scenario is tailor-made to help guide the members of such a coalition in their efforts to address the massive climate challenge that faces us all.”

A sharp pick-up in energy efficiency improvements is the element that does the most to bring the world towards the Sustainable Development Scenario. Right now, efficiency improvements are slowing: the 1.2% rate in 2018 is around half the average seen since 2010 and remains far below the 3% rate that would be needed.

Electricity is one of the few energy sources that sees rising consumption over the next two decades in the Sustainable Development Scenario. Electricity’s share of final consumption overtakes that of oil, today’s leader, by 2040. Wind and solar PV provide almost all the increase in electricity generation.

Putting electricity systems on a sustainable path will require more than just adding more renewables. The world also needs to focus on the emissions that are “locked in” to existing systems. Over the past 20 years, Asia has accounted for 90% of all coal-fired capacity built worldwide, and these plants potentially have long operational lifetimes ahead of them. This year’s WEO considers three options to bring down emissions from the existing global coal fleet: to retrofit plants with carbon capture, utilisation and storage or biomass co-firing equipment; to repurpose them to focus on providing system adequacy and flexibility; or to retire them earlier.

Access the 2019 World Energy Outlook report.

About the IEA: The International Energy Agency, the global energy authority, was founded in 1974 to help its member countries co-ordinate a collective response to major oil supply disruptions. Its mission has evolved and rests today on three main pillars: working to ensure global energy security; expanding energy cooperation and dialogue around the world; and promoting an environmentally sustainable energy future.

International Energy Agency Press Office
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Essay 80: Short-Term Energy Outlook

U.S. Energy Information Administration
November 13, 2019 Release

Highlights

Global liquid fuels
  • Brent crude oil spot prices averaged $60 per barrel (b) in October, down $3/b from September and down $21/b from October 2018. EIA forecasts Brent spot prices will average $60/b in 2020, down from a 2019 average of $64/b. EIA forecasts that West Texas Intermediate (WTI) prices will average $5.50/b less than Brent prices in 2020. EIA expects crude oil prices will be lower on average in 2020 than in 2019 because of forecast rising global oil inventories, particularly in the first half of next year.
  • Based on preliminary data and model estimates, EIA estimates that the United States exported 140,000 b/d more total crude oil and petroleum products in September than it imported; total exports exceeded imports by 550,000 b/d in October. If confirmed in survey-collected monthly data, it would be the first time the United States exported more petroleum than it imported since EIA records began in 1949. EIA expects total crude oil and petroleum net exports to average 750,000 b/d in 2020 compared with average net imports of 520,000 b/d in 2019.
  • Distillate fuel inventories (a category that includes home heating oil) in the U.S. East Coast—Petroleum Administration for Defense District (PADD 1)—totaled 36.6 million barrels at the end of October, which was 30% lower than the five-year (2014–18) average for the end of October. The declining inventories largely reflect low U.S. refinery runs during October and low distillate fuel imports to the East Coast. EIA does not forecast regional distillate prices, but low inventories could put upward pressure on East Coast distillate fuel prices, including home heating oil, in the coming weeks.
  • U.S. regular gasoline retail prices averaged $2.63 per gallon (gal) in October, up 3 cents/gal from September and 11 cents/gal higher than forecast in last month’s STEO. Average U.S. regular gasoline retail prices were higher than expected, in large part, because of ongoing issues from refinery outages in California. EIA forecasts that regular gasoline prices on the West Coast (PADD 5), a region that includes California, will fall as the issues begin to resolve. EIA expects that prices in the region will average $3.44/gal in November and $3.12/gal in December. For the U.S. national average, EIA expects regular gasoline retail prices to average $2.65/gal in November and fall to $2.50/gal in December. EIA forecasts that the annual average price in 2020 will be $2.62/gal.
  • Despite low distillate fuel inventories, EIA expects that average household expenditures for home heating oil will decrease this winter. This forecast largely reflects warmer temperatures than last winter for the entire October–March period, and retail heating oil prices are expected to be unchanged compared with last winter. For households that heat with propane, EIA forecasts that expenditures will fall by 15% from last winter because of milder temperatures and lower propane prices.
Natural gas
  • Natural gas storage injections in the United States outpaced the previous five-year (2014–18) average during the 2019 injection season as a result of rising natural gas production. At the beginning of April, when the injection season started, working inventories were 28% lower than the five-year average for the same period. By October 31, U.S. total working gas inventories reached 3,762 billion cubic feet (Bcf), which was 1% higher than the five-year average and 16% higher than a year ago.
  • EIA expects natural gas storage withdrawals to total 1.9 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) between the end of October and the end of March, which is less than the previous five-year average winter withdrawal. A withdrawal of this amount would leave end-of-March inventories at almost 1.9 Tcf, 9% higher than the five-year average.
  • The Henry Hub natural gas spot price averaged $2.33 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in October, down 23 cents/MMBtu from September. The decline largely reflected strong inventory injections. However, forecast cold temperatures across much of the country caused prices to rise in early November, and EIA forecasts Henry Hub prices to average $2.73/MMBtu for the final two months of 2019. EIA forecasts Henry Hub spot prices to average $2.48/MMBtu in 2020, down 13 cents/MMBtu from the 2019 average. Lower forecast prices in 2020 reflect a decline in U.S. natural gas demand and slowing U.S. natural gas export growth, allowing inventories to remain higher than the five-year average during the year even as natural gas production growth is forecast to slow. 
  • EIA forecasts that annual U.S. dry natural gas production will average 92.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2019, up 10% from 2018. EIA expects that natural gas production will grow much less in 2020 because of the lag between changes in price and changes in future drilling activity, with low prices in the third quarter of 2019 reducing natural gas-directed drilling in the first half of 2020. EIA forecasts natural gas production in 2020 will average 94.9 Bcf/d.
  • EIA expects U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to average 4.7 Bcf/d in 2019 and 6.4 Bcf/d in 2020 as three new liquefaction projects come online. In 2019, three new liquefaction facilities—Cameron LNG, Freeport LNG, and Elba Island LNG—commissioned their first trains. Natural gas deliveries to LNG projects set a new record in July, averaging 6.0 Bcf/d, and increased further to 6.6 Bcf/d in October, when new trains at Cameron and Freeport began ramping up. Cameron LNG exported its first cargo in May, Corpus Christi LNG’s newly commissioned Train 2 in July, and Freeport in September. Elba Island plans to ship its first export cargo by the end of this year. In 2020, Cameron, Freeport, and Elba Island expect to place their remaining trains in service, bringing the total U.S. LNG export capacity to 8.9 Bcf/d by the end of the year.
Electricity, coal, renewables, and emissions
  • EIA expects the share of U.S. total utility-scale electricity generation from natural gas-fired power plants will rise from 34% in 2018 to 37% in 2019 and to 38% in 2020. EIA forecasts the share of U.S. electric generation from coal to average 25% in 2019 and 22% in 2020, down from 28% in 2018. EIA’s forecast nuclear share of U.S. generation remains at about 20% in 2019 and in 2020. Hydropower averages a 7% share of total U.S. generation in the forecast for 2019 and 2020, down from almost 8% in 2018. Wind, solar, and other non-hydropower renewables provided 9% of U.S. total utility-scale generation in 2018. EIA expects they will provide 10% in 2019 and 12% in 2020.
  • EIA expects total U.S. coal production in 2019 to total 698 million short tons (MMst), an 8% decrease from the 2018 level of 756 MMst. The decline reflects lower demand for coal in the U.S. electric power sector and reduced competitiveness of U.S. exports in the global market. EIA expects U.S. steam coal exports to face increasing competition from Eastern European sources, and that Russia will fill a growing share of steam coal trade, causing U.S. coal exports to fall in 2020. EIA forecasts that coal production in 2020 will total 607 MMst.
  • EIA expects U.S. electric power sector generation from renewables other than hydropower—principally wind and solar—to grow from 408 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2019 to 466 billion kWh in 2020. In EIA’s forecast, Texas accounts for 19% of the U.S. non-hydropower renewables generation in 2019 and 22% in 2020. California’s forecast share of non-hydropower renewables generation falls from 15% in 2019 to 14% in 2020. EIA expects that the Midwest and Central power regions will see shares in the 16% to 18% range for 2019 and 2020.
  • EIA forecasts that, after rising by 2.7% in 2018, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will decline by 1.7% in 2019 and by 2.0% in 2020, partially as a result of lower forecast energy consumption. In 2019, EIA forecasts less demand for space cooling because of cooler summer months; an expected 5% decline in cooling degree days from 2018, when it was significantly higher than the previous 10-year (2008–17) average. In addition, EIA also expects U.S. CO2 emissions in 2019 to decline because the forecast share of electricity generated from natural gas and renewables will increase, and the share generated from coal, which is a more carbon-intensive energy source, will decrease.

Essay 47: Novels as a Kind of University Demonstrating Storms of Global Finance and Technification

Edith Wharton began writing The Age of Innocence in 1917 as a way of recalling and criticizing the world of her youth, which had not yet experienced the devastation of World War I (1914–18).  Beginning in July 1920, the novel was published in serial form in New York’s monthly Pictorial Review.

The centrality of finance and technical change can be seen. We are reminded of the very first line in The Magnifcent Ambersons of Booth Tarkington, which tells the reader that the basis of the magnificence of the Ambersons was established when they somehow benefited from the 1873 financial crisis which destroyed many others. (Whether the Ambersons were shrewd or lucky or wily is not clarified.)

The Age of Innocence is set in New York in the 1870s and the financial storm and “techno-storm” become vital:

The Panic of 1873:

In The Age of Innocence, the investment bank run by Julius Beaufort collapses, bringing shame upon him and his wife and throwing New York into a tizzy. Beaufort’s business failure is a fictionalized version of the Panic of 1873, industrial capitalism’s first worldwide depression. Then, the United States backed its currency with both silver and gold, but when Germany and several other countries stopped using silver to back their currency, the price of silver fell precipitously, devaluing U.S. currency. The U.S. Treasury made matters worse by releasing large amounts of paper money into the economy. Speculators and bankers now had to immediately pay off their debts with gold.

In 1873, a prominent investment banker by the name of Jay Cooke went bankrupt, the effects rippled throughout the entire U.S. economy, and panic ensued. Trading was suspended for two weeks on the New York Stock Exchange as company after company failed, wages dropped precipitously, and unemployment spiked. The rise of the labor movement can be traced to the widespread unrest and economic instability set off by the panic. Additionally, the panic allowed a few of the wealthiest businessmen—such as Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Cyrus McCormick, who retained access to valuable capital—to vastly increase their wealth and snuff out competitors.

Technological Advancements

Characters in The Age of Innocence are aware their world is about to be forever changed by the culture of outsiders, brought to them in part by advancements in technology. Although inventions like the telephone were on the horizon, they seemed improbably fantastic to people living in the early 1870s world of telegrams and horse-drawn carriages. However, in the final chapter, Wharton depicts Newland Archer living in a world that has been significantly altered by these technologies, a mere quarter century later.

In 1876, for example, American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) patented an early telephone and wowed audiences by demonstrating the world’s first telephone call by placing a call from one telegraph station to another five miles away.  The Western Union company refused to buy Bell’s telephone patent, claiming his invention would amount to no more than a novelty. However, the first telephone line was built in 1877-78, and after that, telephone usage skyrocketed.  At the start of the 1880s, there were almost 50,000 telephones in use, a number that swelled to over half a million by the turn of the century.

A similar large-scale change was the invention and development of electricity. Although the first electric light was developed in 1835, it was not until 1879 that American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) developed and patented a light bulb with a life span of 15 hours. Edison’s work also focused on the problems of electrical generation and conductivity.

At the same time that communication was becoming easier and the day was lengthened artificially through electric lighting, the distance between continents was shortened by advances in turbine steam engines

In the 1860s, it took between eight and nine days to cross the Atlantic Ocean; by 1907, the Mauretania (the ship that Dallas and Newland Archer take to Europe in the last chapter) makes the voyage in half that time.  This was a contributing factor to the great influx of European immigrants who arrived in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Chapter 29, Newland contemplates the “brotherhood of visionaries,” who predict a train tunnel under the Hudson River as well as “ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days … and other Arabian Night marvels.” In 1904, excavation for train tunnels under the Hudson began, directed by Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1910, New York’s Penn Station opened and began receiving traffic from electric trains that traveled through the tunnels.

Notice that the novel The Magnificent Ambersons is from 1918, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence from 1920. In each, the personal storms of private emotion are somewhat carried along and swept up into the storms coming from national and even global finance (1873 caused a tremendous crash in Germany and Austria called the “Grunderkrach” [founder’s crash]) as well as techno-waves that are very baffling to the people of the time.