18 January 2022. Work | Energy
The post-pandemic geography of American work is here to stay. The post-carbon transition is simpler than we think.
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I have a family commitment all day tomorrow, so it’s possible that Wednesday’s edition won’t happen.
#1: The post-pandemic geography of American work is here to stay
In her contribution to the Financial Times’ ‘Swamp Notes’ newsletter yesterday, Rana Foorahar writes about what she calls ‘the new geography of jobs’. (I’m not sure if the newsletter is available online, or if it is, if it’s behind the FT’s paywall. So I may let some of these extracts run a bit long.)
Anyway, anything that links geography and work is interesting to me: I wrote a paper with a similar title for the Journal of Futures Studies a few years ago. I’m going to unpack the argument that she makes in her contribution.
So, suddenly CEOs are worrying labour shortages. This is from a new Conference Board survey of C-suite headaches:
CEOs in every part of the world ranked attracting and retaining talent as their top focus for 2022. And one of the key ways they plan to do it, particularly in the US, is by making remote work permanent. Pre-pandemic, just 28 per cent of all US CEOs had 40 per cent or more of their workers remote. This year, 53 per cent will, and they plan to keep those figures even after the pandemic subsides. In the US, more than any place else, remote work is here to stay.
Executives also say that they think that this makes people more productive, which is an interesting cultural shift. For years company cultures were most about control—and often had a Theory X view of their workers (channelling Douglas McGregor) as being lazy and needing control and sanctions, rather than a Theory Y view, that people want to be fulfilled through purposeful work.
Her question about geography, however, is about whether people’s ability to live in a far wider range of locations will cause cultural and political dislocations in the US.
(T)he states that have seen the biggest pandemic population influxes are those like Texas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, where people pay lower taxes but also get a lot more space and cheaper real estate. Parts of the Midwest as well as places like North Dakota and Montana have also added a disproportionate number of jobs in the last year. It could be that the lure of space will wear off, and people will migrate back to coastal cities. But I doubt it. I think we are witnessing a major new geographic shift in the US, one that could have big political consequences.
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(The Catskills are coming back into fashion. Via the public domain search engine PICRYL.)
Of course, this depends on the extent to which people take their political and cultural views with them when they move, and the extent to which they are shaped by their surroundings. So far, most of the evidence is for the former, not the latter:
This shift is already evident in big Southern cities like Atlanta and Charlotte. Anecdotally, I can see it happening in some parts of the Midwest that I know well, and even outside New York, in the poor, rural places where city residents have now flocked to buy houses.
The research says that people become less polarised when exposed to other views than their own, and that’s what Foorohar hopes will happen here.
But one can also see plenty of scope for economic conflict as remote salaries earned by people working for businesses in the economic core price out people who earn their money locally, in more marginal parts of the economy. As we see repeatedly in the UK.
#2: The energy transition is simpler than we think
Cory Doctorow has a longish review on his blog of Saul Griffith’s book Electrify. Griffith is an engineer who has won the MacArthur awards (the so-called ‘genius prize’) and the book focuses on the US context. The good news is that from an engineering point of view, the electrification of our energy systems may not be as hard as we think.
The first reason for this is that the US energy budget has been wildly overstated, because half of the energy it uses goes to keeping the fossil fuel economy functioning:
About half of the energy that the US consumes is actually the energy we need to dig, process, transport, store and use fossil fuels. Renewables have these costs, too, but nothing near the costs of using fossil fuels. An all-electric nation is about twice as efficient as a fossil fuel nation. That means that the problem of electrifying America is only half as hard as we've been told it was.
There are similar gains to be had across the whole energy spectrum—“When you have electrified your life, everything you do will be cheaper, faster and better.”
However, the investment needed to make this happen needs to be front-loaded:
retrofitting our homes, replacing our appliances, and changing over our utilities will require large upfront investments.
That’s why we get lots of rhetoric about mobilising for the energy transition in the way that countries mobilised for World War II. That’s the language that the US climate ambassador John Kerry uses, perhaps following an argument made by Andrew Simm two decades ago.
Griffith has good news here as well.
For Griffith, the roadmap is pretty straightforward. From now on, every time we replace a vehicle or renovate a building or swap an appliance, we should be buying electric. Every new roof should include solar panels. New housing should be energy efficient and shouldn't even have a gas hookup. All of this should be financed with low-cost, long-term loans comparable to the government-backed mortgages that created the post-war middle-class (but without the racism that created Black housing precarity and poverty).
As I’ve written about here before, we also get a long way by stopping investing in the things that make the climate crisis worse.
And some of the problems that have been endlessly rehearsed (intermittent power generation from renewables) pretty much disappear as battery technology improves, and gets cheaper.
Griffith also seems to be the source of the idea discussed in the Kim Stanley Robinson podcast (see yesterday) about buying off the fossil fuel sector:
Some of Griffith's solutions raised my eyebrows, particularly his plan to simply buy off the fossil fuel sector, giving them a fractional return on their stranded assets (book value minus the expected expenditures to dig them up and process them, discounted by some kind of penalty percentage)... I hate it. But Griffith makes a good case for it, a kind of "would you rather be happy, or right?" conundrum.
There also seems to be some interesting detail, at least from a US perspective. Who knew that adopting safety standards prevalent in Europe or Australia on solar conversions could knock a couple of percentage points off the cost of transition?
There’s also a chapter on current controversies in the green movement on transition, which Doctorow summarises in a couple of lines (I’ll need to read the book for the detail):
(N)uclear power (mmmmmmaybe); geoengineering (no), carbon capture (fuck no), hydrogen (don't be stupid), etc.
Doctorow’s review starts by comparing Griffith to the late David Mackay, whose fine book Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air (freely downloadable here) also took an engineering view of sustainability problems, and helped to clarify them. As Doctorow says, Griffith
has a real gift for simplifying ideas to the point where anyone can grasp them, but not so much that they lose nuance or coherence.
j2t#245
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