The Breakthrough Institute

NEW REPORT: Seaver Wang and Juzel Lloyd confront a glaring issue that the climate community and solar sector have avoided for too long: solar manufacturing in China's Xinjiang province is linked to forced labor and environmental injustice, and we need to act. The authors write, "Solar manufacturing plants that began operating in Xinjiang over a decade ago were attracted to industrial parks and coal mines established under regional political oppression that left Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz peoples uniquely powerless to object to local environmental and socioeconomic impacts." The region now "produces a significant quantity of some solar PV commodities, particularly solar-grade polysilicon. As such, the availability and price of solar PV products are currently quite sensitive to the region’s manufacturing output, elevating the risk that efforts to truly divest the solar industry from dependence on Xinjiang could disrupt solar supply chains, at least until new, ethical production capacity is established elsewhere." "However, tackling this hurdle head-on is exactly the right choice for promoting a better, more innovative, and more socially responsible future for solar PV technology." Keep reading at the link below: https://lnkd.in/exnrBZnZ #technology #solar #photovoltaics #manufacturing #technologyinnovation #renewableenergy #climatechange #china #humanrights #ethics #supplychains #environmental

For our substack, the Breakthrough Institute's Alex Trembath reflects on the responses to his previous work on the Social Cost of Carbon. "So it’s fair to say that climate policy is a matter of weighing costs and benefits of fossil fuels. But that’s about as much as you can say. The questions of how to address climate change, and how to trade off climate action against other societal priorities, are ones for transparent scientific and democratic deliberation, not technocratic authority. Indeed, what was most interesting about the reaction to our post wasn’t just the relative lack of defense of the new SCC research, but the strength of the consensus against the usefulness of the SCC." Read the piece here: https://lnkd.in/gmYrk-dB

Intense wildfires in California impose significant economic impacts beyond the insured losses of destroyed buildings and the costs of fighting fires. In all, the total economic burden of CA wildfires is estimated to be around $100 billion annually. To curtail this impact, the California state government has set a goal of performing fuel reduction treatment on 1 million acres per year. A new report from Patrick Brown assesses whether the economic benefits of these fuel reduction treatments in California have large enough benefits to justify their costs. The analysis finds that 1 million acres of fuel reduction annually would cost $3 billion, but have economic benefits close to $11 billion per year, conferring a 3.7-to-1 benefit-cost ratio. The report also finds: - Delaying fuel reduction also costs more than actually doing the treatments. Each year of delay in scaling up fuel treatment in California to 1 million acres annually costs the state $4 billion. - The optimal rate of fuel reduction is actually 3.9 million acres per year, almost four times the state’s articulated goal.  - 3.9 million acres of fuel reduction annually in California would cost $10.5 billion annually but confer an annual benefit of $22.2 billion. The cost of delaying fuel reduction treatment scale-up to 3.9 million acres annually would be $5.8 billion per year. Read the Report Here: https://lnkd.in/gt5DnFTb

In a new substack post, BTI Executive Director Ted Nordhaus unpacks how a new wave of progessive nuclear advocates have turned debates about nuclear regulation upside down. "The determination of progressives to point the finger at every conceivable cause of nuclear cost escalation except regulation is neither defensible nor a serious strategy for deploying a new generation of nuclear reactors." Read the post here: https://lnkd.in/gisZiYwn  

Bans on cultivated meat in Italy, Florida, and Alabama are just the beginning of a growing culture war over the future of meat. Politicians cited the "unnatural" quality of cultivated meat, it's threat to traditional foodways, and the impact that alternative proteins could have on conventional livestock producers. In a new piece for Breakthrough Journal, Alex Smith covers two new economics pre-prints that tell an overarching story: alternative meats, even if they do meet the alternative protein industry’s projected short-term goals, will not meaningfully hurt the bottom line of conventional livestock and crop producers. https://lnkd.in/eTBk3j-a

Have decades of deregulation of the electricity sector biased the technology choices in a way that reduces our ability to clean up the generation system? It's certainly made it harder to build new nuclear. Read the latest from Matthew L. Wald for Breakthrough Journal on Substack. https://lnkd.in/gU_ar3P4

"We see that there are large increases in the economic losses associated with severe thunderstorms, but there are not well-documented increases in the physical hazards responsible for those losses." Read Patrick T. Brown's myth busting of media coverage of severe thunderstorms for Breakthrough Journal. https://lnkd.in/g2Xa-Qwb

If the federal government is serious about decarbonizing agriculture, we will need to see bold changes at the USDA. First and foremost, Washington must invest in the future of agriculture. A new report from Emily Bass and Alex Smith goes into the details of what USDA can do to create an ecosystem of innovation for agricultural and food technologies. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/gvBe7Gmi