China's announcement, last week, that its Export-Import Bank inked a $2.9 billion deal to finance exports of China Energy Conservation Investment Corporation outshines an earlier announcement by the U.S. Ex-Im Bank of a $250 million investment in clean energy exports, offering yet another example of the widening investment gap between the U.S. and China in the clean energy race.
The Export-Import Bank of China inked a $2.9 billion deal last week to finance exports of China Energy Conservation Investment Corporation (CECIC), out-doing a $250 million outlay announced by the U.S. Export Import Bank earlier this month.
Charles R. McElwee, based in the Shanghai law office of Squire, Sanders, and Dempsey LLP, told the Wall Street Journal:
"This swamps any U.S. [government] initiatives to support exports,"
China's Ex-Im Bank is also financing the controversial 600 MW Texas wind farm, which will be the first U.S. project to use imported Chinese turbines. The Ex-Im Bank supports companies like CECIC, an energy-efficiency and renewable energy project developer, because they tend to have less access to the global banking system. Government support for clean tech export financing will further boost Chinese exports of energy efficiency and clean energy technologies to international markets, particularly in developed countries, where demand for clean energy technologies is greatest.
A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment. If we are grateful to be alive, then we must also be grateful that our ancestors overcame. It is thanks to them and the world that made them possible that we live.
A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment. If we are grateful to be alive, then we must also be grateful that our ancestors overcame. It is thanks to them and the world that made them possible that we live.
The political theorist Jane Bennett suggests in The Enchantment of Modern Life, "This life provokes moments of joy, and that joy can propel ethics." Bennett's book is a happy deconstruction of the belief that the modern life objectifies and disenchants the world, robbing it of its mystery, ineffability, magic, and connectedness. Bennett insists that the world never lost its capacity to surprise and inspire. She argues for an ethics that begins with a commitment to affirming life in all of its joys and sufferings.
If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others.
The ethics, and politics, born from joy, mystery, and gratitude of overcoming adversity will be radically different from the ethics born of the sadness of living in a fallen world pervaded by fears of the eco-apocalypse to come. The truth is, there are still ancient redwoods to behold and great rivers to swim in. There is still the Amazon and the Boreal. There are still seven billion wondrous human animals, each one of us capable of making ourselves into something utterly unique. And there is still great wildness abounding inside and outside of ourselves.
A story by E&E News Greenwire checked the fine print of a recent European Environment Agency evaluation of the EU's cap and trade program, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and gets at the truth behind this "success" story: creative accounting.
Touted as a model for future U.S. cap and trade policy, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is on track to help the EU comply with their Kyoto Protocol obligations, according to a recently released EEA report and liberal climate bloggers. But a recent story by E&E News Greenwire published in the New York Times checked the fine print, and gets at the truth behind this "success" story: creative accounting.
Current greenhouse gas emissions from Western Europe still exceed their U.N. commitments, the report says, and 10 countries will have to rely on emissions trading, land-use changes or carbon offsets to meet their legally binding levels. In general, Mediterranean countries like Spain and Italy have been most delinquent about meeting their targets, the agency said.
Of the wealthy, older E.U. members, only France, Germany, Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom are currently below their Kyoto agreements, the report says...
A close reading of the report reveals that European ambitions have only begun to catch up with the bloc's commitments, with many of the greenhouse reductions achieved by countries partially derived from secondary benefits, like the gasification of the energy industry in Britain or the economic collapse of the former East Germany.
The 15 Western European nations that accepted a joint target as part of the last U.N. climate deal -- which covers 2008 to 2012 -- committed to cutting emissions on average 8 percent below Kyoto's baseline, typically set at 1990 levels. Even with the help of the recession, emissions for the region sat at 6.2 percent below this baseline in 2008, and the most recent five-year average was 3.9 percent.
The gap is especially pronounced because of the inability of several southern countries to meet the reductions promised as part of the bloc's burden-sharing agreement, which divvied up the bloc's emission commitment in the late 1990s.
"This [emissions] average would have been substantially lower without the large absolute gaps observed between actual domestic emission levels and burden-sharing targets in Italy and Spain," the report says.
These countries will be joined by Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal in using Kyoto accounting mechanisms to close their emissions gap.
Some additional emission credits -- enough to increase the E.U. average by 1.4 percentage points -- will come from financing clean energy projects in the developing world. Improved forest management and other land-use changes will account for an additional percentage point, the report estimated.
Another 2.2 percent will come from excess emission credits purchased from other Kyoto members. Already, a host of European countries have purchased these credits from flush post-communist nations, largely through what are called green investment schemes, which seek to mollify criticisms that the emission credits amount to "hot air" (Greenwire, Nov. 9).
By using these accounting schemes, only Austria will be projected to be above its Kyoto commitments. Excess Kyoto credits from Germany, France and Britain will be essential for the region meeting its overall target, the report adds.
In a recent interview with Breakthrough Institute founders, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the Energy Tribune's Robert Bryce leveled some pointed questions about the "Climate McCarthyism" series, Nordhaus' and Shellenberger's political leanings, as well as their long-advocated policy prescriptions for meeting the energy challenge.
In a recent interview with Breakthrough Institute founders, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the Energy Tribune's Robert Bryce leveled some pointed questions about the motivation behind the recent "Climate McCarthyism" series, Nordhaus' and Shellenberger's political leanings, as well as their long-advocated policy prescriptions for meeting the energy challenge. Below are some key excerpts from the conversation; the full interview can be read here.
On "Climate McCarthyism,"
RB: What motivated you guys to write the Climate McCarthyism series?
Ted: In the past we had only responded to Romm when he attacked us directly. The truth is that for months we kept trying to avoid the guy. We'd put out an analysis of climate legislation and instead of actually taking issue with the content Romm would attack us personally. We'd respond by saying things like, "No, we're not global warming deniers or delayers," duh. After he started going after reporters and others we started saying to ourselves, "Somebody really ought to stand up to that guy," but nobody ever did. So when he went after Keith Kloor -- a guy we've never met but who was the editor of Audubon Magazine for eight years - and called him a "trash journalist," we knew somebody had to say something. Romm was engaging in character assassination to intimidate the press corps, and it was starting to work.
Bryce touches on the fact that many critics have questioned both Nordhaus' and Shellenberger's political affiliations, occasionally asserting that the two are part of a libertarian political camp, despite their advocacy of massive public investment in clean energy technology and infrastructure central to Breakthrough's energy and climate policy positions. On political ideology:
RB: How do you describe your own political leanings? Do you consider yourselves Democrats? Libertarians?
Ted: We're both Democrats and liberals. Some highly partisan liberals and environmentalists have attacked us as libertarians or neo-liberals and it is laughable. We're advocating massive and direct state intervention in the energy economy. Whatever you think about that idea, it is indicative of how simultaneously hyper-partisan, ideological, and incoherent the climate debate has become that liberals who disagree with us can only understand our view point as some combination of conservative, libertarian, or neo-liberal even as our views and proposed solutions are diametrically opposed to those ideologies. It's just one more example of the ways in which the climate debate has been completely narrowed down to just two positions by both sides.
In continuously challenging the dominant environmental paradigm since the release of their article, "Death of Environmentalism" and their subsequent book, "Break Through," Nordhaus and Shellenberger have asserted that a politics that focuses on limits, instead of possibility, isn't applicable to meet the challenges presented by climate change. On pending climate and energy legislation and why its cap-and-trade mechanism won't work:
RB: Why? It can't work because they can't pass it through Congress or because it won't work if it passes?
Ted: What they can pass through Congress can't work. This is the problem of the "Gordian knot" that we describe in Fast, Clean, and Cheap. No political economy in the world has been willing to seriously raise energy prices sufficient to drive substantial emissions reductions and the U.S. Congress is not different. Until climate change advocates stop trying to implement solutions that are predicated on high carbon prices in a political economy that, if it does anything, is only going to establish low carbon prices, we will be stuck with the same basic problem.
Nuclear power is a hot-button issue in the debate surrounding pending climate and energy legislation, passed by the House in June, with many environmentalists coming out in extreme opposition to increased nuclear deployment despite the fact that it is a low-carbon energy source. On nuclear power:
RB: What is your position on nuclear power?
Ted: Our position has changed from radical opposition to qualified support. We need appropriate safeguards. But we are impressed by the technological improvements over the last 50 years, and think nuclear needs to both be a key power source for developing nations, and a way to displace coal in the developed world. We support the fuel bank mechanism and other key safeguards to prevent proliferation.
Bryce hits on one of the biggest questions about Nordhaus' and Shellenberger's call for increased public investment in clean energy technology by asking why the U.S. can't just rely on the private sector to "make clean energy cheap." On large-scale public investment in clean energy technology:
RB: You advocate bigger government-sponsored investments in renewable energy. Why should those investments be made by the government? The potential payoffs for a company that develops a high-density battery technology or other energy storage technique are enormous. Why can't the private sector be trusted to do this work?
Ted: The energy sector is massively under-investing in R&D compared to the national average for several reasons. First, few have any economic reason at this point to move away from fossil fuels, which are incredibly cheap and profitable sources of power. Second, energy technology innovations are fairly easy to reverse-engineer, and unlike pharmaceutical drugs and media, patent protection is weak. This makes firms unwilling to spend much on R&D. Third, energy technologies are expensive. You can start Google in your garage for a few million, but new power plants cost on the order of $5 billion. It's not an industry that lends itself to start-ups.
Last week, the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a report benchmarking the clean energy competitiveness in four nations - China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The report found that the these Asian nations will out-invest the United States by a margin of 3-to-1 in clean energy technology. On the report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate the Clean Energy Race by Out-investing the United States," and clean energy innovation:
RB: In "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," you argue that China, Japan, and South Korea are about to eat our lunch on all the major low-carbon technologies, including nuclear, because their governments are poised to spend three times more on infrastructure and technology than we are. What do you say to those who argue that you're looking at the wrong metric? America is still the global leader in R&D and home to most of the venture capital.
Ted: Yes, but look at where things are headed. For the first time in 2008, China attracted more private sector investment money than the U.S. Contrary to the neoclassical mythology, government investment in infrastructure and technology for new firms doesn't "crowd out" the private sector, rather it crowds them in. What you're seeing in all three Asia countries is a deliberate effort by governments to establish a first mover advantage over the U.S. through regional clusters of manufacturing, suppliers, universities, R&D labs - just like Silicon Valley.
Michael: And even Google got money from the federal government. Indeed, if Americans had held the libertarian resistance to state funding of new infrastructure and technology, we would not have built the railroads, the highways, or the Internet, nor would we have cheap and abundant food, radios, many pharamaceutical drugs, jet airplanes, computers - the list goes on and on.
The South Korean government has announced a plan to invest 5 percent of the nation's GDP in R&D, one of the highest rates in the world. The plan is one more indication that other countries are moving quickly to close the innovation gap with the United States.
The government of South Korea has announced a plan to increase investments in research and development (R&D) to 5 percent of the nation's GDP by the year 2012, according to an article by Nature News. The new goal, unveiled by South Korea's Ministry of Knowledge Economy on Monday, would channel funds to a number of priority sectors, including information technology, energy and environmentally-related technology, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
According to the article, experts expect "green technology" to benefit most from the government's new plans, as energy and environmental issues have become a major focus of South Korean President Myung-bak Lee's young administration.
Indeed, South Korea is dramatically increasing government investments in a suite of clean energy technologies in order to boost its competitiveness in the global clean energy industry. According to a new report by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," South Korea is planning to invest $46 billion over the next five years--a full one percent of the nation's GDP each year--in clean energy technology R&D, manufacturing, and deployment.
As people wonder if the Copenhagen conference will lead to any significant outcomes, the dramatic expansion of carbon-intensive infrastructure continues with little apparent worry about the effects of climate policies. From a quick tour of news from Asia over the past day or so:
JSW Steel Ltd., India's third- biggest producer, may spend $500 million buying coal mines overseas to secure supplies for its local expansion.
The company is seeking mines in nations including Australia and South Africa, Managing Director Sajjan Jindal said in an interview in Mumbai. JSW Steel plans to source half of its coal overseas, he said.
Indian steelmakers are expanding as local demand is expected to grow by about 10 percent in the second half of this financial year. JSW Steel is looking at new locations after failing to find coking coal at its exploration project in Mozambique.
The company plans to raise capacity by more than 33 percent to 10 million metric tons at its Vijayanagar plant in South India by 2011 as demand from customers including Larsen & Toubro Ltd. and GMR Group increases, Jindal said in the interview yesterday. Later, JSW aims to build a mill in West Bengal state with an initial 3 million ton capacity, he said.
Top Indian power-equipment maker Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL.BO) said on Wednesday it has signed a joint-venture pact to build a 1,600 megawatt (MW) thermal power plant in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
The power plant at Khandwa will be equipped with supercritical technology, which helps lower coal consumption and leads to lower emissions.
State utility Madhya Pradesh Power Generation Co Ltd and BHEL will initially have an equal share in the joint venture. Their stakes will later be diluted to 26 percent each, with the rest held by financial institutions and other partners, BHEL said.
BHEL has been promoting joint ventures with state utilities to set up and operate supercritical thermal power plants. It has set up joint ventures with the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Earlier this month, leading Indian power producer NTPC (NTPC.BO) said it would set up a 2,640 megawatt (MW) thermal power plant under a pact with the Madhya Pradesh state government and the MP Power Trading Co.
At a press conference earlier this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Rush Holt joined leading university leaders and researchers to launch a new initiative designed to emphasize the impact the economic stimulus package, ARRA, is having on scientific research and innovation and to promote the long-term public investment in R&D that drives innovation
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), were joined by university leaders and researchers to launch a new initiative, ScienceWorksForUS, as part of a press conference discussing ARRA-backed funding for research, recovery, and reinvestment opportunities. The science initiative, whose new website went live on Tuesday as well, is being sponsored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and The Science Coalition (TSC).
ScienceWorksForUs is a collaboration of the AAU, APLU, and TSC to demonstrate the positive impact that direct government funding, in this case the stimulus dollars from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), can have on university research efforts.
While ScienceWorksForUS focuses on general scientific research, the AAU and APLU are part of a growing consensus of experts that have called for direct public funding for clean energy R&D on the order of $15 billion dollars per year. In addition, the AAU and APLU joined the Breakthrough Institute this summer, as well as 100 universities, professionals, and youth groups, in submitting a letter to Congress asking them to fully fund President Barack Obama's national math and science education program, RE-ENERGYSE, a program which needs to be funded in FY2011.
Joe Romm became America's most influential climate blogger by presenting himself as a straight-talking, independent expert. But the truth was always quite different. As an employee of the Center for American Progress (CAP) Romm was hired to defend and serve the Democratic agenda. In our fourth and final post in this series, we show that when it came time to get behind the same climate proposal he had savaged just a month earlier, Romm embraced the Party line without hesitation. And when it came time for Romm to attack liberal critics of climate legislation as "global warming deniers," the most powerful think tank in Washington -- and its head, John Podesta, President Obama's transition chief -- had his back.
Over the last three years Joe Romm has won the trust of American liberals and greens through his apparently unvarnished take on climate science, technology, and policy. Everyone from Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman to grassroots activists with 350.org to green leaders like Al Gore have come to see Romm as someone they could rely on to give it to them straight.
But they confused Romm's confidence for courage, and his volume for veracity. For even though Romm has branded himself a renegade truth-teller he has long been a Democratic Party insider. During the Clinton years he was a senior administrator at the Department of Energy. Today he acts as chief spokesperson for climate science and policy at the Center for American Progress, Washington's most powerful Democratic think tank.
And so when it came time for Romm to abruptly reverse his position on climate legislation, his change of heart was as predictable as it was inevitable.
In our last post we saw that one of the forces behind Climate McCarthyism is growing hyper-partisanship. America today is more divided along partisan lines than it has been since the Civil War Reconstruction. Romm rose to power and influence by feeding red meat to the liberal and green base of the Democratic Party. In this post we will see how ideological hyper-partisanship has been institutionalized at the Center for American Progress (CAP), Romm's employer.
Founded in 2003 by President Clinton's last chief of staff, John Podesta, the $29 million a year organization is not so much a think tank as a war room. While in the White House Podesta experienced first-hand the combined power that conservative think tanks like Heritage Foundation and right-wing media have over the public debate. Respected but staid liberal think tanks like Brookings were no match for the pugilistic posture of the New Right.
And so Podesta sought to create a more aggressive and partisan think tank in the mold of Heritage, which had famously delivered a thick briefing book of policy recommendations to Ronald Reagan before the President-elect took office and then engaged in ideological combat to defend it. And he has done precisely that. After the 2008 elections, Podesta oversaw President Obama's transition into office.
Like Heritage, CAP is more explicitly ideological than traditional Washington think tanks and invests substantially more money in media and marketing. It still produces reports and white papers to provide a substantive justification for the Democratic agenda, but the heart and soul of the operation are CAP's blogs. Their purpose is to wage ideological warfare with Republicans and enforce ideological discipline among Democrats.
In recent months, as Joe Romm has stepped up his attacks in defense of a climate proposal he once opposed, some commenters have openly wondered how it is that an ostensibly liberal think tank could countenance such behavior. But they miss the point of both Romm and CAP.
In denouncing a former senior editor of Audubon Magazine as a "trash journalist," framing non-skeptical scientists as "global warming deniers," and attempting to link independent academics to fossil-fuel interests, Romm has not gone off-the-reservation. Rather, he's doing precisely the job he was hired to do.
Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog In 2005 I wrote that it was just a matter of time before air capture -- the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- was going to move to the center of...
In 2005 I wrote that it was just a matter of time before air capture -- the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- was going to move to the center of climate policy debates. Since that time I have been following the issue closely and even doing a bit of research on it (PDF). Today, Nature reports on the final results of a major European research project called Ensembles:
Carbon dioxide emissions will have to be all but eliminated by the end of this century if the world is to avoid a temperature rise of more than 2℃, scientists warned yesterday. And it might even be necessary to start sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The findings are the culmination of five years work by Ensembles, a major European research consortium led by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and involving 65 other research institutes worldwide. In the first study of its kind, scientists in the project used a variety of the latest global climate models to determine the reductions needed to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases, termed CO2 equivalents, at 450 parts per million. That level, which offers a reasonable chance of keeping the temperature rise under 2ºC, is the goal of European climate policy.
The results suggest that to achieve that target, emissions would have to drop to near zero by 2100. One of Ensemble's models predicted that by 2050, it might also be necessary to introduce new techniques that can actually pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Here is what Ken Caldeira says:
The results suggest that simply switching to renewable sources of energy may not be enough to stabilize emissions. "It's clear that if we continue our current emissions trajectory and we want to stay at 450 parts per million, we'll need to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere," says atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, who works at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California. That could mean deploying new techniques for capturing carbon, such as biochar, reforestation or air filtering, on a massive scale.
Caldeira adds that action now could be a better option. If people stop building new CO2-emitting devices within the next decade, they could achieve the same result at a lower cost.
Any bets on whether or not people will "stop building new CO2-emitting devices within the next decade"? As I have often said, no one really knows the possibilities of air capture (chemical, biological, geological) and sequestration at scale, and we won't until a greater effort is devoted to it. But whether you like it or not, the slow pace of mitigation policies to meaningfully deflect trajectories from business-as-usual means that air capture is gaining traction as a policy option, and will continue to do so. It is not at the center of debates over climate -- yet -- but it is moving closer.
Excerpted from an E&E News report by Saqib Rahim, (November 19, 2009) (Subscription reqd)
It may be early in the global race to develop low-carbon technology, but a new report warns that East Asian governments are investing at a feverish pace -- and that if the United States doesn't follow suit, it will be left behind in an accumulating cloud of emissions.
The study, released yesterday by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, is an early effort to size up efforts by three "Asian Tigers" -- China, South Korea and Japan -- to take a global lead on clean energy.
While the United States remains the world's most innovative nation, the authors said, that lead is closing as these countries plunge $500 billion into clean technologies over the next three years. That's nearly triple the U.S. figure, assuming it passes the House climate bill giving a fraction of expected cap-and-trade revenues to research and development.
"We are and will be the world's leading consumer of clean energy technology. The problem is that demand will ultimately create supply, and supply doesn't necessarily have to be in the U.S.," Rob Atkinson, president of the ITIF and a co-author of the report, said at a release event yesterday on Capitol Hill.
"Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant" makes it clear that the U.S. could use a roadmap to technological success similar to those that Asian nations have developed. It recommends a framework for channeling R&D funds to specific technologies that are the most promising, and also establishing domestic development programs funded by public investment to keep the innovation process moving ahead of the standard private investment model, which relies more on proven successes -- a Catch-22 for technologies on the breaking edge of innovation.
While this might smack of "picking winners and losers" to some energy lobbyists, Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute, thinks that's the point. Without government stewardship of certain technologies, he said, President Lincoln might not have built the railroads, food wouldn't be cheap, and the Internet might not exist.
"This calcified ideology that the government should not be procuring cutting-edge technologies, the government should not be picking technological winners and losers, that is the ideology of American decline," he said at the Capitol Hill event.
Benchmarking clean-tech competitiveness: A new report by the Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology & Innovation Foundation provides the first comprehensive analysis of competitive positions among the U.S. and key Asian challengers in the global clean energy race.
The report examines the competitive position of each nation in core clean energy technologies, including solar, wind, and nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, advanced vehicles and batteries, and high-speed rail, as well as the government strategies each nation hopes will strengthen its position in the global clean technology sector. The report also offers recommendations for U.S. federal policymakers for regaining U.S. competitiveness.
A new report by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," is the first to thoroughly benchmark clean energy competitiveness in four nations: China, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Update 12/14/09: See here for full overview, release video, and media coverage of "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant."
Asia is poised to dominate the fast-growing clean energy industry by outspending the United States by at least three-to-one on infrastructure and technology, according to a new report, Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant, which was released today by the Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology and Innovation Foundation at an event hosted by the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee.
The summary and full report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate the Clean Energy Race By Out-Investing the United States," can be downloaded here:
The report comes at a time of rising anxieties in the U.S. about a jobless economic recovery, and new reports showing that over 85 percent of President Obama's economic stimulus clean tech grant program went to foreign firms. Recently Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote to Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu opposing a $1.5 billion Texas wind farm to be built with Chinese turbines. In response, China's A-Power Generation Systems wind manufacturer announced plans to open a factory in the U.S.
"Should the investment gap persist," the report warns, "the United States will import the overwhelming majority of clean energy technologies it deploys."
"Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant" is the first report to comprehensively benchmark clean energy competitiveness and government investments in cleantech by China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. These Asian governments will invest $519 billion in clean technology between 2009 and 2013, compared to $172 billion by the U.S. government. Climate and energy legislation, which passed the House in June, would contribute $28.7 billion of the $172 billion five year total. China alone will spend $440 billion to $660 billion over the next ten years on clean tech.
The direct, immediate, and coordinated nature of Asian government investments stands in contrast to the sporadic regulatory approach pursed in the United States. The report suggests that government investments will allow Asian nations to create innovation "clusters" of manufacturers, universities, R&D labs, suppliers and other firms, much as the Pentagon helped create Silicon Valley in the fifties and sixties. These clusters will be attractive to U.S. firms, the report argues, which are already making large investments in China.
Indeed, the United States' traditional prowess in attracting venture capital and other private funding could soon be eclipsed by Asia. China and other Asian nations, the report concludes, are offering a better business and investment climate than the United States. And China's share of private sector clean tech funding is growing rapidly. Between 2000 and 2008, the United States attracted $52 billion in private capital for renewable energy technologies, but China alone attracted $41 billion. China secured more private investment in renewables and efficiency technologies than the U.S. for the first time in 2008.
Investment bank giant Deutsche Bank recently concluded that "generous and well-targeted [clean energy] incentives" in China and Japan will create a low-risk environment for investors and stimulate high levels of private investment in clean energy because those nations rely on a "comprehensive and integrated government plan, supported by strong incentives." In contrast, Deutsche Bank says, the United States is a "moderate-risk" country since it relies on "a more volatile market incentive approach and has suffered from a start-stop approach in some areas."
"While some U.S. firms will benefit from the establishment of joint ventures overseas," the report warns, "the jobs, tax revenues, and other benefits of clean tech growth will overwhelmingly accrue to Asian nations."
New pollution regulations, a national renewable energy standard, and efficiency regulations in the U.S. will not, the report finds, be sufficient to close the technology investment gap between the US and Asia. New climate pollution regulations will not be strict enough to send much private investment to clean technologies, and large infrastructure barriers such as the need for new transmission lines stand in the way of greatly expanding solar and wind.
"Small, indirect and uncoordinated incentives are not sufficient to outcompete Asia's clean tech tigers," the report says. "To regain economic leadership in the global clean energy industry, U.S. energy policy must include large, direct and coordinated investments in clean technology R&D, manufacturing, deployment, and infrastructure."
You know the world is changing when the president's first trip to Asia is defined by a new U.S. foreign policy dubbed "strategic reassurance" - convincing China that the United States has no intention of containing its growing power or endangering its foreign investments. As the New York Times put it, "When President Obama visits China for the first time on Sunday, he will, in many ways, be assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay respects to his banker."
You also know times are changing when China, the world's greatest polluter, and other Asian nations are poised to dominate the burgeoning global clean-tech industry by out-investing the United States. That's the conclusion of a large new report we co-authored called "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," released this week by the Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (see coverage in Financial Times and Wall Street Journal). The report is the first to thoroughly benchmark clean energy competitiveness in four nations - China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States - and finds the following:
"Asia's rising 'clean technology tigers' - China, Japan, and South Korea - have already passed the United States in the production of virtually all clean energy technologies and over the next five years will out-invest the U.S. three-to-one in these sectors... While some U.S. firms will benefit from the establishment of joint ventures overseas, the jobs, tax revenues, and other benefits of clean tech growth will overwhelmingly accrue to Asian nations... Should the investment gap persist, the U.S. will import the overwhelming majority of clean energy technologies it deploys."
What do these two changes have in common? They both reflect the accelerating shift of global power from America to Asia, caused in large part by the serious mismanagement of U.S. economic policy.
In Newsweek's most recent cover story, the oft-times brilliant Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post American World, asks the question: "Is America Losing Its Mojo?" And, if so, is there anything we can do about it? Zakaria argues that the America we know and love for its plucky "can do" spirit was largely a product of a strategic advantage gained as a result of the Second World War. With the European and Japanese innovation centers crippled and beset with reconstruction, and a flood of intellectual refugees arriving by the day, America by and large had a generation's head-start on the rest of the world. That, coupled with large public investment in basic R&D, guaranteed America's success.
Government funding of basic research has been astonishingly productive. Over the past five decades it has led to the development of the Internet, lasers, global positioning satellites, magnetic resonance imaging, DNA sequencing, and hundreds of other technologies. Even when government was not the inventor, it was often the facilitator. One example: semiconductors. As a study by the Breakthrough Institute notes, after the microchip was invented in 1958 by an engineer at Texas Instruments, "the federal government bought virtually every microchip firms could produce." This was particularly true of the Air Force, which needed chips to guide the new Minuteman II missiles, and NASA, which required advanced chips for the on-board guidance computers on its Saturn rockets. "NASA bought so many [microchips] that manufacturers were able to achieve huge improvements in the production process--so much so, in fact, that the price of the Apollo microchip fell from $1,000 per unit to between $20 and $30 per unit in the span of a couple years."
Over the past two decades, the three great waves that carried America to the heights of innovation have started to ebb. Obviously, the rest of the world is not in ruins--quite the contrary. Other countries are growing rapidly and hoping to rise up the value chain. China has declared that 60 percent of its GDP will be related to science and technology within two decades. More pertinent right now is Europe, which is peaceful, prosperous, and productive. The continent's unity might be limited in the geopolitical realm, but European nations have come together to spend lavishly on signature scientific projects. Consider the Large Hadron Collider, primarily a European enterprise, which cost more than $5 billion. It is the successor to the U.S.-based Superconducting Super Collider, which was shut down in the early 1990s by the House of Representatives after 14 miles of tunnel had been constructed at a cost of $2 billion.
And then there is the challenge from Asia. The numbers are small, but the trend is clear. Pharmaceutical research--dominated by America today--is succumbing to the same dynamics that drove T-shirt manufacturing and electronics production overseas. "In 2006, 5.5 percent of all global pharmaceutical patent applications named one inventor or more located in India, and 8.4 percent named one or more located in China," according to a report by the Kauffman Foundation. This was a fourfold increase from 1995, and corresponds to a surge in drug demand in emerging markets--from 13 percent of global industry sales growth in 2001 to 27 percent in 2006.
With the end of the Cold War, Americans stopped worrying about the Soviet threat and, as a result, R&D funding for applied science plummeted, dropping 40 percent in the 1990s. It has picked up since then, but the government's share of overall R&D spending remains near its all-time low. And while corporations still spend on R&D, they do not fund the kind of basic research that leads to breakthroughs.
In Yale e360.org, Ted and Michael make the case that the recent decline in the public's belief in global warming is partly due to apocalypse fatigue. Mobilizing the public around an abstract, distant and long-term issue like climate change is hard enough. What makes it even harder is when advocates of action engage in an apocalyptic and hyper-partisan discourse demanding changes to the American way of life. "Rather than galvanizing public demand for difficult and far-reaching action," they write, "apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science."
Update (12/7/2009): Citing Nordhaus and Shellenberger, The Christian Science Monitor has weighed in on "apocalypse fatigue" with a thoughtful piece discussing public attitudes towards climate change and the challenge of engaging the public in such an abstract but urgent problem.
Experts reason that, after years of warnings of future disaster and protracted negotiations to achieve a climate treaty, a sense of fatigue has set in. The worldwide recession also has people focused on keeping their jobs, if they even have one, and on keeping a roof over their heads. That may be one reason President Obama rarely talks about climate change itself but frequently mentions the "green" jobs that fighting it will create.
Some even argue that Gore - his Nobel Prize notwithstanding - is a poor standard-bearer for the cause because he is seen as a partisan politician...
In fact, the louder and more alarmed climate advocates become in these efforts, the more they polarize the issue, driving away a conservative or moderate for every liberal they recruit to the cause," argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in the article "Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change," written for Yale Environment 360 magazine, a publication of Yale University's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
Just up today at Yale e360, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' latest op-ed tackles the issue of "apocalypse fatigue".
Make no mistake, despite the ever growing consensus that global warming is a human induced problem, roughly fifteen percent fewer Americans believe that this is the case when compared with polls from as recent as April 2008 (from 71% in Apr 08, to 56% in Oct 09). Many pollsters blame the polls themselves for being flawed, many blame the recession. To get the whole picture, Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue, one must examine the way the global apocalyptic narrative is being "sold" to us.
The truth is both simpler and more complicated. It is simpler in the sense that most Americans just aren't paying a whole lot of attention. Between being asked about things like whether they would provide CPR to save the life of a pet (most pet owners say yes ) or whether they would allow their child to be given the swine flu vaccine (a third of parents say no), pollsters occasionally get around to asking Americans what they think about global warming. When they do, Americans find a variety of ways to tell us that they don't think about it very much at all.
Three years after it seemed that "An Inconvenient Truth" had changed everything, it turns out that it didn't. The current Pew survey is the latest in a series of studies suggesting that Al Gore probably had a good deal more effect upon elite opinion than public opinion.
Public opinion about global warming, it turns out, has been remarkably stable for the better part of two decades, despite the recent decline in expressed public confidence in climate science.
Further:
What is arguably most remarkable about U.S. public opinion on global warming has been both its stability and its inelasticity in response to new developments, greater scientific understanding of the problem, and greater attention from both the media and politicians. Public opinion about global warming has remained largely unchanged through periods of intensive media attention and periods of neglect, good economic times and bad, the relatively activist Clinton years and the skeptical Bush years. And majorities of Americans have, at least in principle, consistently supported government action to do something about global warming even if they were not entirely sold that the science was settled, suggesting that public understanding and acceptance of climate science may not be a precondition for supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The more complicated questions have to do with why. Why have Americans been so consistently supportive of action to address climate change yet so weakly committed? Why has two decades of education and advocacy about climate change had so little discernible impact on public opinion? And why, at the height of media coverage and publicity about global warming in the years after the release of Gore's movie, did confidence in climate science actually appear to decline?
Asian countries, backed by giant economic stimulus packages, are leading the world in investments in "green" technologies, the chief executive of Siemens AG said in Singapore on Thursday.
Asian countries, backed by giant economic stimulus packages, are leading the world in investments in "green" technologies, the chief executive of Siemens AG said in Singapore on Thursday.
These large, targeted investments in clean energy technology will help Asian nations like China develop thriving clean energy markets.
The Journal continues:
Siemens CEO Peter Loescher said in an interview on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that countries such as China have moved more quickly than the U.S. to spend their stimulus packages and are increasingly doing so on high-tech, low-pollution technologies such as high-speed trains.
"If you ask us where we sell the most advanced technologies" now, he said, "it's Asia and China." China's economic rebound and spending programs are turning out to be "stronger than one would have anticipated," he said.
This report is clearly timely, as the WSJ article continues:
Some analysts have questioned whether spending from stimulus packages will generate as much long-term demand as expected for energy-saving and other green technologies. Some countries, including the U.S. but also some Asian nations such as Thailand, have run into bureaucratic and other delays in implementing their spending plans.
With billions of dollars of money unused and signs of asset bubbles emerging in some parts of the world, some economists have suggested governments should begin reining in stimulus and perhaps leave some expenditures unfinished, or risk crowding out private sector investment and whipping up inflation.
But Loescher said that Siemens, whose high-tech motors, power systems and other products make it a beneficiary of many stimulus packages, is sticking to earlier estimates of the windfall it could receive from government spending. He said the company is expecting about EUR15 billion in orders for Siemens equipment from stimulus packages by 2012.
"I'm still very encouraged by how they're being rolled out globally," he said, though he added, "I've not heard anyone talking about additional programs" of stimulus spending.
To decarbonise the nation and achieve the 80% reduction in GHG output by 2050, the UK will need to undertake a monumental task at a scale it has never seen before, reducing carbon output per unit of GDP by over 5% annually until 2050. Between 2001 and 2006, we achieved an average of 1.3% annual reduction, but in more recent years, progress has been far more limited. Globally, while the UK, is one of the better performing nations. France has the most decarbonised economy among the large developed nations - through its move towards nuclear power as the predominant source of electricity generation.
For the UK to be on track to achieve the emission reductions required by the Climate Change Act, it would have to become as carbon efficient as France by about 2015; which magnitudinous challenge would require the equivalent of the UK constructing and putting into service about 30 new nuclear power stations in the next five years, while retiring an equal amount of coal-fired generation!
"The Institute of Mechanical Engineer's can't do, won't do attitude is sending out a defeatist message ahead of the crucial climate change talks in Copenhagen. The truth is that if we act now we can not only beat climate change but gain from the green benefits that will flow in terms of jobs and investment from going low carbon."
If some of the numbers in the report sound familiar, it is because it relies a good deal on my analysis of UK climate policy:
A new report by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," is the first to thoroughly benchmark clean energy competitiveness in four nations: China, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Join Breakthrough and ITIF principal staff in DC on Wed, November 18th @ 10:30AM for the release of this new report and a discussion of the reports findings.
A new report by the Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," is the first to thoroughly benchmark clean energy competitiveness in four nations: China, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Developing better and cheaper clean energy technologies will be central to addressing climate change, securing U.S. energy independence, and creating new clean energy jobs. Increasingly, nations are seeking to gain competitive advantage in this rapidly growing, high-technology sector and the stakes for the United States are significant: will the United States largely be an importer of these clean technologies and lose the jobs related to them, or can America emerge as a global leader, driving exports and high-wage jobs?
The report analyzes clean energy investments and public policy support for research and innovation, manufacturing, and domestic demand, with a particular focus on six key technologies: wind, solar, nuclear, carbon capture and storage, hybrid and electric vehicles and advanced batteries, and high-speed rail.
Please join the Breakthrough Institute and ITIF for a discussion of the report's findings at a briefing hosted by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on November 18th, 2009.
EVENT DETAILS
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Location: Washington, D.C. - Senate Energy Committee Room, Dirksen Senate Office Building (SD-366)
Moderator and Presenter
Robert Atkinson (bio)
President, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
What gave rise to Joe Romm and Climate McCarthyism? In a word: hyper-partisanship. America is more polarized politically today than it has been in 130 years. The fracturing of traditional media has political partisans looking for people who will filter news, analysis, and opinions for them. Democrats who care about the environment have been turning to Joe Romm. They wished for somebody tough to stand up to the bad guys on climate change. They wished for somebody to simplify complicated questions. In "The Hyper-Partisan Mind," we see why they should be careful what they wish for.
In Part 1 and in Part 2 we documented how Joe Romm uses McCarthyite tactics, including character assassination, misrepresentation, and guilt-by-association, to intimidate the press corps and discredit non-skeptical climate experts as "global warming deniers." In this post we will explore one of the main forces that gave rise to Climate McCarthyism: hyper-partisan polarization.
America is more polarized today than at any time since Reconstruction. A major quantitative analysis by social scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal found today to be the most polarized period in 130 years.
Little wonder then that Romm's strength lies in his appeals to Democratic partisan identity. He writes for a Democratic audience and mobilizes liberal and environmentalist readers to attack reporters, activists, and policymakers who diverge, literally, from the Party line.
The EPA attempted to prevent two of its attorneys from citing their experience as background for their opinions about cap and trade on the grounds that they violated federal policy, but the effort does not detract from the couple's important critique of pending climate and energy legislation
Two EPA staff attorneys, who published an op-ed in the Washington Post last week arguing that cap-and-trade was fatally flawed, are being reined in by the Environmental Protection Agency on reportedly ethical grounds and were asked to take down their informational video "The Huge Mistake." But attempts to prevent the attorneys from citing their EPA experience as background for their opinions may be born of an effort to muzzle their outspoken disagreement with pending climate legislation that has garnered significant media attention, rather than a need to comply with federal regulations.
According to the New York Times blog, Dot Earth, the EPA has insisted that Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel remove the video from YouTube as well as from their own website, explaining:
"...they could mention their E.P.A. affiliation only once; must remove language specifying Mr. Zabel's expertise and their years of employment with the agency; and must remove an image of the agency's office in San Francisco."
The demand came just days after the couple's op-ed was published, despite the fact that the video had been available online previously and that the couple had included a satisfactory disclaimer stating, ""Nothing in this video is
intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama Administration."
In our last post we saw how America's most-influential liberal climate blogger, Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, seeks to intimidate the press corps through misrepresentation and character assassination. In this post we will see how Joe Romm uses the tactic of guilt-by-association to suggest that experts he disagrees with, including advocates of strong governmental action on global warming, are industry-funded "global warming deniers."
Wikipedia defines a "global warming denier" as someone acting in "bad faith," which is to say, someone who takes money from a fossil fuel interest to deny the connection between human-induced carbon emissions and warming. By contrast, a "global warming skeptic" is someone who denies the connection between emissions and warming but has no financial interest. "Global warming denier" has long been viewed as a loaded term, Wikipedia notes, because it conjures an association with Holocaust deniers.
For the last two years, America's most-read and most-influential liberal climate blogger, Joe Romm of Center for American Progress, has used the term in radically different ways than the way Wikipedia defines it. Romm has used it to describe people who are neither funded by fossil fuel interests nor skeptical of anthropogenic warming. In fact, as we will see, Romm often levels the charge against those who support strong policy action on climate change -- just not the same policies Romm supports.
Senator Schumer and others are demanding a ban on federal stimulus funding to import Chinese wind turbines for planned Texas wind farm, but attempting to cut off foreign imports addresses the symptoms not the problem, which is a lack of long-term, consistent investment in domestic clean energy manufacturing, deployment, and R&D
Outcry over a planned Texas wind farm, which will be the first project to import wind turbines from a Chinese manufacturer, has resulted in calls to prevent government stimulus money from funding the project. As Bloomberg reported, in a letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Senator Charles Schumer insisted that funding only be granted to U.S. manufactured turbines.
"I urge you to reject any request for stimulus money unless the high-value components, including the wind turbines, are manufactured in the United States...China is fast emerging as one of our main rivals in the race to build the technology that can help us achieve energy independence. We should not be giving China a head start in this race at our own country's expense."
But those expressing alarm that money from the stimulus package will accrue to China are forgetting that importing wind turbine components is actually nothing new in the United States. In fact, this story broke at almost that same time that a new investigative report by the American University School of Communication revealed that 84% of the U.S. stimulus money for renewable projects has been given to overseas companies.
Analysis of late-release data on Australia's cap-and-trade plan revealed significant flaws but Prime Minister Rudd seems unperturbed and unwilling to listen to those calling for improvement
Less than three weeks from the Australian Senate's highly anticipated second vote on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) bill, the Australian Government's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) has revealed new problems with the Rudd Government's deeply flawed cap-and-trade plan. Crikey's national politics correspondent Bernard Keane has found that the CPRS will require a massive $5 billion of taxpayer subsidies in its first five years, and that taxpayers won't break even until 2022. With the Labor Government releasing this crucial data so late in the game, it's no wonder that Australia's policy analysts are finding some interesting surprises.
In addition to the billions of dollars in public money the scheme requires to function, Keane shows that the government will give away more free permits to polluting industries than originally thought, concluding that:
"In 2012-13, free permits to [Emissions Intensive Trade Exposed Industries] EITEs account for 28% of revenue. By 2020, they account for nearly 35% of scheme revenue..."
Such giveaways will keep downward pressure on the domestic price of carbon and increase the viability of polluting industries for a decade.
Daily Show host Jon Stewart challenged Al Gore's assertion that we have all the technology we need to solve climate change and questioned whether the urgent and apocalyptic tone in Gore's newest book, "Our Choice," precludes the solution to global warming
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart strongly challenged Al Gore last Wednesday on the former Vice President's contention that "we have all the tools we need" to solve global warming. Said Stewart:
"It is a much more fundamental shift than I think environmentalists realize. It's not just about sorting plastic and paper. It's about how the life that humans have carved out was from burning things we found. You say, let's do a different thing, but you haven't given us that thing...It's very frustrating to me to keep hearing about this and not seeing hover cars."
Stewart also questioned the effectiveness of Al Gore's apocalyptic climate change messaging in Gore's new book, "Our Choice." Stewart balks at a line in the book's opening page:
"I'm offering you the choice of life or death, you can choose either blessings or curses."
While Gore is quick to attribute inaction on global warming to lack of political will, Stewart questions whether we can solve global warming by merely making a choice to do so. Gore's apocalyptic discourse does not resonate with Stewart and other concerned people like him, however, and Stewart says he's frustrated not inspired.
Republicans on the EPW committee are reverting to schoolyard tactics to stall markups of pending climate and energy legislation and in the process, are belittling the functionality of the American democracy
"Their behavior challenges everything that we're about here. If you don't like it, turn your back and walk out. It's almost like school children over there."
Those were the remarks of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), chastising the Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) who have spent the past two days showboating for the press while boycotting the committee's markup of pending climate and energy legislation.
Sending just one Republican member to monitor the stalled hearings each day, the Republicans are using procedural tricks (rules require at least two members of the minority party present to consider amendments to pending legislation) to block any debate on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill.
The excuse for these schoolyard tactics? Republicans complain that the U.S. EPA has not fully analyzed the Kerry-Boxer climate bill, despite the fact that Agency analysts spent weeks looking at impacts of key differences between the House and Senate climate bills, which are nearly identical in most major components.
Joe Romm's recent attack on an independent journalist is further proof of his intimidation campaign aimed at squashing the debate over climate solutions. But bullying only works when nobody stands up to the bully. Jon Stewart has indirectly challenged the climate of intolerance. Will others?
Update 2 (Nov 6, 2009 8:30 am PDT) Joe Romm has surreptitiously changed the headline to his attack on journalist Keith Kloor, from "Meet Trash Journalist Keith Kloor" to "Meet Blogger Keith Kloor." In the comments below, Brad Plumer retracts his misrepresentation of our views on geo-engineering and Superfreakonomics while continuing to downplay his role in hyping Romm's misrepresentations of the views of Stanford scientist Ken Caldeira, and refusing to acknowledge that he has done little to correct the record or rebuke Romm's McCarthyite tactics on his New Republic blog.
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has weighed in. It's been heartening to receive so many emails from activists and reporters thanking us for standing up to a bully. Yesterday, Center for Environmental Journalism Director Tom Yulsman affirmed our defense of journalists and weighed in on the importance of standing up against McCarthyite attacks. In the comments below, The New Republic's environment blogger, Brad Plumer distances himself from Romm's McCarthyite tactics - but then he insists that we agree with Superfreakonomics, even though we had made clear our disagreements with Levitt and Dubner in our original post below. Howard University Chemistry Professor Joshua Halpern comments below under a pseudonym, "Eli Rabbett," and claims that we are supported by a right-wing foundation and organization -- a smear we have repeatedly corrected throughout the blogosphere. Readers can decide for themselves whether the comments Plummer and Rabbett/Halpern are consistent with the pattern of behavior we describe below.
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
If you want to understand how it is that the debate over global warming policies became so shrill, consider the recent pattern of behavior by the country's second-most read most-read climate blogger, Joe Romm.
Last month Romm emailed Stanford scientist Ken Caldeira for a quote so he could, in Romm's words, "trash" the authors of the new book, Superfreakonomics, which includes a discussion of a climate solutions that Romm hates.
"I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance."
The reason we know this is because Caldeira forwarded the whole awkward interaction to the authors of Superfreakonomics, who had run the relevant sections of their book by Caldeira twice before publication for his approval.
Romm wanted to make sure Caldeira understood the impact his trashing of Superfreakonomics would have:
"My blog is read by everyone in this area, including the media."
Romm then added:
"I'd like a quote like 'The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work,' plus whatever else you want to say."
"[The Freakonomics authors] sent me the draft and I approved it without reading it carefully and I just missed it. ... I think everyone operated in good faith, and this was just a mistake that got by my inadequate editing."
This post formerly appeared on the Breakthrough site, April 8, 2008
by Ted Nordhaus
Back in the 90's and early part of the current decade, the environmental movement embarked upon a well documented campaign to convince the news media and the American public to stop taking those who questioned the existence of climate change seriously. Environmentalists went to great lengths to demonstrate that those who doubted the existence of climate change were crackpots, paid flaks of the fossil fuels industry, or otherwise lacking in credibility. They urged media reporters to stop covering "both sides" of the debate about climate, pointing out that on one side of that debate was an overwhelming consensus within the scientific community while on the other was a motley collection of ideologues and marginal academics, most with connections to the fossil fuel industry. And they started labeling them "deniers," explicitly referencing those who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred.
Environmental groups assumed that once the debate over the science was settled, the debate over policy would be settled too. But things didn't turn out that way.
The strategy worked. News coverage today rarely, if ever, cites sources who question the existence of climate change or its anthropogenic origins. And few policymakers continue to publicly question climate change. The assumption among environmental leaders was that once the scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change was occurring was established, this consensus would translate into a consensus as to what to do about it -- a consensus that would embrace the policies long advocated by the national environmental movement, namely the Kyoto framework at the international level and cap and trade legislation at the domestic level.
Mark Blumenthal of The National Journal has an insightful blog post about the perils of public opinion polls. Here is an excerpt:
How do Americans feel about cap-and-trade legislation?
In recent weeks, two media pollsters reported results on the point. "Six in 10 Americans support a 'cap-and-trade' proposal to cut pollution," said the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. Despite "growing public skepticism about global warming," the Pew Research Center found "more support than opposition for a policy to set limits on carbon emissions."
How accurately do these questions measure public opinion on cap-and-trade legislation?
To answer that question, you may want to consider how Americans answered another: "Some people say the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree with this idea?"
As a well-informed reader of NationalJournal.com, you are probably inclined to wrinkle your brow and ask, "What's that?" For good reason: It never existed. But its fictitious nature didn't stop 34 percent from expressing an opinion when University of Cincinnati political scientist George Bishop and his colleagues asked a sample of Cincinnati adults that question in 1978. Bishop and other scholars have consistently replicated that finding using national samples and similarly fictitious or unknown legislation. As summarized in Bishop's book, The Illusion of Public Opinion, between 30 and 40 percent of Americans will offer opinions on legislation they have never heard of.
Blumenthal asks "what are we to make of responses to questions that use possibly unfamiliar terms like "greenhouse gases" and "carbon dioxide emissions?""
He put that question to George Bishop, author of the 1975 study referenced above, here is Professor Bishop's response:
"'Cap-and-trade' legislation is so obscure and so little-known by the vast majority of Americans," he concluded via e-mail, that questions about it generate the same sort of "pseudo-opinions" as the fictitious 1975 Public Affairs Act. "Reliable and valid measures of public opinion on such a complex policy issue," he writes, "cannot be so simply simulated by merely telling respondents what it's about and then asking them to react to it on the spot. Down that road lie misleading illusions and the manufacturing of public opinion -- a disservice to the Congress, the president and the press that covers them."
My view is that public opinion is plenty strong enough for action to occur, in other words, there is nothing politically intrinsic about the issue that stands out as being a barrier to action. By contrast, legislation to make abortion illegal might face such an intrinsic political barrier. That means that the issue is about the specifics of policy, and the political implications of specific policies -- who wins and who loses in specific bills. Consequently, at this point in the debate public matters very little. What matters are the perceptions of various decision makers in Congress. Crafting policy that can be effective, be seen to be effective and provide parochial as well as national benefits is the political challenge facing the Congress. From what I read, they are not doing so well in meeting these criteria.
In a Washington Post op-ed, long time EPA lawyers criticize the cap and trade policy espoused by both House and Senate version of climate and energy legislation and point out that such an approach is not sufficient to ignite a clean energy revolution
Update: NASA climate scientist James Hansen has affirmed Williams and Zabel's criticism of cap-and-trade in pending climate and energy legislation. To read his commentary see Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog here.
Two lawyers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with more than forty years of collective experience, wrote this week in the Washington Post criticizing pending climate and energy legislation and enumerating the flaws of the cap and trade system both House and Senate versions of the bill espouse.
According to Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel:
"Cap-and-trade means a declining "cap" on total emissions, while allowing trading of pollution permits. Confidence in the certainty of declining caps is based on the mistaken assumption that cap-and trade was proven in the EPA's acid rain program. In fact, addressing acid rain required relatively minor modifications to coal-fired power plants. Reductions were accomplished primarily by a fuel switch to readily available, affordable, low-sulfur coal, along with some additional scrubbing. In contrast, the issues presented by climate change cannot be solved by tweaks to facilities; it requires an energy revolution through investments in building clean-energy facilities.
The biggest obstacle to this revolution is that uncontrolled fossil fuel energy remains much cheaper than clean energy. Cap-and-trade alone will not create confidence that clean energy will become profitable within a known time frame and so will not ignite the huge shift in investment needed to begin the clean-energy revolution. In recent interviews, even the economists who thought up cap-and-trade have said they don't believe it's an appropriate tool for climate change."
Williams and Zabel go on to point out that perhaps the biggest flaw of the proposed cap and trade system is its inclusion of dubious carbon offsets, that are not only close to impossible to verify, but allow major carbon emitters to continue to maintain business-as-usual practices for the majority of the next two decades.
