The Breakthrough Institute

NPR had a story today about the shifting conceptual paradigms of climate change and climate change solutions. Essentially a conversation with Dan Sarewitz, one of the leading thinkers studying innovation and technology policy, the piece gets at some fundamental truths regarding energy, society and the immense challenge of rebuilding the entire global energy system. The entire segment is about 4 and half minutes, and I would recommend listening to the entire thing. From the story:

Using energy "is really the metabolism of modern industrial society," [Sarewitz] says. "And changing that system is not about replacing a few technologies or advancing our level of efficiency along certain fronts."

It means creating a whole new basis for the global economy. Sarewitz is skeptical that politicians can deliberately manage a transformation of that scale, either through legislation or through climate treaties. He says, for starters, measures that will ultimately force everyone to pay more for energy are doomed both economically and politically.

"Politically, what you're asking people to do is to pay a huge upfront cost for benefits many decades down the road that they can't even anticipate or predict. And that is politically an extremely difficult sort of situation to manage," Sarewitz says.

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"The economic dislocation that would be created by getting to that sort of level would absolutely be immense," he says. "And it's easy to be casual about that or it's easy to pin that kind of argument on conservative Republicans or on the executives of oil corporations, but nevertheless it is absolutely true you would be talking about something that would be destabilizing to global economies."

Instead, Sarewitz says, we need to think about new ways to approach our dual climate and energy crises:

To do that, he's looked back in history to see how we managed other major transformations. One example is how America transformed agriculture over the past century. The United States government created a highly successful, century-long effort to make food more abundant and affordable.

"And it didn't do so by setting any particular target or timetable. It did so by investing in research and development -- and very importantly, in institutions," Sarewitz says.

For example, agricultural extension programs brought together researchers to tackle the big problems, and farmers to put the solutions to work quickly. The key to it all was speeding up innovation. And the good news is none of this required an ugly political or public debate. That's the model Sarewitz would like to use for climate change.

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Sarewitz is now hard at work trying to identify what institutions we need to drive that transformation in the coming decades. The ultimate goal is to make renewable energy about as cheap as fossil fuels. Otherwise, there's little hope that the nations of the world will agree to tackle climate change.