President Obama has repeatedly promised America $150 billion in clean energy spending over ten years--but, if and when that money materializes, what precisely has it been promised for?
By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow
In a post
today on DotEarth, Andy Revkin raises an excellent question: President Obama
has repeatedly promised America $150 billion in clean energy spending over ten
years--but, if and when that money materializes, what precisely has it been
promised for?
As Breakthrough has observed,
the language of Obama's promise has varied over time. During the campaign,
he pledged $150 billion to help "build a clean energy future." At that point,
Obama suggested the money would go toward a variety of green improvements
ranging from development and deployment to new grid and infrastructure.
But as Revkin notes, the White House web site
now states more narrowly that the Obama administration will: "Invest $150 billion over 10 years in energy research
and development to transition to a clean
energy economy."
Confusingly, a White House fact sheet quoted by Revkin seems to contradict the web site's assurance of $150 billion for R&D alone. Instead, it says the $150 billion line item in President Obama's budget outline will support "a balanced portfolio of basic research, applied research, development, deployment, and commercialization." This despite the fact that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu testified before a Senate committee in March that "[t]he president's proposed budget allocates $150 billion for research and development."
Obama's equivocal definition of "investment in clean energy technology" could mean he actually invests less than the $15 billion per year America needs to fund research and development at a scale that matches our energy challenges.
The Breakthrough Institute knows that $15 billion per year is needed for clean energy research and development alone. So do the 34 Nobel laureates who cautioned Obama that $150 billion in "stable R&D spending is not a luxury."
As for the other "D's" (demonstration and deployment), analysis by Breakthrough (supported by many of the nation's top energy experts) has concluded that clean energy investments, broadly defined, should total at least $30 billion to $50 billion per year. Breakthrough advocates $15 billion to scale up R&D investment, $5 billion to demonstrate promising emerging technologies at scale, and at least $15-30 billion per year to accelerate the deployment of emerging clean technologies, helping to capture economies of scale and drive down costs.
If House Democrats and the White House fact sheet are right--if Obama's $150 billion spending plan indeed covers research, development, demonstration and deployment of clean energy technologies-- then we'll effectively be splitting the baby, leaving insufficient funding to propel the necessary massive transition to a clean, prosperous energy economy.
Breakthrough voiced the same warning two years ago, when Obama first unveiled his $150 billion promise. It may be "larger than anything proposed by the other Democratic Presidential candidates, [and] much larger than anything lobbied for by the national environmental lobby in Washington, " wrote Breakthrough's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. But "it goes half way toward the at least $300 billion [over ten years] we need to achieve the emissions reductions" we need and the technology innovation necessary to make clean energy cheap and abundant. That remains true to this day, and the question persists: will President Obama commit the kind of real money America needs to spur clean energy innovation, accelerate the deployment of emerging clean technologies, and win the clean energy race?
