Sachs echoes Breakthrough Institute's call for a new focus on accelerated clean technology development and deployment instead of emission reduction targets.
Jeffrey Sachs, in a recent interview with TreeHugger, echoed Breakthrough Institute's call to focus on accelerating the development and deployment of clean energy technology instead of setting emission reduction targets.
As TreeHugger notes: "Sachs's big point: The debate over cap-and-trade, the clamoring for a carbon tax, and the bickering over greenhouse gas targets are distracting from serious efforts at advancing technological and policy solutions."
Sachs states:
"What I want is more plan that says quantatively how do we achieve our targets. ...
If we say 50 percent by 2020, I want people to know what is a realistic way for that to be achieved. What does it mean in terms of the auto sector, what does it mean in terms of housing, what does it mean in terms of the power sector. ...
Simply setting a target will be setting us up for disappointment. And simply believing that cap-and-trade will be sufficient to accomplish these goals I think is a mistake. When you have major technologies that need to be tested, demonstrated, when you have land use that needs to be changed, when you need to develop a new kind of power grid, those will not be solved by cap-and-trade alone."
Sachs isn't alone, the TreeHugger article notes, citing Breakthrough Institute as one of the key proponents of a public investment-led strategy to spur the development and deployment of clean energy technologies:
He's Not Alone
The idea that technological R&D, not a cap-and-trade or carbon tax system, would be the best solution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions is one that environmental contrarians Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger recently put forward in an article for Yale Environment 360.
Targets mean nothing if we can't get there, and they argue that neither a market nor tax approach to pricing carbon will help us do that. "No government in the world so far has been willing to establish and sustain a high price on carbon," the economists write.
Instead, we need to use public spending to bring down the costs of clean energy technologies, they argue, a tactic that would not only make it easier to achieve lower emissions in the U.S., for instance, but in a developing country like China, where such technologies could be manufactured and tested.
Breakthrough Institute's long-held position is that we need $30-50 billion per year of federal U.S. investment in clean energy technology research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D). Some of our ideas for how to do so can be found on our Ideas Page.
Sachs latest call for a new focus on clean technology development follows a series of articles and interviews last year where he expressed similar ideas. In an article in Scientific American last spring, Sachs wrote:
"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."
Sachs repeated this sentiment in an interview with Time Magazine last June:
"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 position is supported by the world's top energy experts, including the International Energy Agency and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, as we covered here.
The full TreeHugger article and video is available here.
