Breakthrough

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By Teryn Norris, Founder & Co-Director of Breakthrough Generation

In a recent article in Time Magazine, Jeffrey Sachs took up the call for a $30 billion annual investment in clean energy:

At the start of the next Administration, it will be high time to increase our annual energy-research budget to $30 billion, which would make it at least comparable to what we spend on medical research each year at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And I propose, with the same sense of mission that gave rise to NASA and NIH, that we create a National Institutes of Sustainable Technology.

Sachs joins the ever-growing number of energy scientists and policy experts who are challenging the efficacy of carbon pricing and calling for massive public investments in clean energy. If anything, Sachs is calling for an even greater level of investment, since his $30 billion proposal would apparently be reserved for research-only.

In December 2007, a group of over 30 energy scientists, including several Nobel Laureates, called upon Congress (PDF) to invest $30 billion per year in clean energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment:

"A wide range of policies aimed at increasing conservation, efficiency, and reducing emissions is vital, but carbon prices and regulations alone will not create new, clean and affordable energy systems soon enough or at the scale needed...

America should be ramping up to invest a minimum of $30 billion per year to develop, demonstrate, and stimulate the commercialization of a range of technologies and approaches that can provide affordable carbon-neutral energy and use that energy more wisely. This is less than half of what America already invests in military research and development."

The demand for massive investments in clean energy was also recently taken up by the International Energy Agency in a landmark report, Energy Technology Perspectives 2008, which recommended $45 trillion total global investments in clean energy technologies and infrastructure -- and $4.5 trillion for clean electricity technologies alone -- between now and 2050. "A global revolution is needed in ways that energy is supplied and used," the 600+ page IEA report concluded.

Sachs, the IEA, and other energy scientists understand that global warming is essentially a technology and innovation challenge. Sachs' position originates from a high level of expertise in development and poverty alleviation -- he believes that clean energy technologies in their current state simply cannot provide enough energy to power the growth of the developing world. He drove this point home in a March 2008 article in Scientific American:

Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.

Economists often talk as though putting a price on carbon emissions -- through tradable permits or a carbon tax -- will be enough to deliver the needed reductions in those emissions. This is not true. Europe's carbon-trading system has not shown much capacity to generate large-scale research nor to develop, demonstrate and deploy breakthrough technologies. A trading system might marginally influence the choices between coal and gas plants or provoke a bit more adoption of solar and wind power, but it will not lead to the necessary fundamental overhaul of energy systems.

For that, we will need much more than a price on carbon. Consider three potentially transformative low-emissions technologies: carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), plug-in hybrid automobiles and concentrated solar-thermal electricity generation. Each will require a combination of factors to succeed: more applied scientific research, important regulatory changes, appropriate infrastructure, public acceptance and early high-cost investments. A failure on one or more of these points could kill the technologies.

The ever-growing number of experts calling for large-scale investments in clean energy -- a minimum of $30 billion per year -- is compelling evidence that the consensus on regulation and carbon-pricing as the top priority for climate mitigation policy is beginning to crumble. But will it crumble quickly enough to allow for an investment and technology-centric policy push in 2009? Stay tuned -- only time will tell.