Turns out that decades of energy efficient lightbulbs and Energy Star appliances haven't led to reductions in energy consumption in the average household, but they have given the average American relatively more disposable income to devote to new (energy-guzzling) gadgetry.

As David Fahrenthold reports in the Washington Post:

The amount of energy that the average American requires at home has changed little since the early 1970s -- despite advances in technology that have made many home appliances far more energy efficient...

But on a per-capita basis, Americans still require about 70 million British thermal units a year to heat, cool and power their homes, just as they did in 1971...

A key reason, experts say, is that American homes are getting bigger, which means more space to heat and cool. And consumers are buying more and more power-sucking gadgets -- meaning that kilowatts saved by dishwashers and refrigerators are often used up by flat-screen televisions, computers and digital video recorders.

These trends "have balanced each other out. It's been a wash, basically," said Lowell Ungar of the nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy.

Continue reading "In 40 Years of Energy Efficiency Improvements, No Change in Household Energy Consumption" »

As new reports confirm a stark decline in long-term U.S. economic competitiveness, the United States needs a new economic paradigm to refocus economic policy and rebuild its damaged economy. That new paradigm should focus on strengthening America's "regional innovation clusters," according to a new report authored by Mark Muro and Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

First defined by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter twenty years ago, clusters--geographic concentrations of interconnected firms, suppliers, educational institutions and other supporting organizations--have staged a comeback in economic policymaking at different levels of government and are now widely viewed as important to accelerate innovation and therefore economic growth. According to the new study, The New Cluster Moment: How Regional Innovation Clusters Can Foster the Next Economy, clusters offer an attractive new economic paradigm for three particular reasons.

Continue reading "America Must Realize Its "Cluster Moment"" »

One of the most curious facts about energy is that economies continue to use more of it even as they use it more efficiently. This strikes us as strange because it has become an article of faith that making cars, buildings, and factories more energy efficient is the key to cheaply and quickly reducing energy consumption, and thus pollution.

But energy experts have never seen this as particularly mysterious. As energy historian Vaclav Smil notes, "Historical evidence shows unequivocally that secular advances in energy efficiency have not led to any declines of aggregate energy consumption." A group of economists beginning in the 1980s went further, suggesting that increasing the productivity of energy would increase economic growth and energy consumption. Efficiency advocates dismiss the evidence of rebound in energy use pointing to direct behavioral changes at the household or business level that are easiest to measure. But the most significant energy rebounds are indirect -- in the production of energy, raw materials, and consumer goods -- not in the "end use" of consumer products.

Below, a leading energy economist, Harry Saunders, explains why energy efficiency does not decrease energy consumption in the way we conventionally understand it. In the process, Saunders clarifies the controversy over his recent co-authored study for the Journal of Physics, which reviews 300 years of lighting history to predict the impact of new solid-state lighting technologies (e.g. LEDs). Against the widespread belief that new lighting technology will reduce energy consumption, Saunders and his colleagues found that they will likely increase it -- greatly expanding the global use of lighting in the process, especially in developing countries. Saunders clarifies some important questions, and explains the basics of "the rebound effect."

With the new study, rebound has firmly moved from the theoretical to the empirical, and the implications of it must now be dealt with by all of us who were counting on efficiency to be an easy way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

-Michael Shellenberger, President, Breakthrough Institute

Why Energy Efficiency May Not Decrease Energy Consumption

By Harry Saunders

I recently co-authored an article for the Journal of Physics ("Solid-state lighting: an energy-economics perspective" by Jeff Tsao, Harry Saunders, Randy Creighton, Mike Coltrin, Jerry Simmon, August 19, 2010) analyzing the increase in energy consumption that will likely result from new (and more efficient) solid-state lighting (SSL) technologies. The article triggered a round of commentaries and responses that have confused the debate over energy efficiency. What follows is my attempt to clarify the issue, and does not necessarily represent the views of my co-authors.

Continue reading "Why Energy Efficiency May Not Decrease Energy Consumption" »

A new National Academies report released last week confirms what many concerned with U.S. economic competitiveness have warily suspected: America's competitive standing in the 21st century global economy has deteriorated markedly in the last five years.

The report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category Five, is an update to a landmark 2005 report that warned of urgent competitiveness challenges ahead and led to the passage of the America COMPETES Act of 2007--an effort to strengthen the nation's science and technology-based capabilities.

The outlook has only worsened since the publication of the original report, according to the Gathering Storm committee, which includes leading academics, CEOs, and science and technology experts. For those concerned about America's ability to create lasting, high-paying, high-quality jobs in a time of economic distress, the report's conclusion is disheartening:

"America's competitive position in the world now faces even greater challenges, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the last few years and by the rapid and persistent worldwide advanced of education, knowledge, innovation, investment, and industrial infrastructure. Indeed the governments of many other countries in Europe and Asia have themselves acknowledged and aggressively pursued many of the key recommendations of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, often more vigorously than has the U.S."

Continue reading ""Gathering Storm" Threatens U.S. Competitiveness" »

As time runs out in the 111th Congress, at least one senator is working hard to secure bipartisan support for key energy policies that could provide a boost to U.S. clean energy companies at a time of increasingly fierce competition.

Monday, on the pages of Politico, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), made an impassioned plea to his Congressional colleagues to enact legislation to create a new Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) to accelerate the commercialization of innovative clean energy technologies. He is also spearheading a last ditch effort to pass a national renewable electricity standard (RES) to help build a domestic clean energy market.

Progress on these key bipartisan measures was held up by months of debate over cap and trade legislation that ultimately failed in the Senate, but there is still a little time to score a last-minute clean energy victory this year.

Continue reading "Bingaman Leads Last Ditch Effort for Clean Energy Progress" »

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s blog

The NYT has a story today on a new report from the IEA (here in PDF) issued in conjunction with a meeting of the UN general Assembly:

More than $36 billion a year is needed to ensure that the world's population benefits from access to electricity and clean-burning cooking facilities by 2030, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

In a report prepared for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals meeting in New York, the agency said the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 would be possible only if an additional 395 million people obtained access to electricity and one billion gained access to more modern cooking facilities that minimize harmful smoke in the next few years.

"Without electricity, social and economic development is much more difficult," Fatih Birol, the energy agency's chief economist, said by telephone. "Addressing sanitation, clean water, hunger -- these goals can't be met without providing access to energy."

The problem of energy inequality mirrors the gap between rich and poor countries, Mr. Birol said. "The amount of electricity consumed by sub-Saharan Africa, with 800 million people, is about the same as that used in New York State, with about 19 million people," he said.

Continue reading "Access to Energy, Poverty Alleviation and Policy Blinders" »

The death of cap and trade and the collapse of Kyoto/Copenhagen has driven a discernible movement of old ideological foes toward a new consensus energy policy framework centered on making clean energy cheap.

On the right, Bjorn Lomborg, long a leading skeptic of efforts to address climate change, has wholeheartedly embraced a new clean energy innovation agenda, calling for massive global investments--on the order of $100 billion per year--in energy R&D. New York Times conservative commentator David Brooks has also acknowledged that the government should invest much more--around $25 billion per year--in research and development.

On the left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Democratic think tank whose spokespersons have in the past attacked Breakthrough's proposal to "Make Clean Energy Cheap," appears to be embracing just such a strategy -- at least rhetorically. According to a recent news report, Democratic lawyer Reed Hundt, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is working with CAP and Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection on a new energy bill for the next Congress that focuses first and foremost on "lowering the cost of clean."

Hundt and CAP/Gore are also talking about measures to scale out the "breakthrough technologies" that the Department of Energy has funded.

Continue reading "Right and Left Move to New Climate Center" »

Breakthrough Senior Fellow Gregory Nemet has been awarded a $183,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue launch new policy research initiative, "Choosing a Portfolio of Technology Policies in an Uncertain World". The project, which will evaluate the effect of different technology policies on the economy and climate change, comes as a new consensus is emerging that the development of new clean energy technologies is crucial to mitigating climate change.

Nemet, along with a colleague from the University of Massachusetts, will study combinations of three policy options: government-funded R&D, demand-side subsidies, and carbon pricing.

'Addressing climate change without damaging the economy will require substantial investments in new knowledge to devise improvements to energy technologies,' Nemet says. 'Because knowledge produced in the laboratory and in commercial settings is notoriously difficult for private firms to control and exclusively profit from, many stakeholders argue government support is required. The models we develop can help improve the allocation of public funds and thus could have an important fiscal impact.'

Continue reading "Senior Fellow Wins Grant for Climate Focused Technology Policy" »

By Devon Swezey and Jesse Jenkins

It is fashionable these days to paint the government as a useless yet ravenous institution, the expansion of which will turn America into a third world country - or, worse yet, France.

Even the Economist, a respected, moderate publication, has recently taken to framing the government as a hideous Leviathan consuming private business, and everything else in its path.

But according to a new column by conservative commentator David Brooks, the hysterical, anti-government ideology that has taken root within even mainstream corners of the Republican Party is driven by an "oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications."

Continue reading "Brooks: Anti-government Ideology Threatens American Greatness" »

President Obama's recent proposal to increase and make permanent the research and development (R&D) tax credit is unlikely to substantially accelerate economic growth without greater efforts to manufacture and commercialize innovations in the United States.

The President recently unveiled the new $100 billion measure as a way to boost the flagging economy and provide incentives for businesses to invest in new products and technologies.

Yet the decades long trend of U.S. innovations being commercialized abroad threatens to dilute the economic benefits--in terms of new industries, jobs, and revenues--of new technology investment. The United States pioneered advanced technologies like flat-panel televisions, printed circuit boards and semiconductors--ubiquitous technologies for which there are enormous global markets--but the production of these technologies and many others has long since shifted overseas, particularly to Asia.

Take the semiconductor industry. In 2009, the percentage of global semiconductor production capacity in the United States was only 14 percent, down from 25 percent in 2005, according to Manufacturing and Technology News. Nearly 75 percent of manufacturing capacity was in Asia.

Overall, the U.S. trade balance in product fields designated as "technologically advanced" is negative, and has remained so for the last eight years.

Continue reading "As Manufacturing Shifts Abroad, Innovation's Reward Dwindles" »

Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr.'s new book, The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming, will be hitting bookstores later this month but it's already available through a variety of vendors and is garnering top reviews.

From the Library Journal:

Pielke is unusual, as he neatly separates the science of climate change from the rhetoric, bringing the issue back to the realm of rational discussion ... Overall, an excellent primer for getting past the politically charged debate clouding the issues.

Continue reading "The Climate Fix: Pielke Jr.'s New Book Earns Praise" »

by Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr.

The UK NGO Sandbag has released a report (PDF) evaluating the effects of the European Emissions Trading Scheme on the bloc's carbon dioxide emissions. Here is an excerpt from the report:

We are now two years into the second Phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and it is already clear that, like Phase I, Phase I I will fail to deliver significant abatement2. Policymakers set a Phase I I cap sitting just 6% below 2005 allocations3. But as 2005 was actually overallocated by more than 7% meaning Phase I I actually represents a 1% growth cap against 2005 emissions4. Furthermore, this unambitious Phase I I cap was almost immediately blindsided by the recession. In 2009 the recession dragged down production levels by 1 3.85%, reducing emissions by 1 1 .6%5.

Even with an aggressive economic recovery, our projections find it unlikely that the Phase I I cap would constrain emissions by more than 32Mt across the full 5 years of the phase (2008-1 2), a meagre 0.3% of the 1 0.5 billion tonnes we expect covered installations to emit across the period. To put this in context, the current phase of the ETS, which polices more than 12,000 installations, would have been almost twice as effective if it had simply enforced a cap on one of Europe's largest polluters: Drax power station in the UK is likely to face a shortfall of 60Mt across the same period, double the net effect of the entire scheme.

Furthermore, the low cost and high availability of offsets make it is highly unlikely that this meagre 32Mt of abatement will take place in Europe. I t is more probable that European emitters will purchase cheap offsets to give them a carbon space to grow domestic emissions. In fact, despite the promise of much more aggressive Phase I I I caps we find that on-going availability of cheap offsets could allow Europe's domestic emissions to grow a staggering 34% from current levels by 2016.

Continue reading ""Minuscule": Effects of European ETS on CO2 Emissions" »

As the Obama Administration and Republicans are set to do battle over an extension of Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, clean energy innovation is getting the short end of the stick.

According to the New York Times, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is hopping mad about President Obama's plan to let tax cuts expire for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. McConnell's plan, which would extend the tax cuts for the countries wealthiest, would add $700 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

Meanwhile, Senate appropriators are considering providing only $200 million for the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) for FY2011, $100 million less than the Administration requested and only half the level appropriated to the agency in the stimulus. Most of that money is going to universities and private businesses for high-risk, high-reward research projects that could form the basis for transformative new industries and drive economic growth.

Energy experts have long argued that investments in R&D programs like ARPA-E should be scaled up to accelerate innovation. In a policy brief released last June, the Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution, and Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, called for ARPA-E to increase to around $3 billion in ten years time, "a funding level on par with DARPA budgets and at a scale necessary to truly impact the pace of innovation in the expected multi-trillion dollar clean energy market."

To recap: $200 million for clean energy innovation, $700 billion for wealthy Americans.

Come to think of it, I've seen that $700 billion figure before...

Oh that's right--China is planning to invest $738 billion over 10 years in new clean energy industries to dominate an expected multi-trillion global market and become the clean energy factory for the world.

According to most electoral prognosticators, Republicans are poised to win major victories in the upcoming November midterm elections, with control of both the House and Senate within their reach. That should spell the end for climate and clean energy legislation, according to many observers, at least for the next Congressional cycle.

But what if it doesn't? Over at SolveClimate, Elizabeth McGowan takes a fresh look at what a GOP win in November could mean for clean energy progress, noting that split control in Washington could actually improve chances for bipartisan energy legislation.

Continue reading "Does November GOP Win Spell the End for Clean Energy Progress? Maybe Not" »

Democrats pulled the plug on ill-fated climate and energy legislation that finally collapsed under its own weight and - believe it or not - that is a good thing. Now a new window is open to shift the overarching goal of climate policy toward unleashing a clean energy revolution brought about by large scale government investment in clean energy technology innovation. In a series of posts, Breakthrough highlights the means by which we can develop a new strategy for achieving transformative clean energy progress that is capable of overcoming the policy and political barriers that have always doomed cap and trade.

Myths About the Death of Cap and Trade

"Time to Bury Cap and Trade and Plan Anew"

"Shellenberger Q&A with Ezra Klein: 'This is the end of cap-and-trade for a long time'"

"Cap & Fail: The Collapse of our Climate Policy Paradigm"

In another clear sign of the steadily unraveling pollution paradigm, Yvo De Boer, the former head of the UN climate negotiations, has acknowledged that the long debate over targets and timetables for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is irrelevant. Asked by Bloomberg about emissions reductions targets in the context of the upcoming climate negotiations in Cancun, De Boer replied:

"Discussions about targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome. I don't think that we're going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition."

De Boer was singing a different tune in the run up to last year's Copenhagen climate negotiations, which ended, predictably, without a comprehensive and legally binding emissions treaty. In August 2009, de Boer told TIME Magazine that even if the U.S. didn't show up to Copenhagen with a new climate change law in hand, an ambitious target would be enough to placate the international community:

"The international community is keenly interested in seeing what steps America is making at home to get its emissions under control, but it also wants to see what the Administration says it will do. If the Administration in Copenhagen commits to a target that is good enough for the international community, that will work. It's up to the U.S. to see how the target will be implemented nationally."

Continue reading "Former UN Climate Chief: Emissions Targets and Timetables are Irrelevant " »

By Roger Pielke Jr., Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow. Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr's Blog.

In a perspective just out in Science commenting on a new paper (Davis et al.) that shows another way to explain the decarbonization challenge, Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Marty Hoffert of NYU explains how the magnitude of the challenge of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at a low level has been underestimated:

Pacala and Socolow (8) analyzed a scenario that envisioned stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 500 ppm within 50 years. They found that reaching that goal required the deployment of seven existing or nearly existing groups of technologies, such as more fuel-efficient vehicles, to remove seven "wedges" of predicted future emissions (the wedge image coming from the shape created by graphing each increment of avoided future emissions). Those seven wedges, each of which represents 25 gigatons of avoided carbon emissions by 2054, are cited by some as sufficient to "solve" climate change for 50 years (9).

Unfortunately, the original wedges approach greatly underestimates needed reductions. In part, that is because Pacala and Socolow built their scenario on a business as usual (BAU) emissions baseline based on assumptions that do not appear to be coming true. For instance, the scenario assumes that a shift in the mix of fossil fuels will reduce the amount of carbon released per unit of energy. This carbon-to-energy ratio did decline during prior shifts from coal to oil, and then from oil to natural gas. Now, however, the ratio is increasing as natural gas and oil approach peak production, coal production rises, and new coal-fired power plants are built in China, India, and the United States (10).

The enormous challenge of making the transition to carbon-neutral power sources becomes even clearer when emissions-reduction scenarios are based on arguably more realistic baselines, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "frozen technology" scenario ( 11, 12). Capturing all alternate energy technologies, including those assumed within this BAU scenario, means that a total of ~18 of Pacala and Socolow's wedges would be needed to curb emissions (13) (see the figure). And to keep future warming below 2°C, even under the Davis et al. age-out scenario, an additional 7 wedges of emissions reductions would be needed-- for a total of 25 wedges (see the figure).

Continue reading "Science: Scale of the Climate Challenge Demands Committment to Technology Innovation" »

If you live in states like Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Kentucky, you may have already seen them: new political hatchet ads attacking Democrats and even some moderate Republicans for support of Congressional cap and trade bills.

According to E&E News ($usbcription required), the climate policy, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year before stalling in the Senate, is the latest weapon wielded by conservative Republican Congressional candidates across the country, who are trying to ride a wave of anger over perceived, out-of-control big government policies into office.

Continue reading "Republican Candidates Wield Cap and Trade as Political Weapon" »

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr's Blog.

The German government is proposing to extend the life of its nuclear power plants and use the resulting windfall to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels. The WSJ reports:

Germany's proposal to keep its nuclear reactors running on average 12 years longer than planned will bring in €30 billion ($38.69 billion) in taxes and levies from utility companies, Economics Minister Rainer Brüderle said Monday.

"It's about €30 billion overall. These are large sums that will be directed to the government, toward renewable energy," Mr. Brüderle said in an interview with radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. He added that the revenue includes the contributions utilities will be obliged to make toward renewable-energy research and development, and a tax on nuclear fuel rods. The fuel-rod levy, which utilities fought vigorously to avoid, will generate an estimated €2.3 billion annually but will be limited to six years, Mr. Brüderle said.

Continue reading "German Nuclear Power and the Future of Climate Policy " »