Originally posted at The Real Ewbank

By Leigh Ewbank

Australia's new Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has declared war on the Rudd Government. He has kicked-off his leadership by implementing a polarisation strategy, with the emissions-trading policy forming a central part of the political battlefield. The Opposition's new strategy provides some insight into the way in which the cap and trade politics might unfold in the United States.

The new Opposition Leader has identified the proposed emissions-trading scheme as a weak point for the Rudd Government. Labor exposed its vulnerability with efforts to keep the public debate centred on climate change 'skeptics' and 'deniers', the best example of which being Rudd's high-profile speech at the Lowy Institute late last year.

The Rudd Government has created the perception that emissions trading is the only available climate policy option. They have framed opponents of the so-called Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as 'climate skeptics' and opposition to the policy as preventing action on climate change. Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull bought into this logic--or played along with it--throughout the emissions trading debate and diminished the need for the Government to explain the details of the CPRS to the general public. The result is that while the Government's emissions trading policy is well known to the electorate, how it functions remains largely unknown--excluding of course the climate campaigners, policy wonks, and politicos closely following the passage of the legislation.

Continue reading "Australia Update: Opposition Attempts to Brand Emissions Trading a Tax" »

The choke job that Democrats pulled in Massachusetts last week has the Obama Administration in full blown panic. Unfortunately, tonight's State of the Union, it appears, will not offer much hope for displays of courage, perseverance, valor, and oh yeah, level-headed leadership.

Last year, Obama used his congressional address to take on every major challenge facing the nation, all at once, but it appears Obama will revert back to Clinton era small ball in his first State of the Union address tonight. Press reports suggest that the President intends to offer the nation a range of small and symbolic actions - a $100 million or so in middle class tax breaks and a freeze on non-military discretionary spending, most prominently.

For those keeping score at home, $100 million is approximately equivalent to 1/20th of what George Soros made last year betting against the Bush economy and non-military discretionary spending covers pretty much everything except all the stuff that is actually driving up the budget deficit.

Continue reading "Daily Breakthrough: Did the President Choke or Panic?" »

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

World Resources Institute conducts ostensibly independent and objective analyses of environmental legislation for Congress, media including the New York Times, and advocates. But in its analysis of competing climate legislation, WRI used a double standard for measuring emissions reductions in a way that resulted in a more favorable intepretation of Waxman Markey legislation -- legislation WRI helped create.

1. Role of Carbon Offsets Central to Understanding Whether Legislation Will Reduce Emissions

Carbon offsets represent perhaps the most contentious single element of climate legislation currently proposed in Congress. Many environmental groups and energy industry interests support the broad use of carbon offsets because they promise to limit the cost associated with reducing carbon emissions while offering firms greater flexibility in complying with carbon caps.

Unfortunately, there is strong and growing evidence that carbon offset programs deliver little by way of actual emissions reductions. Numerous experts warn that offsets may not represent real emissions reductions (logging, for example, may just move to non-offsetted properties) and are in many cases fraudulent (e.g. businesses being paid to do what they would have done anyway, like capturing methane, planting trees, building dams, not tilling, and not logging).

Continue reading "Think Tank? Or In the Tank?" »

By Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey, and Yael Borofsky

A new Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) is critical to "position the U.S. as the global leader in the development and deployment of clean energy technologies for years to come," according to a letter written by the country's leading clean tech entrepreneurs, investors, and stakeholders.

Thirteen leading clean tech companies, including Google, GE, and Kleiner Perkins, wrote to President Obama last week urging him to expedite the creation of a Clean Energy Deployment Administration along the parameters outlined by the Senate's American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 (ACELA).

Continue reading "Clean Tech Execs Champion Innovative Clean Energy Deployment Administration" »

Cap and trade has been the go-to policy in the effort to mitigate climate change but it is predicated on the idea of making carbon more expensive. In an interview with "Living on Earth" Breakthrough co-founder Michael Shellenberger explains to host Jeff Young why technological advancements that make clean energy cheap, and not carbon regulations, are the key to controlling climate change.

Download the mp3 directly
Or read the transcript that follows...

Continue reading "Michael Shellenberger on "Living on Earth"" »

U.S. clean tech manufacturers are losing global market share to their international competitors. What is the federal government going to do about it?

That was the question posed last week to Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Chu was speaking on the central role that energy research and development holds in any successful effort to mitigate climate change.

During questioning, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) quotes an earlier statement by Secretary Chu, calling it "the challenge of our time":

"The only question is which countries will invent, manufacture, and export clean technologies, and which countries will become dependent on foreign products?"

Unfortunately, the United States is headed in the wrong direction. According to Senator Wyden, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, "80% of clean energy investments are going to take place outside the United States, even though global trade in environmental goods has doubled just in the last few years."

A recently published report by Senator Wyden's office shows that global exports of environmental goods (the majority of which are associated with clean energy technologies) more than doubled to $215 billion from 2004 to 2008. While U.S. exports have certainly benefited from the major expansion in worldwide demand for clean tech products, it has steadily lost international market share as other nations move more aggressively to capture competitive advantages in the burgeoning clean energy sector.

In the United States, clean tech imports have grown faster than exports, and U.S. exports have not kept up with global demand or international competitors, leading to an erosion of market share for U.S. products. By contrast, other nations, particularly China, have dramatically boosted their exports over the five-year period with China experiencing the greatest value growth in clean tech exports of any nation in the world.

Key figures from the report include:

• The United States is the largest import market of environmental goods (EG) as well as the fastest growing import market from 2004-2008 in terms of product value.
• In the last five years, the U.S trade deficit in renewable energy products increased by 1,400% to nearly $5.7 billion. 
• The United States faces declining export market shares in virtually every regional market, while China has substantially increased its market share in every regional market, over the last five years.

Continue reading "Wyden to Chu: Clean Tech Competitiveness Is the "Challenge of Our Time...Not Clear What the Strategy Is" " »

In a recent New York Magazine excerpt from their book on the 2008 campaign, John Heilemann & Mark Halperin tell the story of John Edwards' self-destruction -- and his delusional belief that political salvation lay just around the corner, long after he had laid waste to his campaign and his political future.

In admitting paternity of a child he fathered in the midst of his campaign, Edwards has finally accepted that his political career is over. What will it take for greens and sympathetic fellow travelers to accept that cap and trade and the UN climate process is dying and move on?

A look around the blogosphere finds various key players working their way through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance).

Continue reading "Daily Breakthrough: How to Get Over the Death of Your Paradigm" »

Here's a short (and potent) Friday Factoid to conclude this week:

In the last five years, the U.S trade deficit in renewable energy products increased by 1,400% to nearly $5.7 billion.

That's according to a report on the opportunities and challenges America faces in the production and export of environmental goods, including clean energy technologies, published in December by the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, chaired by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

The graphic below shows the growth in the U.S. trade deficit in environmental goods. Imbalance in the import/export of renewable energy products ("REP" in the key) is the largest contributor to this deficit.

(Click to enlarge)

Product Key:
REP: Renewable Energy Products
CRET: Cleaner or More Resource Efficient Technologies
EMAA: Environmental Monitoring, Equipment
SHW: Management of Solid and Hazardous Waste
HEM: Heat and Energy Management
WWM: Waste Water Management and Treatment
APC: Air Pollution Control

We'll have more on this report and it's implications on Monday. Enjoy your weekend.

After receiving no help from the White House to secure the $15 billion in annual energy R&D investment Obama promised during the campaign, Energy Secretary Steven Chu is speaking out for R&D -- with the help of Sen. Jeff Bingaman and high tech billionaire Bill Gates.

The push by these three powerful figures comes in the wake of Republican Senator Scott Brown's upset victory for Edward Kennedy's seat and a series of high profile Democratic Senators, most recently Diane Feinstein, saying cap and trade can't be passed this year.

Continue reading "Bingaman and Gates Back Chu on Energy R&D" »

Yesterday, Bill Gates, yes, the Bill Gates, voiced his support of clean energy innovation as the path forward if the United States aims to transition to a clean energy economy and meet "the 80% goal by 2050."

In the piece, "Why We Need Innovation, Not Insulation," crossposted at the Huffington Post from his new blog Gates Notes, Gates asks an important question:

"Should society spend a lot of time trying to insulate houses and telling people to turn off lights or should it spend time on accelerating innovation?"

Continue reading "Gates: Efficiency Won't Cut It" »

Republican Scott Brown's upset victory over Democratic incumbent Martha Coakley for the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat spells the almost certain demise of cap and trade in the Senate.

Yesterday, with eyes fixed on the Brown vs. Coakley race Sen. Bryan Dorgon (D- N.D.) declared cap and trade dead.

Now today Democratic House whip Steny Hoyer says House leadership may strip cap and trade off the other parts of the climate bill:

"We ought not to let one be the victim to the other," Hoyer declared.

It's not the end yet, though. Senate President Harry Reid must dutifully insist that cap and trade is not dead and Senators Kerry and Lieberman will continue to tell themselves that they can pull vibrant (and by necessity, bipartisan) support for a withering policy.

Continue reading "What Comes After Cap and Trade? " »

Originally published at LeadEnergy

A major report released last week by the National Science Board concludes that U.S. global leadership in science and technology is declining as foreign nations - especially China and other Asian countries - rapidly develop their national innovation systems.

"U.S. dominance has eroded significantly... The data begin to tell a worrisome story," stated Kei Koizumi, assistant director for federal research and development in President Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The Director of the National Science Foundation, Arden Bement, noted that "China is achieving a dramatic amount of synergy by increasing its investment in science and engineering education, in research, and in infrastructure, which is attracting scientists from all over the world."

The report, "Science and Engineering Indicators 2010," is published every two years by the National Science Board, a 25-member expert council that advises the National Science Foundation, President, and Congress on science and technology policy, education, and research. Koizumi called it a "State of the Union on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics."

This "state of the union" for science and technology comes amidst growing concern that Asia is out-competing the U.S. in the burgeoning global clean-tech sector. According to the "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant" report I recently co-authored with the Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, China, Japan, and South Korea have already surpassed the U.S. in the production of nearly all clean energy technologies, and these governments are expected to out-invest the U.S. three-to-one in this industry over the next five years. As U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu recently said, "The world is passing us by. We are falling behind in the clean energy race."

Continue reading "Asia Challenges U.S. Innovation Leadership, New Report Shows " »

In Part 1 of our analysis of the new Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, we demonstrated how the bill fails to make the investments needed to jumpstart a competitive American clean energy economy and fund the technology innovation and deployment needed to affordably secure deep cuts in U.S. carbon emissions. In Part 2, we focus on several important structural advantages of CLEAR that open the door to a more transparent debate about the costs and benefits of climate action in Congress.

Simplicity and transparency are the strengths of the CLEAR Act, a climate bill recently introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

In contrast to competing climate proposals, which weigh in at several hundred pages in length, CLEAR contains just under 40 pages of text. Some of this brevity is achieved by punting on the development of a clean technology investment and competitiveness strategy (see more in Part 3, forthcoming), but much of the bill's simplicity comes from avoiding many of the complex and opaque measures in competing bills, creating new opportunities for transparent and open debate of climate action that may prove critical to securing real political consensus.

CLEAR does not allow offsets, is transparent about emissions reductions carbon cap will drive

Fossil fuel importers and producers regulated under CLEAR are not permitted to use emissions offsets to prove compliance with the bill's emissions cap. Unlike other climate bills, CLEAR keeps emissions reductions in non-capped sectors strictly separate from efforts to transform the U.S. energy system through the bill's carbon cap.

This enables a transparent debate over how quickly the U.S. energy sector can (or must) transition away from fossil fuels towards cleaner alternatives (and there will surely be much debate on that subject). Avoiding offsets also ensures that emissions reduction efforts in other sectors, including agriculture and forestry, are pursued in conjunction with, rather than instead of, the critical transformation of the energy system.

CLEAR's transparent cap on energy-related CO2 emissions is thus much better than competing climate bills at providing the kind of certainty that energy sector players need to plan investments in technology and infrastructure.

Continue reading "A CLEAR Look at the Cantwell-Collins Climate Bill, Part 2: Structural Advantages" »

Originally published at Foreign Policy

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

There was good reason to be hopeful in January of 2009 that the election of Barack Obama would bring about America's long-awaited clean energy revolution. As president-elect, Obama had started to talk about energy policy in a way that no leader of either party had before. Promising to save the country from both severe recession and industrial decline, Obama described the transformation of America's energy economy as a defining challenge of his presidency -- an economic and national security imperative that Congress would fail to address at the nation's peril.

But the reality fell far short of expectations. The Obama administration succumbed, like many others, to a sort of magical climate thinking that promised a painless and even prosperous transition to a low-carbon future with the tools already at hand. The only official within his administration to accurately grasp the technology challenges we faced, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, was sidelined at crucial moments.

Continue reading "The End of Magical Climate Thinking" »

Has America forgotten its own history? Do we remember nothing about what made us a great nation?

Americans are like screaming schoolboys over the latest technological toy - iSlate! Google phone! 3D TV! - without acknowledging, for even a minute, that so many fundamentals for these technologies, and many more, were delivered by Defense Department contracts.

Given our collective technology amnesia it's little wonder that America's Most Important Columnist has convinced so many Times readers that pollution regulations rather than government investments in technology are crucial to America winning what he cheesily calls "the Earth Race."

Continue reading "Daily Breakthrough: America's Future is Up in the Air" »

Cross-posted from LeadEnergy

Yet again, Thomas Friedman nails the clean energy race and fails on the policy strategy. His op-ed today, "Who's Sleeping Now?" (similar to our recent report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant") claims that carbon pricing is the solution to secure U.S. competitiveness in the global clean-tech industry:

"We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China's main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it... It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation."

By calling for the passage of the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACESA) -- without mentioning a single area for improvement -- Friedman implies it is strong enough to compete with Asia and drive the U.S. transition to clean energy, when in fact the bill would (1) establish a very modest price on carbon due to numerous cost-containment mechanisms like international offsets; (2) invest an order of magnitude less in clean energy technology development than a large and ever-growing number of experts say is necessary -- including dozens of Nobel Laureates, America's top research universities, Google, Brookings Institution, Breakthrough Institute, Third Way, military veterans, and others; and (3) establish a renewable electricity standard that would not ensure any increase in U.S. renewable energy deployment beyond already conservative business-as-usual projections (see here for comprehensive analysis of ACESA).

That may be acceptable to Thomas Friedman, but it is no way for the United States to lead the clean energy industry. For more on this ongoing debate, see my recent response to Friedman, "Earth to Thomas Friedman: Winning the 'Earth Race' Requires Federal Investment."

UPDATE: Alternet and Buffalo Beast have both corrected their posts about Roger Pielke Jr. and Breakthrough and apologized for the error. Score one for responsible journalism - an increasingly endangered species in today's brave new media world.


Conservatives and liberals are duking it out over the blockbuster Avatar's portrayal of American humans as violent corporate imperialists, and of the giant blue Na'vi as humanoids who live at one with nature, blissfully free of science and technology. Old story, old debate.

The strangest and most interesting thing that both sides have overlooked is that Na'vi have both science and technology -- which they use (gasp!) to dominate nature.

Continue reading "Daily Breakthrough: Avatar, Eco-Paranoia, and Technology" »

Making clean energy cheaper than coal through investments in game-changing innovation is the critical path to a low-carbon energy future, according to Bill Weihl, Google's "Green Energy Czar" and a Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow. In today's New York Times Green Inc blog, Weihl answers a few questions about what it's like to be on the frontlines of the push for clean energy.

As a consumer of large quantities of energy -- used to run its ever growing data centers -- Google has a personal stake in the business of energy politics. It also has vast sums of revenue from its sponsored ad business, and the kind of creative culture that urges its engineers to think beyond the short-term, profit-centric model that too-often paralyzes large corporations.

From the NYT:

Q: Google is obviously best-known as an Internet company. Why is Google involved with alternative energy in the first place?

A: I'd say there are two reasons. One is that we use a moderate amount of energy ourselves: we have a lot of servers, and we have 22,000 employees around the world with office buildings that consume a lot of energy. So we use energy and we care about the cost of that, we care about the environmental impact of it, and we care about the reliability of it. The other reason is that, starting with the founders and filtering down to many of our employees, people care about environmental issues.

...

Continue reading "NYT: Q&A with Bill Weihl, Google's "Green Energy Czar"" »

Cross-posted from Americans for Energy Leadership

President Obama gave a speech today on the "Educate to Innovate" Campaign and the Science Teaching and Mentoring Awards, emphasizing the importance of STEM education for maintaining American leadership and successfully competing with the rapidly growing economies of Asia. As we found in our recent report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," Asian nations like China, South Korea, and Japan are launching massive government investment projects to dominate the clean-tech sector, which promises to be one of the largest new growth sectors of the next few decades.

In order to catch up, the United States will need a national clean-tech education strategy on par with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, as my colleague and I wrote back in 2008. The Obama administration's RE-ENERGYSE proposal was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately it was rejected by Congress last year. Will the administration and Congress work together on a new proposal in 2010 on the scale we need to win the clean energy race? Stay tuned.

Here are some of Obama's remarks:

Continue reading "Obama says STEM Education Critical for Competing with Asia" »

What follows is an excerpt from Breakthrough Senior Fellow Jim Proctor's essay "Environment after nature: Time for a new vision¹," one of 16 essays examining the five central visions of biophysical and human nature in Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion, which Proctor also edited.

Introduction

Recently I left an enviable faculty position of thirteen years, sold my house on the ocean, and became director of an environmental studies program at a small liberal arts school in the US Pacific Northwest. I say this, so that when I say what I will say next you will not ignore me as some rabid anti-environmentalist:

I am anti-environment.

At least in the sense that environment is generally understood today, a taken-for-granted notion underlying everything from environmentalism to "environmentology."² Somehow our notion of environment got wrapped up in our notion of nature, and with it came a whole host of conceptual binaries that effectively drive a wedge through any lasting resolution of environmental problems.

This is not a new argument; in fact, everything I cite to support my claim is someone else's idea, not mine.³ What is surprising is that so little of it has found its way into environmentalism. Thirtysomething years ago, around the time of the birth of the modern environmental movement, there was a great deal of low-hanging fruit to be picked, lots of obvious environmental problems that had pretty much been ignored up to then. Maybe this is why environmentalists didn't want to spend too much time forging new conceptual tools: nature was imperiled, in some cases people were imperiled as a result, and the imperative was action, not talk. Well, thirtysomething years later, it's no revelation that there are environmental problems; we've all tasted the low-hanging varietals. And, sadly, it's no secret that many have proven rather indigestible, while the higher-up fruit has been virtually impossible to reach, let alone digest. Maybe it's time to rethink--to paraphrase Neil Evernden--what exactly is this environment we struggle so hard to save.⁴

Continue reading "Environment after nature: Time for a new vision" »