Alternative to Russian Oil: Clean Energy?

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now our climate story of the week. We're featuring at least one climate related conversation on the show every week at least through August because like the frog in the pot of water, we don't necessarily feel like we're slowly boiling to death unless we pay attention early enough. Today's climate question of the week, can the embargo against oil, gas and coal from Russia become an opportunity for a faster permanent transition away from fossil fuels? There's a lot of energy to make up. Russia is the main exporter of oil and natural gas to the European Union.

The Russian finance minister said last year that the country's daily revenues from fossil fuels added up to about $500 million per day that according to Reuters. What will replace all that energy? Well, Republicans and fossil fuel trade groups here in the United States say that the solution is more domestic drilling and beefed-up gas exports to Europe, and with a spike in gasoline prices being exacerbated by the embargo even Democratic politicians are now trying to make it easier to get gasoline. Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont just announced what he calls a gasoline tax holiday in the nutmeg state.

New Jersey Congressman Josh Gottheimer spoke out yesterday for increased domestic fossil fuel production and more investment in renewables but only for the long term, just two examples from the last day. We always seem to talk about transitions to renewables as something down the road. We're asking can the embargo spur a faster transition that's good for justice for Ukraine now, and also good for all humanity trying to stave off climate catastrophe down the road? With us now one of the most recognizable voices who says we can use the embargo as a climate opportunity, it's Bill McKibben.

Bill McKibben educator, environmentalist and co-founder of the climate activism group three fifty.org, and author of several books, including his most recent from 2020 called Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? He put an intriguing post on his sub-stack blog the other day, which inspired this invitation called Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom. Hi, there. Welcome back to WNYC. Great to have you with us.

Bill McKibben: Good to be with you as always, Brian.

Brian: Let's jump right in, Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom. I think most people don't even know what a heat pump is or what it has to do with global warming.

Bill McKibben: Absolutely. All right, let's start at the beginning. A heat pump is great new technology now well proven. In fact, I'm sitting in a nice warm house courtesy of one at the moment. Think of them as a air conditioner that also works in reverse. They're an electric appliance that takes the ambient heat from the air outside and produces heat for your home. They're far more efficient than the gas furnace or oil boiler that might be in your basement and they're now affordable and ready to go. The reason that I brought them up is that they're one of the technologies that we might be able to help supply in quantity to Europe and have installed before it gets cold again next fall, when Putin's biggest leverage is control over the energy supply of Western Europe comes into play.

Think of it as LendLease part two, that's what we did before World War II to help supply the Brits and others with material to get them through the early years of Hitler's war. This is a good way to help take some of the strain, some of the leverage away from Putin.

Brian: This would be a big lift at the scale that would be needed and so you call on Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act, which people will remember from the beginning of the pandemic when it looked like there weren't going to be enough ventilators, and people were saying invoke the Defense Production Act to force companies to make ventilators, a lot of ventilators right away. Are you talking about the President of the United States doing that with respect to heat pumps for Europe?

Bill McKibben: Indeed, the Defense Production Act has been invoked apparently about 50 times since it was passed during the Korean War. Both Trump and Biden used it to help spur the pace of vaccine production, and Joe Biden used it last year when the wild fires in California apparently decimated our supply of fire hose in America. He used the defense production act to get a factory in Oklahoma churning out miles and miles of hose for fire crews to use. It's not as if this is something we've never done before. This is a particularly good moment because a; look, let's be very clear, the war in Ukraine may not be a war for fossil fuel, which is something that you could say about some of our adventures perhaps in the Middle East, but it's definitely a war funded by fossil fuel.

As you point out 60% of Putin's export earnings come from oil and gas, and a war whose leverage depends on fossil fuel. It's not as if Putin is the only autocrat who benefits the longer we stay addicted to fossil fuel. Look, the king of Saudi Arabia is having a windfall this month too, thanks to what's happening in Russia as the price of oil goes up. We've been back for the first time trying to persuade the Venezuelans to start pumping more oil on and on and on. The sooner we get off this stuff, the better because nobody, not even Vladimir Putin has any method for embargoing sunshine or blocking the wind.

Brian: Listeners, we can take phone calls for environmentalist Bill McKibben or tweets on our climate question of the week, can the oil and gas embargo against Russia, be used as an opportunity to move more permanently more quickly away from fossil fuels, 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. I'm glad you brought up what you just brought up, Bill about some of the other non-democracies in the world and their relationship to energy production. The energy consuming world has been somewhat at the mercy of the energy producing meaning fossil fuel producing world.

For some time, the US has long been skeptical of Germany's dependence on Russian energy exports. For example, Trump made a big deal about that as a distraction away from he's enabling Putin, but he wasn't necessarily wrong on the issue. This country has gone to war for oil in the Middle East, and propped up some bad governments there because of our dependency, and you mentioned getting ready to do business with Venezuela in a different way than we've been doing. In a larger sense, how do you see the relationship between energy and autocracy?

Bill McKibben: Well, fossil fuel, coal, gas and oil is concentrated in a few deposits around the world. The people who happen to sit on top of or control those deposits end up with way more power than they deserve. Putin is one example. The Saudis are another. It's not like the Saudis have interesting ideas about the world, they just beheaded 81 people the day before yesterday for daring to disagree with them. This extends in a slightly different, less grotesque fashion into our own country. Our biggest oil and gas parents are the Koch brothers, who built one of the biggest fortunes on Earth controlling oil and gas pipelines and they used it to buy one of our two political parties.

Everywhere it goes, fossil fuel leads to that concentration in power. Sun and wind are ubiquitous. There's some of them everywhere and so a world that runs on them won't be perfect, it won't get rid of all the problems on the planet, but it will tend towards less concentration of power. At this point, that would be a very good thing. Even absent the fact that we have to do this anyway. It's worth remembering that it was on day two of Putin's invasion, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, put out their most dire warnings yet. The Secretary, the general of UN said, "I've never seen a scientific paper like this in my life."

It's unclear to me what we're waiting for, except that the endless toxic vested interest of the fossil fuel industry gets in the way. Just yesterday, they managed to use their power on Capitol Hill to kill the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to the Fed. Why? Because she was the first nominee to the Fed, who would raise serious questions about whether there shouldn't be more oversight of the banking relationships with fossil fuel industry. I wrote an op-ed earlier this week with an old colleague of mine in Ukraine, Lana Ramco living in a city that's being bombarded at the moment. The point of the op-ed that we wrote together was the time has come to ask these questions about in particular, the banks that continue to finance all this.

It's time for people to stop trying to make a profit off climate change and off autocracy. That's clearly what they've been doing because no one's had any illusions about climate change or about Vladimir Putin for the last 20 years.

Brian: All right, you've got your proposal, Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom to help you Europe provide enough energy for itself without the oil and gas that they're now embargoing at least to some degree from Russia. We're getting a lot of calls about heat pumps. Let's talk to Elizabeth in Huntington, you're on WNYC with Bill McKibben. Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hi, thanks very much for taking my call. Hi, Mr. McKibben. Thanks for 350. We've been to several of the marches we think you're great.

Bill McKibben: Thank you.

Elizabeth: I'm curious about how you keep your house warm with a heat pump. We have installed heat pumps in two different houses and we love it for the air conditioning, but because they're installed so high on the wall, we don't find it effective for getting much heat. Do you have a method for making that work?

Bill McKibben: That's interesting. Ours are installed more at floor level, but they work great. It's one of these technologies that's been getting steadily better. The latest, as with say induction cooktops or things, the more of them we make the better we get at them. I think they're now at the point where everybody from wire cutter on down has been saying, this is a route to go. We're very lucky because ours are connected to the solar panels outside our house just as our vehicle is so we can cut out the middle man on all of this.

It is worth noting too, that one of the advantages of getting off gas and oil is electricity prices don't fluctuate in the way that gas prices do. I tweeted out last week someone should remind the Cable News Network that the sun is delivering energy for the same price it was last week. That's the world we're headed towards and it's much less politically volatile or crazy than the one we're in now.

Brian: Elizabeth, thank you for your question. Well, the power transmission grid system in the United States is also vulnerable. There's a little bit of concern over whether mass electrification like heat pumps, more electric cars, so on may overwhelm it. Is that a concern for you?

Bill McKibben: Well, all these things are concerns. It's not going to be easy to build out the electrified world that we desperately need, but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier Brian than trying to cope with the overheated world we get instead. It's not like we have our choices between don't do anything and just stay pat because we know where that choice is taking us. You've gone through hurricane Sandy, you saw the remnants of hurricane Idaho last August. You have some visceral sense of the world that we're building, if we don't get on top of this fast and the technical challenges, but they're not by any means insurmountable.

That's what human engineer OD is for. I think the point about the moment that we're in right now with Ukraine is it's one of those moments we might actually cease to put human ingenuity to work in a quick powerful way.

Brian: Give us your suggestion number two, heat pumps built in large numbers through the Defense Production Act to send to Europe to compensate without more fossil fuel exports for the oil and gas embargo Russia there. What else?

Bill McKibben: Well, there's no limit to the number of things that you could be doing. One of the other things that apparently America has a great deal of spare capacity and Europe needs is the simplest of all devices, insulation. I don't know whether you've spent much time in the UK, Brian, but one of the things that everybody notices over there is houses are cold and that turns out to be because they often lack insulation. Well, we've got factories that can turn it out. Why not? We're in a moment when we're happily and correctly sending billions of dollars' worth of weapons off to help the Ukrainians.

These are different kind of weapons. They don't kill anybody. They do all kinds of good in the long run, but they're also effective weapons in that arsenal.

Brian: Here's another heat pumps question, David in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Bill McKibben. Hi, David.

David: Oh, hi there. Thanks for taking my call. Hi, Mr. McKibben. I just wanted to ask a quick question about heat pumps in residential apartment buildings. I live in a building which has an ancient gas boiler that's incredibly inefficient. How can air source heat pumps be used in a residential apartment building? Are they as like a hybrid solution or are there ones that are now effective enough to do the heating in an entire apartment building?

Bill McKibben: That's a very good question that I don't know the answer to. I think they've often been deployed unit by unit in apartment buildings the way that people often deploy air conditioners, but we may be reaching the point when we've got larger solutions for this. This is one of these really important questions that New York is going to be on the forefront of exploring. As you know the City Council and the mayor in the last days of the de Blasio administration agreed on this plan to retrofit big buildings across New York City to make them far more energy efficient and to save a lot of money in the process.

This is a really good thing to be having your apartment board or whatever it is take up as soon as possible with the HVAC contractor, because I bet there's some emerging solutions that are probably New York specific.

Brian: Do you agree that there has to be some short-term accommodation for people suffering under spiking fossil fuel prices like gasoline prices while we ramp up renewables production? Things like gasoline tax holidays. I was somewhat surprised to see the Democratic governor of Connecticut announce a temporary suspension of part of their gasoline tax that'll take effect next week, and short-term increases in domestic drilling. Do we need to also do those things for the short-term?

Bill McKibben: Well, short-term increases in domestic drilling don't get you very far because they're actually not short-term it takes a long time to bring any of this online. Bringing LNG off to Germany and things is a two, three-year process--

Brian: Liquid natural gas.

Bill McKibben: -that's what we shouldn't be doing. If people have to do something over the next couple of weeks, then, whatever, it's not going to break the back of the climate system or anything else. The point is to make sure that it is coupled with aggressive real promises to move fast on what we actually need to do, which is renewable energy. Unless we do, we'll never break the grip of autocrats around the world, and obviously we won't do anything on climate change. I will say that the one useful part of high gas prices is it's reminding an awful lot of people that they'd really rather move sooner rather than later to the future, which is cars that don't require gasoline, or bikes or buses both of which can and should be electrified quickly. I think New York City's actually headed in that direction with its bus fleet now.

Brian: Yes. Listener tweets please ask McKibben about price controls as the only way to immediately bring down oil prices. Doesn't contradict using current situation to push for quicker switch to renewables, the person writes, but better than increasing production which won't result in quick impact on price anyhow.

Bill McKibben: Sounds good to me and I note that there's some of the senators on Capitol Hill, who I trust on these issues are arguing now for a windfall profits tax as well. Clearly this meets every definition of a windfall. There's no reason that Exxon and Shell or whatever should continue to reap huge profits on the backs of the people of Ukraine. All of this the real point is we have to be able to break the political power of those industries before they take us any further down this road. That's why I was so crushed yesterday by the defeat of Sarah Bloom Raskin for her nomination to the Fed, because that was a point, a real pressure point, where we might have been able to get Wall Street starting to move in the right direction. Instead, Joe Manchin who's taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else in Washington, not an easy contest to win, put the kibosh on her nomination. She's one of the smartest people and she's already served on the Fed. Been approved unanimously by the Senate before but this time around because she got into crosshairs of the fossil fuel industry, no dice.

Brian: We're almost out of time but I will note again that we're getting so many pieces of advice with respect to heat pumps after you raised there's a global geo-politics climate saving issue. We're getting granular level stuff like a listener tweets, "Does the lady from Huntington have fans to distribute the heat from the high vents? Ceiling or free-standing fans would circulate the hot air instead of it collecting at the ceiling." I guess hot air does after all rise.

Bill McKibben: Rise.

Brian: One more, Merrick in Westfield you're going to be our last caller with environmentalist Bill McKibben. Hi, Merrick.

Merrick: Good morning, sir and I'm so pleased to hear this subject on the public radio. A long-time listener, few times caller. I do install floor heating for the last 17 years. I'm not plugging in my business I'm just plugging in the concept. Electric floor heating just like the electric heat pumps is in the floor, the floor has to be ceramic, no wood or anything else. It creates a zone where you are basically supplementing the heat pumps. I would call it a hybrid heating so here you are in a room where the floor is warm, the rest of the room is semi-warm but it feels pleasant.

If you add a heat pump to that you have 100% efficient system that could be powered by solar panels because it's all-electric. Takes me about three hours to install a floor heat on a sub-floor before it's tiled. Say about 100 square feet and you install it only where you walk, not everywhere so it's a pretty simple concept. It's been around a long time.

Brian: Yes. Awesome Merrick, thank you very much.

Bill McKibben: Good stuff. Good stuff, thank you. Yes, it's not that we lack, we don't lack technological options, Brian. We have them, they're affordable what we need is will to make them happen. This is the kind of situation that could create will so let's use it.

Brian: You're giving individual homeowners ideas obviously, but last question on your proposal for the United States to produce many heat pumps and send them to Europe to compensate for the oil, for the Russian fossil fuels that they're embargoing, what you call Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom, do you have any takers in DC? Have you gotten a response from the Biden administration or is anybody carrying this for you in Congress?

Bill McKibben: Oddly enough both the Times and The Poster reported that it's getting moved from sub-stack quickly to the west wing and is getting serious consideration as part of this suite of things that they are trying to do for Europe. We shall see but it's good that the conversation is reaching those levels quickly. Usually, ideas take too many years to marinate in our nation's capital, but in emergencies sometimes things move fast, and time is the one thing we desperately need in all these emergencies.

Brian: All right, Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom. You heard it here in our climate story of the week on the Brian Lehrer Show. We thank Bill McKibben, educator, environmentalist, and co-founder of the climate activism group 350.org. Bill, we always appreciate it.

Bill McKibben: Always a pleasure, take care friend.

 

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