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To change minds, first you have to understand them.
Evangelicals have a reputation as America’s biggest climate change deniers, religious obsessives who’ve let ancient prophecies for the end of the world preclude rational acceptance of environmental science. The “climate alarmist cult want[s] you to think the world is gonna end in 12 years,” longtime Fox host Sean Hannity, apparently eager to fulfill the stereotype, said last year. “My feeling is: If it really was gonna end in 12 years, to hell with it all! Let’s have one big party for the last 10 years, and then we’ll all go home and see Jesus.”
That language won’t surprise anyone familiar with long-standing polling data and political theorizing on (white) evangelicals and climate change. “In general,” as a 2022 Pew Research study summarized, “evangelical Protestants tend to be the most likely of all major U.S. religious groups to express skeptical views” of climate science. And by Pew’s count, evangelicals are both the single largest religious group in the country and markedly more homogenous as a voting bloc than the two next largest factions, “nones” and Catholics. For environmental activists looking for the single greatest public obstacle to climate policy progress, then, evangelicals are the obvious pick.
But American evangelicals aren’t uniformly skeptical of climate science, and even among those who say climate change is real but caused by “natural patterns” (36 percent) or who deny the change altogether (17 percent), a straightforward narrative of wild-eyed apocalypticism is misleading at best. Yet so too is a simple story of political partisanship, a glib assumption that evangelicalism is irrelevant if we’re already dealing with Republicans.
For many evangelical climate skeptics, particularly those who came of age in the last quarter of the 20th century, theology, politics, history, and culture are tightly interwoven on this issue, reinforcing one another in ways that may not be apparent outside the subculture. There’s no way to untangle those factors, to address politics and ignore theology or vice versa. To understand — let alone shift — evangelical thinking on climate change, you have to see the whole tapestry of influences.
Imagine a white evangelical boomer who votes Republican and is skeptical of anthropogenic climate change. He may have first heard about global warming in the 1970s, perhaps in connection to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, a dire prediction of explosive overpopulation, environmental degradation, and mass famine. (The book is newsy again because of Ehrlich’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes, but suffice it to say the forecasts didn’t exactly hold up.) Or maybe this boomer started paying attention to climate policy in the early 2000s, when lifestyle changes like recycling were going mainstream and the climate cause was championed by former Vice President Al Gore, newly loosed from his role as second-in-command to evangelical bête noire Bill Clinton.
It wasn’t inevitable, at this point, that our imagined evangelical Republican would reject the notion of human-caused climate change.
We can envision, for example, an alternate history in which free market types opposed pollution on private property grounds; gun-toting cultural conservatives followed in Teddy Roosevelt’s footsteps as rugged conservationists; and evangelicals — as many have, in fact, done — became champions of “creation care” whose end times theology told them to partner with God in restoring the world.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Our evangelical boomer likely learned about climate change from people who were already his political and social opponents: people with whom he disagreed on a host of other issues, people who protested wars he supported and maybe denounced the religion that gave his life meaning, people who might have even told him he was killing the planet by having his third kid. Evangelicals see climate activism “as another political movement out to get them, one that hates big families,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson toldThe Washington Post in 2017.
Meanwhile, evangelicals’ political allies — which, with increasing uniformity, meant Republicans — insisted climate science wasn’t a sure thing. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly,” advised an early 2000s memo by GOP strategist Frank Luntz. “Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.'”
Republicans talking to evangelical constituents wouldn’t have had a hard sell here, because evangelicals’ recent history made skepticism about climate science unusually easy to swallow. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 and subsequent political scuffles over the origins of the Earth had long since primed the movement to be leery of scientific expertise.
And then there’s the eschatology: theological beliefs about the end of the world as we know it. Our imagined boomer came of age when Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earthwas “the top-selling nonfiction book” of the decade. He’d probably read it and come away convinced that signs of the nearing apocalypse would be reported on the nightly news.
“Christian fascination with the end of the world has existed for a very long time,” as evangelical scholar Mark A. Noll explained in his landmark work, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, first published in 1994, but “recent evangelical fixation on such matters — where contemporary events are labeled with great self-confidence as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies heralding the End of Time — has been particularly intense.” In the framework of Late Great and its many imitators, any crisis could be interpreted as birth pangs of the apocalypse.
But despite the many images of environmental catastrophe in the book of Revelation, Christians’ primary apocalyptic text, the end of the world couldn’t come from manmade global warming. It would come from God (and probably the Soviet Union). The scientists were talking up the wrong apocalypse. And anyway, the story ends happily, with God “making everything new.” As theologian N.T. Wright has summarized the Christian anti-environmentalist position: “Why wallpaper the house if it’s going to be knocked down tomorrow?”
For outside observers, it might appear that evangelicals’ religious beliefs are driving their policy preferences. But the reality isn’t that tidy. The Late Great mindset was inextricably about politics and current events; its interest was as much — or more — in the leaders and headlines of the day as in the meaning of centuries-old scripture. And that kind of entanglement is a constant feature of evangelical thinking about climate.
For instance, the most comprehensive recent research into the role of evangelicals’ religious beliefs in shaping their climate politics likely comes from an October 2022 paper by political scientists Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge in the Politics and Religion journal of Cambridge University Press. The authors come to two key conclusions.
First, political ideology and party affiliation are the best predictors of climate attitudes: “Democrats are more likely to agree that the [federal government should do more to fight climate change], while Tea Party and Republican identifiers are more likely to disagree.”
And second, evangelicals who accept the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change are indistinguishable from other Americans on federal climate policy. It’s only among climate skeptics that evangelicals stand out (they’re unusually opposed to federal action). This means “religious beliefs are only effective when certain secular beliefs are held,” Djupe and Burge write.
It might be tempting to thus assume that evangelical views on climate matter a lot less than Republican skepticism of science. All that stuff about God and the end times isn’t irrelevant, but it’s not the main factor.
Yet that verdict rests on a big assumption: that evangelicals’ acceptance or rejection of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change is indeed a secular belief. For many Americans, that’s a self-evidently nonreligious topic. But for lots of evangelicals, it’s not secular at all. It’s inseparable from explicit theological convictions about how God operates in history, from worries about whether “scientific materialism” leaves any room for divine purpose for humanity, and from a lingering, subconscious mindset that philosopher Charles Taylor called living in an “enchanted world,” a world in which invisible spiritual forces can have real influence over everything from intrusive thoughts to natural disasters.
Younger generations of American evangelicals are markedly more likely to be concerned about climate change and supportive of federal policy intervention. That tracks with generational, political shifts among Republicans, but it tracks with theological and cultural trends, too. Environmentally conscious lifestyle choices have long been normalized. Each generation’s mindset seems less enchanted than the last. And after 50 years of apocalypticism unfulfilled, millennial and gen-Z evangelicals are less interested in eschatology and prophecy-inflected politics. It’s “barely worth considering,” a 2009 essay on evangelical generation gaps explained, “unless, of course, we are mocking Left Behind among our peers.”
Evangelical climate politics were never just partisanship or just religion. For better and worse, it was always both. The rise of evangelical climate skepticism was a messy, multi-causal thing. Its decline among new generations of evangelicals will be too.
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Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they're used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI researcher Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks” will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model ... Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.
On Azerbaijan’s plans, offshore wind auctions, and solar jobs
Current conditions: Thousands of firefighters are battling raging blazes in Portugal • Shanghai could be hit by another typhoon this week • More than 18 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours in Carolina Beach, which forecasters say is a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s COP29, today put forward a list of “non-negotiated” initiatives for the November climate summit that will “supplement” the official mandated program. The action plan includes the creation of a new “Climate Finance Action Fun” that will take (voluntary) contributions from fossil fuel producing countries, a call for increasing battery storage capacity, an appeal for a global “truce” during the event, and a declaration aimed at curbing methane emissions from waste (which the Financial Times noted is “only the third most common man-made source of methane, after the energy and agricultural sectors”). The plan makes no mention of furthering efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the energy system.
The Interior Department set a date for an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Maine, an area which the government sees as suitable for developing floating offshore wind technology. The auction will take place on October 29 and cover eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The area could provide 13 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, if fully developed. The Biden administration has a goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and has approved about half that amount so far. The DOI’s terms and conditions for the October lease sale include “stipulations designed to promote the development of a robust domestic U.S. supply chain for floating wind.” Floating offshore wind turbines can be deployed in much deeper waters than traditional offshore projects, and could therefore unlock large areas for clean power generation. Last month the government gave the green light for researchers to study floating turbines in the Gulf of Maine.
In other wind news, BP is selling its U.S. onshore wind business, bp Wind Energy. The firm’s 10 wind farm projects have a total generating capacity of 1.3 gigawatts and analysts think they could be worth $2 billion. When it comes to renewables, the fossil fuel giant said it is focusing on investing in solar growth, and onshore wind is “not aligned” with those plans.
The number of jobs in the U.S. solar industry last year grew to 279,447, up 6% from 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Utility-scale solar added 1,888 jobs in 2023, a 6.8% increase and a nice rebound from 2022, when the utility-scale solar market recorded a loss in jobs. The report warns that we might not see the same kind of growth for solar jobs in 2024, though. Residential installations have dropped, and large utility-scale projects are struggling with grid connection. The report’s authors also note that as the industry grows, it faces a shortage of skilled workers.
Interstate Renewable Energy Council
Most employers reported that hiring qualified solar workers was difficult, especially in installation and project development. “It’s difficult because our projects are built in very rural areas where there just aren't a lot of people,” one interviewee who works at a utility-scale solar firm said. “We strive to hire as many local people as possible because we want local communities to feel the economic impact or benefit from our projects. So in some communities where we go, it is difficult to find local people that are skilled and can perform the work.”
The torrential rain that has battered central Europe is tapering off a bit, but the danger of rising water remains. “The massive amounts of rain that fell is now working its way through the river systems and we are starting to see flooding in areas that avoided the worst of the rain,” BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor explained. The Polish city of Nysa told its 44,000 residents to leave yesterday as water rose. In the Czech Republic, 70% of the town of Litovel was submerged in 3 feet of flooding. The death toll from the disaster has risen to 18. Now the forecast is calling for heavy rain in Italy. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist with Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, toldThe Guardian.
A recent study examining the effects of London’s ultra-low emissions zone on how students get to school found that a year after the rules came into effect, many students had switched to walking, biking, or taking public transport instead of being driven in private vehicles.