Welcome NPR Listeners

NPR's Morning Edition ran a segment on the Breakthrough Institute this morning, featuring our work to re-frame global warming as an economic opportunity and advance a fundamental shift in policy capable of seizing that tremendous opportunity. You can listen to the segment online here.

If you're visiting The Breakthrough Institute's web site for the first time -- welcome! Many folks who heard us on NPR this morning have emailed to say hello and read about our work. Below are a few recommendations of things to read -- we love your comments, so please don't hesitate to opine.

Here are a few places to begin:

1. The Big Picture on Breakthrough Institute's politics. We wrote a book called Break Through that criticizes apocalypse talk and the policy focus on regulation. You can read a lot about it here. Time magazine called the book "prescient" and Wired said it "could be the most important thing to happen to environmentalism since Silent Spring." You can download the introduction from here for free and you can click here to buy the book from Amazon (the paperback is out, and there is a new preface).

2. The Big Picture on climate and energy. The best place to start for the average reader is a New Republic piece -- "Second Life" -- we wrote in the fall of 2007. A longer more technical argument can be found in "Fast Clean and Cheap" which we wrote for the Harvard Law and Policy Review. Our analysis of global action on climate is in "Scrap Kyoto" which was the cover story of the Democracy journal. All of these can be downloaded for free from our Writings page.

3. Making clean energy cheap To tackle climate change and build a clean, prosperous global energy economy, we believe governments around the world need to launch a proactive effort to make clean energy cheap. Our ideas about policies to drive down the price of clean energy technologies with large-scale public investments in research, development, demonstration, and deployment can be found on our Ideas page here. We summarize the case for clean energy investment here and policy recommendations for effective clean energy and climate policy here.

4. Cap and Trade climate legislation in the House. The best big picture overview is a piece we wrote just as the debate over cap and trade was getting started for Yale360.org. If you are interested in our analyses of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, a good place to start is here, which is the post where we explain that the Act does not require that emissions actually decline between now and 2030 (at which point policymakers may not be any more likely to put in place a binding cap.) All of our analyses are here and here.

5. Cultural criticism. We have long argued that environmentalism must let go of messianic utopianism and apocalypse mongering. This was the case we made in "The Death of Environmentalism" and a recent article we wrote for The New Republic, "The Green Bubble."

Comments

Happened to catch the interview on NPR this morning, and I agree that a positive financial spin on global warming solves a multitude of problems the world is facing. In the realm of economics, developing clean energy creates jobs in basic R&D for engineers and scientists, there will also be manufacturing and installation jobs for the blue collar workers and a number of sales jobs for those former booth babes at car shows.

Another benefit off the radar screen of people not technically savvy about the petroleum industry, is IMHO developing the alternative energy sector is a good segway to try and solve the very real problem of reserve replenishment (AKA PeakOil). Right now the world has a steady or declining demand for liquid fuels which powers 98% or so of the transportation fleet (cars, ships and aircraft).

A society which has an economy 70% based on consumption and banking isn't sustainable! If it were then the global economy would be going up right now instead of going down or sideways. History is full of examples where innovative technology has the ability to drive the economy forward, witness the 1870's railroad which drove westward expansion. The aircraft industry of the 1950's ushered in the jet age. Silicon valley, commericialed the computer and a new form of "web" communication. The next tech breakthur that will drive the economy is clean energy because it solves many problems and those who "invest" in finding market solutions will make lots of $$$!

By ben on 2009 06 25

Great segment this am. Thought I'd share a video with you that I produced for the CA Innovation Corridor about how the collaboration between government, universities and business (or venture capitol) is what grew innovation in CA. It is the only way we are going to keep any kind of edge here in America. We have already lost manufacturing, if we don't invest to keep innovation going, we will lose that too.

Here is the link: http://www.innovatecalifornia.net/BTHvideo
You have to download it and then use QuickTime to view it. If you want a CD copy , just email me and I'll send it along.


kathy cummings
kcummings@wslc.org

By Kathy Cummings on 2009 06 24