“it ain’t a bunch of small things adding together” → Still 100% true. Eyeballing the EIA’s data, wind + natgas account for ~80% of the decrease in carbon emissions. That’s 2 things added together.
“Practically all of the reduction in US carbon emissions over the past 10 years has come from that shift” → False, based on EIA 2005-2017 data. More than half of the reduction came from the natgas shift (majority, not just plurality), but not practically all.
“all these well-meaning, hard-working people were basically useless” → False for the wind people.
“PV has been an active research field for thousands of academics for several decades. They’ve had barely any effect on carbon emissions to date” → Still true. Eyeballing the numbers, solar is maybe 10% of the reduction to date. That’s pretty small to start with, and on top of that, little of the academic research has actually translated to the market, much less addressed the major bottlenecks of solar PV (e.g. installation).
“one wedge will end up a lot more effective than all others combined. Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” → Originally intended as a prediction further into the future, and I still expect this to be the case. That said, as of today, “one wedge will end up a lot more effective” looks false, but “Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” looks true.
… So a couple of them are wrong, though none without at least some kernel of truth in there. And a couple of them are still completely true.
And it needed to be that, rather than something weaker-and-truer like “Substantially the biggest single element in the carbon reduction has been the natgas transition”, because the more general thesis is that here, and in many other places, one approach so dominates the others that working on anything else is a waste of time.
No, as the next section makes clear, it does not need to be one approach dominating everything else; that just makes for memorable examples. 80⁄20 is the rule, and 20% of causes can still be more than one cause. 80⁄20 is still plenty strong for working on the other 80% of causes to be a waste of time.
Let’s go through them one by one:
“it ain’t a bunch of small things adding together” → Still 100% true. Eyeballing the EIA’s data, wind + natgas account for ~80% of the decrease in carbon emissions. That’s 2 things added together.
“Practically all of the reduction in US carbon emissions over the past 10 years has come from that shift” → False, based on EIA 2005-2017 data. More than half of the reduction came from the natgas shift (majority, not just plurality), but not practically all.
“all these well-meaning, hard-working people were basically useless” → False for the wind people.
“PV has been an active research field for thousands of academics for several decades. They’ve had barely any effect on carbon emissions to date” → Still true. Eyeballing the numbers, solar is maybe 10% of the reduction to date. That’s pretty small to start with, and on top of that, little of the academic research has actually translated to the market, much less addressed the major bottlenecks of solar PV (e.g. installation).
“one wedge will end up a lot more effective than all others combined. Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” → Originally intended as a prediction further into the future, and I still expect this to be the case. That said, as of today, “one wedge will end up a lot more effective” looks false, but “Carbon emission reductions will not come from a little bit of natgas, a little bit of PV, a little bit of many other things” looks true.
… So a couple of them are wrong, though none without at least some kernel of truth in there. And a couple of them are still completely true.
No, as the next section makes clear, it does not need to be one approach dominating everything else; that just makes for memorable examples. 80⁄20 is the rule, and 20% of causes can still be more than one cause. 80⁄20 is still plenty strong for working on the other 80% of causes to be a waste of time.