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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Before we go on to our next conversation-- and heads up those of you who may have been listening to the previous segment very closely because you work in the mental health field or know people who do. We're working on this year's Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being, which we give out each year. This year it's to honor people who work in and around schools making an impact, specifically on the social and emotional well-being of children in our area.

Of course, we all know there are so many people who've been doing important work helping our children since the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic and back into in-person school and in-person social interactions more. So many children who have needed social and emotional counseling. If you know someone doing this work and would like to nominate them as perhaps exceptional in this field, we are looking for some people like that to honor. Really, we're honoring the whole field of people who work in social and emotional well-being for children.

If you would like to nominate any groups or individuals who you know personally or you know professionally or who you think are doing exceptional work in social and emotional learning for children, we invite you to go to our website and just submit their names and we'll follow up from there. You can go to wnyc.org/lehrerawards2023. That's wnyc.org/lehrerawards2023. Thanks for nominating someone if you think they are worthy. All right?

Onward. Now, our climate story of the week. We do this every Tuesday on The Brian Lehrer Show now. Last week, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released its latest assessment report. Now, one detail from the report caught our eye, "Human aerosol pollution, for all its risks to the environment and to our health, has partially mitigated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and therefore global warming." We're going to focus on that detail, which my guest, journalist Ryan Cooper, has written about on the climate news site Heatmap.

We'll talk about some of President Biden's climate agenda, including what Ryan calls "Biden's Climate Betrayal" in a recent decision. Ryan Cooper is managing editor of The American Prospect and host of the Left Anchor podcast, no doubt about where he's coming from, and he joins me now. Ryan, thanks for joining. Welcome to WNYC.

Ryan: Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with a simple, what are aerosols?

Ryan: Sure, yes. Aerosols are just basically tiny particles, and they can be of all sorts of different materials. Sulfur dioxide is a real common one that comes from burning diesel fuel and coal, but you can also get them from forest fires or dust storms, or even ocean sprays - believe it or not - is a fairly significant source of aerosols. Yes, when they get up into the stratosphere they reflect sunlight, and so they make the earth a little bit cooler by reflecting some of that sunlight energy back out into space.

Brian Lehrer: Although wasn't it not that many years ago when we were blaming aerosols for a lot of the depletion of the ozone layer? Even in consumer products like hairsprays and things like that, and that got turned around?

Ryan: Yes. That's kind of a different type of aerosol-like spray that uses a refrigerant. The refrigerant that they use was a particular type of chemical that got up into the atmosphere and would react with high-energy light and create molecules that would destroy the ozone layer. These are different. The aerosols in this context are talking about not refrigerant chemicals, but these little tiny particles. They may have an effect on the ozone. There's a body that looks at the ozone hole and how it's being repaired slowly over time. They've looked at the possibilities of doing sulfur dioxide injections into the stratosphere on purpose, and they concluded it probably wouldn't affect the ozone by that much.

Brian Lehrer: Got it. That's just useful for people who remember aerosols from that story, but you're describing an irony where a source of pollution from fossil fuels or a type of pollution from fossil fuels actually helps mitigate global warming. Right?

Ryan: That's right, yes. Coal-fired power plants are being phased out. Diesel has gotten a lot cleaner. One of the biggest sources of this is ocean shipping. Up until quite recently, these big container ships were allowed to use the stuff called bunker fuel, which is basically this tarry residue that's left over after everything else has been refined out of crude oil. This stuff has like 3,000 times as much sulfur in it as regular diesel does, but there were regulations finally in 2020 to sharply cut the amount of sulfur that was allowed to be used in container ships. They cut it by like 86%. International regulations.

There was a NASA story, or a study rather, that found that the ship tracks, which are these clouds that you can see from space that are created by all the ships going in the corridors where they move back and forth between countries, you could see these tracks coming up from all these polluted molecules that would come up and they would create unusual types of clouds. Well, those clouds are going down by quite a lot. That's good for the breathability of the air on the ground especially, but it is having this effect and the effect of reducing our cooling, and it could be very large.

So far, according to the IPCC, we've warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius. The cooling effect is very uncertain, but they say it could be between 0 degrees and 0.8 degrees.

Brian Lehrer: This is the kind of dilemma we hope to never have, right? On the one hand, we shouldn't have to breathe in toxic pollutants at ground level, but on the other hand, something that mitigates global warming is good. I'm having a hard time getting my brain to side on the side of pollution.

Ryan: Yes. It's difficult, but I think that the thing to realize about this is that you wouldn't want to just go back and put the filthy bunker fuel back in the shipping ships. You could do it with sulfur dioxide, for instance. You can just take a plane and you put it directly up in the stratosphere far away from where anyone would be breathing it and sort of release it in that way.

Brian Lehrer: Uh-huh. Like that.

Ryan: Also, it's not necessary to use sulfur dioxide. That's just the most commonly proposed one. You could possibly use ocean water to replicate the ocean spray aerosol, like I was saying before. That's one reason why we need to be studying this stuff. Both to know about the potential size of the effect, but also to figure out what may be the best, cheapest, least dangerous possible option that could compensate for this cooling effect that is going away in a safe fashion without all the terrible effects of burning heavily sulfur-polluted fuel near big cities.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You're pretty clear in your articles on this that an aerosol program wouldn't be a climate panacea. You're right. It would be a flawed temporary measure to buy us time, but we have to be realistic about the space of political possibility, particularly when it comes to the limits of influence on the other global superpower.

Ryan: Yes, and that--

Brian Lehrer: Did you look at the-- Oh, go ahead. Go ahead on that.

Ryan: I want to emphasize that part because Americans can be a little self-centered about this stuff, partly because we are largely responsible for historic emissions, but today China emits more than the United States and the EU put together by 60%. It's by far the biggest emitter. What are we going to do about that aside-- We're going to threaten to invade them or something? That's up to them. They're working on it in China. They're working on it quite hard, in fact, but it's just not happening nearly fast enough.

Brian Lehrer: That's another climate dilemma, isn't it? Because I think progressive thinking is that there should be more leeway for developing countries with a lot of people in poverty to develop industrially like the United States and Western Europe have taken the privilege of doing with their technology and their money. Ideally, it would be the kinds of subsidies that are in some of the climate agreements for developing countries to produce renewable energy more quickly and bypass the fossil fuel industrialization phase. That's not entirely possible at this point, I think it's fair to say.

Developing countries get a little more leeway, and then the dilemma is, in which category do we view China if it's the most massive climate polluter, but on the other hand is having some success in bringing a billion people out of poverty? It's a dilemma.

Ryan: Yes, it's a dilemma. Though I would say that it's less so than we might have thought like 10 years ago. The fact is that today renewable energy is cheaper than any other form. The cheapest energy in human history, cheaper even than gas now. Gas also, as we've learned from Putin's invasion of Ukraine, carries a huge price risk. Maybe it'll be cheaper in the future, but you never know when it's going to go back up again for some reason. I think developing countries, India is the big question mark here. If they went the China way we're cooked, literally.

Brian Lehrer: Another billion people being developed in a way that would make it the number one or two climate polluter. Right.

Ryan: Yes, but anyone sensible just on business grounds, just over the last couple of years it's suddenly just become the case that if you want to develop you go zero carbon almost across the board. It just doesn't make sense to do it otherwise. The energy transition is just not happening fast enough. You look at the IPCC report. We've done a lot, but on our current policy trajectory, we're going to hit 3 degrees probably. It might be much more than that if climate sensitivity turns out to be different than they think or we hit some feedback loops like the polar ice cap melts or something like that.

Having this sort of policy in our back pocket to basically shave the peak, as they call the peak-shaving policy, to give us time to get our emissions down, I think it's just-- We won't be able to avoid it. One of the big countries is going to try it sooner or later, I suspect.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking to Ryan Cooper, if you're just joining us, who writes about climate science and climate politics for the climate news site Heatmap News. He's also the managing editor of The American Prospect. We can take a phone call or two on what we're talking about regarding aerosols or these other climate stories we're also touching on. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Ryan, you just touched on one of your other recent stories that I found really interesting, which is about the war in Ukraine, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and how a side effect of that has been a positive development for preventing global warming. Of course, that's not what Putin had in mind, but can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Ryan: Yes. Basically, everyone thought that this was going to be a total disaster for the climate because Europe would be forced to go back to coal. That has happened to some extent, but the remarkable thing is that basically it's caused a sort of green new deal-style thing to happen in Europe. Renewable investments are up hugely. They're going to be up even more in 2023. Gas consumption is down by about 13%, something like that.

The result has been that emissions are basically flat year-on-year despite more coal being used. This year, emissions from carbon-generated electricity are going to fall by something like 46% if I recall correctly. We're seeing in Europe the type of policy we should have been doing 10 years ago. Just stampeding into energy security in a sense that is also zero carbon for the most part.

Brian Lehrer: For its own sake, without that external prod or external inadvertent leverage. If Europeans-- and I don't know if they are or not, but it seems, I guess, from what you're saying. If Europeans are not being energy-deprived as a result of this and are really making the transition, then it's a lesson in the amount of shame we should have as a global society that we didn't take these steps voluntarily.

Ryan: I don't want to underestimate or understate the harms. It has been quite painful, I think, across Europe in many ways. A lot of businesses have gone under because the cost of energy went up so much.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Because it's not just a shortage of energy. There is renewable energy, but it's more expensive than it was a year and a half ago before the invasion.

Ryan: Yes. In some cases much, much more expensive. I don't want to downplay that part of it, but it just goes to show you how big of a mistake it was to hook themselves on Russia's gas. Germany especially went all in on that being their major source of this type of dispatchable energy. They were just putting a choke chain directly around their own necks that he could yank at any time. Honestly for national security reasons as much as for climate change reasons, it was a terrible decision, and they're paying for it. But they are compensating now, and I think in three or four years they're going to be glad that they did it, and they'll be better off.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned in the intro that we were also going to talk about some of your writing about the Biden administration's climate policies. Here's O'Brien in East Orange who wants to raise that topic. O'Brien, you're on WNYC. Hello.

O'Brien: Hello. Thanks for taking my call. My point was that the Biden Administration reached an agreement on the Willow project in Alaska, but that's not going to come online for maybe a decade from now. By that time renewables would make the whole project obsolete. I think that wasn't the giveaway from Biden because it's not going to be of effect in the future anyway.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Thank you. We didn't have a great line there, so I don't know if some of the listeners could hear what he was referring to as Biden's Willow project. That's exactly what you wrote about recently as "Biden's Betrayal" on the climate, right?

Ryan: Yes, that's right. This is the biggest lease of drilling on federal lands in many years. It's up in Alaska. It's in one of the last relatively untouched pieces of wilderness. It's estimated to produce over 30 years something like 600 million barrels of oil. That'll produce 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. It's the kind of thing where-- I mean, the color may be correct. It will depend on the price. Oil is going to be a lot more difficult to replace than coal, but you certainly see it's in the works already. Electric cars are really advancing gangbusters.

Yes, 30 years maybe, but still this is totally gratuitous. It's not going to really help Americans in terms of prices. You'll get a few jobs in Alaska for a few years, and then it'll probably be messed up environmentally. You never know what kind of spills you might get out of this thing as well. Yes, it wasn't great.

Brian Lehrer: It's not just Alaska. You write in that article that Biden's record is of approving oil drilling projects faster than Donald Trump when he was in the White House. Really?

Ryan: That's true. It's not entirely his fault. He has been forced to do that, to some extent, by Congress and by the courts. He had blocked some things and then they sued, and the court said that he had to approve it, but this one was completely under his control. He could have probably shot it down. ConocoPhillips, the developer, have weaker legal standing. In any case, he could have just tied it up for years, regardless of whether it ended up being approved at the end or not.

Brian Lehrer: People forget what any candidate's list of campaign promises is, except maybe for a few central ones each time. You remind us that when he was campaigning for president he promised to stop drilling on federal lands. It's not only something that climate-concerned people don't like on a policy level. He also broke a campaign promise?

Ryan: That's right. He said, "No more drilling on federal lands, period." Doesn't get clearer than that.

Brian Lehrer: What does he have to gain by approving these drilling leases? Does he think he's going to win some swing states as a result?

Ryan: Well, I think that the influence of the oil and gas industry is powerful. The whole Alaskan Congressional Delegation, including the Democrat who just won the seat in the House, was behind it. Even local native communities were split because it does mean jobs, and it is a relatively poor part of Alaska. It's just like what Obama did. It was sort of like all of the above energy strategy, and you see the old habits are hard to break in this area.

Brian Lehrer: Just to pull back and look at the Biden climate record holistically, not just on drilling in federal lands, I see you wrote a response to a recent op-ed by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin in the Houston Chronicle. The headline for that Manchin op-ed was "The Biden administration panders to climate activists. I won't support their nominees." That's one view of Biden's record, the Joe Manchin view. Also, of course, we've had the Inflation Reduction Act, which I think people have celebrated as the most aggressive piece of climate legislation in US history. How do you see the Biden record overall?

Ryan: Overall I think it's pretty positive. This is a betrayal, no question about it, but the Inflation Reduction Act really is going to massively accelerate the energy transition. I think it's especially remarkable that he managed to get this through. The Democrats did win a Senate that was 50-50. Had no margin for error at all. This is head and shoulders above anything that happened during the Obama years when they had briefly, if people remember, 60 seats in the Senate. It was only for a few months, but still it was nothing like the Inflation Reduction Act. That part of it is pretty positive, I would say, on net.

Our hope for the future is that the subsidies in there are going to crash the price of renewable energy so quickly that all of this drilling approval will end up being uneconomical.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that's our climate story of the week. We thank Ryan Cooper, who writes about climate news for the climate news site Heatmap, and he is managing editor of The American Prospect. I enjoyed it, Ryan. Thank you. Let's do it again.

Ryan: Any time.

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