This weekend 5,000 student climate activists will meet in Washington, D.C. Let's hope a substantial number of them see the challenge of energy and global warming as fundamentally intellectual and conceptual -- not just strategic and tactical. This isn't simply a matter of mobilizing a few more campus groups or passing another city-wide or state-wide resolution about the need for pollution limits. Global warming is a civilization-wide challenge, one that demands our best thinking and largest selves. I did an interview with Powershift organizers that you can read here.

In this week's Nature magazine, Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University make a strong case that climate policy decidedly does not need more of the same approach that has not been working. They write:

We stare at stark divergences of trends. On the one hand, the International Energy Agency predicts a doubling of global energy demand from present levels in the next 25 years. On the other, since 1980 there has been a worldwide reduction of 40% in government budgets for energy R&D. Without huge investment in R&D, the technologies upon which a viable emissions reduction strategy depends will not be available in time to disrupt a new cycle of carbon-intensive infrastructure.

So investment in energy R&D should be placed on a wartime footing. This is a cause that embraces the political spectrum, including Kyoto supporters. In 1992 former US Vice-President Al Gore called for a 'strategic environment initiative' as part of his vision for a 'global Marshall Plan'. The conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC also supports primary research on sustainable new energy technologies. In 2006, Lord Rees, the president of Britain's Royal Society suggested that major public investment in R&D should be kick-started by a global investment in energy technologies research on the scale of the Manhattan Project.

Read the whole thing free here.

Several friends and strangers emailed from Portland to insist that, ahem, Portland, not Minneapolis, remains the coolest town in America. The food, the music, the people, the natural beauty (the biting rain, the clear-cuts, etc)

Breakthrough Advisory Board member Larry Wallack has put on a couple of events for me next week, November 1 and 2, including a City Club lecture (see upcoming events for more information).

Today, Portland's Willamette Week, one of the country's best weekly newspapers, ran a brief Q&A with me today. I haven't yet checked music listings for November 1, but can't help but think it will be hard to top the New Pornographers show in Minneapolis.

Okay, I'm a bit biased because 350 people turned out in the rain for my book talk in Minneapolis -- and they then took me to the New Pornographers show afterwards -- but still. And the local NPR affiliate actually plays rock music. Cool town. Maybe cooler even than Portland. You can hear me getting interviewed in Minneapolis, and then a short piece on the local NPR affiliate. Oh, and a Q&A with me that ran in the local weekly, the Minneapolis Monitor.

The most quoted part of our essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," was that Martin Luther King didn't give the "I have a nightmare" speech for a reason. The "I have a dream" speech worked because people knew about the nightmare. What America needed was a positive vision of the future. It's time for Al Gore to tell the world about the dream.

Continue reading "Tell them about the dream, Al!" »

Download the PDF here.

Green groups may carp, but the the truth is the book could turn out to be the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring."

Download the PDF here.

Health is arguably the most universal human values. Consult any parent and the health and of their child(ren) will consistently draw top rank. Consult the Global Burden of Disease project's infant mortality data and the contributors to children's health are evident - food, safe water and immunization. Absent these fundamentals dysentery and infectious disease run rampant and deadly. If you are reading this, chances are you live in a corner of the world where food is abundant, sanitation systems are established and vaccination has created heard immunity. The conditions of affluence, especially the absence of rampant infectious disease, have given rise to a modern anti-vaccination movement.

Continue reading "Political Science" »

Literature Review Reveals Expert Consensus on Need for Large Public Investments into Energy Technology Innovation to Stabilize the Climate.

Report prepared by Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Jeff Navin, Teryn Norris, and Aden Van Noppen.

Download the PDF here.

American Power: The Case for an Energetic New Progressive Politics

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

Most progressives today are optimistic that, in 2008, Democrats will regain the White House and solidify their majority in Congress, largely on the basis of the country's anti-war sentiment alone. But down this path lies danger, for if Democrats fail to offer a vision for the future that is as large and positive as the war in Iraq is negative, we may take back the White House and Congress and fail to take back America.

A new politics should inspire Americans to grapple with certain existential questions: What kind of a country do we want? How can we achieve it? These questions implicitly contain a question about investment: how shall we invest our wealth and our labor?

Continue reading "American Power" »

In Break Through we argue that the military's virtual creation of Silicon Valley is a model for investments the military should today make into clean energy. Right on cue, the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle offered up this history:

The early chip industry, like the two waves of innovation before, initially depended on military expenditures, Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, writes in his book "A History of Modern Computing."

Only this time, it was the Cold War that opened the government's checkbook.

The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, prodded the United States to modernize its missile and space program. The newfangled silicon chips were considered vital - albeit costly - components, and Ceruzzi writes that NASA and the Defense Department bought so many "that the price dropped from $1,000 a chip to between $20 and $30."

Falling chip prices fueled development of new electronics for corporate customers and eventually individual consumers. Reliance on military purchases lessened, though defense dollars remained important in spurring research. Thus, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin later dreamed up Google, a defense research grant helped support their work. And when Stanford computer scientists won a robotic car race in 2005, the prize came from the Defense Department.

By the 1970s, therefore, Silicon Valley was poised to capitalize on new civilian technologies like PCs, as exemplified by Apple Computer.