I have long thought that for many politicians the most compelling reason for cap and trade legislation is not just an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but to tap a new source of revenue in an era where explicit tax increases are politically dangerous. The economic meltdown coupled with the large deficit spending, along with President Obama's commitment to reduce the deficit make it more likely that cap and trade legislation will in fact be passed as a mechanism of revenue generation. Whether or not it will actually reduce emissions is a separate question. A story in today's E&E Daily discusses this process, asking whether or not expected cap and trade revenues will appear in the Congressional budget resolution. Even though the resolution is non-binding, if the cap and trade revenue appears in it, then the commitment to cap and trade as a source of general government revenue will have been made.

Continue reading "Fiscal Policy and Cap and Trade" »

"Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here. Now is the time to act boldly and wisely - to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jump start job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down. That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that's what I'd like to talk to you about tonight."

-- Barack Obama

Last night, President Obama articulated a vision for a new strategy of investment in sustained prosperity in the 21st century, which reminds us here at Breakthrough of the the new growth strategy called for by Teryn Norris following President Obama's election.

I know I may be chastised for criticizing Obama so soon after he delivered an unprecedented clean energy investment in the stimulus. But let's be clear: those investments were just the beginning, and Obama needs to articulate a clear and viable plan to make the sustained commitment and ongoing public investments necessary to truly build a new energy economy.

The public is overwhelmingly behind President Obama right now, and if he was elected with a mandate to do anything beyond stem the economic crisis, it was a mandate to build a new, clean energy economy that finally secures America's energy independence and averts potentially catastrophic climate change.

Yet once you start looking at the critical areas for public investment - research, development and demonstration, or RD&D; critical infrastructure, like a modernized electrical grid; deployment incentives to spur emerging technologies; and efficiency incentives, financing and other investments to retrofit American homes, businesses and factories - it's not hard to see why $15 billion per year is simply not up to the task.

Continue reading "Will Obama Put Real Money on the Table for Clean Energy?" »

"The President's message on fiscal responsibility -- that he'll cut the current one by half by the end of his first term -- is smart politics right now, but it may be dumb politics by November of 2012, and doesn't make much economic sense regardless.

We're in a deepening recession, in case you hadn't noticed. The biggest challenge is to ramp up aggregate demand. Yes, we have to borrow lots from the Chinese and Japanese to do this, and, yes, it's costly in terms of additional interest payments to them. But there's no choice. In fact, if the slump gets worse -- and I have every reason to fear it will because that's the direction we're heading in as fast as you can imagine -- we'll probably have to have a second stimulus. And if the second isn't enough, a third."

--Robert Reich

Andy Revkin at the New York Times asked Al Gore's office for their comments on Gore's use of data from CRED in Belgium in recent versions of his talk to illustrate the impacts of human-caused climate change on disasters. In response, Gore's office has said that they will pull the slide, as it does not have a scientific foundation.

Kudos to Al Gore who has demonstrated a commitment to scientific accuracy in his presentation. However there are still some issues with their response. Here is how Gore's office responded to Revkin as related at Dot Earth (please visit their for embedded links):

Continue reading "Gore Pulls CRED Data From Talk" »

In his latest piece, Time magazine's energy and climate writer Bryan Walsh takes readers beyond carbon pricing, to look at the more active government engagement in energy innovation necessary in the race against climate change.

"[A] growing chorus of experts is beginning to doubt whether cap-and-trade alone will reduce CO2 enough to curb runaway climate change," Walsh writes, before turning to the need for new energy innovation on an unprecedented scale. As Walsh writes, "If the U.S. is to invent its way out of climate change, which some suggest is our only hope, it will need to spend [a] lot more and a lot more wisely on basic energy research."

Selected excerpts after the jump...

Continue reading "Time's Bryan Walsh Takes Us Beyond Carbon Pricing" »

A story about the GOP's governors in Sunday's New York Times paints a picture of the current Republican Party through the prism of the stimulus debate. The future of the GOP could very well be determined by whether it is the centrist or conservative governors who map out the party's next steps:

Republican governors split sharply during the weekend over how to respond to the economic crisis, a debate whose outcome will go a long way toward shaping how the national party redefines itself in the wake of its election defeats of recent years.

The divisions were evident at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association here as the Republicans differed both in their approaches to their own states' budget shortfalls and in their attitudes toward President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package.

Many pundits and political reporters have postulated that any revival of the GOP will likely come from the Party's governors, who have the double advantage over their Congressional counterparts of 1) a smaller stage with which to experiment with new policy ideas that are necessary for any Republican rebirth and 2) the blessing of not having to go head to head with Barack Obama--who still commands a stunning level of public support--in the course of their daily work.

Continue reading "The GOP's Big Question" »

Breakthrough Institute Seeks Nation's Top Young Writers & Thought Leaders

Application Deadline: March 15, 2009

The Breakthrough Institute, a public policy think tank, is seeking up to ten of the country's top young writers and thoughts leaders for a paid fellowship in Summer 2009 as part of its young leaders initiative, Breakthrough Generation. Fellowships are highly competitive -- in 2008, 10 percent of applicants were accepted -- and involve cutting-edge writing, research, and analysis on energy/climate, national security, the economy, health care, and other issues. Previous Breakthrough Fellows have published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Huffington Post, and Alternet.

In 2009, Fellows have a unique opportunity to be closely involved with the Breakthrough Institute. Over the next year, Breakthrough will work to seize today's historic moment to establish a new era of progressive governance that prioritizes major, long-term government investments in clean energy technology innovation, as well as a new social contract. But major obstacles lie ahead, including severe economic recession and an unpredictable global landscape. To seize the moment, our leaders will need bold ideas backed by sharp thinking and clear analysis.

Continue reading "Calling all young intellectuals: Apply for a Breakthrough Fellowship" »

At a public event at an efficient co-generation power plant in China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama Climate Envoy Todd Stern both discuss the importance of partnership and collaboration to develop and deploy clean, cheap energy technologies to power sustainable development in China.

Are these the first signs of a new Obama Administration strategy for U.S.-China engagement on climate change? Are Clinton and Stern preparing to embark on a strategy focused explicitly on harnessing the best and brightest researchers, entrepreneurs and businesses and leveraging major investments on both sides of the Pacific to develop and deploy clean, cheap and scalable energy sources?

I'll be writing more about this tomorrow, but for now, the full transcript of their remarks are below. I'm interested in your reaction to these remarks and your thoughts on how the United States and the Obama Administration should engage China to ensure a climate stability and to help drive sustainable development in China?

Continue reading "Sec. of State Clinton and Obama Climate Envoy Discuss U.S.-China Clean Energy Collaboration" »

"[G]overnment isn't fundamentally in the Last Judgment business, making sure everybody serves penance for their sins. In times like these, government is fundamentally in the business of stabilizing the economic system as a whole."

--David Brooks

If Obama aims to successfully achieve a transformational presidency and launch a new progressive age, he must offer a new economic governance model that gives America a fresh start.

Cross-posted from The Huffington Post

By Teryn Norris & Adam Zemel

On Tuesday, President Obama signed the historic American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to avoid a spiraling economic downturn. But is it enough?

No. The Congressional Budget Office projects the U.S. economy will lose $2.9 trillion in total economic output over the next three years (PDF). To close that gap, Obama would need to sign a bill with approximately $2 trillion in total spending. But the current plan is less than $800 billion, with almost $300 billion for tax cuts. A recent report (PDF) by the chief economist at Moody's Economy shows that while one dollar of public spending can boost GDP as much as $1.70, every dollar of tax cuts can increase GDP by only $0.30 to $1.00. In other words, spending is up to five times more effective than tax cuts at boosting GDP.

So we have a stimulus bill that contains about $500 billion of public spending and $300 billion of dubious tax cuts. Given the CBO's projected $2.9 trillion output gap, calling the bill weak is an understatement. This gap presents a danger not just to the economy. If the economy is still dragging in two years, and the stimulus is publicly perceived as a failure, Democrats could not only lose the mid-terms in 2010, but the role of public investment could be discredited for years to come.

Continue reading "Obama Needs an Economic Philosophy" »

"It's not as though you're supposed to have a JPMorganBernankeCo.gov ATM card sitting in your wallet come 2013."

-Nate Silver, on the confusion surrounding the term "nationalization" as applied to banks and financial institutions. The whole post, "Things I Think We Know About the Banking Crisis..." is worth reading.

A few years ago, on this blog and at Climate Audit, there was a healthy discussion of a paper by Greg Holland and Peter Webster that claimed definitive attribution of hurricane activity to greenhouse gas emissions (PDF). Now a paper by Sim Aberson is out in the current issue of BAMS (PDF) which uses the Holland/Webster paper as a good example of how not to do statistics.

The Aberson paper is summarized as:

A cautionary tale in which previously published results are shown to be invalid due to the lack of statistical analyses in the original work.

Continue reading "Aberson on Holland/Webster" »

The New York Times reports that even as President Obama signs the economic stimulus bill into law today, he and his aids are indicating that the President has not ruled out the need for continued public spending to stimulate economic recovery:

The president said he would not pretend "that today marks the end of our economic problems."

"Nor does it constitute all of what we have to do to turn our economy around," Mr. Obama said at the signing ceremony in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. "But today does mark the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the way of layoffs."

Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs told reporters on the way to the stimulus bill signing, "I think the president is going to do what's necessary to grow this economy." The Times reports that he then added, "[While] there are no particular plans at this point for a second stimulus package, I wouldn't foreclose it."

This rhetorical shift suggests that Obama recognizes that economic recovery will be a long process that will require sustained action and last deep into his first term. The President seems to be beginning to prepare the public for that reality as well.

Continue reading "Obama: Sowing Seeds for Stimulus 2.0?" »

Question: What is the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world"? Is it (a) grinding poverty, or (b) global warming, or (c) low farm productivity, or (d) drought?

Well, according to noted environmentalist icon, Vandana Shiva, it is none of the above. Addressing a recent conference of the Slow Food Movement in San Francisco, Shiva claimed that the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world" was none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Yes, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' Gates Foundation. The reason for such ire? Apparently, it is because the Gates Foundation has committed the sin of attempting to fight poverty in Africa through technological transformation. Through the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Gates Foundation has sought to increase agricultural productivity in Africa through technology. This, some environmentalists believe in their infinite wisdom, represents the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world"

Continue reading "Is Bill Gates a Menace to Poor Farmers?" »

James Hansen of NASA has written an op-ed for the Guardian that, more than any other piece of his that I've seen, expresses his political philosophy. In a phrase, that philosophy can be characterized as "scientific authoritarianism." Scientific authoritarianism, as I am using it here, holds that political decisions should be compelled by the political preferences of scientists. It is a very strong form of the "linear model" of science and decision making that I discuss in The Honest Broker.

Hansen believes that the advice of experts, and specifically his advice alone, should compel certain political outcomes. He opens his op-ed in the Guardian with this statement:

A year ago, I wrote to Gordon Brown asking him to place a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in Britain. I have asked the same of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and other leaders.

Continue reading "The Political Philosophy of James Hansen" »

The House of Representatives approved the conference report of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today, by a vote of 246-186. Not a single Republican joined Democrats in approving this version of the bill, which was the product of long negotiations between leadership in both the House and Senate, as well as a block of centrist Senate Democrats and Republicans who have taken control of much of the debate on the stimulus.

The public investment numbers in the stimulus have bounced around during the countless negotiations, so if you've been following this crazy game at home (all twelve of you), here's our detailed summary, provided without further comment, of the energy-related investments and tax provisions in the conference version of the stimulus.

Assuming the block of centrist Senators remains supportive, this will be the version passed into law by the Senate soon, as early as later this evening.  Keep in mind that all spending will be spread out over roughly two years.

Continue reading "Detailed Summary of Energy Investments in Stimulus" »

"Final quarter GDP in the eurozone fell by 1.5% in the final quarter, the first contraction since records started being kept in the 1990s. If our subprime market is the cause of this mess, how come they're suffering more than we are?"

--Megan McArdle (emphasis added)

"So far the Obama administration's response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large enough to avert the worst, but not enough to kick-start recovery; support for the banking system, but a reluctance to force banks to face up to their losses. It's early days yet, but we're falling behind the curve."

-Paul Krugman

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe today, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield championed long term federal investments in technologies and technology-based sectors as an engine of long term economic growth.

Hockfield invokes World War II and Cold War investments in education and fundamental and applied research and development, citing the many technological innovations--in electronics, aerospace, computing and communications and others--that directly resulted from these investments. These innovations, she points out, and created industries and growth sectors that provided decades of prosperity for the American economy. Hockfield writes:

With stimulus plans now in place, Congress and the Obama administration must plant the seeds of longer-term economic growth. Economists broadly agree that more than half of US economic growth since World War II has come from technological innovation, much of it stemming from federally funded, fundamental research. In the late 1990s, for example, US productivity grew at more than 3 percent per year. The revolution in information technology - a direct outgrowth of federally funded research - was pivotal to this extraordinary growth.

Citing the potential for future technological breakthroughs to help America overcome pressing national challenges, she continues:

Finding new energy answers may be the most pressing concern, given the implications of the current energy mix for the economy, national security and climate change. To help unleash an innovation wave in energy technology, the United States must go beyond the priorities of the stimulus package, which aims to create tens of thousands of "green jobs"; it must now invest in the kind of research and innovation that will ultimately spin-off millions of jobs by building a new economy. This includes investing in early- and later-stage research on the most promising technologies; funding new R&D centers to accelerate critical breakthroughs; equipping research labs with state-of-the-art instrumentation for advanced research, prototyping and demonstration of emerging technologies; and training a new energy talent base.

With debate over the stimulus coming to an end, progressives need to begin using the recovery bill as a springboard to advocate for a new model of governance that values sustained federal investments that can yield broad societal benefits and fuel economic growth. It is great that MIT's respected president is moving the discourse around creating a new progressive economic philosophy for forward.

(Read the whole op-ed after the jump)

Continue reading "MIT President Champions Federal Innovation Investments" »

"I do not remember hearing a plausible, principled alternative powerfully articulated by the Congressional Republicans. Maybe that's because the great success of the GOP over the last eight years has been to destroy the reputation of free markets and limited government by deploying its rhetoric and then doing the opposite. Partisan Republicans choke on the truth that the emerging shape of the Obama era is the aftermath of the GOP's successful, if unwitting, campaign to destroy the political economy they proclaimed."

--Will Wilkinson

In a candid conversation with reporters yesterday, newly-confirmed Energy Secretary Dr. Stephen Chu called for "a second industrial revolution" in energy technology to overcome the world's energy and climate challenges.

Sounding like an honorary Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow, Dr. Chu said solving these pressing challenges would require Nobel-level "breakthroughs" in at least three core energy technologies: advanced batteries for vehicles, new crops for biomass energy, and solar panels cheap enough to deploy without subsidy.

Continue reading "Energy Secretary Steven Chu: Honorary Breakthrough Fellow?" »

The following is a question and answer question with Breakthrough Institute friend and ally Dr. Dan Sarewitz. Dr. Sarewitz is the co-Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. His thinking about how innovation happens, and how government and society can best foster technology innovation makes his insights invaluable to policymakers, engineers and others who seek to transform's America's energy system from its current fossil-fuel dependent form into a clean, low carbon system that utilizes a myriad of new technologies.

Adam: Dr. Sarewitz, your work on innovation policy has forced you to confront some hard truths about the limits of policy in driving technology innovation and deployment. Would you say that we know how to properly draft policy that stimulates the proper technology innovation necessary to transition to a low-carbon energy system in America?

Dr. Sarewitz: In fact we do understand how to stimulate innovation. What we don't understand is how to drive innovation down particular social paths to yield particular society-wide outcomes over particular time frames.

Adam: So setting a goal like "80 percent emissions reduction by 2050"--deciding on an outcome and a time frame--aren't exactly helpful to the job of decarbonizing an energy system?

Continue reading "Q&A With Dan Sarewitz" »

Not in Europe it doesn't, according to this article in Der Spiegel (thanks RG and BP for the link):

Germany's renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country's electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.

But there's a catch: The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.

Continue reading "Does More Renewable Energy Equal Less Emissions?" »

"I just wish the GOP had been as worried about debt these past eight years the way they have these past three weeks."

-Andrew Sullivan

After the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in the lower chamber of Congress with absolutely no support from House Republicans two weeks ago, it was hard to predict what shape the debate would take in the Senate. But with perspective, the course of the Senate debate offers lessons for how we could secure investments in making clean energy cheap, and transform American politics in the process.

Just as it seemed that debate over the stimulus might stall, Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, and Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine took the lead in an effort to bring a centrist approach to the bill in order to secure bipartisan support. What came out of this effort is a bill that slashes necessary and fast acting stimulus in the form of aid for state budgets and money for education, among other spending measures, while expanding tax cuts that will help the more affluent disproportionately to middle and lower class Americans.

Continue reading "Energy, Economy, and How to Rebuild the Center" »

"Republicans don't want their fingerprints on the stimulus bill or the next bank bailout because they plan to make the midterm election of 2010 a national referendum on Barack Obama's handling of the economy. They know that by then the economy will still appear sufficiently weak that they can dub the entire Obama effort a failure -- even if the economy would have been far worse without it, even if the economy is beginning to turn around. They'll say 'he wanted more government spending, and we said no, but we didn't have the votes. Elect us and we'll turn the economy around by cutting taxes and getting government out of the private sector.'"

-Robert Reich

By Jesse Jenkins & Teryn Norris

The Brookings Institution officially unveiled a new proposal yesterday calling for "a new paradigm in energy innovation" at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The proposal, which was developed for over a year and is one of the most in-depth proposals for new energy R&D out there, calls for an "order of magnitude" increase in federal energy R&D investment and proposes a new model for clean energy technology research and commercialization: establishing a national network of regionally-based "Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes" (e-DIIs) to serve as hubs of distributed research linking the nation's best scientists, engineers, and facilities and effectively combining the forces of academia, government and industry.

Continue reading "A New Paradigm in Energy Innovation: Energy Discovery-Innovation Institutes" »

An article in last week's New York Times delved into Japan's "Lost Decade," - the prolonged period of economic stagnation that hit the nation in the 1990s - and explores what lessons for U.S. stimulus efforts can be learned from Japan's efforts to restart their economy. The article's findings echo some of the arguments Breakthrough has been making regarding the stimulus debate. Japan's stimulus missteps reinforce the argument that our recovery program should be focused on modern infrastructure--not traditional public works--in addition to spending on other national priorities such as energy and education.

The Times story begins with a look at which types of public spending helped Japan grow out of its recession, and which types stifled recovery:

[I]t matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than [traditional] infrastructure spending.

"It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again," said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. "One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future."

Continue reading "Lessons from Japan: How to Avoid A "Lost Decade" in America" »

The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon. The collapse is not due to the cold winter in places you may live or see on the news. It is not due to years without an increase in global temperature. It is not due to the overturning of the scientific consensus on the role of human activity in the global climate system.

It is due to the fact that policy makers and their political advisors (some trained as scientists) can no longer avoid the reality that targets for stabilization such as 450 ppm (or even less realistic targets) are simply not achievable with the approach to climate change that has been at the focus of policy for over a decade. Policies that are obviously fictional and fantasy are frequently subject to a rapid collapse.

The current shrillness that has been put on display by many politically-active climate scientists and the feeding-frenzy among their skeptical political opposition can be explained as a result of this looming collapse, though many will confuse the shrillness and feeding-frenzy as a cause of the collapse. Let me explain.

Continue reading "The Collapse of Climate Policy and the Sustainability of Climate Science" »

"There's a case to be made for a stimulus that's radically different than the one we have now; there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we're getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They've done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they've shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right - but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right."

--Ross Douthat

Here is a remarkable display of incoherence. According to a report commissioned by Greenpeace and discussed by The Christian Science Monitor, the economic stimulus package now under debate by the U.S. Congress will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What does the report mean by "reduce"? It means that some future emissions that might have occurred will be avoided. Emissions will therefore increase, just not as much as under some other scenario. The difference between that other scenario and the scenario implied by the stimulus package represents a "reduction" in emissions. Yes, you are reading that right.

Continue reading "Cutting Emissions While Increasing Them" »

"It's time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation's future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge."

--Paul Krugman

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is not sailing through the legislative process quite as easily as many pundits had anticipated. The stimulus received no votes from House Republicans last week, and this week GOP Senators are joining the tumult. The bill has become embroiled in a few debates that are more political than economic, and is certainly demonstrating what President Obama means when he says he wants to bring a spirit of bipartisanship to Washington.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans proposed an incredible array of tax cuts and incentives--some trying to encourage consumers to make bigger purchases like tax credits for car and home purchases, as well as a big increase in plain tax cuts. The GOP has been in the media criticizing the spending aspects of the bill as not being timely enough or just generally less preferable then tax cuts (although it's pretty clear there's a healthy dose of ideology mixed into this economic-sounding argument).

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have also come together to try their hands at reshaping the stimulus. The New York Times reports:

Continue reading "The Politics of Bipartisanship Stimulates Debate over Stimulus" »

A recent New York Times article highlighted China's spending on rail projects as part of its stimulus package. The package, totaling $586 billion, amounts to almost 14% of the entire economic output of China in 2008. The goal of the plan, which is almost entirely focused on infrastructure projects, is to add 1 to 3 percent to its economic growth in 2009. The differences between the Chinese and American stimulus plans illustrate the differences between China and America's current economic doldrums.

China's infrastructure stimulus is an attempt to maintain growth levels in the area of 13%, the level at which China's economy was expanding up until 2007. Already, in 2008 China's rate of growth fell to 9%. While China's economy is not contracting, and continues to grow, Chinese leaders are worried that any loss of jobs will cause unrest amongst workers and lead to social instability.

China's stimulus plans are almost entirely focused on traditional infrastructure projects, which, in addition to expanding China's rail system, include subway, road and airport projects. This plan is much closer to the traditional Keynesian-style stimulus efforts than the public spending provisions of America's stimulus. China is able to spend so much money in so short a time on traditional infrastructure stimulus for two reasons:

Continue reading "A Tale of Two Stimulus Plans" »

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.

...
"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."

Continue reading "Dan Sarewitz is Making Sense" »

President Barack Obama has called for a global coalition on climate change mitigation:

To protect our climate and our collective security, we must call together a truly global coalition. I've made it clear that we will act, but so too must the world. That's how we will deny leverage to dictators and dollars to terrorists. And that's how we will ensure that nations like China and India are doing their part, just as we are now willing to do ours.

President Obama's call for nation's like "China and India" to "do their part" is sufficiently ambiguous to allow for some diplomatic interpretations, however, Obama's remarks probably best interpreted as a continuation of the long-standing US position on the inclusion of developing countries in any international mitigation agreement.

Continue reading "Obama vs. IPCC" »

By Adam Solomon Zemel and Jesse Jenkins. Also posted at HuffingtonPost

Barack Obama's stance on energy issues is not the easiest to discern. While Obama the orator's language regarding energy has been inspiring - he's eloquently spoken of the need take bold steps and transform America's energy system - it is still not clear that Obama the President's policy ideas are similarly transformative. For a perfect case study, let's look at the seemingly ambitious goal to double renewable energy announced as part of President Obama's stimulus and recovery plan.

Early on, before the Inauguration, Obama gave his address announcing the key components of his stimulus plan. For clean energy, the big punch line was this:

"To finally spark the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years."

On the surface, this sounds like an ambitious and transformative goal. Doubling alternative energy production in just three years sounds like quite a feat. But, as usual, the devil is in the details, and it all depends on what Obama actually means when he says "double alternative energy production."

Continue reading "From Rhetoric to Reality: Is Obama's Clean Energy Goal Really That Ambitious?" »

Last week, reporting on Hilary Clinton's appointment of Todd Stern as chief envoy on climate change, we raised questions about whether or not Stern, a former Clinton administration negotiator at the Kyoto Protocol climate talks, would be able to offer a fresh, new direction at the Copenhagen negotiations this December.

However, it seems that we missed an important piece that Stern last year published in the Washington Quarterly's Winter 08 edition. A picture in broad strokes of how Stern and his co-author William Antholis would construct an international framework for emissions reductions, the report shows how Stern's views have evolved since the Kyoto negotiations. He writes:

"This is no time to indulge in orthodoxies or in the kind of overextended discussion that marked too much of the six-year Kyoto Protocol negotiation."

Continue reading "Todd Stern: A Renewed Chance for Global Cooperation" »

There's an interesting, if frustrating, piece by David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine this week on the need for a strategy for long-term growth, not just short term stimulus. In it he makes a critique of green jobs -- and offers up pollution pricing orthodoxy.

"Green jobs can certainly provide stimulus. Obama's proposal includes subsidies for companies that make wind turbines, solar power and other alternative energy sources, and these subsidies will create some jobs. But the subsidies will not be nearly enough to eliminate the gap between the cost of dirty, carbon-based energy and clean energy. Dirty-energy sources -- oil, gas and coal -- are cheap. That's why we have become so dependent on them.

The only way to create huge numbers of clean-energy jobs would be to raise the cost of dirty-energy sources, as Obama's proposed cap-and-trade carbon-reduction program would do, to make them more expensive than clean energy. This is where the green-jobs dream gets complicated."

It seems that this analysis is only half-right.

Continue reading "Carbon Pricing is No Engine for Sustained Growth" »

"For centuries, people have worried that economic growth had limits -- that the only way for one group to prosper was at the expense of another. The pessimists, from Malthus and the Luddites and on, have been proved wrong again and again. Growth is not finite. But it is also not inevitable. It requires a strategy."

David Leonhardt, NY Times Magazine