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development ArchivesAre We Losing the Race?
While the U.S. drags its feet, our competitors abroad are poised to wrest the upper hand in the new energy economy.
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:
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... What Does China's Wind Boom Tell Us?
There’s really only one option - bring more price-competitive clean technologies into the global marketplace (surprise!), and put policies in place to facilitate their diffusion into China and elsewhere.
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?). Come Back, Salmon!
Salmon fishing has been banned in California and Oregon -- we need a campaign to bring back our salmon. It may sound foodie-elitist, but the truth is that salmon fishing used to provide thousands of jobs that are now gone. A campaign to bring back the salmon would be pro-jobs and pro-consumption. Make the fishermen and women the spokespersons for it.
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." Breakthrough Responds: Why Carbon Pricing Won't Cut It
In the real world, the American polity and the American market are not ready for a tough carbon price. The best way to respond to the climate challenge right now is to massively expand the role of the federal government in researching, developing, and deploying clean technology.
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" » Research, Develop, Deploy and Repeat
The NYTimes' Andy Revkin debates Joe Romm who claims the time for R&D has passed. But as Revkin knows, any push to transition to a clean energy future must put money across the board into Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment.
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. Electrify China: Street Smarts, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love China
As China's car culture comes of age in a post-cheap oil world, will the rapidly developing nation leapfrog to new, innovative transportation technologies like plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles? Do they have another choice?
By Genevieve Bennett, Breakthrough Generation Fellow 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.Against Anti-Consumption
Promoting the low-tech small-scale agrarian model is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve problems like global warming. Instead, we should use consumption as a tool to encourage new and innovative technologies, like solar energy, wind energy, electric vehicles, biotechnology, etc.
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. Productivity (read: Growth) is the Answer to Our Woes
"Any successful program of action on climate change must support two objectives--stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and maintaining economic growth."
by Adam Solomon Zemel, Breakthrough Generation Fellow 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" » You Can't Always Get What You Want: India's Clean Energy Pursuit
India's recent climate plan not only reveals its preference for clean energy, but the obligations of the wider world.
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" » What Does the Future of our Global Energy Consumption Look Like?
What would the world look like at night if everyone consumed electricity like Americans do? Researchers use the familiar "Earth at Night" map to provide visual illustration of the radically transformed energy atlas of the global energy future. No surprise here: China and India will sharply alter the geography of world energy consumption in their pursuit of energy development.
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?" » India: Mini-Cars and Malnutrition
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.
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. Brazil: "Lungs" -- or Bowels -- of the Earth?
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.
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?" » |
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