Many Climate ‘Solutions’ Come With Big Helpings Of Motivated Thinking

The short list of climate actions that will work has a chunk devoted to distractions, purported climate solutions that mostly aren’t. As we work to aggressively decarbonize our world for our own benefit and the benefit of future generations, we often find ourselves dealing with people who for a variety of reasons, have the wrong end of the stick. They are pushing the distractions hard. And others are claiming actual solutions aren’t solutions. But why are they and why are people listening to them?

Let’s start with the bleedingly obvious. We all have cognitive biases. If you think you don’t, I would recommend reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast & Slow. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics despite being a psychologist by overturning homo economicus, the robotic, unbiased and perfectly rational creature at the heart of so many economic models, filling the gap where actual humans live. His prospect theory, developed with Amos Tversky, quantified and validated the reality that we humans fear potential loss more than we desire potential gain.

It’s far from the only bias. Confirmation bias simply means that if we think something is true already, we tend to downplay the credibility of evidence that challenges it, and consider more credible evidence that supports it, regardless of the actual quality of the evidence. This is easy to see with climate change deniers, for example, who get a meme from Facebook and think that they’ve discovered something that climate scientists ignored.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is rife as well. That’s the situation where people with little knowledge of a domain arrogantly assume that they have a great deal of knowledge, while actual experts are much more strongly aware of the limitations of their knowledge.

It’s been relatively easy for the people fighting to delay climate action to create messaging that targets our messy human thinking, creating fear instead of hope and conspiracy ideation instead of rationality. They built on the same techniques used for tobacco, and often with the same organizations and ‘experts’.

Personally, we have to confront our own cognitive biases in order to ensure that what we are are working on is as good as we think it is. That’s hard. It’s typically much easier to see cognitive biases in others, as Kahneman notes in the foreword to his book, recommending it be fodder for enlightening water cooler discussions that improve the thinking of teams.

There are many cognitive biases that are making the transition much slower than it needs to be. Let’s start with industrial heat. It’s a big climate problem as so much of it comes from burning fossil fuels for limestone kilns, blast furnaces and phospate manufacturing, among many others.

There are no chemical or industrial processes that can’t use electricity for heat via heat pumps, electric arc furnaces, electric gas plasmas, induction heating and a host of other existing technologies. But innumerable people are claiming that heat can’t be electrified. Why?

Well, when someone in an industrial plant is working to decarbonize their heat, the first problem is that they often frame the question incorrectly. They ask what gas or liquid they can burn tomorrow which is cleaner than the gas or liquid they burn today, instead of framing the question as being about energy. No harm and no foul for that. It’s part of cognitive biases to get the framing wrong, and it’s something we all have to work on.

But that leads them to ask their gas or liquid supplier what cleaner gas or liquid they will sell them in the future. And here’s where a big problem occurs. The vendor doesn’t sell electricity. They sell gasses or liquids. They are strongly motivated to tell their existing customer that they will be able to sell them something cleaner to burn tomorrow, and further that it will be almost exactly the same and cheap. Further, they’ll be strongly motivated to say that electricity can’t possibly solve the client’s problem.

None of that is true. They may believe it’s true, although that’s doubtful. As Upton Sinclair pointed out, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

There’s a similar problem with carbon capture and sequestration, something that is in the set of distractions. Accepting that we have to change is hard, so when the fossil fuel industry tells us that we don’t have to change anything, we’ll just vacuum the greenhouse gases out of the air and put them underground, it’s a very tempting pitch.

And it’s nonsense. The fossil fuel industry understands that very well. They know that the energy and costs of capturing a fraction of the greenhouse gases their products emit along their entire value stream from extraction to use make them uncompetitive without completely unproductive governmental subsidies. They know that burning coal, gas and oil makes a gas massing up to three times the mass of the fuel, and that the gas is much less dense. They know that carbon capture is relatively ineffective, capturing perhaps 90% of the gas when it’s working at all.

They know that every carbon capture solution that’s been bolted onto fossil fuel generation plants has been an economic failure. They know that every million ton plus carbon sequestration facility they brag about simply takes long sequestered carbon dioxide out of the ground in one place and puts into the ground in another in order to get more oil out or to harvest tax dollars. They know that transportation can’t do carbon capture at the tailpipe. And they know that squeezing carbon dioxide out of the air after it’s mixed in is economic and energetic foolishness.

None of that stops the fossil fuel industry and their paid propagandists and lobbyists from painting the opposite picture. They create fear of loss — remember prospect theory? — with tales of economic failures without fossil fuels, then they paint pictures of solutions that will enable us to continue using them. They are lying to everyone, and sometimes even to themselves.

The same is true of hydrogen, of course. Without that slippery molecule being the basis for energy for economies, the fossil fuel reserves that have massive amounts of it bound up in them are worth pennies on the dollar. So the fossil fuel industry is highly motivated to pretend that hydrogen is an energy solution instead of a climate problem on the same scale as aviation.

The industry finds willing accomplices, of course. The governments that have significant portions of their gross domestic products bound to fossil fuels are motivated to believe the beguiling lies of the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s financiers and investors, typically people without STEM literacy and a very large debt or equity stake in the fossil fuel firms, are easy marks, very motivated to believe that their counterparts are telling them the truth.

Similarly, the manufacturers of internal combustion engines, Wärtsilä, Man, Cummings, Bosch and many others, are highly motivated to believe that they will be able to burn synthetic fuels or hydrogen in variants of their existing technology. Unless that’s true, 90% or more of their business disappears in the coming decades. And they have willing listeners too, people who are wondering what cleaner gas or liquid they will burn instead of realizing that they won’t be burning anything for transportation outside of longer haul aviation and shipping.

Then there’s the nuclear industry. Back in the early 2000s, it was very reasonable to think that renewables weren’t going to cut it, and that only nuclear could do the heavy lifting of decarbonizing electricity. And a lot of people became committed to that solution, just as others became committed to hydrogen. Once you’ve established a personal brand and public position on something being a solution, it’s quite hard for most people to admit that they were wrong and stop flagellating the deceased equine.

But now we have global empirical proof that renewables in very high penetrations are easy to manage in reliable grids, that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electrical generation we’ve yet discovered, and that wind and solar scale a lot more quickly and can be built in vastly more countries than nuclear. But for the people committed to nuclear energy, it’s hard to accept that evidence. It contradicts their biases, so they reject it. This doesn’t mean nuclear doesn’t have a role to play in the coming years, mostly in countries that already have aging fleets, but it’s in the set of distractions for a reason.

And nuclear advocates have, once again, a lot of people very willing to listen to them. Unions have a lot of nuclear workers, so unions tend to like nuclear a lot. The politicians of towns, counties and states with existing nuclear tend to be easy marks for considering nuclear as an option. The people who haven’t quite managed to get into the 21st Century and ignore the economic and energy success of wind and solar are willing listeners. Countries with nuclear weapons programs or aspirations to nuclear weapons programs like to hear tales of the synergies between commercial and military nuclear programs.

There are also a lot of people biased against biofuels, for historical reasons. They often are the same people who are biased against the Green Revolution technologies and companies which have been essential to feeding our eight billion people, and which are essential for solving agriculture’s climate problem as well. In the USA, subsidies to corn farmers to grow corn for first generation ethanol biofuel have become a political third rail. No politician of any leaning is willing to say that this is wasteful nonsense because it would cost them votes.

And so, they throw the biofuel baby out with the corn ethanol bathwater. Second generation biofuels use waste crop stalks, timber waste, food waste and livestock dung to manufacture the limited number of biofuels we will actually require for longer haul aviation and shipping. But for those biased against biofuels, this much more virtuous circle clearly can’t be correct, because it doesn’t align with their pre-existing biases.

We all have work to do on our biases. I work on mine constantly. I’m always looking for the larger framing so that I am comparing all major possible solutions, not just a subset of them. For example, that means I compare hydrogen and synthetic fuels to grid-ties, batteries and biofuels, and find that the latter three are much more economically effective as well as being climate friendly. Broadening the frame avoids cognitive traps.

I’m always looking for empirical data from the real world to test my hypotheses. In 2014 it was intuitively clear to me that wind and solar would scale much more rapidly than nuclear because of massive parallelization of manufacturing, distribution and construction. And so I started looking at the largest natural experiment in the world, China, which had national strategic programs for nuclear, wind and solar. Renewables are growing exponentially in China, while nuclear growth is flat.

When some piece of evidence makes me feel uncomfortable, I take that as a potential sign of cognitive dissonance between my biases and the evidence, and lean into looking at the evidence more closely. I don’t reject it out of hand, but work to understand why it makes me uncomfortable.

When I’m proven wrong, simply because I got something wrong or the march of time has changed the conditions, I accept that I am wrong, and rework my assumptions and solutions. Something similar is attributed to Keynes among many others: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

And, obviously, I pay attention to motivated thinking on the part of those who have a vested interest in selling us solutions from the past for problems of the present and future. You should too.

As a reminder, here’s the short list of climate actions that will work:

• Electrify everything
• Overbuild renewable generation
• Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets
• Build pumped hydro and other storage
• Plant a lot of trees
• Change agricultural practices
• Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes
• Price carbon aggressively
• Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively
• Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel
• Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration
• Ignore distractions
• Pay attention to motivations