Our priority, then, should be a five- or ten-fold increase in investment in clean energy--broadly defined to include R&D, deployment, procurement, education, and infrastructure--from less than $3 billion per year to $15 to $30 billion. Indeed, what matters most about the global-warming legislation being considered in Congress is how much money it will raise to invest in clean energy. Auctioning emissions permits to polluting firms could generate $15 billion or more per year. A tax on carbon could generate a similar amount. A $300 billion investment over ten years would, according to one study, generate an additional $200 billion in private capital.

I think they are correct that governments, preferarbly at all levels, need to spend big bucks to get over the hump of introducing solar (and wind) and train technologies, although it is unclear how much they are pushing actual procurement, that is, as in Japan and Germany, the government simply built wind and solar energy systems, and also heavily invest in public transit.  Cap-and-trade won't do it, and neither will a carbon tax.

My "oy vay", however, comes in the next two paragraphs, starting with this:

Some of this money ought to be used to create a new military-industrial-academic complex around clean-energy sciences, similar to the one we created around computer science in the 1950s and '60s

I don't even know where to begin on this one, but there is no way we are going to get a transformation of our energy/transportation systems if the military is in control of the process (by the way, check out nowarnowarming.org if you want a perspective opposite to theirs).  So they seem to have gone off the rails (pun perhaps intended) on that one.  Minus the military, though, it could work, but only with a large procurement investment.

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt this book, at least judging from the excerpt, was really aimed at the politicians. That is, the aim of the book is to enable politicians to win power by not threatening the "non-negotiable American way-of-life" (GW Bush?). That is, it appears to be doing something about environmental problems without addressing either our lifestyles or the power-differential in the status quo, so that the military-industrial complex and Empire can continue (indeed, be renewed).

My understanding of the polls is that the public is opposed to the Iraq war and wants a smaller military and a stronger presense of the UN in world policing. However, that notion challenges both parties, who heavily rely on campaign financing from the war profiteers. I suspect most people would support $100 billion taken out of the Pentagon budget to further a clean energy transition. But that is obviously beyond the pale for these authors (and their intended audience). I suspect their polling was done with narrow and loaded questions.

As such, this book might help the next Party win the battle for the next election, but it could also help us losing the war of humans vs. the Earth. It seems to continue the myth that environmentalists are merely pests to be brushed off, so that Americans can go on with their SUV lifestyles. Unfortunately, environmentalists warn not just of global warming, but a host of other ecological problems from ecosytem collapse to resource depletion (fossil fuels). We are skeptical of techno-fixes, the belief that a new technology is just around the corner. We have other warnings too that renewable energies are simply not energy-dense enough to support the American energy-intensive lifestyle.

Rather than foster a productive dialog between the left and environmentalists, this article seems to want to divide us, even shun us. In that process, the insights of ecologists will be lost and the Earth's ecosystems will continue to spiral out of control. The other danger is that the longer politicans continue to pander to base instincts and false optimism, the more credibility they lose as the environmental problems grow more obvious. In my opinion, we need bolder approaches than the path-of-least-resistence that Nordhaus and Schellenberger seem to offer us.

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With the above statement, these policy wonks fall into the trap almost every economist falls into. They fail to consider all the impacts. "Level of prosperity"  is shorthand for "consumption of materials and (mostly natural) services." The posited levels of consumption will run into limiting factors other than energy long before energy consumption becomes the limiting factor.

Steve E. Whidbey Environmental Action Network