India is at a political, environmental, and economic impasse -- and the common denominator is coal. According to recent reports, India simultaneously has too much coal and not enough, a problem that results from the collision of a variety of factors: rising energy demand, greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental degradation; environmental regulations on coal productions, bureaucratic red tape, and poor infrastructure that appear to be motivating coal producers to import; and limits to the potential for clean energy deployment to keep pace with the demands of an emerging economy.

While the crisis is largely political, one thing is clear: over the long term, an intensifying coal shortage is likely to drive the cost of electricity up and India's energy poor are likely to suffer the most.

From the Washington Post:

India's dependence on coal will continue to grow for 30 years, experts say. Proposed nuclear power reactors will take many years to complete, and renewable-energy sources can, at best, light up rural homes and streetlights but not power factories, said Jaiswal, the coal minister.

"We have solar energy for six hours a day. But it can light only two bulbs. If the coal can bring 24 hours of electricity to our homes, my children can study better, and I can buy a television," said Amme Lal, from Morga village in Chhattisgarh, who was taking home on his bicycle logs from the forest for cooking fire. "But I have also seen how sad coal mines look -- all black, no trees, fumes rising."

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

Today's FT has a special report on Nigeria, and has a very interesting discussion of energy access:

Despite average cash injections of $2bn annually over recent years and large untapped gas reserves, electricity capacity remains at about 40 watts per capita, roughly enough to run one vacuum cleaner for every 25 inhabitants.

China manages 466 watts per person, Germany 1,468. South Africa, the continent's economic powerhouse, generates 10 times as much electricity as Nigeria for a population one-third the size.

Officials calculate that the potential activity stymied by lack of electricity amounts to $130bn a year.

In the absence of a functioning grid, those who can afford it, spend about $13bn a year running the small generators whose rattle and sputter is the soundtrack of urban life. The poorest 40 per cent have no access to electricity.

Banks estimate that spending on power drives up their costs by 20 per cent, helping push interest rates well beyond what small businesses can afford.

Potential investors are hardly filled with confidence when the lights go out at ministries or - terrifyingly - airports.

The article has two very powerful quotes:

As Babatunde Fashola, Lagos state governor, said of the [Nigerian business conference] audience: "For them, electricity has become as important as oxygen."

And:

As if the audience needed reminding, the organisers added: "The cost of darkness is infinite."

By Mark Caine, Breakthrough Generation Fellow

Last week, the Indian government showcased a prototype of a low-cost laptop that could trigger an education revolution in India and elsewhere in the developing world. If successful, the newly announced computer will serve as a prime example of how direct government investments can reduce the price of technology quickly and effectively.

Funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development and designed by students from India's top universities, the laptop is slated to enter the market in 2011.

Continue reading "The $35 Laptop: Can Indian Public Investment Make Computing Technology Cheap?" »

Global climate policy should be radically overhauled in the wake of the failure of the United Nations process, an international group of 14 climate policy experts and scientists argue in a new paper. The Kyoto-Copenhagen focus on national emissions targets and timetables was bound to fail because it proposed a single over-arching framework to deal with a "wickedly' complex problem. Instead what's needed is a focus on expanding access to energy for the poor, quickly reducing non-CO2 climate forcings, and adaptation to changing climate.

The paper brings together a set of ideas that have been developing over the last decade. The meeting was convened by Gwyn Prins of London School of Ecomomics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who wrote "The Wrong Trousers," a 2007 critique of Kyoto. The group included, among others, East Anglia University climate scientist Mike Hulme, author of "Why We Disagree About Climate Change," Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, the economist Chris Green, co-author of a 2002 Science article calling for advanced energy research to stabilize climate emissions, and University of Colorado's Roger Pielke and Arizona State's Dan Sarewitz, authors of a 2000 Atlantic magazine story arguing climate policy to shift focus to technology innovation and adaptation. Green, Pielke, and Sarewitz are all Breakthrough Senior Fellows.

Continue reading "Hartwell Paper: A New Approach on Global Climate Policy" »

Two new posts for Earth Day argue that we need to move from nature protection to tech innovation. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are in Slate and Mother Jones arguing that the focus on technology transfer as part of a global climate agreement is a distraction: clean tech IP has already been rapidly transferred to China -- soon it will be transferred back here.

And Breakthrough's Director of Climate and Energy Policy, Jesse Jenkins, dings America's political 'elites', including cap and trade author Rep. Ed Markey, for frequently suggesting, in the face of all this, that "clean energy jobs cannot be exported." Like American IP, U.S. clean tech jobs in manufacturing and innovation are already flowing overseas -- or being created there in the first place.

Continue reading "Earth Day: From Conservation To Innovation" »

Andy Revkin has posted several commenter responses to his great piece at the new Dot Earth 2.0, declaring that a global, "sustained energy quest" should be "an organizing principle if humanity wants to avoid hard knocks in the next few decades."

One response, from Hugh Whalan of New York provides a powerful way to envision the realities of energy poverty and it's central importance to the global energy quest of the 21st century:

More than 125,000 years ago, your ancestors discovered fire. With it came a source of heat, warmth, and light. Unfortunately, for 1 in 3 people living today, very little has changed. This is energy poverty.

Really let that sink in - one third of the world's population lives like this.

Addressing energy poverty is a key step to alleviating poverty - with the IEA noting that an additional 700 million people need to gain access to modern energy services by 2015 if the UN's millennium development poverty alleviation goal is to be met (halving world poverty).

Just as importantly, energy poverty is a huge contributor to climate change, as those stuck in energy poverty are forced to rely on fuels like kerosene and firewood which caused enormous amounts of pollution.

Significantly expanding green energy access to developing countries is a simple solution - addressing poverty and reducing emissions - with the possibility that we can set developing countries on a 'clean energy' path to development.

It won't be easy. It won't be cheap. But importantly companies are starting to show that delivering clean energy to billions of poor can be profitable.

Energy is important to everything. Policy makers, governments and the general public need to be more aware of this because we all too easily take access to energy for granted.

Continue reading "Energy Poverty is Being Stuck 125,000 Years in the Past" »

[Update, 4/9/10: According to E&E News ($ubcr. required), the 24 member World Bank board voted to approve the $3.75 billion loan to South Africa, including $3.05 billion to construct a new 4.8 GW supercritical coal-fired power station and additional funding to construct 100 MW of utility-scale wind power and 100 MW of concentrating solar power with energy storage capability.

The United States' representative on the World Bank board abstained from the vote, and the explanation is the clearest example of the multi-faceted challenges of global development and the ways in which energy poverty and climate change objectives remain largely opposed in the absence of clean, affordable, and rapidly scalable energy technology options. According to E&E:

In a statement released just as the 24-member World Bank board started to debate the Eskom loan behind closed doors, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a statement saying its abstention "reflects concerns about the climate impact of the project and its incompatibility with the World Bank's commitment to be a leader in climate change mitigation and adaptation."

Still, the United States noted, it "recognizes South Africa's pressing energy needs and the lack of near-term feasible low-carbon alternatives."

Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, roundly condemned the World Bank decision, and chastised the U.S. for not voting in opposition. However, there is no indication that viable alternative plans to expand energy access in South Africa without exacerbating the nation's greenhouse emissions were proposed. ]

South Africa's finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has an op ed in the Washington Post that illustrates the multi-faceted challenges facing developing nations as they struggle to provide the affordable access to modern energy needed to pull citizens out of poverty. The piece highlights the current tension between such objectives and simultaneous concerns about the environmental and climate impacts of energy development.

With South Africa's economy growing rapidly - it's expanded by two-thirds since 1994, when Nelson Mandela first took office - the nation's demand for energy has grown apace. As Gordhan notes, "Millions of previously marginalized South Africans are now on the grid." And that's a very good thing.

Consider that not having access to affordable, modern energy sources, particularly electricity, means no access to potable, running water; it means having to burn dung and wood and other primitive biofuels to provide cooking and indoor heating; and it means sputtering kerosene lamps as the only source of light after the sun goes down.

The human toll of such energy poverty is incredible. According to the World Health Organization, solid fuel use causes 1.6 million excess deaths per year globally, especially among women and children, while waterborne disease is one of the leading global killers, ending the lives of over 3 million annually - again, many of them young children - who lack access to clean and safe water supplies.

Continue reading "Without Affordable Clean Alternatives, South Africa Turns to Coal" »

Discover illuminates the differing perspectives of climate scientists, Judith Curry (Georgia Tech) and Michael Mann (Penn State), on the implications of ClimateGate and the state of climate science, in general. Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. has excerpts from the interview on his blog.

Here's Judith Curry in response to the question: "So where does climate research go from here?"

"I personally don't support cap-and-trade. It makes economic sense but not political sense. You're just going to see all the loopholes and the offsets. I think you're going to see a massive redistribution of wealth to Wall Street, and we're not going to reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We need a massive investment in technology. We do need to help the developing world that is most vulnerable now to the impacts of climate variability, not even the stuff that's related to carbon dioxide. There are a lot of things going on--floods, hurricanes, droughts, and whatever--that can't even be attributed to global warming right now. By reducing the vulnerability of the developing world to these extreme events, we'll have gone a long way to helping them adapt to the more serious things that might come about from global warming."

Originally published by The Stanford Daily

"If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years," declared the world's wealthiest man during last week's TED 2010 conference, "I can pick who is president, I can pick a vaccine - or I can pick that an [energy technology] at half the cost with no carbon emissions gets invented, this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact."

Bill Gates is right. And he is not just talking about the impact on climate change, which does of course present a major threat. He is also talking about one of the most critical global imperatives to make poverty history: making clean energy cheap.

"If you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy," said Gates in his introduction. Gates should know as well as any development expert, since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - the world's largest transparent private foundation - has invested billions of dollars in extreme poverty alleviation since 1994.

Nearly 1.6 billion of our fellow human beings have no access to electricity, and around 2.4 billion people - over one third of global population - meet their basic cooking and heating needs by burning biomass, such as wood, crop waste, and dung. "Without access to modern, commercial energy, poor countries can be trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, social instability and underdevelopment," concludes the International Energy Agency.

Continue reading "To Make Poverty History, Make Clean Energy Cheap" »

Some food for thought here: Nathan Wyeth pens a very thoughtful column on the Copenhagen climate summit focused on the key challenges of fueling sustainable global development and expanded energy-access to the billions of energy poor worldwide, via the new WRI-affiliated blog, NextBillion.net:

Excerpts below with emphasis added:

Copenhagen Climate Summit: The Missing Billions

Continue reading "Thoughts on Ending Energy Poverty and Copenhagen's Zero-Sum Game" »

By Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey

Forget 80% by 2050 and 450ppm. Stop fixating on emissions reduction targets and timetables. As UN climate talks kick off in Copenhagen, Denmark, if you want a number to focus the world's attention on, try this one: $10.5 trillion.

That's the scale of additional investment required between now and 2030 to put the world's energy system on a lower-carbon path, according to the world energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency.

Without measurable progress that dramatically increases global investments in clean energy, we can forget stabilizing global temperatures or atmospheric carbon dioxide at any level. And as the IEA makes clear, the world's governments must lead the way in making massive public investments to rapidly develop and deploy an array of clean energy technologies capable of sustainably and affordably powering the planet.

So for those following the progress in Copenhagen, keep that sense of scale -- $10.5 trillion -- and just one phrase on your mind: Show me the money!

Enough With the Targets and Timetables

In the days leading up to the UN climate summit beginning today in Copenhagen, the focus has been on pronouncements from world leaders establishing various national targets to reduce or curb the growth of the carbon dioxide emissions principally driving global warming.

In July of this year, the world's 17 largest economies declared support for "an aspirational global goal" to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050. Then, the world watched in recent weeks as first the United States, then China and most recently Brazil and India put their emissions pledges on the table. Each would cut their emissions some amount by some date, with the developed countries outlining targets for absolute cuts to CO2 emissions and most developing countries, including China and India, announcing reductions in the carbon intensity of their economies (aka CO2 per GDP).

Continue reading "$10.5 Trillion by 2030: the Number that Should be at the Heart of Copenhagen Climate Talks" »

Serious doubts about the efficacy of carbon offsets projects to produce real, verifiable emissions reductions have been validated by a Greenpeace report, released this week, that exposes a prominent sub-national forest offset project as a "carbon scam."

The Noel Kempff Climate Action Project (NKCAP) has been underway in Bolivia since 1997 thanks to a coalition that involves the Bolivian government, concerned environmentalists and sponsorship from oil major BP and U.S. utilities American Electric Power and PacifiCorp. Originally designed to protect a 6,000 square mile section of the Bolivian rainforest while simultaneously allowing its sponsors to offset carbon emissions, the project was supposed to be a win-win-win for the rainforest, climate change advocates, and private utilities.

But according to the Greenpeace report, entitled Carbon Scam: Noel Kempff Climate Action Project and the Push for Sub-national Forest Offsets, the original goal to avoid emitting 55 million metric tons of carbon has not been met. The project had to recalculate its estimates, concluding it will prevent just 5.8 million metric tons from entering the atmosphere - an order of magnitude less. Furthermore, Greenpeace uncovered evidence that the project sponsors - AEP, BP and PacifiCorp - misreported the project's efficacy to the EPA, telling the agency it kept 7.4 million tons from entering the atmosphere between 1997 and 2009.

Continue reading "Forest Offsets Scam Exposed, Not a Strategy to Mitigate Climate Change" »

By Johanna Peace, Breakthrough Fellow

In New Delhi today, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that India must invest in both new and existing clean energy technologies in order to develop sustainably over the coming decades. This comes as the latest indication of India's progress on building a domestic clean energy economy through investment--a strategy that could also serve as a new approach to international climate policy. Unfortunately, Western nations that stall climate negotiations with their insistence on setting carbon caps continue to miss the world's best chance at forging a global agreement.

Continue reading "Indian Prime Minister Says India Must Invest in Clean Energy Technology" »

By Yael Borofsky, Breakthrough Fellow

Imagining China as a giant green frog seems a little ridiculous, but, as Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor reported last week in a piece entitled "China's Green Leap Forward," China's intent to "leapfrog" the United States in the clean energy race is far from ridiculous - it may soon be a reality.

While the U.S. languidly inches forward in clean energy RD&D, China's burgeoning clean and renewable energy industries are growing at an unprecedented pace for a developing nation. Much more than a response to the suffocating pollution clogging the airways of its major cities, the explosion of clean energy technology is part of a national strategy to dominate the industry. As Ford succinctly puts it:

"China price" and "China speed" are poised to snatch the lion's share of the next multitrillion-dollar global industry - energy technology... Indeed, China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race.

Indeed, China is approaching clean energy with a "space race" mind-set, however, the U.S. has yet to adopt the same sense of urgency. As Americans wait for a Senate decision on the significantly weakened American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), which will invest just $1 billion per year in clean energy R&D and $10 billion for clean energy investments broadly defined, China has already implemented a suite of clean energy policies beginning with the Renewable Energy Law of 2006.

By supporting the growing wind sector with subsidies, tariffs, and an obligatory renewable energy requirement for power companies, China now expects wind manufacturing to grow from 8GW in 2007 to between 12GW and 20GW by 2010. In comparison, the U.S. manufactured just 2.4 GW of wind turbines in 2007 despite having the largest wind market in the world.

Continue reading "CS Monitor: China Aims to "Leapfrog" U.S. in Clean Energy Race" »

By Yael Borofsky, Breakthrough Fellow

The United States needs a new "sustained national commitment" to improving energy efficiency and accelerating both the development and deployment of clean energy technologies, according to a major new report from the National Academies Press (NAP).

Authored by the National Academies' Committee on America's Energy Future, the recently released paper is the first part in a longer report, titled America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. The result of a major study initiated in 2007, the report is designed to inform policymakers about the state of development, costs, implementation barriers, and impacts of current energy technology and potential options for the future and presents eight key findings (summarized below).

Policymakers should employ a portfolio of policies that "supports a broad range of initiatives from basic research through demonstration," the Committee recommends, adding the typical cautionary note, that policymakers should strive to avoid "select[ing] technology winners and losers,"

America's Energy Future explains that the scope and scale of the U.S. energy challenge requires that the U.S. take advantage of available energy efficiency improvements, deploy emerging clean energy technologies, and fund long-term investments in research and development of new technologies. No single component of that strategy is sufficient. According to the report:

"'Business as usual' approaches for obtaining and using energy will be inadequate for achieving the needed transformation. The efforts required will involve not only substantial new investments by the public and private sector in research, development, demonstration, and deployment--in virtually all aspects of the energy infrastructure--but also new public policies and regulations on energy production, distribution, and use."

The authors also acknowledge that the "the U.S. energy system has developed in response to an array of uncoordinated market forces and shifting public policies," the result of the fact that the United States has never before advanced a comprehensive set of national energy policies. The report calls for a concerted, coordinated and sustained suite of federal policies and investments to advance clean energy technologies and transform the U.S. energy sector, such as the Breakthrough Institute's proposal to make clean energy cheap and abundant.

Continue reading "National Academies: America's Energy Future Demands Sustained National Commitment to Clean Energy" »

Driven largely by strong economic growth in developing nations, world energy consumption will grow 44% between 2006 and 2030, according to updated projections released Wednesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The EIA reports:

World marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2006 and 2030, driven by strong long-term economic growth in the developing nations of the world, according to the reference case projection from the International Energy Outlook 2009 (IEO2009) released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The current global economic downturn will dampen world energy demand in the near term, as manufacturing and consumer demand for goods and services slows. However, with economic recovery anticipated to begin within the next 12 to 24 months, most nations are expected to see energy consumption growth at rates anticipated prior to the recession. Total world energy use rises from 472 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) in 2006 to 552 quadrillion Btu in 2015 and then to 678 quadrillion Btu in 2030.

In the decades ahead, the world's rapidly developing nations will clearly demand abundant and affordable energy to power their economic growth. The question remains: what will the nations of the world do to ensure that demand is met by clean and cheap energy technologies?

Continue reading "EIA: World Energy Use Will Rise 44% By 2030; Developing Nations Demand Abundant, Affordable Energy" »

"Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.

Economists often talk as though putting a price on carbon emissions--through tradable permits or a carbon tax--will be enough to deliver the needed reductions in those emissions. This is not true. Europe's carbon-trading system has not shown much capacity to generate large-scale research nor to develop, demonstrate and deploy breakthrough technologies. A trading system might marginally influence the choices between coal and gas plants or provoke a bit more adoption of solar and wind power, but it will not lead to the necessary fundamental overhaul of energy systems.

For that, we will need much more than a price on carbon. ...

Economists like to set corrective prices and then be done with it, leaving the rest of household and business decisions to the magic of the market. This hands-off approach will not work in the case of a major overhaul of energy technology. We will need large-scale public funding of research, development and demonstration projects; intellectual property policies to promote rapid dissemination to poor countries; and the promotion of public debate and acceptance of new options. We will need to back winners, at least provisionally, to get new systems moving. "

An oldie but a goody from well-known economist and direct of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs, April 2008 in Scientific American, "Keys to Climate Protection."

Dalton Conley, sociology professor at NYU and senior fellow here at the Breakthrough Institute, recently published an article in The Nation (to appear in the March 23rd print edition) about the US's continual slide down the UN's global Human Development Index (HDI) rankings. We still rank near the top in per capita income, but Conley argues persuasively that income inequality is the driving force behind the seeming contradiction that a nation can have high income levels and low measures of development. For interested readers, the American Human Development Project has an interesting website that goes into detail about these measures at the state and local level.

Please follow the link above for the article, or you can read it below:

Continue reading "America is #... 15?" »

A few days ago I came across an article in the New York Times entitled "Trashing the Fridge", a mildly amusing piece about some environmentalists who have decided to give up their home refrigerators, ostensibly in order to become more environmentally responsible.

The anti-refrigerator movement may represent nothing more than a harmless fashion statement - an attempt to achieve a "holier than thou" status in fringe environmentalist circles, but the broad thinking behind it is something that is quite widespread in the environmental movement today: the notion that technology is the problem, that human prosperity is the problem, and that we will have to make major sacrifices of technology and prosperity (such as refrigerators) if we want to save the planet.

For me, one particular quote by an environmentalist in the New York Times article stood out: "Refrigerator lust is one of the things driving huge energy-use increases in the developing world".

Continue reading "Refrigerator Lust and Disgust" »

Andy Revkin at the New York Times asked Al Gore's office for their comments on Gore's use of data from CRED in Belgium in recent versions of his talk to illustrate the impacts of human-caused climate change on disasters. In response, Gore's office has said that they will pull the slide, as it does not have a scientific foundation.

Kudos to Al Gore who has demonstrated a commitment to scientific accuracy in his presentation. However there are still some issues with their response. Here is how Gore's office responded to Revkin as related at Dot Earth (please visit their for embedded links):

Continue reading "Gore Pulls CRED Data From Talk" »

At a public event at an efficient co-generation power plant in China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama Climate Envoy Todd Stern both discuss the importance of partnership and collaboration to develop and deploy clean, cheap energy technologies to power sustainable development in China.

Are these the first signs of a new Obama Administration strategy for U.S.-China engagement on climate change? Are Clinton and Stern preparing to embark on a strategy focused explicitly on harnessing the best and brightest researchers, entrepreneurs and businesses and leveraging major investments on both sides of the Pacific to develop and deploy clean, cheap and scalable energy sources?

I'll be writing more about this tomorrow, but for now, the full transcript of their remarks are below. I'm interested in your reaction to these remarks and your thoughts on how the United States and the Obama Administration should engage China to ensure a climate stability and to help drive sustainable development in China?

Continue reading "Sec. of State Clinton and Obama Climate Envoy Discuss U.S.-China Clean Energy Collaboration" »

Question: What is the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world"? Is it (a) grinding poverty, or (b) global warming, or (c) low farm productivity, or (d) drought?

Well, according to noted environmentalist icon, Vandana Shiva, it is none of the above. Addressing a recent conference of the Slow Food Movement in San Francisco, Shiva claimed that the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world" was none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Yes, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' Gates Foundation. The reason for such ire? Apparently, it is because the Gates Foundation has committed the sin of attempting to fight poverty in Africa through technological transformation. Through the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Gates Foundation has sought to increase agricultural productivity in Africa through technology. This, some environmentalists believe in their infinite wisdom, represents the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world"

Continue reading "Is Bill Gates a Menace to Poor Farmers?" »

An article in last week's New York Times delved into Japan's "Lost Decade," - the prolonged period of economic stagnation that hit the nation in the 1990s - and explores what lessons for U.S. stimulus efforts can be learned from Japan's efforts to restart their economy. The article's findings echo some of the arguments Breakthrough has been making regarding the stimulus debate. Japan's stimulus missteps reinforce the argument that our recovery program should be focused on modern infrastructure--not traditional public works--in addition to spending on other national priorities such as energy and education.

The Times story begins with a look at which types of public spending helped Japan grow out of its recession, and which types stifled recovery:

[I]t matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than [traditional] infrastructure spending.

"It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again," said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. "One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future."

Continue reading "Lessons from Japan: How to Avoid A "Lost Decade" in America" »

Here is a remarkable display of incoherence. According to a report commissioned by Greenpeace and discussed by The Christian Science Monitor, the economic stimulus package now under debate by the U.S. Congress will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What does the report mean by "reduce"? It means that some future emissions that might have occurred will be avoided. Emissions will therefore increase, just not as much as under some other scenario. The difference between that other scenario and the scenario implied by the stimulus package represents a "reduction" in emissions. Yes, you are reading that right.

Continue reading "Cutting Emissions While Increasing Them" »

NPR had a story today about the shifting conceptual paradigms of climate change and climate change solutions. Essentially a conversation with Dan Sarewitz, one of the leading thinkers studying innovation and technology policy, the piece gets at some fundamental truths regarding energy, society and the immense challenge of rebuilding the entire global energy system. The entire segment is about 4 and half minutes, and I would recommend listening to the entire thing. From the story:

Using energy "is really the metabolism of modern industrial society," [Sarewitz] says. "And changing that system is not about replacing a few technologies or advancing our level of efficiency along certain fronts."

It means creating a whole new basis for the global economy. Sarewitz is skeptical that politicians can deliberately manage a transformation of that scale, either through legislation or through climate treaties. He says, for starters, measures that will ultimately force everyone to pay more for energy are doomed both economically and politically.

"Politically, what you're asking people to do is to pay a huge upfront cost for benefits many decades down the road that they can't even anticipate or predict. And that is politically an extremely difficult sort of situation to manage," Sarewitz says.

...
"The economic dislocation that would be created by getting to that sort of level would absolutely be immense," he says. "And it's easy to be casual about that or it's easy to pin that kind of argument on conservative Republicans or on the executives of oil corporations, but nevertheless it is absolutely true you would be talking about something that would be destabilizing to global economies."

Continue reading "Dan Sarewitz is Making Sense" »

President Barack Obama has called for a global coalition on climate change mitigation:

To protect our climate and our collective security, we must call together a truly global coalition. I've made it clear that we will act, but so too must the world. That's how we will deny leverage to dictators and dollars to terrorists. And that's how we will ensure that nations like China and India are doing their part, just as we are now willing to do ours.

President Obama's call for nation's like "China and India" to "do their part" is sufficiently ambiguous to allow for some diplomatic interpretations, however, Obama's remarks probably best interpreted as a continuation of the long-standing US position on the inclusion of developing countries in any international mitigation agreement.

Continue reading "Obama vs. IPCC" »

Last week, reporting on Hilary Clinton's appointment of Todd Stern as chief envoy on climate change, we raised questions about whether or not Stern, a former Clinton administration negotiator at the Kyoto Protocol climate talks, would be able to offer a fresh, new direction at the Copenhagen negotiations this December.

However, it seems that we missed an important piece that Stern last year published in the Washington Quarterly's Winter 08 edition. A picture in broad strokes of how Stern and his co-author William Antholis would construct an international framework for emissions reductions, the report shows how Stern's views have evolved since the Kyoto negotiations. He writes:

"This is no time to indulge in orthodoxies or in the kind of overextended discussion that marked too much of the six-year Kyoto Protocol negotiation."

Continue reading "Todd Stern: A Renewed Chance for Global Cooperation" »

Todd Stern will be named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the U.S. State Department's special "Climate Envoy," news outlets reported today. Stern's climate credentials include a stint as a senior negotiator representing Bill Clinton's White House at the Kyoto Protocol talks, a role he'll likely reprise at the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks this December.

As a high level negotiator at Kyoto in 1997, Stern helped forge an international climate reduction framework that has been largely ineffective (see Michael and Ted's essay, "Scrap Kyoto", here [pdf]). Stern's appointment thus makes one wonder: has the Clinton-era negotiator learned the lessons of the past 12 years and is now prepared to offer a new direction at the Copenhagen talks? Or does Stern's appointment signal that the Obama administration's official thinking on international climate policy is still stuck in the winter of 1997?

Continue reading "Will New "Climate Envoy" Bring More of the Same for the US in Copenhagen?" »

Confirmations were held today for Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and director of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL). Chu, a clean energy expert, is well known for turning the Berkeley Lab into a center of clean energy and efficiency innovation, forging the Berkeley Lab-British Petroleum partnership, sitting on the Copenhagen Climate Council, and winning a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.

Suffice it to say that Chu has a deep and nuanced grasp of the many variables and drivers that contribute to global warming and he understands the scale of the challenge as well as anyone. As an administrator at LBNL, Dr. Chu worked to secure increased funding for research in clean energy and efficiency. And as an academic, Chu was able to speak candidly--and in fact, quite bluntly--about energy and climate issues.

Not any more! Dr. Chu has arrived inside the Beltway now, and already his tone is changing...

Continue reading "Inside the Beltway, No Coal Nightmares or Gas Taxes for Steven Chu" »

Clean energy advocates who are motivated to transition from oil for reasons of national security have a new reason to lobby for clean technology innovation in America:

"[E]ven as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America's route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy."

It seems that Middle Eastern states that enjoy a high standard of living due to their thriving oil industries have recognized that due to rising population, societal change and global warming, oil will not be the fuel of the future. And they are taking steps to build new energy industries. The Times article reports that entities in Middle East petro-states are investing in things like alternative energy, carbon capture and low carbon cement on the order billions of dollars:

Continue reading "Middle Eastern Petro-States Seek to Broaden Energy Exports" »

The graph below shows relative improvements in carbon dioxide emissions for four countries (from the U.S. Energy Information Agency) per national GDP (as measured in PPP terms and reported by Maddison). The data starts in 1991, selected because it is the first year that the EIA reports total emissions for reunified Germany.

Continue reading "Relative Improvements in CO2 Per GDP" »

The figure below shows the relationship of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (with data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency) with global GDP (as measured in PPP terms and reported by Maddison).

A few things stand out.

Continue reading "Carbon Dioxide and the Global Economy" »

Last week in response to Michael and Ted's piece in The American Prospect, Bradford Plumer at The New Republic's "The Vine" wrote a piece called "Should We Forget About Carbon Pricing? (No.)" The post, which mischaracterizes the stances Michael and Ted take in the Prospect piece, also propagates the myth of successful emissions reductions in Europe.

Plumer writes:

"Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have yet another essay arguing that environmentalists should abandon all hope of trying to cap or tax carbon emissions, and instead focus solely on subsidizing clean-energy sources if they want to avert drastic global warming.

...Simply having the Energy Department dole out $50 billion per year to clean-energy producers (as Nordhaus and Shellenberger suggest) will pale beside the amount of private-sector money that will flow to alternative energy and efficiency improvements if carbon is priced properly."

This characterization of S&N's positions in The American Prospect and the Breakthrough Institute in general is a strawman.

Continue reading "In "Vine" Veritas? (No.)" »

Dominic Lawson, columnist for the British newspaper "The Independent," issued a scathing condemnation of the Poznan Climate Talks aimed at renewing the Kyoto Protocol after 2012:

The truth, however, is that Kyoto, as a means to reduce carbon emissions, has been like Monty Python's parrot, long dead, despite all the protestations to the contrary by its salesmen.

You don't have to be a "climate change sceptic" to assert this unwelcome fact. Professor Gwyn Prins, Director of the LSE's Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events, has been advocating measures to reduce what he sees as man-made climate change since 1986. He was a lead author on the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on the Advisory Board of Friends of the Earth UK. For some years now, Prof Prins has been warning that the Kyoto approach is hopelessly flawed - and his unpopularity in the environment ministries of Europe has grown, precisely as his criticisms of their approach have been vindicated.

Continue reading "Kyoto: Like A Parrot Long Dead" »

Last week the United States Government Accountability Office released its evaluation of Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme, the European Union's cap and trade program designed to control greenhouse gas emissions. The GAO was asked to investigate the effectiveness and outcomes of the ETS in order to inform the ongoing debate on emissions reduction strategies in the United States.

A carbon pricing scheme has two basic purposes: to reduce carbon emissions and to drive private investment in low carbon technologies. However, according to the GAO, the ETS has failed to accomplish either objective in any measurable way:

Continue reading "GAO Report Skeptical of ETS, Critical of CDM" »

Gwin Pryns, author of "The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy (pdf)," recently published "Time to Ditch Kyoto: the Sequel." The short pamphlet was handed out at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland.

Towards the end (pdf), Prins summarizes his point about a new direction for an international agreement on climate change:

"Poznan has an opportunity to... put in place the foundations and essential architecture for a radically re-engineered climate policy for adoption at the Copenhagen meeting next...That architecture will not depend upon carbon trading in the present form; it will not lead with emissions targets tied to specific dates (although benchmarks are part of the sectoral strategy for reducing energy intensity); it will not focus upon international legal agreements that are dubiously enforceable, if at all."

Continue reading "Prins to Poznan: Seriously, Time to Ditch Kyoto" »

The stark tone of the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2008 is a dramatic departure from their normally staid and frequently rosy projections about the world's energy future (I presented highlights from the piece in this proceeding post). The report's opening statement that current world energy trends are "patently unsustainable" will no doubt receive the most attention in headlines across the blogosphere and mainstream news. But in this post, I want to delve deeper into the key statement that follows it:

"It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply."

While the environmental community focuses primarily on the latter of those two concerns, the IEA appropriately recognizes that the future of human prosperity depends on our ability to tackle both challenges: decarbonizing the energy supply and providing ample and affordable energy supplies to power global development.

In short, the IEA confirms what is perhaps the central challenge of the 21st century: developing clean and affordable energy sources to power the globe.

Continue reading "IEA Report Confirms Clean and Cheap Energy Needed to Power Global Development" »

The world's energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, released their annual World Energy Outlook report today, and it starts out with a bang. The first paragraph of the IEA report reads:

"The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable - environmentally, economically, socially. But that can - and must - be altered; there's still time to change the road we're on. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply. What is needed is nothing short of an energy revolution."

Continue reading "World's Energy Watchdog Warns Current Energy Trends are "Patently Unsustainable"" »

As the parties to the United Nation's Kyoto Protocol on global warming prepare to meet in Poznan, Poland next month, India's Minister of Science and Technology weighed in today to voice little interest in a global action plan on climate change.

In a statement that strongly favored initiatives tailored to suit local needs, Minister Kapil Sibal told attendees at a climate change conference, "You cannot have a global action plan on climate change. You can only have a global commitment."

Minister Sibal, who been representing India at international climate negotiations, said the issue of climate change has to be addressed at national, regional and local levels as each part has different sets of problems.

Continue reading "Indian Official Rules Out Global Action Plan on Climate Change" »

Michael D. Mastrandrea and Stephen H. Schneider, both of Stanford and the IPCC, in an article titled "The Rising Tide" in the current issue of The Boston Review argue that adaptation now needs to be part of the discussion of climate change:

Continue reading "Adaptation is Now Cool Says IPCC Authors" »

China's greenhouse gas emissions could more than double by 2020, according to a new report released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Beijing has been reluctant to release official data on greenhouse gas from the nation's fast-growing use of coal, oil and gas. This new study from the state-run institute breaks that reticence and sends another clear reminder that China is where our quest for climate stability will be won or lost.

"To a significant degree, our planet's energy and environmental future is now being written in China," says the study's authors. And the only way that story has a happy ending is if China has access to clean and cheap energy sources to power its sustainable development.

Continue reading "China's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Double in Coming Decade" »

By Adam Solomon Zemel

The biggest new book of the fall is Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How It Can Renew America. Here he is in a nutshell:

America is always at its most powerful and most influential when it is combining innovation and inspiration, wealth-building and dignity-building, the quest for big profits and the tackling of big problems. When we do just one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, we are greater than the sum of our parts--much greater.

I applaud Friedman's grand, inspiring rhetoric, but am disturbed that he has fallen back on the failed policy agenda of green groups.

Continue reading "Rhetoric and Reality in Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded"" »

Written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold

We're all used to the sense of ecological urgency that accompanies the climate debate. Green activists work with the knowledge that the time for action is limited, as rising emissions push the global climate toward irreversible changes. But there's another ticking clock out there, one that may be about to run out: while the U.S. drags its feet, our competitors abroad are poised to wrest the upper hand in the new energy economy. And as usual, no competitor looms larger than China.

Last week, I blogged about China's wind economy, which is currently expanding at a pace somewhere between mind-boggling and out of control. Yesterday, the Climate Group released some highlights from their upcoming report on China's renewable economy. To wit:

• China is already the world's largest producer of renewable energy, with 152 GW of capacity already in place in 2007 (although I imagine that may take into account some mixed-bag projects - e.g., Three Gorges)


• As a percentage of GDP, China's annual investment in renewables is second only to Germany


• China is set to become the world's largest exporter of wind turbines sometime in the next year


• China's largest solar firms have a total value of over $15 billion


• China has the world's second-largest installed solar PV capacity (820 MW)

Impressive figures, although of course, they pale in comparison to China's far larger fossil fuel numbers. 820 MW of solar power? China adds that much capacity in coal literally every few days. Nonetheless, what we're seeing now in China are the vital first stirrings of a new sort of energy. Renewable sources are finally coming into their own as substantial additions to the grid, and massive development is only going to speed the advent of clean tech, as turbines and PV panels become cheaper and faster to produce with every new factory that goes online.

I discussed several of the factors behind China's wind rush in my post last week, and most of them apply to clean tech efforts in general (although efficiency regulations, as I discussed, are an entirely different story). With China's strong, pro-renewable government incentives and breakneck pace of development, it's entirely plausible that China will become the world leader in renewables development sooner rather than later, gaining the upper hand in a lucrative and quickly growing global industry - especially considering that China's only potential major opponent is busy bickering over offshore drilling...

Written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold

Over at the Environment and Energy blog, Bradford Plumer points the way to a great Guardian article on the Chinese wind boom. Wind installation there has been surpassing projections for some time, blowing through 6 GW earlier this year, and by year’s end China should lead the world in capacity. By 2010, one wind farm will add 3.8 GW - i.e., one third of total current US capacity - in its first phase of expansion. In other words, T. Boone Pickens has nothing on Chinese entrepreneurs (does anyone?).

Continue reading "What Does China's Wind Boom Tell Us?" »

When I moved to California in 1993 I quickly fell in love with one of the rites of summer: grilling fresh salmon. Ted took this ritual to another level, hosting salmon BBQs at his house complete with fancy sauces, cold rose wine, and friends.

Back then, salmon was cheap -- thirty or forty bucks would get you a whole one, enough for 30 or 40 people. Over the years, the salmon stock declined and the price increased, enough so that the size of the parties and the servings got smaller and smaller.

This year, salmon fishing has been banned from the California and Oregon coasts. There are no salmon BBQs. There are many reasons, some historic and some proximate. More than 150 years of logging has stripped rivers of their shade cover, heating up the water and clogging it with silt, boiling and suffocating salmon eggs. Mining has had a similar effect. And the need for water for agriculture has lowered rivers to levels that the salmon can't swim back up stream.

I'm not sure what's more depressing, the loss of salmon or the lack of public outcry about it. I would have expected Alice Waters and Michael Pollan to be leading marches on Sacramento and Washington by now. Bring back our salmon! Yes, it sounds foodie-elitist, but the truth is that salmon fishing used to provide thousands of jobs that are now gone. Put the fishermen and women at the front of the march. What a great pro-consumption and pro-jobs campaign that would be.

I've been bummed out about this all summer, but couldn't figure out what to say or do about it. Then, this morning, somebody emailed me asking what my take is on environmental education. If we are post-environmental, what does a post-environmental education look like? I had given a talk on the subject back in 2005 to the New England Environmental Education Alliance and when I re-read it just now I was reminded that the centerpiece of my talk was one of my favorite children's book, Bring Back the Salmon, which I used to read to my son and which invariably choked me up every time I did.

It's an inspiring story about how a bunch of kids in Washington state restored a local creek and brought back the salmon. For me it was a launching point into a meditation about environmental education. But now I hope it can serve as an inspiration for a future effort to bring back the salmon. I encourage readers who know about existing efforts to bring back the salmon to our rivers (and dinner plates) to comment here.

Here's the first of three posts on "The Dream of a Post-Environmental Education."

Continue reading "Come Back, Salmon!" »

This is a response to Max Epstein's guest post, "In Defense of Carbon Pricing: Why Clean Energy RD&D Isn't Enough." Our response is written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold.

Before anything else, I want to thank Max for his thoughtful post. His arguments have been a big help in clarifying our own thinking.

In my response, I'm going to try to define the problem we're trying to solve, and clarify the differences I see between a carbon price driven regime (as Max advocates) and an investment-led regime (as we're more fond of at Breakthrough). I'm then going to explore the political feasibility of a carbon price, and what a politically sustainable carbon price can and can't do to address climate change. In doing so, I hope to show that, for now, we can't rely on carbon pricing to drive the shift to a clean energy economy.

Continue reading "Breakthrough Responds: Why Carbon Pricing Won't Cut It" »

By Adam Zemel, Breakthrough Generation Fellow

Andy Revkin has blogged today on a debate he is engaged in on the threads of Joe Romm's climateprogress.org. It's almost unclear what they are debating over before I remember that Joe Romm categorically rejects any calls for public investment in energy technology R&D as the machinations of climate deniers/delayers -- or at least as "misguided" efforts.

Romm is probably right that this is the Debate of the Decade as it concerns the best way to transition to a clean energy system.  Revkin posits that we need public investment in R&D in order to make scalable and bring down the price of clean energy.  Romm himself admits that he has called for R&D for the past twenty years, but claims that the time when this research would have helped has passed.  It is now time to focus primarily (if not entirely) on deploying the technologies currently on hand.

Continue reading "Research, Develop, Deploy and Repeat" »

By Genevieve Bennett, Breakthrough Generation Fellow

This post is part of our week-long Special Issue exploring ways to sever the link between transportation and oil by electrifying transportation. Stay tuned for more...

There may be a pretty mournful tune coming out of Detroit these days, but over in China, everyone's gone car-crazy. Consider this: in 2000, the private vehicle stock numbered about ten million automobiles. A McKinsey report out in June projects that ten million cars will be sold in 2008 alone. China is now the second-largest automobile market in the world after the U.S.

China's romance with the automobile is reminiscent of America's back in the mid-twentieth century: a personal car means comfort, convenience, and tangible proof of newfound wealth to the millions of Chinese entering the ranks of the middle class (the New York Times ran a piece on this phenomenon back in April). The big difference is that China's car culture is coming of age in a post-cheap oil world.

Continue reading "Electrify China: Street Smarts, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love China" »

Over the last few weeks at the Breakthrough Blog, there has been some discussion and debate over consumption and anti-consumption (see my post "Is Consumption Evil" here and Michael Shellenberger's post "The UnGandhi Generation" here). This post is intended to be a continuation of this discussion.

Continue reading "Against Anti-Consumption " »

by Adam Solomon Zemel, Breakthrough Generation Fellow
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The McKinsey Global Institute's Climate Challenge Initiative released a report last week entitled "The Carbon Productivity Challenge." It is a prime example of how to analyze climate change--not solely or even primarily an ecological crisis, but also a social, economic and developmental problem. The conclusions they draw are astounding, and inspiring. In my opinion, the relevancy and appeal of their analysis relies on a fundamental assumption: "Any successful program of action on climate change must support two objectives--stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and maintaining economic growth."

Continue reading "Productivity (read: Growth) is the Answer to Our Woes" »

By Natasha Yurk, Breakthrough Generation Fellow

On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unveiled a new national climate plan that balances environmental and economic interests. First and foremost, the report highlights a need for increased energy efficiency and renewables. Special attention was paid to solar technology, which has the potential to displace coal and petroleum with India's 250 to 300 sunny days per year. At the same time, however, Singh recognizes that a hard-and-fast emissions cap could cripple his country's economic development. The plan thus avoids limiting emissions in order to sustain a nine percent annual growth rate.

Continue reading "You Can't Always Get What You Want: India's Clean Energy Pursuit" »

By Alisha Fowler, Breakthrough Generation Fellow. Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Generation Blog

We talk a lot about the future of global energy consumption, and the implications of continued development in China and India, but it is a hard future to conceptualize. We do not really know what it will look like to add billions of people to our energy grid. Luckily, for the visual learners out there, the folks over at The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development (EJSD) did a simple light experiment to help people envision the future of global energy use in our current system - literally.

First, they examined a map of global night brightness in 1996 - an image that serves as an excellent proxy for where energy use is concentrated.

Image below the fold...

Continue reading "What Does the Future of our Global Energy Consumption Look Like?" »

In India, a generation of people who never learned to read are now able to pursue their dreams of car ownership. With the second largest population in the world, India is at a crossroads, with rapid technological innovation and development alongside high levels of poverty, illiteracy, and malnutrition.

Continue reading "India: Mini-Cars and Malnutrition" »

Brazil is a country of stark contrasts. It is the land of the Amazon and the favelas. Of breathtaking natural beauty and rampant violence. Its forests hold what some have called "the lungs of the earth," but the desire for a better life is driving their destruction. Environmentalist efforts to save the rain forest tend to brush over the plight of the Brazilian people, but until the country's widespread poverty is addressed, Brazilians will keep hacking down trees to eke out a living.

Continue reading "Brazil: "Lungs" - or Bowels - of the Earth?" »