The meaning of global warming, part one

Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development

Posted by David Roberts at 12:37 PM on 05 Oct 2007

The following is a guest essay by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the latest in the ongoing conversation about their new book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

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Thank you to everyone here who has participated in this discussion. We are grateful to Grist to making the space for this debate, and to everyone who has chimed in. Through agreement and disagreement alike, it is inspiring to find this many people joining a conversation about how to achieve a common goal.

It is the argument of Break Through that we need to replace the pollution paradigm with one that is investment- and innovation-centered. Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress in Washington and David Hawkins of NRDC are just wrong in their claim that we have all the technology we need and that we just need to scale it up. Readers can contrast the consensus of expert opinions we cite below with the anecdotes and assertions by Romm and Hawkins.

It may be that there is simply disagreement over terminology. Romm and Hawkins misinterpret our call for major investment into non-incremental breakthroughs in price and performance as saying there's nothing we can do now. Perhaps we are misunderstanding what they mean when they claim that all the technologies exist and just need to be scaled up. Whatever the case, we hope that both will weigh in again, hopefully with a bit less hysteria and more clarity about our position.

The truth is that there are many things we need to do at the levels of both technology and regulation. More than that, we need to understand how both are, in Muir's lovely turn of phrase, "hitched to everything else in the Universe," especially global economic development and the politics of energy prices.

The Case for Both/And: Regulation and Technology

There remains some confusion about what we mean when we talk about things like technology breakthroughs, public vs. private investment, and basic R&D versus commercialization. Here we'll attempt to shed a bit more light on these subjects, and trace what we believe is a path toward climate stabilization, one that requires the embrace of technology, public investment, and global economic development.

There are two challenges that must be addressed to achieve deep reductions in global carbon emissions, one regulatory and one technological. The regulatory challenge is the one that Joe Romm, David Hawkins, and the vast majority of environmental groups have focused their efforts on addressing.

This challenge involves creating regulatory and market conditions that drive energy use away from dirty, carbon-intensive sources of energy and primarily toward efficiency and less polluting conventional energy technologies. These policies are an important part of the solution and will allow us to achieve some significant initial reductions in carbon emissions in the U.S. and other developed economies. These policies will be accomplished primarily through establishing a cap and trade regulatory system or a carbon tax or some combination of the two and will, if all goes well, lead to emissions reductions in the neighborhood of 20 percent in the U.S. and other developed nations that enact similar policies.

If the costs of low-carbon alternative technologies -- solar energy, along with complementary energy storage, transmission technologies, and alternative transportation fuels -- come down dramatically, these policies could lead to deeper reductions.

But the potential of regulatory policies to reduce carbon emissions more dramatically depends upon our success in addressing the technology challenge.

Shellenberger & Nordhaus The Technology Challenge

The technology challenge is fundamentally different from the regulatory challenge. The problem is that the technology innovation challenge will in large part determine what the regulatory challenge is, in the end, able to accomplish. "The key reason to develop and deploy advanced energy technologies," concluded James Edmonds at University of Maryland, one of the world's leading experts on energy technology innovation, "is to control the cost of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations" (Edmonds et al. 2007: 9).

The right regulatory framework can help create market conditions that are more amenable to deploying alternative energy technologies. Thus, these two challenges, while different, are also interlinked and interdependent.

Environmentalists imagine that once a price for carbon is set, the market will drive private sector investment and innovation sufficient to overcome the technological obstacles to deep reductions in carbon emissions. As such, many environmentalists, including many of those who have responded here at Grist, conflate two distinct challenges: increasing the cost of fossil fuels and decreasing the cost of clean energy. Even some energy experts, wrote Dennis Anderson for the Stern Review, "frequently confound the aims of innovation policies with the aims of carbon pricing, which are to encourage the use of technologies that have already passed through their RD&D and commercial trial stages ... By facilitating invention and reducing costs, such policies complement the pricing of carbon directly, and should pave the way to lower carbon prices in the long-term" (Anderson 2006: 41).

When people say that "we already have all the alternative energy technologies we need," what they mean is that we have invented technologies that can produce energy without emitting carbon. This is true only insofar as these technologies exist, have been demonstrated in laboratory settings, and in the case of things like solar panels, have been deployed over a number of years at a relatively small scale. Other technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, are at an even earlier stage of development.

What we have not yet succeeded in doing is producing clean energy technologies at costs low enough to deploy widely, such that they might actually represent a real alternative to cheap, high-carbon conventional energy sources. "Many of the technologies needed are already available or close to commercialization," the International Energy Agency wrote in a major report last year. "But it will require substantial effort and investment by both the public and private sectors for them to be adopted by the market ... Urgent action is needed to stimulate R&D, to demonstrate and deploy promising technologies, and to provide clear and predictable incentives for low carbon options and diverse energy sources" (Mandil/IEA 2006: 3)

When we say "breakthrough" technologies, what we are referring to are breakthroughs in the performance of current clean energy technologies and the cost of deploying them. Without these breakthroughs, the costs of these technologies are too high, and their performance and return on investment too low, to justify private sector investment in their widespread deployment. This will likely be the case even with the higher carbon prices that the many proposals currently being considered in the U.S. Congress would establish.

Moreover, even dramatically improving the performance of clean energy alternatives and decreasing their price relative to conventional energy sources such that, with help from a regulatory framework that increases the cost of conventional sources, they will be cost-competitive, will not be sufficient, alone, to see them widely deployed.

Clean energy alternatives like solar and wind will require significant improvement in the cost and performance of battery and other energy storage technologies, and probably a new electricity grid as well, to be deployed at levels that might allow them to displace conventional energy sources on a large scale.

Finally, even if environmentalists succeed in establishing a radically higher carbon price in the U.S. and other developed nations, a dubious prospect even with today's environmentally friendlier Congress, China, India, and other developing countries, where almost all of the projected increase in energy use and carbon emissions are going to occur, appear unlikely to establish a significant price for carbon in the foreseeable future.

Given the likelihood of low to non-existent prices for carbon in the developing world for many decades to come, the technology challenge will require that we very quickly drive the deployed price of low-carbon alternative energy technologies not just down to levels at which they are competitive in energy economies with relatively high carbon prices, but down to levels wherein the real cost of those technologies are cost competitive with coal in developing economies with very low (or nonexistent) carbon prices.

For this reason we argue that, in the end, the most important objective of our efforts to address the climate crisis is to drive the real, deployed costs of clean energy technologies dramatically downward as quickly as possible.

Public Versus Private Investment

Several folks here at Grist have pointed out a key demarcation between what government does well in terms of promoting technological innovation and what the private sector does well. The standard distinction is that government is the appropriate funder of basic research while the private sector is much better and much more efficient at commercializing new technologies.

However, there is a vast chasm between basic research and commercialization, where many promising technologies, particularly energy technologies, die. This is known as the "technology valley of death." It represents critical early stage production and deployment stages of commercialization. At these stages the private energy sector has not, for a variety of reasons, done particularly well.

There are also a number of features particular to energy technology that further increase risk. Energy patents are notoriously difficult to defend and easy to reverse engineer. Fearing "knowledge spillover" -- innovations that can't be captured or monopolized by the companies doing the research -- investors and firms avoid making big, long-term investments in emerging technologies. "Investors," wrote Stanford's David Victor and Danny Cullenward in September's Scientific American, "tend to focus on technologies that are nearing commercial application and potential profit."

Finally, the commodified nature of energy (one electron is as good as another) makes it difficult to develop initial commercial products that can command a higher price. While Apple enthusiasts lined up to shell out $600 for an iPhone, very few consumers are willing to pay two to three times more for clean energy.

These challenges and others have resulted in huge barriers to the widespread commercialization of new clean energy technologies by the private sector. And it is for this reason that the vast majority of energy experts, as well as the large-scale reviews of the technology challenge as it relates to climate (such as the spring 2007 IPCC report, and the 2006 Stern Review), have called for exponential increases in public investment in research, development, and deployment of clean energy technologies.

The lack of investment is not a minor barrier -- most energy experts view it as the primary barrier. "Probably the most significant barrier to ETI [Energy Technology Innovation] is inadequacy of funds, especially for R&D, in relation to the challenges that are faced by energy system" (Sims Gallagher et al. 2006: 221-222).

John Holdren, the current chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote, "Around the world, the energy sector's ratio of RD&D investments to total revenues is well below that for any other high-tech sector of the economy ... These investments will need to be boosted at least 2-3-fold if the world is to meet the energy challenges it faces in the decades immediately ahead" (Holdren 2006: 20). Others say it should be much higher. "Using emissions scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a previous framework for estimating the climate-related savings from energy R&D programs (Schock et al.., 1999), we calculate that U.S. energy R&D spending of $15-30 billion/year would be sufficient to stabilize CO2 at double pre-industrial levels [550 ppm]" (Kammen 2006a: 4).

The efficacy of this kind of public investment is well-documented. In the roughly five years that the federal government guaranteed the market for microchips in the 1960s, the price of a microchip came down from $1000 per chip to $20. A similar federal effort in the 1980s saw similar improvements in price and performance. Here's Stern and IPCC:

"Extensive and prolonged public support and private markets were both instrumental in the development of all generating technologies. Military R&D, the US space programme and learning from other markets have also been crucial to the process of innovation in the energy sector" (Stern 2006: 361)

"Government support through financial contributions, tax credits, standard setting, and market creation is important for effective technology development, innovation and deployment" (IPCC 2007: 20)

The dramatic price and performance improvements in wind technology occurred because Denmark guaranteed its market for wind energy in the 1980s and 90s. And the Japanese government saw similar breakthroughs in the price of solar panels as result of its intervention in the solar market in the 1990s.

This is the kind of public investment we desperately need to unleash the power of private sector investment and innovation. Without it, faith that the private sector will massively increase investment to deploy clean energy technologies is probably unfounded.

Setting a Price for Carbon Won't Be Sufficient

Most energy experts do not believe a carbon price is enough. "Getting those new technologies on line will require more than price signals because no company on its own will invest in the necessary speculative and costly research and development concepts," wrote Victor and Cullenward. "Ultimately, the belief that prices alone will solve the climate problem is rooted in the fiction that investors in large-scale and long-lived energy infrastructures sit on a fence waiting for higher carbon prices to tip their decisions. In fact, many factors stifle the implementation of novel low-carbon policies."

It is for this reason that everyone from the Stern Review to the IPCC call for major public investment. "[T]he presence of a range of other market failures and barriers mean that carbon pricing alone is not sufficient," the Stern Review concluded. "Technology policy, the second element of a climate change strategy, is vital to bring forward the range of low-carbon and high-efficiency technologies that will be needed to make deep emissions cuts." (Stern Review 2006: 308)

Socolow and Pacala, who are frequently cited in justification for regulation-centric policies, agree. "But a price on CO2 emissions on its own, may not be enough. Governments may need to stimulate the commercialization of low-carbon technologies to increase the number of competitive options available in the future" (Socolow and Pacala 2006).

This kind of public investment will drive early stage innovation and commercialization that the private sector will by and large not engage in without a government push, and draw in greater private investment to commercialize and bring those technologies to scale. MIT's John Deutsch writes, "Government support of innovation -- both technology creation and technology demonstration -- is desirable to encourage private investors to adopt new technology ... Virtually every energy study recommends that the federal government mount technology research, development, and demonstration (R, D, & D) programs that require large and sustained budgetary support, of course, funded by the taxpayer."

Skepticism about federal coal and ethanol subsidies is reason to have, not eschew, a serious public investment strategy.

There has been a bit of schizophrenia among those who have attacked public investment or discounted its importance. On the one hand, the assertion is made that whatever public investment may be necessary will be relatively easy to get, and that the hard part will be establishing the regulatory system. On the other hand, everything that has gone wrong with federal energy investment in recent decades is invoked as evidence that public investment can't be depended upon to address the crisis. But you can't have it both ways.

It will no doubt be easy to allow pork-barrel Congressional politics and energy industry skullduggery to hijack or waste public clean energy investment. Similarly, it would be easy to allow Congress and the Bush administration to propagate meaningless carbon regulations. We should not allow the latter to occur and neither should we allow the former.

While the national environmental movement has invested enormous resources in thinking through its preferred approach to regulating carbon, and is expending enormous resources to advocate that approach, there is little evidence to suggest that the environmental movement has done much of anything to define a proper public investment strategy, to think through what kinds of investments will need to be made, how they should be made, how they should be insulated from pork barrel politics and energy industry sabotage, and how much we need to spend.

So what would a post-environmental global warming agenda look like and how would it differ from the present policy and political strategy? We'll lay this out in part II on Monday.

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Bibliography

Aitken, Donald W. "Transitioning to a Renewable Energy Future," International Solar Energy Society, 2003.

Alic, John, David Mowery, Edward Rubin, "U.S. Technology and Innovation Policies: Lessons for Climate Change," Pew Center on Global Climate Change, November 2003.

Anderson, Dennis. "Costs and Finance of Abating Carbon Emissions in the Energy Sector," Imperial College London, White Paper Prepared for the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, October 20, 2006.

Blyth, William and Hamilton, Kirsty. "Aligning Climate and Energy Policy: Creating incentives to invest in low carbon technologies in the context of linked markets for fossil fuel, electricity and carbon," Chatham House White Paper prepared for the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, April 2006.

John Deutsch, "What should the government do to encourage technical change in the energy sector?" Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, March 2005.

Duke, Richard D. "Clean Energy Technology Buydowns: Economic Theory, Analytic Tools, and the Photovoltaics Case," Ph.D Dissertation, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

Edmonds, JA, Wise, MA, Dooley, JJ, Kim, SH, Smith, SJ Runci, PJ, Clarke, LE Malone, EL, Stokes, GM. "Global Energy Technology Strategy: Addressing Climate Change," Global Energy Technology Strategy Program, May 2007.

General Accounting Office, "Key challenges remain for developing and deploying advanced energy technologies to meet future needs," December 2006.

Grubb, Michael “Technology Innovation and Climate Change Policy: An Overview of Issues and Options,” Keio Journal of Economics, 2004.

Hoffert, Martin, Caldeira, Ken, Benford, Gregory, Criswell, David R., Green, Christopher, Herzog, Howard, Jain, Atul K., Kheshgi, Haroon S., Lackner, Klaus S., Lewis, John S., Lightfoot, H. Douglas, Manheimer, Wallace, Mankins, John C.

Mauel, Michael E., Perkins, L. John, Schlesinger, Michael E., Volk, Tyler, Wigley, Tom M. L., "Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate

Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet," Science, November 1, 2002.

Holdren, John P. "The Energy Innovation Imperative," Innovations, Spring 2006.

Jaffe, Adam B. Richard G. Newell, and Robert N. Stavins, "A Tale of Two Market Failures: Technology and Environmental Policy," Resources for the Future, October 2004.

Josefsson, Lars G. Vattenfall AB, "Statement given at the Ministerial Dialogue Meeting of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development," 2006-05-10

Mandil, Claude. "Foreward," Energy Technology Perspectives, International Energy Agency, 2006.

The National Commission on Energy Policy, "Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges," December 2004.

Karsten Neuhoff, "Large Scale Deployment of Renewables for Electricity Generation," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics #59, Cambridge – MIT, 2005.

William Nordhaus, The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy, forthcoming book, 2008.

Kammen, Daniel M. "Climate Change Technology Research: Do We Need a 'Manhattan Project' for the Environment?, Testimony before Congress, September 21, 2006.

Kammen, Daniel, "The Rise of Renewable Energy," Scientific American, September 2006.

Margolis, Robert M. and Daniel Kammen, "Underinvestment: The Energy Technology and R&D Policy Challenge," Science, July 30, 1999.

Nemet, Gregory. "Policy and Innovation in Low-Carbon Energy Technologies," Ph.D Dissertation, Spring 2007.

Richard Richels, Rutherford, Thomas, Blanford, Geoffrey, Clarke, Leon. "Managing the Transition to Climate Stabilization, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, January 2007

Sims Gallagher, Kelly, Holdren, John P., and Sagar, Ambuj D. "Energy-Technology Innovation," Annual Review of Environment and Resources, August 25, 2006, pp. 193 – 237.

Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala. "A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check," Scientific American, September 2006.

Stern, Nicholas. The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, UK Treasury, October 2006.

Victor, David, and Cullenward, Danny. "Making Carbon Markets Work," Scientific American, September 24, 2007.

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Summary for Policymakers," April 30 to May 4, 2007.

For story: The meaning of global warming, part one
24 Comments | Post a Comment

Interesting.

Can you see the tiger hiding behind the potted palm?

"...to think through what kinds of investments will need to be made, how they should be made, how they should be insulated from pork barrel politics and energy industry sabotage, and how much we need to spend."

I studied the government's role in the innovation of inventions during the early 1970s. It was determined then that new ideas fail for a number of reasons, and the main reason for more than 50% failure was initial seed capital failure. Not much was known so a government research program was crafted to collect data with a pilot program. Energy was chosen, almost randomly, to limit the scope of the inventions test. The Office of Energy Related Inventions (Nixon) was formed under the management of the DoC because it was widely thought that ERDA [DoE] was a revolving door with big energy and would block disruptive technology developments.

I entered the program with a solar dish and Bernard Sater, the lead power systems engineer at NASA, entered with a high voltage and high intensity pv breakthrough. We were among the 2% of all non-nuclear proposals that were approved for funding. When the Reagan White House heard that new solar technology was about to receive funding that energy money was abruptly cut off and the program suspended. Jack Anderson (a syndicated columnist circa. 40 million) wrote a widely reported story about our political sabotage. His researchers found that the industrial return on the inventions program was several hundred fold, very unusual for a government program. I got my $50,000 when I informed the Presidential Press Secretary about my plans to hold a news conference with a big solar dish on the Capital Mall.

Recently, I was sitting at a solar industry round table sponsored and moderated by NREL. One main issue was that government support and subsidy for renewable electricity became a slam dunk for wind. Other competing technologies (HIPV) remained isolated in the cold.

So the least developed, most isolated, and/or most disruptive energy inventions will likely be marginalized (or worse) from industry insiders and from political sabotage. Nothing has changed since the 1970s and I expect more of the same. Even President Carter lost control of institutional bias. So how do we solve these conflicts of interest and make new public investment programs truly effective with the old fossils at the helm?

by sunflower at 3:13 PM on 05 Oct 2007

The true meaning of global warming

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger -- who repeat the George Bush, Michael Crichton, and Bjorn Lomborg myth that we need breakthrough technologies to address global warming and that environmentalists only advocate sacrifice and pain -- are playing right into the hands of those who argue for doing nothing -- even if that isn't their intention.

By constantly attacking their potential allies in the environmental movement -- who have advocated a combination of regulations and technology deployment and also R&D (though that is less important) FAR LONGER than they have -- and repeating the tired myths of the Deniers and Delayers, they undercut any value whatsoever in their message.

They claim: "The regulatory challenge is the one that Joe Romm, David Hawkins, and the vast majority of environmental groups have focused their efforts on addressing."

Uhh, no. I've focused my efforts on technology development and deployment -- that's why I know the regulatory challenge is far, far important. The vast majority of environmental groups, including Hawkins' NRDC, focus on both regulations and technology -- indeed, that's how I got to know most of them in the 1990s,when they were -- yes, it's true, S&N, -- lobbying for much higher clean technology budgets.

I don't know why S&N keep attacking a straw man. It annoys your potential allies and helps no one but the Deniers and Delayers.

by jromm at 5:56 PM on 05 Oct 2007

I'm confused

On the one hand, N&S are calling for more r&d to get prices on renewable energy down to the point that the regulatory method (cap-and-trade,etc) works. On the other hand, they point out that by purchasing large quantities of, say, solar panels, the price would come down -- but is that because the manufacturing processes would reach economies of scale, or because the technology would get better, because those are two different things. If the former, then their arguments could be used to push for massive purchases and deployment of solar now, say on all government buildings. In other words, we could use current technology, by their reasoning.

The other question is, where would the money for these programs come from? Apparently the focus on the military excludes cutting that biggest piece of pork, although I heard them being interviewed on KQED, where they said that we could use a peace dividend from the end of the war in Iraq, which implies money from the military. The problem with carbon taxes or price of carbon, as I read their analysis, is the the middle classes pay. If the government pays, I think money should come from the wealthiest, not the middle classes. So where does it come from?

by Jon Rynn at 6:35 PM on 05 Oct 2007

Put Down the Talking Points Joe

How many times can you cram the words Deniers, Delayers, Bush, Crichton, and Lomborg into a post, Joe? You'd do us all a favor if you'd put down the talking points and respond to the actual content of our post, which, through many thousands of words and four mostly unreadable posts you have failed to do. Mainstream energy science is pretty damned clear about the need for massive increases in public investment into clean energy research, development, and deployment. It is you, not we, whose views are outside the mainstream. It may be the case, as you have repeatedly asserted, with little evidence other than your own experience at DOE, that we "don't know what we're talking about." But if we don't know what we're talking about than neither do Stern, IPCC, or the many other reviews of the current state of energy technology and energy needs that we have repeatedly cited and you have repeatedly ignored in your attacks on us. Go ahead and make the case that those analyses are wrong. We are the last people to criticize heterodoxy. But it is you not we who are coming out of left field on this. So please explain to us all why the energy experts and economists who we cite are wrong. You might even convince the good folks here that they are. But we'll thank you for not continuing to project your heterodoxy onto us.

by Ted Nordhaus at 7:24 PM on 05 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

I call BS on these delayers.

The raw facts are that energy efficient options are available NOW, as in today that applied to existing structures pay off well within the standard 30-year mortgage model.

Here are a few of them:

Zero Energy Homes: residential buildings that require a net-zero input from the grid. To get to a building that requires no net energy use requires multiple factors which can be installed independently of each other.

Geo-exchange HVAC systems provide significant savings over every other active heating/cooling system as well as providing free hot water. These systems have been installed in downtown Sacramento on row houses and apartment buildings all over Europe. They generally pay off their installation costs within ten years of installation. Since installation costs are fixed and energy costs can be expected to increase early payoff is pretty much a guarantee.

Here are some nice case studies that show that you don't have to live in California to be off-grid or energy efficient. You can even reduce your energy profile if you are a brewery that manages to produce dang good beer in the most environmentally friendly manner possible for an operation of that size.

Simply changing roofing materials can result in as much as a 75% reduction in heat load from your roof. In Florida and the Southwest this is a major factor in cooling loads from AC systems on coal burning power plants. This doesn't require any technological change at all, but merely a minor regulatory change. Outlaw asphalt roofing in areas with high cooling loads and millions of tons of GHG emissions are saved. Existing asphalt roofs have to be replaced regardless. More roofing material information.

Straw Bale buildings use little energy other than that needed for lighting and appliances. More here. You can wrap straw bales around an existing house if you extend the roof out to cover the addition.

Cob Houses are affordable and efficient in materials and energy use. After all they're built of clay, sand and straw with the addition of small amount of wood for windows doors and roofing timbers. That means that there aren't so much GHG's produced in the transportation of materials.

As everybody familiar with Gristmill knows eating locally and reducing your meat intake is also good for reducing greenhouse gases. With the use of pre-historic farming techniques such as Terra Preta we can harvest energy from agricultural waste AND reduce fertilizer requirements. This is significantly important because most nitrate fertilizers end up as NO2 gas which has a far more potent effect than CO2. It also permanently puts atmospheric carbon into the ground while reducing future emissions.

Yep, we could also drive electric cars, take public transit, increase our use of rail transit, quit flying everywhere and add some sails to all those smog pumping container ships. People would even be willing to accept a (gasp) revenue-neutral Carbon Tax that taxes those that pollute (the rich) and returns the revenue to those least able to pay for increased cost of goods and services (everybody else). If the well off don't want to pay carbon taxes they could simply reduce their purchases of high CO2 producing goods or services.

Reduction of grid loads means that power generation by means of solar PV, solar-thermal/stirling systems, geothermal, wind and tidal power require less capacity build out to replace coal. Coal is the enemy of the planet. That is without a doubt.

All of these solutions require small changes to zoning, building codes, financial systems or other regulatory systems. None of them require anything like the new technologies that we are supposed to wait for. I'm tired of waiting for the technological Easter Bunny to come. I want to see some solutions moving NOW. The authors proposing throwing money at research before installation of existing technological solutions should be considered delayers and deniers. They are effectively allies with the coal, oil and natural gas industries.

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 1:03 AM on 06 Oct 2007

Pangolin --

That was awesome. Can you please put that comment on your website so that it can be easily accessed? Also, if you put it there as an article, you can update it. Thanks!

by Jon Rynn at 6:08 AM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

Stop the attacks, Ted

I was for a significant increase in energy R&D long before you were. I have been writing about this for two decades and worked on it inside the government for 5 years in the 1990s. I still am advocating it. The difference is, I don't think it is anywhere near the most important thing we need to be doing to stop catastrophic global warming, and I don't keep attacking environmentalists for pursuing the right priorities.

If we don't put in place the regulations that accelerate clean technologies in the marketplace, all the R&D in the world won't help. The top priority must be a price for carbon, especially to make things like carbon capture and storage economic. The next priority is tough CAFE, to accelerate into the marketplace all those technologies that R&D developed in the past two decades. Equally important is redesigning utility regulations to give energy efficiency equal footing with new generation. Tougher building and appliance standards are vital. We will probably need government standards to push cellulosic ethanol and plug in hybrids -- if the history of alternative fuels is any guide. A renewable portfolio standard would also be useful. And yes, way down the list of priorities, more R&D would be useful to give us new technologies to deploy in the 2030s and beyond, after we have spent the next quarter-century saving the planet by aggressively deploy existing technology.

The fact is that the core of your argument -- we need major technology breakthroughs and environmentalists only want to inflict government control and sacrifice on the public -- is exactly the same argument Luntz, Crichton, Lomborg, Bush and all his energy/climate advisors make. You ever ask yourself why is that? I know you are more sincere than they are. But the fact remains, they think this argument is the best way to delay action. They most know something -- since so far they have succeeded.

by jromm at 8:21 AM on 06 Oct 2007

Con fight at the OK Coral

As one who might benefit from the public investments promoted by N&S I must agree with the comments above. Existing technologies can displace all existing coal power plants and waiting for new technology is not a reason for delay of new regulations.

I cringe when environmentalists are attacked, and I wonder if this is to generate heat to sell books. Or is it more sinister? I am not an environmental activist though my neighbors may disagree. I camp with environmentalists because they are more concerned about our collective futures than others who are often more focused on self-interests. Anti-environmentalist solutions to global warming does not make any sense to me, a fundamental contradiction.

Independent of all other actions and prejudices, it is time to do whatever it takes to regulate coal to extinction. New technologies will fill the void organically. My only complaint is that occasionally environmentalists embrace emerging energy technologies that won't pencil out. N&S do exactly the same thing.

by sunflower at 9:22 AM on 06 Oct 2007

Criticism vs. Cynicism

With the exception of CCS, which will require carbon prices well beyond what Congress is likely to establish (as noted in earlier posts, every cap and trade bill before the Congress, including Boxer/Sanders, has some form of safety valve built into it that will limit that actual price of carbon), every step you have listed above will result in modest, not deep reductions, in the neighborhood of 20 to 30%, not the 60 to 80% we need, and that's just in the US and other developed nations that establish such policies and only if they succeed wildly. It should be sobering to note that the EU, where most of these same policies have been established, along with a cap and trade system, has seen it's emissions go up since 2000, not down. That's why all of the sources cited above call for major public investment now, not later and not as an afterthought or secondary priority. Why not acknowledge this reality Joe? And why don't you see doing so, and having a serious public technology policy as consistent with, indeed an asset to, any effort to establish needed regulatory policies? Because Bush and other conservatives have cynically suggested that the lack of low cost alternatives and the economic costs of pricing carbon at levels necessary to drive deep reductions are reasons not to cap carbon emissions? If as you say this has been the reason for delay and not say, the single minded obsession of environmentalists with defining their global warming and energy agenda around limiting pollution, then why would you not define your agenda such that it coopted those arguments rather than ignored them?

I don't doubt that you have been advocating clean energy investment since before any of us were born Joe. But your posts make pretty clear that it is not a very high priority for you and a quick perusal of what the national environmental groups are actually advocating in Congress makes pretty clear that it is not a high priority for them either, no matter what they may say on their websites. Perhaps that is as it should be. But to suggest that any one with a divergent view who questions those priorities is essentially a global warming denier, or is trying to delay action to address global warming is outrageous and cynical.

by Ted Nordhaus at 9:31 AM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

What we know how to do, and what we don't

Finally, the commodified nature of energy (one electron is as good as another) makes it difficult to develop initial commercial products that can command a higher price. While Apple enthusiasts lined up to shell out $600 for an iPhone, very few consumers are willing to pay two to three times more for clean energy.

This argument states one and only one thing to me. The necessity of carbon pricing. How else can you replicate an initial higher price? Is that not precisely what carbon pricing would do?

Investment is important, but will never succeed alone. If I had the choice of one, and only one policy, it would be carbon pricing. It would work. The only reason for continued debate is whether there is a mix of approaches that will work better.

Once you set carbon pricing, attacking climate change becomes no different than every other economic issue. Investment is important in clean technologies. Investment has always been important in non-clean technologies too. Our economic, policy and corporate infrastructure knows how to balance all of these factors from experience, assuming that the numbers they are working from represent a goal we actually want.

by nedruod at 10:41 AM on 06 Oct 2007

Nedruod, who pays? and Ted....

Nedruod -- To me, much of the discussion boils down to "who pays?", and nobody is discussing it - well, almost, N&S point out that carbon pricing, based on current technologies, will hit the middle classes (and poor and poor nations) very hard. They would pay. OK, the next resposne to that criticism, I believe, is you make carbon taxes (or whatever) revenue-neutral, that is, you either reimburse(?) or lower other kinds of taxes. But that doesn't solve the problem, I don't think, maybe you can explain: if carbon taxes replace income taxes exactly, there's no money left over for investment in either r&d or bulk purchasing, or anything else, unless you cut something else out of the budget -- and where would that be? N&S seem to rule out the military. Taxes on the superrich and corporations? Am I missing something? You can't just wave a hand and say "the market" will work it out, somebody is going to pay more money somewhere. So it is not an economic problem, it's a political, or really, a power problem, who has the power to make others pay for more expensive carbon -- or to pay to build an entirely new energy/transportation infrastructure, which I think is preferable to either what N&S or Romm are saying.

If Nordhaus is reading this -- Can you at least answer one question: would you advocate spending big bucks now on some existing technologies in order to ramp them up in production and bring the costs down as a result of economies of scale? If the answer is yes, then I think you and Romm are much closer than the two of you seem to think. If the answer is no, then I have to agree, at least partially, with Romm. Thank you.

by Jon Rynn at 11:30 AM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

We support investment in current tech now.

I'm not sure how many times we have to say this. We believe that major investment in existing clean energy technologies is a necessity. In some cases, such as efficiency, cleaner conventional energy sources like natural gas, and perhaps even wind, a carbon price will be sufficient to dramatically increase use and deployment of those technologies. Doing so has the potential to drive US emissions down probably 20 to 30% over the next several decades. This is a good thing, we support it, and we believe we should enact policies to achieve that objective NOW. This will require both cap and trade legislation or some other mechanism to establish a price for carbon and things like efficiency standards. But to drive emissions down much further, you need to bring solar, CCS, and other technologies which presently exist but are no where close in terms of cost and performance to scale very quickly. Carbon pricing, at least any carbon price that is likely to be established and sustained politically and economically, will not be sufficient to drive widespread deployment of these technologies. Yes, you do need a carbon price in place such that when you bring the price down far enough there is market pull to drive the widespread commercialization of those technologies. But a carbon price in and of itself will not be sufficient. That is the point that we have made over and over again in these posts so I don't know how many more times and ways we can figure out how to say it.

by Ted Nordhaus at 2:44 PM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

Thanks Ted....

although I think there should be governmental investment in current technologies, for example, put solar pv on all government buildings, now...sorry if I missed it, but it appears that you are saying that Joe's carbon pricing would bring that 20 to 30% reduction by spurring private investment -- but I'll assume you have also talked about direct public investment, a la Germany or Japan, in the government forking over the money to construct solar, etc.

by Jon Rynn at 2:54 PM on 06 Oct 2007

correct

yes that's correct. private sector is probably sufficient for efficiency, NG, and wind but not for PV, CCS, and not to make big gains in battery and other storage technologies.

by Ted Nordhaus at 3:48 PM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

well, alrighty then,

it seems to me that there is plenty that you (Ted) and Romm could agree on in terms of actually crafting policy, thanks again.

by Jon Rynn at 4:07 PM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

Wish it were so

Perhaps. But ask Joe how much public investment the big national enviro's he is defending have actually proposed. Ask him what legislation those groups are backing in Congress to establish the necessary public investment and to direct it toward the right investments. Ask him if any of the cap and trade legislation those groups are supporting would direct $30 billion, or even $15 billion annually toward those investments. Ask him what the plan of those groups is to safeguard those investments from pork barrel appropriation. That's where a serious public investment strategy begins, not with a few throw away lines at NRDC's or ED's websites. We see little evidence that the national enviro's are taking any of this very seriously. That's because they don't see it as particularly important.

by Ted Nordhaus at 5:01 PM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

I have been very frustrated...

...that none of the big enviro groups seems to take public transit seriously. In fact, the only public figure I can find who does is James Howard Kunstler, who has a similar problem that you guys have, people never seem to register his alternatives and proposals.

I have been continuously commenting on Romm's posts, and I will continue to do so, asking about and suggesting public investment as a policy tool -- so far to no response, but that's ok, I'll keep trying.

by Jon Rynn at 5:40 PM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

And there's the rub

Relying on the government to solve for global warming is too risky. Send the funds to universities - to the generation that is actually in this fight for survival.

by sunflower at 6:13 PM on 06 Oct 2007

The market isn't risky?!

by Jon Rynn at 7:20 PM on 06 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

Markets and governments are in bed together.

I feel the reaction coming from the next generation, their passion and focus, their urgency. Governments and markets are not reacting to reality, all very passive. So use the fire burning at our universities. No time to lose.

by sunflower at 7:45 PM on 06 Oct 2007

The argument is mostly over the first step

Ted, we can only, as a group, support so much legislation at once. We are bound to be asked to make compromises by the opposition or the undecideds. So, knowing that, we have to decide, what is the first issue that receives top billing?

Yes, you do need a carbon price in place such that when you bring the price down far enough there is market pull to drive the widespread commercialization of those technologies.

Here you show a predisposition to the approach of inventing first, and then working on carbon pricing. There is some logic, but there is much more logic toward the other approach.

One argument that is hard to ignore is the political argument. If carbon pricing is put in place, the big multinationals will have a reason to push the public R&D investment you're calling for. Knowing that they need those technologies, they are vested in their creation. Private companies invest in R&D in more ways than in private labs.

But on the other side, what new motivation do those companies have to support carbon pricing after public R&D investment? None really. In fact they have even less reason than before. Now they'll want to sell solar panels AND coal AND sequestration. Or Hybrid Hummers.

Technology innovation without controls can go both ways. Every invention has multiple uses, and without some directing force, a great deal of the potential R&D will unleash will be wasted, misused or worse.

You worry about stopping pork barrel R&D projects. There are two ways to fix that. The first is constant vigilance, activism, energy all directed at understanding, communicating, persuading and influencing each proposal to insure the pork is wiped out. The second is to redefine what pork is, so that 80% of the pork is beneficial anyhow. You can do both, but if I had a 20 year battle in front of me, I'd make sure the second was done first. It also seems clear to me, that the second has some chance of success, where as the first is a fight thousands of years old.

by nedruod at 10:52 PM on 06 Oct 2007

Jon - Who Pays?

Jon, there are a lot of forces involved in who pays for anything. I think asking that question in as part of a debate on carbon pricing a needless distraction. The issue will come up surely, and all the necessary paybacks, pork, will happen.

Ultimately what will happen is the people paying will be the people from each class who are the most wasteful. Some poor will pay more, many will pay less. Some middle class will pay more, many will pay less, etc.

There is an element of fairness in that equation that goes beyond class, and I see it as exceptionally likely the greater fairness will afford some flexibility toward the marginal overall revenue necessary for public investment.

by nedruod at 11:12 PM on 06 Oct 2007

"Who pays" is always important,

it's always one of the basic political questions. But to be more concrete, the poor are already very energy efficient, because they don't consume as much as the rich. Assuming you could design a revenue-neutral carbon tax system, I'm just saying that 1) there won't be room left over for public investment and 2) if people do the right thing and decrease carbon use, the governmental revenue will decrease and then somebody will have to get less money, and who will that be? Unless you increase the carbon tax to make up for it, I don't know how that works.

by Jon Rynn at 9:11 AM on 07 Oct 2007
[ Parent ]

What's the goal?

Who pays is important. Here's a lesson in politics, however. If everything is important to you, you will accomplish nothing. To accomplish something, you need to focus on that.

From here, do two things. First, recognize areas that have natural synergies with secondary goals, and use the synergies to broaden the support base for your primary goal.

Second, when there is no natural synergy, don't confound your task with complications. Rather push in a singular direction and allow the pre-existing forces to push you left, right, up or down, and focus on moving yourself forward.

by nedruod at 12:17 AM on 10 Oct 2007

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