Weekly Wrap 6.6.2024

Project Innerspace’s Geothermal Maps are out. Project Innerspace is a project to map all the potential for geothermal resources in the United States. As you can see if you play around with it there is some interesting potential not just in the US West but also Texas, West Virginia and even around the coast. The appeal of geothermal is that it can play very well with renewables because you can charge a reservoir with heat when the sun is shining and extract the energy later as well as being a direct heat source which is useful when the sun is not shining as it tends not to do in winter.

Silver has risen markedly this year on the back of increased precious metal demand but also much higher intensity of use in current solar designs. Recent announcements in trade magazines indicate this may be coming to an end - manufacturers are now laser focussed on thrifting silver using new metallization techniques or getting rid of silver entirely as in the case of Sundrive. It seems the cure for high prices is still high prices.

Direct electrification: plenty of room to run. This combined report from Agora Energiewende and Fraunhofer shows just how much space there is to expand electrification of heat for industry.

A major appeal of electrified heat for large grid models is that industrial heating often has some tolerances around the heat range - you can modulate power demand as demand response without messing up whatever process you are running to make something, and some processes are more “batch” like where you can simply choose not to run the plant at peak hours as is the case for electric arc steel manufacturing. Batteries are great but demand response is better and generally cheaper. I have not seen any work done characterizing how all the major industrial processes can or cannot participate in demand response - if anyone has one, let me know because this is going to be important for working out how much storage is actually required.

GLP-1s are great, but so is urban design: This study outlined below shows how walkability and all the insights of Jane Jacobs remain relevant to human health and happiness today. This makes the preferences of NIMBYs all the more strange - even modest uplift in density is associated with much better health outcomes:

Non-single-family homes (indicator of mixed land use), sidewalks (indicator of walkability), and green streets (indicator of neighborhood aesthetics) were associated with reduced diabetes and obesity. Zip codes in the third tertile for non-single-family homes were associated with a 15% reduction (PR: 0.85; 95% CI: 0.79, 0.91) in obesity and a 20% reduction (PR: 0.80; 95% CI: 0.70, 0.91) in diabetes. This tertile was also associated with a BMI reduction of −0.68 kg/m2 (95% CI: −0.95, −0.40)

“Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle”. Often the world can seem incredibly complex and hard to characterize or understand. In statistics or machine learning dimensionality reduction techniques seek to reduce phenomena to underlying drivers that can parsimoniously describe the world. Principal components analysis, independent components analysis, latent factor analysis - all these methods try to tease out a few clear signals from a whole lot of noise. What I find amazing in this paper is that it manages to significantly reduce political ideology into a continuum from universalism to parochialism. There is plenty more to it of course but that is clearly a key driver in views. The bigger someone defines their “in group” the more liberal they are and vice versa.

With this knowledge you can get some deep insights about what works and what does not in politics.

Screaming at conservatives and calling them heartless bastards generally does not work: they simply care differently, and this behaviour polarizes them against you. I have seen this approach taken time and again and it never works. What does work is if you can explain the problem is a collective action one - like climate change - and that some out-group cooperation improves likelihood of success, lowers costs or some mixture thereof. Similarly if you can move the scale of cooperation to something lower and more local uptake the range of what is possible politically tends to improve. Appeals to national security and resilience for climate action sells far better than things that happen at the UN.

Another phenomenon I and others have noticed is that extreme liberal left people seem to have poorer mental health. Burnout, depression and anxiety seems endemic among activists. My theory for this is that this is mostly empathy burnout as described here. People who care - and feel the pain - of everything everywhere all at once are unsurprisingly inclined to burn out. Interventions that seem to work include meditation and oddly, compassion meditation. As noted in this article in Scientific American on Richard Davidson’s work:

This form of meditation on love and compassion has proved to be more than just a spiritual exercise. It has shown potential to benefit health care workers, teachers and others who run the risk of emotional burnout linked to the distress experienced from a deeply empathetic reaction to another person's plight.

The clear delineation here is between compassion - wanting to resolve a problem and wishing it to be so - and empathy which is just living the same pain. Matthieu Ricards book Altruism is excellent throughout on this. The key is to not dwell and take a more agentic view focussing on what you can do to fix it. This practical action orientation means more gets done but also people can chase the dopamine rush of getting things done rather than falling into a depressive hole. The effectiveness gap between certain kinds of left activists and conservative ones may be attributable to this - the relentless grind of minor victories does not appeal to those who need to do everything all at once with Messiah complex intact - but they do compound over time. Look at the Supreme Court.

There are practical folks on the left who just want to get it done and they seem happier, healthier and all the better for it. Climate policy is becoming more about simply building the thing faster and building broader coalitions to make that happen. With that in mind I hope a sizable chunk of the environmental movement discovers the pleasures of getting stuff done versus extreme in-group extremism competitions for donor funding. Donors can change a lot here - and they really should at this point.

Folks who like to use the word “problematize” generally have aesthetic issues with elements of current Biden era climate policy but seldom can point to issues of effectiveness. As Heatmap notes today, the IRA is likely to be very Trump survivable which could not be said for any climate or energy policy prior. I am reminded of a dialogue in the Vimalakirti Sutra described here:

The hard left view is the world is irredeemable or perhaps impossible and that any good outcome is not going to fit their world view. David Wallace-Wells work certainly carries a certain kind of energy along these lines and it tends to lead to a depressive view of things. I think this is not useful - the possibilities are a lot wider than anyone’s imaginings and, besides, that is not how to get stuff done from here which is going to require a very open mind and a lot of energy - both psychic and physical.