The clean energy shift, how climate threatens your coffee, and taking action at home
Gernot Wagner is an economist at Columbia Business School who studies, writes, and teaches about climate risks and climate policy. He’s been on this path a long time: during Gernot’s first week as an undergraduate at Harvard, he met famed environmental economist Marty Weitzman, who would become his mentor and co-author.
At that first meeting in Weitzman’s office, Gernot asked him how he could become a climate economist, too. They spent so long talking together that Gernot almost missed a talk that Kofi Annan was giving on campus. Why did that matter? The woman who’d become his wife was there, too! (They have now been married for 22 years and have a 12-year-old son named, yes, Annan.)
When he first started, the title ‘climate economist’ was often considered an oxymoron, Gernot says. Today, though, nearly every economist understands how misguided market forces are driving this problem, and many recognize it’s essential that we re-channel them in the right direction.
I love this quote from this 2013 op-ed that Gernot and Marty Weitzman wrote together for the New York Times: “Specificity can help reduce the numbing complexity of climate change to something that we can all understand — and fear. And perhaps that is the first step in mobilizing to fix the problem.” That is why I spend so much time talking about how the things we value – chocolate, sports, our homes, beaches and more – are already being impacted by climate change. And as you can see below, Gernot does too.
Take it away, Gernot!
GOOD NEWS
The global climate race is on. It’s accelerating. It’s even “unstoppable,” according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) – not exactly an activist environmental group. To put it in more practical terms: IKEA now sells induction cooktops for under $60. In the US, IKEA has been selling solar panels for a while now and in Switzerland it’s added heat pumps. It’s only a matter of time before it makes these available globally as well.
I’m not saying that IKEA is going to solve climate change, and I am not making some naïve laissez-faire – “free markets” rah rah! Government out of the way! – argument. Far from it. But clean, green, lean technologies are getting better and cheaper so quickly that there’s simply no stopping them.
Induction cooking is a good example. Rene Redzepi, the famed chef of Copenhagen’s Noma, which boasts 20-course menus and three Michelin stars, has sworn by them for many years. No gas range comes close to induction cooktop’s precision, he says. Turns out, they are better for the rest of us, too. Your pot of water boils faster – and three times more efficiently – compared to on a gas stove. Not too long ago, going induction meant shelling out thousands of dollars for a fancy cooktop. No more.
Add to the mix heat pumps, which are three to five times more efficient than heating or cooling with gas, and it makes no sense to hook up your new home to the municipal gas line. Recent innovations to this 200-year-old technology are making them more efficient than ever. Heat pumps aren’t breaking the bank either. New York City, where I live, is now installing window heat pumps in public housing.
What if you want to cut off the gas line to your current home? That, of course, takes some money; but it pays off, too. Some European countries – in a rush to get off gas entirely, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – fund as much as 100 percent of the installation cost of new heat pumps. The US Inflation Reduction Act helps a lot, too, covering up to $8,000 for that new heat pump, $2,500 to upgrade your home’s electric wiring, $1,600 for insulation, and $840 for that induction stove that’s a lot fancier than the IKEA version – though I must say, I still don’t know what to do with the WiFi-functionality of ours.
NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS
Coffee! Well, coffee is delicious. Pouring that “cup of ambition” is what gets me up in the morning – coffee, plus trying to do my part to fix the climate crisis. And that’s where the not-so-good news comes in: as The Economist put it in January, “global warming threatens the world’s coffee supply.”
That shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point. Rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns wreak potential havocon a number of important food crops. (I’ll spare you my argument why coffee is an essential food crop, rather than just the most socially acceptable drug.)
Enter James A. Rising, a rising climate economist at the University of Delaware. (Full disclosure: he’s also my co-author on three papers.) The gist of his just-published analysis of Brazilian coffee finds that extreme weather can cause yields in any given year to collapse. One surprise storm late in the growing season, and you can kiss the entire harvest goodbye.
James combines that with “a multiyear plant death effect” to arrive at even more dire results. One year’s extreme weather event doesn’t just kill that year’s harvest, it kills the plants themselves. So one year’s climate-related storm or drought might even have a bigger effect on next year’s harvest, and the year after.
All that’s bad news, and not just for coffee addicts like myself. There’s an even bigger not-so-good news bit in the background: Science often moves at a glacial pace. It takes forever to get things just right. James graduated with his Ph.D. from Columbia in 2015. This paper was his main dissertation chapter, and it was published this January, nine years later.
In other words, science will always be behind in unearthing the full effects of climate change, and economics is even further behind in translating these climate damages into dollars and, ultimately, into impacts on our pocketbooks.
The “known knowns” are bad enough. The known unknowns – and especially the unknown unknowns – make things much worse.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Back to that $60 IKEA induction cooktop – or the overly fancy, WiFi-enabled $5,000 one, for that matter. It’s the most visible symbol of the changes that are now possible to make across your home, right there in the heart of your kitchen.
Climate action in your home comes in two parts: insulate, insulate, insulate; and electrify, electrify, electrify. And yes, also decarbonize the electric grid. That last bit, of course, shows that there is a wider system at work here. Not everything is in the immediate purview of one’s own home. But there’s just no excuse at this point to still be burning fossil fuels in your own home – if you can afford to make these changes, that is.
And that’s perhaps the most important point. Insulating and electrifying your home costs money. I should know. Four years ago, we spent about $100,000 to insulate and electrify our 750 square-foot loft apartment in a 200-year-old building in lower Manhattan. It wasn’t easy, or cheap. (Hello, WiFi-enabled stove, oven, and dishwasher!)
But today, though, things are changing so quickly that you can go electric at basically any price point. Want the fanciest of fancy induction stoves for that Architectural Digest cover shoot? Go nuts. Prefer the IKEA option? That’s cheaper than the gas stove!
In the end, prices for heat pumps, induction stoves, solar panels, and the like are technologies that can only get cheaper and better over time. Yes, there’s been quite a bit of inflation these past two years, but what’s causing those price increases? Over half can be directly attributed to a spike in fossil fuel prices. Call it “fossilflation.”
What to do in response? Get off fossil fuels! The Inflation Reduction Act got its name for good reason. That won’t happen overnight, of course, but there’s no doubt getting off fossil fuels is the right step. Why wait until the next time fossil fuel prices spike again? (After all, oil, coal, and gas are commodities. And their prices have and will always fluctuate.)
And yes, personal action can make a big difference. Especially when you share what you are learning and doing with all your friends, family, and neighbors, to encourage them to make these changes too.
From Katharine Hayhoe’s “Talking Climate” newsletter, published 24 February 2024.
