The United States should more than triple federal investments in the development of cutting edge new energy technologies to accelerate the transition to a low carbon energy system, according to President Obama's top science and technology advisors.

Joining an increasingly broad and consistent set of voices, from academia, policy organizations, business leaders and researchers, the President's science and technology advisors forcefully argue that accelerated energy innovation is critical to the nation's future prosperity for economic competitiveness, environmental, and national security reasons alike.

The report, "Accelerating the Pace of Change in Energy Technologies Through an Integrated Federal Energy Policy," was written by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and released Monday.

Continue reading "U.S. Must Triple Investment in Energy Technology: President's Science Advisors" »

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned today that if the United States allows funding for energy R&D to decline it risks losing its leadership in energy innovation to China and other emerging economic competitors.

Speaking at the release of a new report on energy innovation by the President's science advisors, Chu declared that "federal support of scientific R&D is critical to our economic competitiveness."

The new report, published today by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), urges the President and Congress to substantially boost federal funding for energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment--to $16 billion per year. Recognizing the major advances needed to make clean energy technologies viable alternatives to fossil fuels, the report recommends that the bulk (three quarters) of this new funding be directed earlier on in the innovation process, towards research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) activities

The PCAST report is a prominent addition to a growing chorus of expert voices calling for greater investment in energy innovation. Most recently, the Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution, and American Enterprise Institute released a "Post-Partisan" plan for energy innovation, calling for a $25 billion investment. And earlier this year, top business leaders, including Bill Gates and Norman Augustine, released a plan calling for $16 billion in RD&D.

For more on Chu's speech and the PCAST report, see this great coverage from TIME's Bryan Walsh.

By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

The failure of the U.N. climate process is proof that shared economic sacrifice cannot be the basis of global action. Nations will not scale up clean energy as long as it remains so much more expensive than fossil fuels. Thinking past talks in Cancun, nations should focus instead on energy innovation, adaptation, and no regrets policies that do not require agreement about global warming. The first step is recognizing that the global market for clean energy exists only thanks to government subsidies and mandates. Instead of imposing emissions controls and subsidizing existing technologies, nations should use competitive deployment to purchase advanced energy technologies, benchmark the winners, and allow intellectual property to spill-over between firms and nations.

This is the framework we propose for pragmatic global climate action in the cover story for a special energy section in today's Wall Street Journal, pegged to the start of U.N. climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. Today also marks the launch of a new web site, Breakthrough Europe, and its kick-off post, "Cancun Can't: The Twilight of European Climate Leadership," which documents the failure of Europe's cap and trade system to reduce emissions.

Our Wall St. Journal essay, "How to Change the Global Energy Conversation," builds on Breakthrough Institute's thinking about the failure of the UN process ("Scrap Kyoto," Democracy Journal), the clean tech intellectual property illusion ("The Revolution Will Not Be Patented," Slate), the green Keynesianism and neoliberalism behind Obama's green jobs fiasco ("Green Jobs for Janitors," The New Republic), and our proposal to make clean energy cheap through technology innovation ("Fast, Clean & Cheap," Harvard Law and Policy Review, Feb 2008).

Continue reading "WSJ: Forget the U.N. Climate Convention, Rethink Innovation Instead" »

Were the European Union to call for a deeper cut in carbon dioxide emissions, it would do little to stem the unrelenting increase in global emissions and is unlikely to have any effect on the international climate negotiations, according to the International Energy Agency.

While Europe's negotiating position in international climate talks remains a target of 20 percent emissions reductions below 1990 levels by 2020, some have pushed it to target an additional ten percent reduction. The EU has long maintained that it would boost its target to 30 percent if other industrialized countries followed suit.

What is the significance of an extra ten percent reduction in EU emissions by 2020? Not much, according to IEA Chief Economists Fatih Birol:

"We estimate extending Europe's plan to cut emissions from 20 to 30 percent would roughly equal China's two-week gas output."

Could the 10 percent EU additional emissions cut really equal only two weeks of emissions in China? We checked the numbers on that (h/t Roger Pielke, Jr.), and Mr. Birol is indeed correct.

Continue reading "Eye on the Prize: China is Make or Break for Climate" »

"China's overriding priority will be to develop its economy, eliminate poverty and raise people's welfare, and our energy consumption and (greenhouse gas) emissions will experience reasonable growth for some time."

--Huang Huikang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's special representative for climate change talks.

By Teryn Norris, originally published at Americans for Energy Leadership

David Leonhardt -- one of the country's leading economic reporters at the New York Times -- has a new article, "One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth," which calls for increased federal investment in science, technology, and education as one of "the best ways to promote growth" and a primary strategy to reduce the budget deficit. He reports:

"If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades -- no easy feat, to be fair -- the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears...

Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn't simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do...

Beyond tax reform, both [proposed] deficit plans mention the importance of making investments that will lead to future growth. In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science.

These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the world's most prosperous economy last century in large measure because it was the world's most educated country. It no longer is. Federal science dollars, meanwhile, led to the creation of the intercontinental railroad, the airline industry, the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet and numerous medical breakthroughs. Yet science funding is scheduled to decline as stimulus money runs out."

Leonhardt's case, which our allies and us have consistently advocated, is supported by a large and growing degree of evidence. For example, in an article for The Quarterly Journal of Economics titled "Measuring the Social Return to R&D," two Stanford economists concluded:

"the optimal share of resources to invest in research is conservatively estimated to be two to four times larger than the actual amount invested by the U.S. economy. The extent of underinvestment is substantial, and could well be much larger."

In other words, the federal government has been substantially underinvesting in science and technology, and securing robust long-term growth and deficit reduction requires new public investment in strategic growth sectors -- with clean energy technology being a prime example.

New innovations in energy storage, transmission, and the integration of variable electricity sources are necessary to enable renewable energy sources to contribute significantly to the U.S. energy supply, according to a new report from the American Physical Society.

Establishing national policies to spur the deployment and adoption of renewable electricity sources, such as wind and solar power, are important, but the scientists warn that research and innovation must also proceed in parallel on better energy storage technologies, new strategies for integrating the varying and intermittent output of these energy sources, and improved technologies for the long-distance transmission of renewable electricity.

Continue reading "Scientists: Innovation Needed on Energy Storage, Grid" »

America can recapture the lead in the global clean energy race if it commits itself to a major public-private effort to spur clean energy innovation.

That's the message of a new report released today by Democratic think tank Third Way. The report, "Creating a Clean Energy Century," is the first in a series of reports from Third Way's new project on energy innovation, co-chaired by U.S. Senators Mark Udall (D-CO), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

The report begins with clear-cut premises. Clean energy is still too expensive and unreliable relative to fossil fuels. Other countries are moving toward clean energy more quickly than the United States. Countries that are able to make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels will gain the greatest economic benefits, by capturing more of the rapidly growing domestic and global markets for clean energy.

Continue reading "Creating a Clean Energy Century" »

This should come as no surprise...

According to E&E news ($ubscription required):

There will be no cap-and-trade climate bill considered in the next Congress, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) promised a colleague today.

Newly sworn-in Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said today that Reid made a "total commitment" to him that there would be no cap and trade next session.

Reid's office confirmed the promise. "Given the election results, there is no chance we can deal with cap and trade," Reid spokesman Jim Manley told E&ENews PM.

New ideas will clearly be needed to make clean energy progress in the next Congress and beyond.

For more on that, see the "Climate Next" series now underway at the Atlantic, Slate, Mother Jones and the other participating partners in the Climate Desk project. Breakthrough's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus kick off the series with their essay, "Innovate First, Regulate Later."

The Washington Post has endorsed a step-wise increase in America's funding for energy innovation, becoming the latest in a series of prominent endorsements for the "Post-Partisan Power" proposal put forward by scholars with American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and Breakthrough Institute. The Post editorial, which ran in its Sunday newspaper, notes that "even if cap-and-trade had passed, the government would still have had to invest in scientific research to make green energy affordable; might as well make those investments anyway."

Others have weighed in favorably on Post-Partisan Power.

Josh Green of the Atlantic and the Boston Globe called the report a "long-term project to accomplish what Congress and the president could not: put the country on the path to a clean energy future." Tim Mak of the conservative Frum Forum wrote that "if Americans want to fight the challenges of climate change and reduce their dependence on foreign oil, this piece sets a good baseline for discussion." Libertarian legal scholar Jonathan Adler added, "the proposal represents a serious alternative to politically-moribund cap-and-trade proposals and the regulate-everything mindset that produced the Waxman-Markey bill." And progressive journalist Ezra Klein suggested that when conservatives tack to the center, "they might embrace a limited and direct approach to energy innovation."

You can view more of the reactions and widespread discussion generated by the report here.

See also:

• Technology-First Consensus Grows
• Boston Globe: Moving Past Cap and Trade
• Weekly Standard: Power Surge

How can we reconcile the need to boost the domestic development and production of clean energy technologies with an increasingly rules-based global economy? It's not always so clear cut. According to a new report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), many countries are pursuing policies of "technology mercantilism"--boosting technology exports and therefore growth at the expense of other countries. China, for example, has come under increasing scrutiny for policies to promote clean energy that are clearly protectionist.

Yet not all innovation policies need to be zero-sum. Indeed, global cooperation to promote positive-sum innovation policies is key to fostering shared global growth.

Next week, ITIF will host an event to discuss the findings from their new report, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (and the Self-Destructive) of Innovation Policy."

You can read about the event and register here.

Today, the race for dominance in clean energy technology sectors pits the United States against the greatest international competition for a key emerging technology field than in any era since the Cold War race to lead in aerospace, computing, communications, and IT fields.

Remaining competitive in the fast-growing, 21st century clean energy sectors will demand the same world-class talent and highly-trained workforce that helped the United States lead the world in the high-tech sectors of the 20th century.

As we wrote in "Post-Partisan Power," a road map for a limited and direct national energy innovation strategy recently released by Breakthrough Institute and scholars at the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute:

The United States cannot hope to rise to this global challenge or confront pressing energy innovation imperatives without a new national investment to train and inspire the next generation of intrepid American scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Today, the United States ranks just 29th out of 109 countries in the percentage of 24-year-olds with a math or science degree.47 Only 15 percent of undergraduate degrees in the United States are earned in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields compared with 64 percent in Japan and 52 percent in China. Even South Korea -- a nation with a population one-sixth the size of the United States -- graduates more engineers annually.

The situation is particularly dire in energy technology, with roughly half of the U.S. energy industry workforce expected to retire over the next decade. Meanwhile, demand for workers in the renewable electricity industry is expected to more than triple from 127,000 in 2006 to more than 400,000 in 2018. The anticipated, large-scale ramp-up of the U.S. nuclear power industry would similarly require the industry to hire tens of thousands of new nuclear engineers and related positions annually. Yet today, from elementary school through post-doctorate programs, students and educators lack the resources to develop new curricula and educational programs, receive key training, or expand research opportunities to meet this national challenge.

Continue reading "Educating the Energy Generation: Workforce Needs in Renewable, Nuclear Power Sectors" »

Over at theEnergyCollective.com, Tyler Hamilton dives into the International Energy Agency's newly released forecast of global energy trends (exec sum here [pdf]) focusing on the disparity in global subsidies for renewables and fossil fuels:

The International Energy Agency put out its annual World Energy Outlook today and urges strong and sustained government support for the deployment of renewable energy. The agency pegs 2009 subsidies for renewables at $57 billion and calls for that to increase to $205 billion by 2035. "The share of modern renewable energy sources, including sustainable hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, modern biomass and marine energy, in global primary energy use triples between 2008 and 2035 and their combined share of total primary energy demand increases from 7 per cent to 14 per cent," according to the agency. Fossil fuel subsidies stood at $312 billion in 2009 and the agency urged that they be eliminated to accelerate the transition to renewables.

I applaud the IEA's call for major public investments in clean energy RD&D and deployment and certainly support the agency's calls to phase out fossil fuel subsidies -- excepting where doing so would expand the already deplorable share of the global population (about 2.4 billion) locked in energy poverty.

But while Hamilton and others focus on the disparity between total subsidies for fossil energy and renewables, the IEA figures are actually a stark reminder of the major price gap that persists between mature fossil energy sources and newer, costlier clean energy alternatives.

Continue reading "Phasing out Fossil Fuel Subsidies Will Help, But Only Innovation Can Make Clean Energy Cheap" »

Cross-posted at Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog.

Neal Lane, of Rice University former science advisor to President Bill Clinton, showed the slide above in a recent talk at the University of Colorado (which he provided to me today, Thanks Neal!). It shows a number of technologies somehow connected to federal innovation investments and their relationship to the iPod, discussed in an earlier post today.

This was even recognized by George W. Bush during his presidency:

Apple has long boasted of its culture of innovation, and how this led to such products as the original Mac and the iPod. However, it turns out that, at least in the case of the iPod, Apple had a hidden ally: the US government. During a speech at Tuskegee University, President (and iPod user) George W. Bush told his audience, "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." While we have to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of government agencies such as DARPA in some of the fields mentioned by the President, we also feel obligated to point out the accomplishments of private companies in the US and abroad, including IBM, Hitachi and Toshiba -- not to mention the Fraunhofer Institute, which developed the original MP3 codec, and codeveloped (with Sony, AT&T and others) the AAC format used by Apple in the iPod.

Continue reading "iPods and Federal Innovation Policy" »

In a recent interview with NPR's Robert Siegel, Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. discusses why cap and trade policy collapsed under the weight of its political and practical limitations. He proposes a new path forward focused on making clean energy cheap, instead of continually trying to make fossils fuels more expensive.

Below is an excerpt from the interview transcript. Click here to listen to the full interview and read the entire transcript:

Continue reading "NPR: Pielke Jr. Explains Energy Policy Future After Cap and Trade" »

A coalition of 250 universities, trade associations, and leading businesses has written a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urging them to quickly pass a reauthorization of the America COMPETES act before the end of the current Congressional session.

COMPETES was originally passed by with bipartisan support in 2007, in response to the release of the National Academies Report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," which documented a sharp decline in U.S. economic competitiveness, particularly in education, science and technology-intensive industries.

The Act authorized a number of new initiatives and funding for various programs, particularly for science, research, and science, technology, engineering and math education (STEM), including a doubling of the research budgets of three critical science and technology agencies over seven years time: the DOE Office of Science, National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes for Standards and Technology.

Continue reading "Business and Academic Coalition Urge Congress to Reauthorize Landmark Competitiveness Bill" »

The United States and Australia have inked a new partnership to pursue joint solar energy research designed to make solar energy cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the announcement in Melbourne on Sunday, with the Australian government set to commit up to $50 million towards the program.

Ms Gillard said the aim was to make solar power as cheap as conventional energy sources.

"One of the greatest barriers to a broader commercial take up of solar power is its cost and that is specifically what this joint research initiative will address," Ms Gillard told reporters.

"The joint project with the United States is part of an aggressive effort to bring the sales price of solar technology down by two to four times."

Ms Clinton said the program aimed to make solar power competitive with conventional energy sources by 2015.

The price had dropped by 50 per cent in the past three years but there was more work to be done, she said.

"Under this initiative our two governments will share both the costs and the benefits of research and development which will speed up innovation," she said.

Secretary Clinton also pledged a $500,000 grant from the U.S. State Department to support a global survey to identify opportunities to reuse carbon dioxide emitted by power plant and industrial processes, headed up by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a recently established research center co-funded by the Australian government.

Solar Powerhouse? Solar irradiation in Australia is among the highest in the world, as this color-coded map from NASA illustrates (darker red areas have the most incoming solar energy). Source: The Age/Reuters

Australia, with perhaps the greatest solar energy potential in the world, has an obvious interest in pursuing affordable, scalable solar power solutions, and has also maintained several long-standing solar research efforts. Can the two new partners accelerate efforts to make solar energy cheap?

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog.

It is not clear how much support there is for such a proposal, but the EU Commission is to bring forward a proposal to ban most forms of carbon offsets:

European Union member states may oppose new rules on how far their factories and power plants can offset their carbon emissions, to be proposed by the European Commission, environment ministries told Reuters.

The EU executive is expected to propose in the next two weeks curbs or an outright ban from 2013 on the most common types of offsets.

Europe's emissions trading scheme caps planet-warming gases emitted by industry, but allows companies to offset emissions by paying for carbon cuts in developing countries, as a cheaper alternative to cutting their own.

Shutting the main supply of offsets could push up carbon prices, if agreed by a majority of member states at a meeting of Commission officials and environment ministers later this month.

Any such ban would represent a step towards a more transparent form of carbon pricing, along the lines of a straight up tax. Offsets are of course one reason why there is no such thing as a "cap" in cap and trade.

South Korea is making up for lost time as it follows China into the global clean energy race, once again leaving behind the U.S. in the dust.

Below we've compiled some of the most important updates out of South Korea as the country makes its way to the forefront of the global clean technology sector:

Continue reading "Tracking a Rising Tiger: South Korea" »

In an effort to develop a truly effective post-cap and trade climate strategy, policy is not the only aspect that requires deep reflection - philanthropists, too, must reconsider the best way to channel grants in order to successfully fund solutions to climate and energy challenges. Breakthrough's Director of Climate and Energy Policy Jesse Jenkins recently spoke to a foundation about re-thinking philanthropic efforts in a post-cap and trade policy environment, offering insight into how policy makers, activists, and philanthropists, alike, must re-orient away from the focus on limits and toward an approach that harnesses human ingenuity to directly confront the scale of the global climate and energy challenge.

The transcription of the talk is below:

Continue reading "The Future of Philanthropy in a Post-Cap and Trade World" »