Breakthrough: The NY Times has it Backwards

The New York Times' Monday editorial criticizes President Bush for seeming "disconnected from reality" when it comes to climate change. That may be an accurate assessment, but the Times, too, is disconnected - not from the seriousness and urgency of the problem, but from the need for breakthrough technologies in dealing with it. It seems the Times believes, as Al Gore has said, that "we have all the technology we need" to deal with global warming. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. Our technology is nowhere near the level it needs to be to make a dent in the global warming problem. They have it backwards:

The error is placing too much faith in grandiose projects and technological leaps to solve a problem that is urgently here and now. The most realistic path to reducing global warming gases is to limit emissions across the economy by putting a price on carbon. That would give private industry strong incentives to develop greater efficiencies and cleaner fuels.

The Times is just plain wrong that a regulation-centered approach will produce the kinds of technologies we need right now to stop global warming. The editorial bemoans Bush's rejection of Kyoto, but it's simply not true that what was missing from Kyoto was us. Kyoto was poorly designed to begin with, and we should learn from its failure to adopt a better strategy. We can limit until we're blue in the face, but no amount of regulation or carbon taxing is going to bring down the price of clean energy.

The Times contends that technology innovation follows regulation, but the reverse is just as often the case. Consider that for both the 1989 Montreal protocol that phased out ozone-depleting chemicals, and acid rain regulation in the United States, regulation only passed when cleaner technology was cheap and readily available.

When it comes to reducing emissions, cap and trade schemes present a Gordian Knot: increase energy prices too much and face a political backlash from consumers and industry alike. Increase them too little and the impact on greenhouse gas emissions will be nil.

What's more, even if the United States jumps whole-heartedly onto the cap and trade bandwagon it will do nothing to address the elephants in the room - China and India, and the rest of the developing world. These nations have made clear that they will not take steps to reduce their carbon emissions unless doing so becomes consistent with rapid economic development. With developing nations quickly eclipsing the rest of the world in terms of emissions, an effective plan to deal with global warming must include them.

Where does this leave us? With the U.S. blaming developing nations, developing nations blaming rich nations, and everyone blaming the United States, I think it's pretty clear that finger pointing isn't helping anyone.

The Times calls for Bush to embrace the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, now before Congress. But the truth is, this bill will do startlingly little for clean energy, instead falling into the same old trap of pitting ecological action against economic development. What we're missing isn't a place to lay the blame, nor is it harsher regulation - it's energy that's fast, clean, and cheap.

You're substantially correct; technology can't be legislated into existence by fiat. If that were true we'd all have have a fusion powered flying car by now. Instead, we have toilets that can't flush the output of a 5 year old without assistance and we're fixing to get cruddy lights that probably take more energy to make, dispose of, and recycle than they save.

Pournelle and Possony wrote a smallish book "The Strategy of Technology" which posits that the dominance and progress of the US and the west is precisely because of treating technology as a strategic resource. You can find it online.

Were we to heed this, we could easily put an X-program in place to develop cheap space access (at least cheaper than Shuttle and disposable rockets.) We already know how to build spaceborne solar power; at least we know roughly what to do given that we haven't built this. Combine the two and we can at least solve the power plant problem within a generation. Sprinkle in some additional nuclear capability. Note again that this doesn't require technology leaps, at least in the vein of "and now a miracle happens," although it will require incremental improvement in what we can already do.

Admittedly this doesn't solve automobiles and it doesn't solve batteries etc but it IS a rational starting point that *can* work, *can* create jobs, and is a solution that is "green" and also doesn't require legislating penalties on the use of what we already have.

One step at a time.

Posted by: G Alston at February 6, 2008 6:38 AM

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