Earlier this month, China surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy and since, has snared a flurry of clean tech headlines that collectively tell a very clear story: China is rapidly and effectively securing its position as a global clean technology leader as the U.S. watches in stagnated wonder.
Below we've aggregated some of the most important updates coming out of China over recent weeks as it surges to the front of the global clean technology sector:
Instead of raising the price of fossil fuels, Gates argues that the time has come to shift our attention to raising the revenues necessary to fuel innovation and make clean energy cheap.
In a new interview with Technology Review, Bill Gates nails the global energy and climate challenge and discusses the need for dramatic increases in energy innovation funding to make clean energy cheap.
In a climate discourse dominated by emissions targets and carbon caps, Gates has provided a refreshing and clear-eyed look at the first-order importance of direct public investment to develop clean, affordable technologies to replace fossil fuels on a global scale.
In this new interview, Gates discusses why dismissing the difficulty of the challenge is counter-productive, and argues that carbon pricing can never drive the dramatic innovation required to transform the global energy system. Instead of raising the price of fossil fuels, Gates argues that the time has come to shift our attention to raising the revenues necessary to fuel innovation and make clean energy cheap.
Below the fold, you can find excerpts from Gates' interview, which can be read in full here.
For more, the NYTimesAndy Revkin and TIME magazine's Bryan Walsh each spotlight the interview here and here, respectively.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has funded breakthrough innovation and new growth industries that are driving down the cost of clean energy and building the foundation for competitive 21st century U.S. industries, according to a new White House reportreleased today on the impacts of the U.S. stimulus bill.
Yet while the White House report highlights the considerable clean energy momentum established by the Recovery Act, it also inadvertently raises the specter of an impending clean tech funding cliff which risks sending U.S. clean energy industries into deep freeze as stimulus funds begin to expire over the coming months.
New legislation introduced by Republican Representative Devin Nunes (CA) and backed by several GOP House members would invest billions into renewable energy deployment, signaling an opportunity for bipartisan support for clean energy technology policies.
Over at CNBC, reporter Trevor Curwin has been one of the first to note the significance of the Republican bill, which Nunes' says could "potentially provide hundreds of billions in financing" for renewable energy over the next several decades.
There's been some change over at WhiteHouse.gov's energy and environment page, but probably not the kind we had in mind when we heard President Obama's oft-repeated campaign slogan, "Change You Can Believe In."
A number of (as yet unfulfilled) energy and environmental policy pledges have been removed from the WhiteHouse.gov page in recent weeks.
Chief among them: President Obama's pledge to "invest $150 billion over ten years in energy research and development to transition to a clean energy economy," once a central plank in Obama's energy and environment platform, and a feature of his first national budget proposal (in FY2009).
With support from short-term federal stimulus funds, state and local governments aren't waiting for the academic and political debate over whether the U.S. should pursue an industrial policy to spur a clean energy economy. Instead, they are implementing targeted investments, tax breaks, and loans to help expand home grown clean tech companies and entice foreign firms to expand U.S. operations.
A vigorous debate about whether the U.S. government should invest in and help manage clean energy industries to spur economic growth is unfolding among academics, policy makers and business leaders. Curiously, a handful of federal, state, and local government officials are forging ahead in spite of the national discussion and formulating targeted industrial policies to create vibrant clean energy innovation ecosystems that include manufacturing, material suppliers, customers, and R&D. Cases like Rioglass Solar, a Spanish glass manufacturer expanding operations in Arizona, as well as the considerable growth of the wind industry across the US show how the public and private sector can collaborate and, more importantly, how effective industrial policy can create well-paying, long-term jobs.
This past week Rioglass Solar, which provides curved glass sheets used in solar panels, decided to build a $50 million headquarters and a 130,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Surprise, Arizona. The project will create 100 new jobs at the headquarters alone and many more in the manufacturing plant - a welcome economic boost for the town.
The chief incentive for the American operations expansion? Local, state, and federal officials provided almost $12 million in tax credits and fee reductions to (successfully) lure Rioglass to the area.
"What determines success in industrial policy is not the ability to pick winners but the capacity to let the losers go." - Dani Rodrik, as quoted in a Businessweek article evaluating the future of industrial policy and clean energy...
"What determines success in industrial policy is not the ability to pick winners but the capacity to let the losers go."
- Dani Rodrik, as quoted in a Businessweek article evaluating the future of industrial policy and clean energy technology in the United States. Really, a useful lesson to keep in mind when it comes to policy design.
Perhaps there are some signs that a technology-centered approach to decarbonization is gaining momentum. First, from the international negotiations:
U.S. companies are lobbying at UN climate talks in Bonn for incentives to spur technologies that could slow the pace of carbon emissions, abandoning a push to encourage a cap on gas emissions, a business lobby group said.
The U.S. Council for International Business, whose members include General Electric Co. and Coca-Cola Co., said rules to cap CO2 emissions are unlikely soon, Norine Kennedy, vice president of energy and environmental affairs, said in an interview today. Instead, they want incentives encouraging technologies they're promoting.
"The center of the action is technology," she said at the United Nations climate talks. "There's broad agreement that we won't get to the mitigation targets without technology."
Seemingly inspired by the death of cap and trade, over at the Daily Dish Andrew Sullivan has tied together two interesting threads of conversation -- "Waiting on Innovation" and "Why Not?" -- that deal with the issues of energy innovation and energy taxes.
Highlighted in "Why Not?" the Economist's Ryan Avent is on to something when he suggests a $5 per barrel petroleum tax since it could generate about $40 billion in revenue annually. But to suggest, as Avent does, that the tax should rise by $5 each year with the objective of forcing consumers to drive less or purchase more fuel-efficient cars is a strategy that risks falling into the same political trap that ultimately ensnared cap and trade.
India recently released the first guidelines for the rapidly-developing nation's ambitious National Solar Mission that outline how the program plans to successfully deploy 20,000 MW of grid-tied solar power within the next 12 years. That goal, which would see the equivalent of 13% of the India's entire current electricity generation come from solar panels by 2022, presents a formidable challenge, one that India seeks to address with proactive public policy.
"The objective of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) under the brand 'Solar India' is to establish India as a global leader in solar energy, by creating the policy conditions for its diffusion across the country as quickly as possible. The Mission has set a target of 20,000MW and stipulates implementation and achievement of the target in 3 phases (first phase upto 2012-13, second phase from 2013 to 2017 and the third phase from 2017 to 2022) for various components, including grid connected solar power.
The successful implementation of the JNNSM requires the identification of resources to overcome the financial, investment, technology, institutional and other related barriers which confront solar power development in India. The penetration of solar power, therefore, requires substantial support. The policy framework of the Mission will facilitate the process of achieving grid parity by 2022.
In order to facilitate grid connected solar power generation in the first phase, a mechanism of "bundling" relatively expensive solar power with power from the unallocated quota of the Government of India (Ministry of Power) generated at NTPC coal based stations, which is relatively cheaper, has been proposed by the Mission. This "bundled power" would be sold to the Distribution Utilities at the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) determined prices."
Julia Gillard's announcement last Friday marked a new low point for Australian climate change policy. If reelected, a Labor government will fill the void created by its decision to defer the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) a collection of low-impact policy measures: miniscule investments in renewable energy; an ill-conceived "cash for clunkers" program; and the much criticised plan for a "citizens' assembly" to establish "community consensus" on climate change. Such measures do not reflect the urgency and scale of the climate change challenge.
In the wake of Gillard's announcement, several climateadvocates made the case that community consensus on climate change already exists. Be that as it may, community consensus doesn't tell us whether climate change is a priority issue for Australians. Polling released last week revealed a disturbing truth for Australia's climate change advocates. Contrary to the rhetoric of many, addressing climate change ranks well down the list of the most important issues for voters in the 2010 federal election.
Last week I suggested that Julia Gillard, Australia's Prime Minister, was asking for trouble by promising that carbon pricing would transform society:
When will politicians learn that climate policies are a political loser if they require that people "transform the way we live and the way we work"? The vast majority of people simply do not want their lives transformed. Promising that government will transform your life is one way to ensure a rough political road for any policy -- climate change, health care, economic, whatever.
Basically, cap-and-trade introduces uncertainty at an individual level (though it does the opposite for actual investors); in the current economic climate, that scares people into thinking that they will lose their jobs. . . Anything that the public is unfamiliar with adds to uncertainty - and that is precisely what people don't want. Second, green jobs may poll well across a wide spectrum of voters, but that doesn't mean that selling regulation or taxation with a jobs message will work.
To succeed, policies focused on decarbonizing the global economy must not be seen as adding to personal insecurities, better yet, they should add to personal security. This should be a major lesson taken from the failure of US climate legislation.
The latest death of cap and trade demands a fundamentally new clean energy strategy designed to overcome political obstacles to carbon pricing and simultaneously achieve the primary objective upon which our climate future hinges: making clean energy cheap.
Reports put the time of death at 1 P.M. EST, July 22nd, 2010. That is when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged from a meeting of the Democratic Caucus without enough support for even a severely weakened and scaled-back emissions cap on the utility sector.
With that, recognition has finallyset ineverywhere: the United States Senate is not going to enact any form of cap and trade. Not this year. And probably not any time in the foreseeable future.
Worse yet, clean energy progress this year has gone down with the long-sinking cap and trade ship.
According to a recent IEA report, the U.S. is not alone in facing the possibility of a clean technology R&D funding cliff. The report documents an uptick in global clean energy R&D investment in 2009 as a result of country-level stimulus packages, but the author of the report cautions that investment on this level must be built upon, not allowed to drop off.
According to the [IEA] report, "Global Gaps in Clean Energy RD&D," the recent burst of spending on research as part of various countries' efforts to stimulate their fragile economies has helped provide a substantial boost after decades of diminishing investment on the frontiers of energy inquiry. But the report's author, Thomas Kerr, warned that this was a transitory pulse when sustained growth was needed, particularly given signs that no global price on carbon dioxide emissions was likely any time soon. In essence, the report says, the $24 billion in such spending in 2009 needs to be the new floor for such investments, not a temporary peak.
The report describes how India, despite its poverty, has moved ahead with an initiative for raising money for energy research that the United States -- thanks to a lack of leadership, congressional polarization and fear of anything remotely resembling a tax -- has so far been unable to do: India has created a National Clean Energy Fund for research and innovation financed by a levy of $1.10 (U.S.) per metric ton of mined or imported coal. It's a very modest fee that has created hundreds of millions of dollars to stimulate Indian research and testing of promising technologies.
Click here for more on India's National Clean Energy Fund.
In a recent Guardian op-ed, Breakthrough Senior Fellow Ulrich Beck argues that the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe should be inspiring far more than just a pointless blame game. Instead, he points out, "we need the celebrated innovative power of capital and the utopian enthusiasm of engineers," to revolutionize the way we use energy and make use of the most abundant sources of energy, such as solar power.
Beck writes:
Postwar prosperity in the west laid the foundation for environmental awareness. Now environmental awareness must provide the basis for prosperity in developing countries. These countries will adopt sustainable policies to the extent that the affluent countries invest in their development and adopt a new vision of prosperity and growth. China, India, Brazil and African countries will not agree to any approach that tries to limit their efforts to achieve economic parity - and rightly so.
But does the future lie with a global environmental policy based on carbon trading, which amounts to the global sale of indulgences for CO2 sins? Or will we have the courage to invent and realise a new age of solar energy in which prosperity is not an environmental sin, and when everything from cows to electric toothbrushes is blamed for contributing to CO2 emissions? "It is time to introduce clean forms of energy," Obama has said. If he can ring in an era that is truly Beyond Petroleum, Big Oil's Bastille will be doomed.
The ascension of Julia Gillard provides an opportunity for Labor to reorient its climate change policy agenda.
Contrary to what its proponents have argued for years, emissions trading has not been as politically feasible as initially thought. Labor's inability to pass a market-based mechanism in its first term not only brings into question the political palatability of neoliberal-inspired policy, but also draws attention to the need for alternative approaches.
With the national climate change debate focused solely on capping and trading carbon, policymakers have forgotten that there are many paths to reduce Australia's emissions and transition to a clean energy economy.
The launch of Beyond Zero Emissions'Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy report is an attempt to push back against narrow-minded policymaking. It details a path for Australia to meet 100 per cent of its energy needs with renewable energy by the end of the decade. Making the plan a reality will require a radical shift in climate policy.
A recent collection of nuclear news over at the Energy Collective suggests that Japan and South Korea are taking major steps to sign lucrative nuclear deals - with relatively little competition from Westinghouse or Areva. And China is planning to increase nuclear capacity nearly eight-fold by 2020 by building reactors locally using Westinghouse AP1000 technology.
Julie Gillard, who replaced Australia's Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, has expressed interest in pursuing climate and energy policy, just not the rickety carbon emissions trading scheme proposal that ultimately cost Rudd his job.
Julia Gillard has declared she is the woman to back if voters want action on climate change, despite confirming she will not reverse the government decision to shelve the emissions trading scheme until 2013...
Ms Gillard is preparing to announce new policies to address climate change - including an energy-efficiency program and new renewable energy projects - to fill the gap left by the decision to shelve its trading scheme.
The government allocated $652.5 million in the budget to new renewable energy and energy-efficiency programs...
We will as a nation need a price on carbon; to get there we need community consensus,'' Ms Gillard said.
Gillard's focus on a carbon price - a policy that continues to be embattled in the U.S. and ineffective in the EU - raises plenty of skeptical eyebrows as to whether climate and energy policy will prove to be her undoing, as well.
Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins offers his recommendations for clean energy policy and strategy in a panel format at online environmental magazine, Grist.org.
Over at online environmental magazine Grist.org, I've been featured among a panel of "seven of Grist's favorite journos and wonks" each offering their two cents on what (if any) changes to climate and clean energy strategy should be made now that cap and trade is on the ropes.
Part 1 focuses on what to do with the remainder if this quickly-waning Congressional year, while Part 2 focuses on longer-term strategy. Here's my response to each question:
The twenty-year effort to create a single global pollution framework to reduce carbon emissions is in a state of collapse. Meanwhile, a new climate policy consensus is emerging, one which prioritizes direct investment in technology innovation to make clean energy cheap. The new framework begins from the understanding that the root cause of the failure of the pollution paradigm was the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and their alternatives. But hard and important questions are being asked of the new investment-and-innovation paradigm. How is it different from just increasing subsidies for clean energy? How can we be sure it will reduce emissions? What role should carbon pricing play? Here Breakthrough Institute answers frequently asked questions of the climate technology paradigm and responds to challenges raised by Alex Evans on the left and Robert Michaels on the right, among others, who have taken aim at Breakthrough's and Bill Gates' proposals, respectively.
Update (Jul 16, 2010): Expanding on a Washington Post op-ed, Vinod Khosla delineates his argument "about the deficiencies of an isolated cap-and-trade or carbon-pricing bill," and joins the climate technology consensus. Khosla writes, "If we want to make a significant difference, we need to get on the path to reducing carbon worldwide by 80 percent now by focusing on what I call "carbon reduction capacity building" -- in other words, we need to develop radical carbon-reduction technologies. A utility cap (or a carbon price) won't build capacity -- it will just increase our utility costs and decrease our manufacturing competitiveness without any increase in our technological competitiveness. On the other hand, although a policy that promotes capacity building will increase research investments in the short term, it will likely decrease overall electricity costs in the medium to long run (through the magic of competition, technology and regulatory certainty), while simultaneously reducing carbon. Disruptive technologies require investment; they don't come from the status quo."
Update (Jul 14, 2010): Other observers have reached similar conclusions about the faltering pollution paradigm. Walter Russell Mead and Clive Crook weigh in on "The Big Green Lie" but can't agree on what it is. Mead argues that it is "that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do" while Crook argues that "it's the diminished credibility of the claim that we have a problem in the first place." But both agree that cap and trade and the effort to establish a global carbon pollution regime are dead. Meanwhile, Newsweek's Stefan Theil observes that "the whole concept of radical, top-down global targets is coming under scrutiny" and suggests that the "new climate realism" will "look at other options beyond the current set of targets" and "include a broader mix of policies" including "a shift of subsidies into research and development" and "greater efforts to adapt society to a warmer climate."
Update (Jul 10, 2010): See Andrew Pendleton and Matthew Lockwood of the UK-based IPPR think tank response to Alex Evans' contention that real action on climate will only occur after a major global warming disaster. "There is simply no reason to believe that a climate shock big enough to bring about major changes in thinking will come along before we reach a tipping point (how would we know?)" they write. "Climate change is by its nature long-term and insidious, more like a frog in a warming pot than a sudden Anschluss."
By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The twenty-year effort to create a single global pollution framework to reduce carbon emissions is in a state of collapse. Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has not reduced emissions and is quickly fading as the central effort to decarbonize European economies. The UN process is becoming a forum for nations to compare and coordinate national policies and measures, not create or enforce a binding global treaty. And it is now clear that, if energy legislation passes the U.S. Senate, it will not create an economy-wide cap-and-trade system, nor will it increase the deployment of clean energy.
Meanwhile, a new climate policy consensus is emerging, one which prioritizes direct investment in technology innovation. This consensus begins with the recognition that the root cause of the failure of the pollution paradigm was the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and their alternatives. No nation -- not even the wealthiest in Europe -- is willing to price carbon enough to cover the difference. Until the technology gap is closed, little will be done to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
The truth is that we've never been debating a real, binding "cap" on greenhouse gas emissions, just an emissions target and a (pretty modest) carbon price signal. With that as the bar set by "cap" and trade legislation, it is certainly possible to get even better outcomes -- faster transformation of the U.S. energy sector, faster clean energy innovation, and even faster emissions cuts -- with a new clean energy strategy.
Unfortunately, Doniger, NRDC (and EDF) wind up clinging onto a "cap" on carbon they have already given away while at the same time standing opposed to a new clean energy strategy that could still salvage a substantive win despite what little time remains on the Congressional clock.
In a new IEA report intended to inform and guide climate and energy policy decision makers, the Energy Technology Perspective 2010 (Exec. Summary; full report purchase required) demonstrates that the clean technology revolution will require an additional $46 trillion investment (beyond energy infrastructure investment expected in BAU scenarios) if we intend to halve carbon emissions by 2050 (from 2005 levels). And, the IEA adds, a carbon price alone will not be sufficient to drive that level of investment.
The long holiday weekend will undoubtedly bring the usual calls for energy independence. With a hole in the bottom of the ocean continuing to spew tens of thousands of gallons of oil daily into the Gulf and hundreds of thousands of American troops stationed around the world endeavoring, among other things, to ensure the free flow of oil upon which our economy depends, it is worth remembering why it has been so difficult to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, even though the costs of that dependence have been high.
China is planning to bring on two new reactors at the Ling Ao nuclear power plant complex, adding about 1.7 GW of average capacity (assuming a capacity factor of .87) at the complex. According to Bloomberg, China plans to bring the first new reactor online in October and the second in 2011 as part of its effort to replace some of its coal fired generation with nuclear energy.
Just to put the size of these reactors in perspective, (according to Breakthrough analysis) it would take nearly ten offshore wind farms the size of Cape Wind or about four solar PV projects the size of California's $3 billion Million Solar Roofs initiative to supply the amount of energy that these additional reactors will provide for China.
With the final seconds ticking down on the Congressional clock, President Obama and Senate Democrats face a choice: waste what time remains convincing supporters they haven't abandoned cap and trade, or call a new play and build upon substantive Republican proposals to score a real clean energy win this year.
With the final seconds ticking down on the Congressional clock, President Obama and Senate Democrats emerged from a White House summit with Republican moderates Tuesday still lacking any plan to score a last minute win for clean energy.
Wasted opportunity
Establishing a price (any price) on carbon pollution through a(n increasingly weak) cap and trade system continues to be the the preferred climate and energy approach of environmental advocacy groups and Democratic leadership. This preference holds despite the fact that for at least three years, that plan has consistently failed to uncover any route to securing the sixty votes necessary for passage in the Senate (a similar bill narrowly passed the House last June).
Heading into the Tuesday morning White House summit, Republicans eyed as key swing votes for any clean energy or climate bill telegraphed clear intentions: cap and trade would be a practical non-starter, but they were ready to act with the President on measures to promote zero-carbon electricity, electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, and greater energy technology innovation, clean up dirty coal plants, and improve energy efficiency.
The summit offered President Obama a prime opportunity to reset the Senate energy debate by calling a new play: take up the energy provisions Republicans have offered, counter with a more aggressive proposal on similar fronts, and begin earnest negotiations with GOP swing votes to ensure passage of a final bill that could move America towards a clean energy economy before the Congressional clock expires.
Unfortunately, President Obama let this chance to break from the failed and increasingly desperate cap and trade agenda slip by, using the meeting, instead, to reiterate to the assembled Senators - and greens watching from the sidelines - that "he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is ... by putting a price on [carbon] pollution."
In the face of numerous energy dilemmas there is a growing consensus that energy innovation offers a pathway to the most important solutions of our time. As the White House and Congress seem flummoxed by what steps to take next, it may be time to look to history for some guidance.
Just ten years into the second millennium, the U.S. finds itself in a situation complicated by a catastrophic oil spill dumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf, a badly wounded, if recovering, economy whose historic dominance is being ably challenged, and a growing demand for energy that must be produced without hastening the impacts of climate change. There is a growing consensus that energy innovation offers a pathway to the solutions for all of these challenges, but the White House and Congress seem flummoxed by what steps to take next. As TIME magazine's Bryan Walsh suggests in his latest cover story (subs. req'd) profiling the influence of Thomas Edison's innovative genius on the energy industry in the 20th century, it may be time to look to history for some guidance.
As Walsh explains, Edison "spent his career "inventing the century" - the 20th century." But he did not devise the inventions that gave birth to the electrical power industry (not to mention the recorded music and motion picture industries) in a vacuum. Instead, Edison's innovative potential was nurtured from a young age and as an adult, he continued to encourage his creativity by surrounding himself with others whose knowledge base could help him realize his ideas.
The White House has postponed a scheduled meeting with a group of bi-partisan Senators to discuss plans for comprehensive energy legislation, and while Republicans have made it clear they plan to unanimously block cap and trade, that may prove to be a good starting place for a non-controversial route forward centered on vehicle electrification, nuclear power and energy technology innovation.
Republicans also would press Obama to reach consensus on less aggressive energy options, including incentives for electrification of cars and trucks, more nuclear power and offshore oil and gas production, and research and development for low-carbon energy technologies.
The GOP has several "clean energy proposals which we are for and he's for too," [Sen. Lamar] Alexander said.
Although cap and trade efforts have consumed most of the legislative clock this year and there's dwindling time for any big plays, if Republicans are really willing to support a big technology push Democrats could have the bargaining chip they need to make some real progress, perhaps even mounting a more aggressive push into key technology areas - research and innovation, vehicle electrification, and accelerated deployment of clean electricity sources. This type of bipartisan effort would not be the "comprehensive" solution to our nation's multifold energy and climate challenges, but it would prime the Congressional pump for a greater bipartisan collaboration in 2011...or so one could hope.
Now that Obama has officially opened the door to alternatives to the conventional cap and trade framework, Congressional Democrats are finally willing to admit the policy is dead and focus on finding an economically and politically viable Plan B. According...
Now that Obama has officially opened the door to alternatives to the conventional cap and trade framework, Congressional Democrats are finally willing to admit the policy is dead and focus on finding an economically and politically viable Plan B.
According to E&E (subs. req'd), efforts to formulate that Plan B have just begun and are as yet indecisive. One thing, however, is now clear:
Senate Democrats may have emerged from their much-hyped caucus meeting without a clear plan for this summer's energy bill, but they appeared to agree on one point: Cap and trade doesn't have the votes...
It is unclear whether Obama and Senate Democratic leadership intend to push aggressively for cap and trade or any mechanism to price carbon this year. Obama failed to call for it directly in his Oval Office address this week and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday declined to promise to include a price on carbon in an energy package slated for floor debate next month.
Reid said yesterday that his goals for energy legislation are dealing with the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, creating jobs and cutting pollution. "There are many strong passions and arguments about the best way to achieve these goals," Reid said yesterday after the Democratic caucus met to discuss an energy bill. "And I'm always focused on what is possible."
...
Democrats hope that another caucus meeting slated for next week will help push them closer to a consensus about how to proceed...
"Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, people will come together and come up with a comprehensive plan," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). "There's a lot of hurdles to be jumped."
With time now short in the Congressional calendar this year, it is unlikely that Congress will implement a comprehensive response to our nation's multifold energy and climate challenges. But as the failed cap and trade framework falls away, space is now opening for new and productive ways forward.
The graph above shows the proportion of global fossil fuel consumption that comes from coal, gas and oil. The data comes from the 2010 Statistical Review of World Energy from BP. Contrary to some claims, we are not nearly at the twilight of the coal industry. In fact, coal accounts for a greater share of global fossil fuel consumption than it has since 1969!
At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin discusses why we should stop waiting for the "fog of misinformation and disinformation on climate" to dissipate from the public mindset and instead focus on the developing "energy consensus" that we need clean, cheap energy to meet the expanding energy needs of quickly growing global population.
Reflecting on lawmakers' struggles over climate bills through most of the last decade, it seems clear that insistence on comprehensive one-step legislation including firm, declining caps on emissions from the get-go -- before building confidence and momentum around the new direction -- is a path to nowhere...
Given the stasis in the Senate, even with the "external" costs of fossil fuels on glaring display in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be time to start listening more to those proposing this more stepwise route forward. Such an approach would better reflect an unbending reality: A quest for new energy choices that advance human lives while limiting conflict and climate risks will require sustained work by a generation or more -- not just one Congress or president.
A new policy brief by the Breakthrough Institute and Americans for Energy Leadership, "The Power to Compete?", provides the first independent analysis of how the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act would impact U.S. competitiveness in the global clean energy industry.
A new policy brief released today by the Breakthrough Institute and Americans for Energy Leadership provides the first independent analysis of how the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act would impact U.S. competitiveness in the global clean energy industry, benchmarking its provisions against key policy components for technological innovation and industrial development in the low-carbon power and transportation sectors.
Federal energy policy has become a primary U.S. national priority in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and amidst the ongoing Senate debate over comprehensive climate and energy reform. The May 2010 release of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act (APA) currently represents the flagship proposal for comprehensive reform in the Senate, and its future within the context of broader energy legislation will be determined in the weeks ahead.
The renewed urgency for energy reform arrives among growing national concern that the United States is falling behind its competitors in the growing clean energy industry. Thus, in addition to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, one of the core objectives of the Kerry-Lieberman proposal is to enhance U.S. competitiveness in clean energy technology markets. As Senator Kerry declared in the opening of the APA release press conference, "The bill that we are introducing today and revealing today, the American Power Act, will restore America's economy and reassert our position as a global leader in clean energy technology."
Not only did Lindsey Graham (R-SC) withdraw from talks surrounding a climate and energy bill eventually released by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) in early May, yesterday he announced that he wouldn't vote for the legislation should Kerry and Lieberman successfully bring it to the Senate floor.
Graham cited disagreement over added restrictions on offshore drilling and doubt that the bill could ever get 60 votes on the Senate floor.
"What I have withdrawn from is a bill that basically restricts drilling in a way that is never going to happen in the future," Graham said. "I wanted it to safely occur in the future; I don't want to take it off the table."...
He said he will offer up later this year a "hodgepodge of ideas out there that I think form a potential pathway forward."
This includes introducing as early as this week a "clean energy" production standard that would include a "more aggressive definition of biomass" and give nuclear power the "same standing as other alternative energy sources." The standard needs to be higher to make these sources more deployable and financially attractive, he added.
Graham's announcement is likely the last nail in the coffin for cap and trade this year.
By re-thinking how the federal government can foster innovation and competitiveness in clean energy, from education and research to commercialization and production, the United States can once again become a global leader in clean energy technology.
By Jesse Jenkins, Mark Muro, and Rob Atkinson, originally at the New Republic
Having passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 28th, the America COMPETES Act, America's flagship competitiveness legislation, will soon be debated in the U.S. Senate. The Act was originally passed in 2007 in response to mounting concern that the United States was failing to effectively compete economically with other nations, imperiling the nation's future prosperity.
Now, a new outbreak of anxiety has engulfed the nation's competitive standing particularly as regards the nation's fledgling clean energy industry. Presently, the United States lacks an effective strategy to compete in this high-growth industry, which is expected to surpass $600 billion globally by 2020. Fortunately, the America COMPETES reauthorization offers a key opportunity for Congress to strengthen U.S. clean energy competitiveness.
In a new policy report, the Breakthrough Institute, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program call on Congress to strengthen clean energy competitiveness through the America COMPETES reauthorization.
Congress first passed this flagship competitiveness legislation in 2007 in response to concerns that the United States was losing its ability to compete economically with other nations. On May 28, 2010, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the COMPETES reauthorization by a vote of 262-150 and the bill is set to be debated in the Senate. The reauthorization comes at a time when the United States seeks new sources of growth in a fiscally constrained environment. The clean energy market is one such growth industry--expected to surpass $600 billion by 2020--but the U.S. faces unprecedented global competition.
In "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," an authoritative report on international clean energy competitiveness, the Breakthrough Institute and ITIF recently demonstrated how U.S. leadership on a number of clean energy competitiveness metrics has declined in the last decade. The United States' historic lead in energy innovation is slipping as other countries implement national innovation strategies. America now lags economic competitors in Asia and Europe in the manufacture of virtually all clean energy technologies. And the U.S. lags its economic rivals in preparing its future workforce with critical science, technology, engineering and math education (STEM).
The new report argues that to regain leadership in the global clean energy market, the United States must prioritize major investments in clean energy technology and embrace bold new paradigms in clean energy education, innovation, and production and manufacturing policy.
"Meeting the aggressive challenges to U.S. clean energy leadership will require both increased funding for critical education and technology programs as well as new ideas for how the federal government can foster innovation in the clean energy industry, from basic research to full-scale commercialization," said Mark Muro, Director of Policy at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Project.
Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relation was hard pressed to find a trend amongst 36 studies projecting the share of renewable energy in 2010. "[T]hat's because there pretty much isn't one." See for yourself in the graph below.
A new report by WWF confirms that the potential economic gains associated with clean energy exports are huge, but falls short in advancing an effective strategy for the U.S. to compete. More than pricing carbon and subsidizing clean energy in perpetuity, U.S. competitiveness in clean energy requires a comprehensive federal investment strategy in clean energy innovation and deployment to make clean energy cheap in real, unsubsidized terms.
A new report by the World Wildlife Fund outlines the enormous potential economic gains associated with clean energy export market share. The report, however, misses a critical opportunity to advance the most effective solution to declining U.S. clean energy competitiveness -- major public investment in clean technology innovation and deployment to make clean energy cheap.
Three-quarters of additional energy demand between now and 2050 is expected to occur in developing countries, according to the new report, suggesting that any national strategy to capitalize on the economic benefits of the growing clean energy industry must also focus on boosting clean energy exports.
"If US businesses capture 14% market share (which reflects current US exports in environmental goods and services in developing countries) in just a subset of this new clean technology market, it would result in up to 850,000 new American jobs"
But the policies that WWF recommends--putting a rising price on carbon and subsidizing clean energy in the developing world--will fail on their own to deliver on the promise of securing U.S. market share both domestically and abroad.
Despite the Deepwater Horizon calamity, if the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill gets passed then concessions on offshore drilling are likely to be part of the deal. But Brookings' Mark Muro points out that this outcome could provide a "teachable moment and tie further fossil fuel use once and for all to energy system transformation," citing a post by Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins and I, in which we argued that a 2009 GOP plan to dedicate the new oil and gas royalties to a clean energy fund would be an appropriate compromise if drilling is inevitable.
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 the "Hartwell Paper." Instead of the failed Kyoto-Copenhagen focus on national emissions targets and timetables, 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.
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.
The bottom line: putting a price on carbon or regulating emissions is not sufficient to address the nation's climate problem or seize the economic opportunities in the fast-growing clean energy sector. Any Senate climate bill worth it's salt must clear the critical clean energy innovation threshold: $15-25 billion a year invested in clean energy technology innovation.
What is clear, though, is this: To get to a good bill senators need to deal properly with the revenue--whether from offshore oil drilling or pollution allowance auctions or whatever else is in the bill. And to do that they need to make sure a huge chunk of it gets applied to clean-energy research and development. Get that right and much else needn't be perfect. Blow that, and the bill is likely not worth it.
... The bottom line is this: Putting a price on carbon, or regulating emissions, ... while absolutely necessary, will not be sufficient to address the nation's climate problem and will, importantly, not put the U.S. in the position to seize the extraordinary opportunities that will come with rebuilding to global energy economy. Also necessary, as we keep saying, will be a major drive to promote large-scale technology breakthroughs. No matter how you measure it, U.S. government investment in clean energy R&D remains grossly inadequate. Right now clean energy R&D accounts for only around $3 billion a year. But if we're going to see real progress in de-carbonizing the present economy and creating the next one this number should be closer to $15 billion and probably as much as $25 billion per year.
So that's the target: $15 to $25 billion a year is "the number"--the critical investment threshold for federal clean energy investment that must become a core benchmark for evaluating any and all federal climate, energy, or indeed appropriations deal making.
Mark notes the rumors and reports of the still-not-yet-public drafts of the K-G-L bill do not bode well for the bill's ability to clear this critical clean energy innovation threshold...
Breakthrough's Jesse Jenkins joined Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and moderator Marc Gunther of Fortune Magazine and Greenbiz.com to discuss the fate of climate and energy legislation in the U.S. Senate in a webinar, hosted by theEnergyCollective.com.
Jenkins and Alexander discussed the embattled Kerry-(Graham?)-Lieberman climate bill and potential alternatives to modernize our energy system, secure dependence from oil, and reduce U.S. emissions. Listen to the archived webinar here.
Cape Wind was a momentous clean energy victory but if climate change advocates truly take the immense scale of the energy and climate challenge seriously, we must ensure that this is the last time that a new zero-carbon energy source faces such prolonged NIMBY opposition.
Al Gore has called on the U.S. to "commit to producing 100% of electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon free sources within ten years." But the ten-year hard-fought battle to secure approval for Cape Wind shows that we cannot come close to meeting even a fraction of his goal if we do not appreciate the scale of energy challenge and the incredible pace of clean energy innovation and deployment required to truly reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change.
First, let's put Cape Wind in perspective. A $1 billion dollar project, America's first offshore wind farm will consist of 130 turbines that can produce roughly 1.6 billion kWh of electricity annually, enough to power three-quarters of the homes on Nantucket and surrounding islands. But on a national scale, this iconic project will only meet about 0.04% of the total (forecasted) U.S electricity demand in 2010, expected to be about 3,784 billion kWh.
Yesterday's column in the NYT by Thomas Friedman illustrates why efforts to put a price on carbon are not going to do much at all to stimulate energy technology innovation. Friedman writes:
After months of heroic negotiations, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman had forged a bipartisan climate/energy/jobs bill that, while far from perfect, would have, for the first time, put a long-term fixed price on carbon -- precisely the kind of price signal U.S. industry and consumers need to start really shifting the economy to clean-power innovations. . .
Without that price signal, you will never get sustained consumer demand for, or sustained private investment in, clean-power technologies. All you will get are hobbies. . .
I'd love to see the president come out, guns blazing with this message: "Yes, if we pass this energy legislation, a small price on carbon will likely show up on your gasoline or electricity bill. I'm not going to lie. But it is an investment that will pay off in so many ways. It will spur innovation in energy efficiency that will actually lower the total amount you pay for driving, heating or cooling. It will reduce carbon pollution in the air we breathe and make us healthier as a country. It will reduce the money we are sending to nations that crush democracy and promote intolerance. It will strengthen the dollar. It will make us more energy secure, environmentally secure and strategically secure. . . "
It is not clear what that "price on carbon" is in the legislation or how widely it would be applied, but for the purposes of discussion, let's just say that it starts at $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and is applied economy-wide.
Published by the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster. Cross posted at The Real Ewbank.
By Breakthrough Fellow, Leigh Ewbank
Australia needs a Plan B for climate policy. We need a nation-building project on the scale of the Snowy Mountains Scheme to invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. This is the fresh approach needed to drive Australia's transition towards a clean economy and protect the nation from dangerous climate change.
The Prime Minister's announcement yesterday that the government will delay its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme until 2013 is a tacit admission that pricing carbon is not viable in the current political environment.
Labor and proponents of emissions trading have been living a fantasy for too long. They have ignored the realities of politics to pursue a policy that had no reasonable chance of being implemented at a time when climate change experts agree we must act. Now, Australia is set for yet more inaction.
Out of the scramble over the thrice-delayed Kerry/Graham/Lieberman climate bill, various policy alternatives have emerged. Grassroots greens are arguing for cap and dividend but high tech leaders including Bill Gates are calling for an explicit energy technology innovation agenda that - if backed by a direct, large-scale plan for investment - could leave carbon pricing alternatives by the wayside.
Out of the scramble over the thrice-delayed Kerry/Graham/Lieberman (KGL or "keggles") climate bill have emerged various alternatives, with grassroots greens arguing for cap and dividend and high tech leaders including Bill Gates calling for an explicit technology innovation agenda.
Earlier this month, Bill McKibben advocated in The New Republic for the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, claiming it would solve the political problem of raising energy costs because it would rebate some of the pollution allowances to consumers -- "three-quarters will come out ahead," McKibben claims, "with only real energy hogs hurting .
It is simply not true that the government should not or cannot pick technological winners and losers. That was ITIF President Rob Atkinson's message in a piece today at Huffington Post. Indeed, as Atkinson writes, the government has always picked winners and in the process, has developed entire new industries, like IT, that have formed the foundation of economic prosperity and the basis of our modern way of life. What would our lives be like if we had left everything to the "free market"?
From Huffington Post:
"But the free market opponents will say how can Washington outsmart the market? Is this the same market that through its infinite wisdom invested hundreds of billions of subprime mortgages? In fact, the government has a pretty good track record of picking winners. Just look at the technologies that the government had a key role in developing: the Internet, the web browser, the search engine, computer graphics, semiconductors, and a host of others. There are many other examples of success stories made possible not because government anointed a particular young entrepreneur but because the government made a conscious choice to open new pathways into which young innovators could embark."
A few weeks ago, at an event on the same subject, Atkinson and former-Reaganite Clyde Prestowitz took the neoliberal free market ideologues including former Clintonite, Robert Lawrence (ironic?) to task for their ahistorical views. Amidst all the anti-government fervor lies the true but unconventional wisdom: the government can and should pick technological winners. Our economic prosperity depends on it.
Update: As Alexis Madrigal points out at WIRED, it's great to see the list of "heavy hitters" on the American Energy Innovation Council embrace a technology innovation agenda like the one Breakthrough has been working to advance. Let's hope this welcome show of support will be followed up by a serious commitment of financial resources.
An op-ed from Microsoft's Bill Gates and DuPont's Chad Holliday gives voice to the private sector's support for public investment in clean energy because energy, as Breakthrough has long argued, "requires a public commitment."
Gates and Holliday lay out three reasons why the private sector can't make this investment on its own:
What makes energy different from, say, electronics? Three things.
First, there are profound public interests in having more energy options. Our national security, economic health and environment are at issue. These are not primary motivations for private-sector investments, but they merit a public commitment.
Second, the nature of the energy business requires a public commitment. A new generation of television technology might cost $10 million to develop. Because those TVs can be built on existing assembly lines, that risk-reward calculus makes business sense. But a new electric power source can cost several billion dollars to develop and still carry the risk of failure. That investment does not compute for most companies.
Third, the turnover in our power system is very slow. Power plants last 50 years or more, and they are very cheap to run once built, meaning there is little market for new models.
It is understandable, then, why private-sector investments in clean energy technology are so small. Yet, while it may make sense for individual companies to make these choices, accepting the status quo would condemn our country to very bad options.
Looks like climate legislation is getting bumped...again. This time around it's taking a back seat to immigration reform (not to mention an imminent Supreme Court Justice nomination), raising some eyebrows about whether or not we'll see a climate bill this year.
In a leadership meeting late Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would bring immigration legislation to the floor this year, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said she would try to move the bill if it passed the Senate first, according to three Democratic officials. With limited time available for action this year, both leaders said they would put immigration ahead of energy on their priority list, the officials said.
Previously, leaders were noncommittal on when they would bring the bill up...
News that congressional leaders plan to move immigration higher on their agenda underscores the uncertain prospects for the energy legislation.
The transportation sector is responsible for roughly one-third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet as we await the release of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman senate climate bill next Monday, there's little clarity about how, if at all, transportation sector emissions will fall under the bill's carbon regulations.
According to severalreports, the trio of senators leading the effort to craft a climate and energy bill for release next Monday are back-peddling from earlier plans to implement a new fee on petroleum-based fuels such as gasoline amidst concerns that any new "gas tax" would trigger voter backlash.
Earlier reports of ongoing, private negotiations on a Senate climate and energy bill led by Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) indicated that the trio were planning to drop the 'economy-wide' cap and trade plan included in the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill in favor of a 'three sector' approach to regulating emissions from power plants, industry, and petroleum-based fuels.
A cap would be implemented on the power sector to begin with, with industry phased in at a later date, while the oil sector would be exempted from the plan. Instead, petroleum-based fuels, including gasoline and diesel fuel, would be subject to a "linked fee" that would be tied somehow to the price of carbon pollution credits under the power sector cap and trade program -- in effect, a variable tax on gasoline and other petroleum products.
Now however, the Wall Street Journal reports that Sen. Kerry vehemently declares, "There is no gas tax, there was no gas tax and there will never be a gas tax."
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.
Politicians talking about clean energy jobs like to claim "they can't be shipped overseas." From President Obama's State of the Union to Rep. Ed Markey stumping for the climate bill he co-authored with Rep. Henry Waxman, the promise of new "green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced" is an all too common refrain.
The only problem with it is that it's wrong on its face.
America is already exporting clean energy jobs -- or seeing them created abroad in the first place. After pioneering wind and solar power, electric cars, and nuclear plants, America turned its back on the public investments in cutting edge technology that catalyzed these innovations, forfeiting cleantech industries to foreign countries who did not make the same mistakes. The cap and trade program at the heart of the climate bill authored by Rep. Markey may help create more clean energy jobs overseas, but it won't bring those jobs back to America. Conventional responses to today's competitiveness challenge won't cut it. Here's what will...
During a panel hosted by Waxman-Markey proponent, Center for American Progress, ITIF president Rob Atkinson argued that cap and trade was not sufficient to catalyze a clean energy future, proposing instead, policy focused on public investment in innovation to make clean energy cheap and abundant.
Speaking at a panel on building a clean energy economy, ITIF President and "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant" co-author Rob Atkinson declared that current technologies are not enough to create a competitive domestic clean energy industry and that major investments in energy innovation are necessary to make clean energy cheap and abundant.
Nuclear power might just be energy's version of the phoenix -- rising from the metaphoric ashes to play a key role in the solution to climate change.
That's the gist of a Wall Street Journal feature that points out that as climate concerns rise a number of environmentalists are rethinking their position on the viability of nuclear power, including Gaia Theorist James Lovelock and Whole Earth Catalogue pioneer, Stewart Brand. Quoting Breakthrough co-founder and Chairman, Ted Nordhaus, WSJ explains why it's becoming increasingly hard for environmentalists to be anti-nuclear power:
"If you're an environmentalist and you're arguing that catastrophic climate change is a serious problem that we have to deal with, it's increasingly hard to say that we're worried about nuclear power because of what's going to happen to nuclear waste buried inside of a mountain for 10,000 years," says Ted Nordhaus, chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, Calif., think tank...
"I'm much more optimistic about these next-generation designs," Mr. Nordhaus says. "If we're going to get serious about a new nuclear strategy, it's going to be with these smaller nuclear designs."
"Jumpstarting a Clean Energy Revolution with a National Institutes of Energy," a policy memo co-authored by the Breakthrough Institute's Director of Climate and Energy Policy, Jesse Jenkins, and Third Way's Joshua Freed and Avi Zevin, is a joint effort by both think tanks to jumpstart American energy research and development.
The memo calls for a national commitment to energy innovation that includes direct support for the research and development of new and existing clean technologies and creates a structure for energy research, modeled on the National Institutes of Health, capable of coordinating large scale R&D efforts.
The memo acknowledges that the U.S. faces a "defining challenge" in its effort to transition to clean energy. Based on historical evidence of national commitments made to confront significant challenges, the authors suggest two key components of a national effort to address the clean energy challenge in the United States.
1) Increase federal investment in energy R&D by $15 billion per year: In line with President Obama's 2009 budget request, the scale of investment for comparable national priorities, and the recommendations of innovation experts, the authors propose a sustained $15 billion per year increase in federal clean energy R&D to approximately $20 billion per year. This level of funding is necessary to both create new breakthrough technologies and drive improvements to existing technology, enabling the production of clean energy at significantly higher efficiencies and lower costs.
2) Create a National Institutes of Energy: Modeled on the National Institutes of Health, a new National Institutes of Energy (NIE) would effectively apply R&D funding to the development of new, low-cost commercial clean energy technologies. The NIE would function as a nationwide network of regionally based, commercially focused, and coordinated innovation institutes. Alongside other effective federal energy R&D agencies, an NIE would critically strengthen the U.S. clean energy innovation system.
Last summer I noted that the Obama Administration gave the go-ahead for the building of a new pipeline to bring petroleum from Canadian oil sands to the United States. I am sure that I wasn't alone in wondering why they would do this at the same time that they were pushing to create a cap-and-trade program to put a price on carbon. I got the answer in today's FT in an article on investors who are seeking to increase disclosure from BP on tar sand development.
Over at the Energy Tribune, Robert Bryce brings up a long neglected point about electricity use for information technology, inspired by the latest Apple must-have - the iPad:
Like it or not, much of that electricity will be generated by burning coal because that's the cheapest, most available fuel, particularly in developing countries like China, India, South Africa, and others. And as those countries continue their development, a key element of their growth will depend on their uptake of computers, mobile phones, and Internet-based technologies. Thus, to paraphrase Huber and Mills' 1999 article: The iPad is coming. It's time to dig more coal.
Last week I discussed Paul Krugman's views of climate policy (here and here). I argued that he deemphasized the need for technological innovation, which I argue must be at the core of any successful approach to decarbonization of the economy. A few commenters argued rather strenuously that I got things wrong -- Krugman in fact prioritizes technological innovation.
First, power generation has to be "decarbonized": solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal, and maybe some fossil fuels with carbon capture have to replace coal-fired plants. This is within the reach of current technologies.
Yes, you read that right. Krugman says that replacing coal-fired power is within the reach of current technologies. Krugman is absolutely correct in a mathematical sense. We could indeed replace all current coal fired generation in the United States with about 325 new nuclear power plants (1 GW) or about 300,000 new wind turbines (the big ones, 2.5 MW, setting aside minor issues like storage or grid integration). (Data from The Climate Fix) However, Krugman is completely wrong from anything resembling a practical sense.
The Breakthrough Institute team works to publish quantitative analysis of Congressional climate and clean energy legislation, often working to publish a series of analyses "in real time" as the Congressional debate unfolds. Here is our collection of analysis of climate bills in the current Congress:
Highlighting China's rapidly developing economy and even more rapidly developing energy sector, John Fleck at the Albuquerque Journal highlighted Senator Jeff Bingaman's (D-NM) reflections on the clean energy race after his recent trip to China:
But this is about more than just meeting China's internal needs, according to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. China sees green energy -- wind, solar and the like -- as the global growth industry of the 21st century. And it aims to dominate this new global market.
"The Chinese government has determined that this is an area of substantial opportunity for them," said Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, in an interview last week after returning from a week-long fact-finding trip to learn more about what the Chinese are up to.
If the United States does not respond, we risk losing out on a major global economic growth opportunity, Bingaman said.
Fleck expands on China's clean tech progress, citing our report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant" and quoting Breakthrough's Director of Climate and Energy Policy, Jesse Jenkins:
Some 200 green energy firms are now located [in Baoding, one Chinese clean energy cluster], according to Jesse Jenkins, an energy policy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a California think tank. Jenkins and his colleagues published a report last fall arguing that China and other Asian economic powers are "set to dominate the clean-energy race by out-investing the United States.
Obama invokes this classic imagery in his video message explaining the history of Earth Day.
Forty-one years ago, in the city of Cleveland, people watched in horror as the Cuyahoga river, choked with debris and covered in oil, caught on fire. Images of the burning Cuyahoga shocked the nation and it led one Wisconsin senator, the following year, to organize the first Earth Day to call attention to the dangers of ignoring our environment.
But as Michael and Ted wrote in Break Through in 2007, the image of the burning river that purportedly catalyzed Earth Day and the modern environmental movement was actually taken in 1952, not 1969, because the "historic" latter fire didn't even burn long enough to be photographed.
An Indian Finance Minister recently proposed instating a per-ton tax on coal in order to raise revenue for clean energy research and innovation. The policy is a prime example of the right way to put fees on dirty energy to work -- using them to raise revenue for public investment that can catalyze clean energy innovation and adoption. It is also further evidence that both rich and poor nations can find many reasons, in addition to climate concerns, to decarbonize.
India's recent proposal to tax coal (per ton) and allocate the money to a "National Clean Energy Fund (NCEF)" to finance clean energy innovation largely flew under the radar, but the policy is notable for two important reasons. First, India's plan is a prime example of the right way to put fees on dirty energy to work -- using them to raise revenue for public investment that can catalyze clean energy innovation and adoption. Second, the proposed policy is further evidence that both rich and poor nations can find many reasons, in addition to climate concerns, to decarbonize - another point central to the Breakthrough Institute's energy strategies.
Included by the Indian Minister of Finance, Pranab Mukherjee, as part of the 2010 Budget, the clean energy "cess" (a term for tax), would raise the price of each ton of coal by Rs. 50 (USD$1.10).
Last month, Ted and I argued in Yale e360 that there were reasons for decarbonization other than climate change -- many commenters were incredulous. For example: "Although, fwiw, the content of their message is wrong and frankly stupid as well -- what 'bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy' exists that is divorced from climate change concerns?"
"America's 250-year supply of coal will be an important source of energy. But even people not much worried about the supposed climate damage done by carbon emissions should see the wisdom--cheaper electricity, less dependence on foreign sources of energy--of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander's campaign to commit the country to building 100 more nuclear power plants in 20 years."
China recently installed its first offshore wind farm (102 MW) and reports suggest it plans to invest $100 billion in 30,000 more megawatts of offshore wind power by 2020.
"How much is China willing to invest, in terms of wind? The Beijing-based energy consultancy Azure International has predicted that the country is on track to install 514 megawatts of offshore wind over the next three to four years, a $100 billion investment in up 30,000 megawatts of wind power by 2020."
That amount of wind represents more than double China's current land-based wind capacity.
In stark contrast, America's nearly decade-old NIMBY-beleaguered Cape Wind project was dealt another setback last week when the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) recommended that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar not approve the project. Secretary Salazar is expected to make his final decision by the end of April.
"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."
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.
Last week, Michael and Ted wrote an essay for Yale E360 arguing that the primary basis for decarbonization does not need to rest on the certainty of climate science since there are so many other reasons to craft transformative energy policy.
The horrific West Virginia mine explosion that killed at least 25 miners, is a tragic but clear example of a non-climate reason to decarbonize. Dirty, destructive, dangerous, deadly - there are plenty of reasons to transition away from fossil fuels.
Andrew Revkin's well-regarded Dot Earth blog has moved to the Opinion page, now that he has moved on from his staff position at the New York Times. As Curtis Brainerd notes at the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Revkin "has expressed a desire to move even farther beyond the constraints of traditional news reporting."
To kick off the "new iteration" of his blog, Revkin has an excellent post laying bare his thoughts on the "climate crisis" and the "energy quest" - specifically what we need to do fill the global energy gap and mitigate climate change:
"I'm talking about a sustained [energy] quest, from the household light socket to the boardroom, the laboratory to the classroom, the smart post-industrial American city to the struggling, (literally) powerless sub-Saharan village. This is not some onerous task, but an active, positive assertion that the ways we harvest and use energy -- an asset long taken for granted and priced in ways that mask its broader costs -- really do matter. Dry places do this with water all the time. In Israel, there is no toilet without two flush options. It's not some goofball green concept; it's just the way things are done.
You've heard a lot about an energy revolution of late, involving a (temporary) burst of spending from the stimulus legislation. But it's building from a paltry base of both public and private investment in the energy arenas where breakthroughs could really expand the menu of energy options required to sustain a prospering, healthy planet as the human growth spurt crests. I'm not saying that a sustained investment in scientific research is remotely sufficient, on its own, to drive an energy transformation. But I do see levels of investment in such inquiry as a proxy for our overall interest in this issue."
Breakthrough President Michael Shellenberger comments in an MSNBC report on why energy efficiency efforts in the economic stimulus package have not delivered jobs as promised.
As the Obama administration promotes a second home energy-savings program -- a $6 billion rebate plan -- some experts are asking whether that will pay off for homeowners or for the planet.
"A very rosy picture was painted that energy efficiency would be a great way to create jobs and save money," said Michael Shellenberger, an energy expert who heads the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland-based think tank that is financed by nonpartisan foundations and works on energy, climate change and health care issues. "The Obama administration risks overpromising again."
After President Obama's announcement in support of expanded offshore drilling on Wednesday, another GOP energy plan may offer a silver lining that could work to truly strengthen American energy security and make clean energy cheap.
Update: Michael Lynch, an energy consultant and MIT faculty, writes as an op-ed contributor to the New York Times that total oil and gas tax revenues from new offshore production could reach at least $10 billion per year and likely no more than $25 billion. His estimates are quite a bit higher than ours because he counts both royalty payments and other taxes paid by oil and gas exploration and production companies. Lynch also notes that there would be about $20 billion a year in additional taxes if we open up California and other Pacific coastal areas, which he advocates.
Jesse Jenkins and Yael Borofsky
With President Obama's announcement Wednesday that the Administration would support expanded offshore oil and gas extraction, it's now apparent that price pressures on oil make politicalpressures on politicians impossible to ignore and that some expansion of offshore drilling is inevitable.
But despite Green backlash against the Obama administration's apparent embrace of "drill, baby, drill," it's actually another Republican energy plan Obama should turn to if he wants to make a real dent in America's dependence on oil. Embracing a GOP plan to put the hundreds of billions in potential federal revenues from new oil and gas royalties into a fund to accelerate clean technology innovation could offer Obama a bona fide opportunity to "reach across the aisle," strengthen America's energy security, and help make clean energy cheap.
Of all the news and commentary I read about Earth Hour in Australia, not once did I see a mention of the billions of people that now live in energy poverty. Event organizers and commentators failed to discuss the fact that while millions of people around the world symbolically switched off their lights for one hour, billions are desperate to turn their lights on.
"...roughly 1.6 billion people, which is one quarter of the global population, still have no access to electricity and some 2.4 billion people rely on traditional biomass, including wood, agricultural residues and dung, for cooking and heating. More than 99 percent of people without electricity live in developing regions, and four out of five live in rural areas of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa."
For an event that professes to support climate change solutions, one would think that addressing energy poverty without wrecking our climate would feature prominently in Earth Hour campaigning. So why was energy poverty ignored? And what does this say about the environmental thinking that informed Earth Hour?
Who killed cap and trade? Harvard economist Robert Stavins and the New York Times' John Broder blame a conservative political environment. Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke's not having it:
"[Stavins'] argument is wrong in at least two dimensions. First, since the 2008 elections the US has large Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate (including a Senate "supermajority" for much of 2009) and a Democratic President. This fact alone renders Stavins argument flawed. The problem was not a lack of political support, but failed policy design despite the strong political support."
Perhaps, by switching off the lights for an hour and looking at what our world would look like without the constant buzz of electrons that powers our daily lives, Earth Hour and similar efforts can re-instill a sense of appreciation and wonder for the incredible gift that is modern energy.
March 27th marked "Earth Hour 2010," the now annual event that has cities and buildings across the globe switched off the lights for an hour to ... apparently draw attention to the need for conservation.
As I looked at the incredible collection of images from around the globe here, however, I was struck by a somewhat opposite impression: they struck me with a wonder for how awe-inspiring modern energy sources (particularly electricity) are, how ubiquitous they are in our daily lives, and how widespread such energy consumption has become across the world, as we become an increasingly urban and 'grid-connected' global population.
Update: Michael and Ted are not the only ones who have argued that there are many reasons to catalyze an energy transformation regardless of the certainty of climate science. In 2002, Oxford Professor Steve Rayner made a similar point in the Guardian that " further research is not a prerequisite for sound policy action."
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have an essay up at Yale e360 arguing that in the wake of Climategate, energy policy should be made independent of climate science. The piece is already beginning to set the climate blogosphere aflutter, with coverage from the National Journal, E&E News (subs. req'd), The Hill, and the North County Times.
While Michael and Ted's argument has particular resonance in the wake of Climategate, in truth, they have been making this argument for a long time.
Making your home more energy efficient is often described as picking low hanging fruit or money up off the ground, but it looks like efficiency may not save you quite as much on your energy bill as you'd expect. According to the New Scientist:
"SURVEYS of hundreds of UK households reveal that people who have made their houses more energy efficient are more likely to indulge in small excesses - turning up the heating, for example, or keeping it on for longer.
Small excesses add up to large costs. The results of the studies - seven of them in total - suggest that such energy creep could wipe out as much as half of the anticipated savings from making homes more energy efficient (Building Research & Information, vol 38, issue 1)."
What does big picture, public investment in clean energy look like?
It looks like nine European countries planning to invest up to 30 billion euros (nearly $40 billion) in an underwater North Sea super grid that would harness and integrate Europe's vast renewable resources:
It would connect turbines off the wind-lashed north coast of Scotland with Germany's vast arrays of solar panels, and join the power of waves crashing on to the Belgian and Danish coasts with the hydro-electric dams nestled in Norway's fjords: Europe's first electricity grid dedicated to renewable power will become a political reality this month, as nine countries formally draw up plans to link their clean energy projects around the North Sea...
...All those involved also have an eye on the future, said [EWEA's Justin] Wilkes. "The North Sea grid would be the backbone of the future European electricity supergrid," he said. This supergrid, which has support from scientists at the commission's Institute for Energy (IE), and political backing from both the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, would link huge solar farms in southern Europe - producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun's heat to boil water and drive turbines - with marine, geothermal and wind projects elsewhere on the continent. Scientists at the IE have estimated it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and the deserts of the Middle East to meet all Europe's energy needs."
Until clean and cheap energy sources are available for deployment on a massive scale, developing nations like South Africa will remain stuck in the Development Trap: forced to either sacrifice climate and ecological security in the name of development and poverty alleviation or to condemn countless millions of citizens to energy poverty in the name of climate protection. Breaking out of this untenable position is the urgent challenge of the century. It's time to make clean energy cheap.
[Update, 4/9/10: According to E&E News ($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.
After his governing conservative party took a pounding in regional polls on Sunday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has dropped a key environmental goal: setting up a carbon tax to limit the growth of carbon emissions and spur the development of renewable fuels.
"We want decisions that are taken in common with other European countries, or else we will see our competition gap widen," said François Fillon, the French Prime Minister, according to The Financial Times.
The idea of a carbon tax had been widely opposed by France's business lobby, which argued that it would increase costs, as well as by members of the governing party which opposed the idea of a new tax. A law was initially voted by parliament last year but was censured by France's top court, the Constitutional Council because it was too weak on polluting industries.
That's actually a trick question: both a Boeing 747 and a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier have peak power output of around 190 MW!
(That's the peak rating for an aircraft carrier, and a 747 has an average rating of 140 MW, both according to Wikipedia, so I'm assuming the 747's peak rating is about the same as the carrier).
The 'miracle' of human flight at near super-sonic speeds is certainly an energy-intensive endeavor.
Here's another perspective: a typical U.S. house uses about 1.3 KW of power on average. So a 747 jet flying with 140 MW of average power output (140,000 KW) is consuming as much power as over 100,000 U.S. homes!
Or put another way, a 747 flying five hours from San Francisco to Washington D.C. consumes 700,000 KWhs of energy, enough to fuel the electricity use of an average American home for more than 61 years!
This should actually come as no surprise when you consider that a jet can vault a couple hundred people through the air in a steel tube across an entire continent in five hours... But these figures are astonishing in some ways nonetheless.
(Almost as astonishing as the shear amount of energy and power involved in jet travel is it's relative affordability in the modern age...)
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 posted at Breakthrough Senior Fellow David Douglas's blog, Near Walden.
Bloom Energy's recent announcement of their fuel cell-based "energy server" drew lots of attention from the press, and for good reason. It set some nice marks for performance, and, if successful, will likely be the first of a new market category of energy products.
At Sun we looked at this technology a couple of years back. The use case was as the backup for a datacenter, and to switch to it as primary power when grid power was more expensive (e.g. mid-day in the summer during peak AC time). In this example the technology would enable us to change our view of backup power, from something we only use in emergencies to an energy insurance plan against rising costs. If I recall the only issue was the number of the units that would be required to support a MW or higher datacenter, but improvements in their technology have likely reduced this problem in the meantime.
Beyond work applications, I can't wait to see the home version of this technology, providing electricity and hot water from a single process. Hopefully the folks at Bloom or one of their competitors is working on a version for that!
But putting my nerdish desires aside, its useful to use this milestone to look at the environment in which the Bloom technology came into being. In this case there are two interesting aspects.
Renowned energy expert, Vaclav Smil, launched his new website this week which offers access to many of his publications and information about his numerous published books. In addition to being required reading for Breakthrough Staff and Breakthrough Generation Fellows, Smil's work is widely acclaimed, most recently by Bill Gates, who highly recommended three of Smil's books on his blog.
"None of us knows what lies ahead. What we know is that our uses of energy that define and sustain our physical well-being and allow for an unprecedented exercise of our mental capacities will be the key ingredients in shaping that unknown future."
Speaking to a packed auditorium at Stanford University, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu called for a Manhattan Project for energy, emphasizing the need for "tens of billions of dollars" annually in public funding for energy technology innovation, but he missed a golden opportunity to inspire and rally our nation's future leaders to tackle the political, economic, and technological hurdles standing in the way of a clean, prosperous U.S. energy economy.
The federal government should be investing "tens of billions of dollars" annually to drive a Manhattan Project-style pace of innovation necessary to address the scale of the energy challenge facing the U.S., said Energy Secretary Steven Chu yesterday.
"If you look at the amount of funding for that [the Manhattan Project], and the amount of funding to put a man on the moon, it was a huge spike in funding. I think we do need that. The recovery act actually was the start of that...you still need I think tens of billions of dollars as a minimum per year invested in these technologies and the associated science. The DOE, our base budget for energy research is on a scale of $3 billion...the primary energy industry budget is about $1 trillion, if it's a high tech industry 10-20% is the usable amount of sale that you invest so that's $200 billion, so what we're investing in federal dollar is less than 1% of that or on a scale of 1% of what should be invested."
The Secretary highlighted the steps the Department of Energy was taking to encourage innovation given the limited funds available, including including the launch of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy and several Energy Innovation Hubs (nicknamed Bell-lablets) based on the storied Bell Labs innovation model.
This week, U.S. clean tech news is almost as dramatic as the buzz surrounding the 2010 Academy Awards. And while the outcome of intensifying competition has more serious implications in the clean tech sector, like any motion picture worthy of a nomination, there's a very distinct underlying theme to the clean tech drama unfolding: the U.S. needs a national strategy for clean tech competitiveness.
As Joan Fitzgerald suggested in a lengthy American Prospect piece in December, "America's failure to have a coherent, national industrial policy," has dire consequences for long-term economic competitiveness.
That's part of the reason the Department of Energy (DOE) held its inaugural ARPA-E Innovation Summit in Washington D.C. earlier this week, which amassed about 1,700 scientists, engineers, policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs to discuss the details of a national competitiveness strategy.
Clean tech has been booming, with 25, 30, even 40 percent growth in recent years. Can it last? It cannot. A new Breakthrough analysis and PowerPoint presentation shows storm clouds on the horizon. More subsidies for solar and wind won't do the trick. Radical innovation is the key. The goal? Radical cost reductions so clean energy is as cheap -- or cheaper than -- coal.
The double digit growth of clean tech industries like solar and wind can't last, and climate legislation in Congress won't continue the momentum, according to a new Breakthrough Institute analysis made for a keynote speech at the Cleantech Group's February 2010 conference in San Francisco.
The rapid growth of renewable energy over the last few years will be difficult to maintain politically as solar and wind achieve a larger share of the energy market. If the U.S. were to maintain its production tax credit (PTC) subsidy for wind power to become 20 percent of America's energy generation, the cost would be $20 billion per year. Moreover, existing transmission is rapidly meeting capacity, which will push wind and solar into sites with higher load management, storage, and transmission costs.
Climate legislation currently being considered in Congress would do little to help the clean tech industry. Cap and trade legislation that passed the House would provide a .8 - 1.5 cent/kwh subsidy to renewables in contrast to the current 2.1 cent/kwh subsidy from the PTC, the 2 - 4 cents/kwh subsidy the Chinese government provides to wind, the 36 - 51 cents/kwh the Germans provide to solar, and the 11 - 17 cents/kwh the Chinese provide to solar.
The growing movement to make clean energy cheap, and to deliver that energy globally, has the potential to alleviate as much human suffering and injustice as some of the largest, concerted social movements in history.
"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.
Despite the philanthropic focus of his foundation, Bill Gates confided to a rapt audience at the TED conference last week that if he could have one wish granted he wouldn't ask for "vaccines or seeds," he'd ask for clean, cheap energy, and fast.
Update: You can view Bill Gates' TED speech below or by clicking here.
Bill Gates wants clean, cheap energy more than he wants to pick the next 50 years worth of presidents, even more than he wants a miracle vaccine. At least that's how he ranked his number one wish while describing climate change as the world's greatest challenge to a rapt audience at the TED conference last week.
Just weeks after lending his voice to a growing "innovation consensus" by writing on his blog, Gates Notes, that innovation, not just insulation, must be the focus if we are serious about "getting to zero," Gates' TED speech expanded on what we need to get there:
"We need energy miracles. The microprocessor and internet are miracles. This is a case where we have to drive and get the miracle in a short timeline."
Gates emphasized the need for an energy miracle portfolio that includes carbon capture and storage and nuclear as well as wind and solar. According to CNN's coverage of the conference (the video is not posted yet), Gates showed particular interest in the potential for nuclear waste reprocessing as a source of clean, cheap energy.
A largely-symbolic freeze on domestic spending is the wrong route to trim the deficit. Along with real entitlement reform and winding down the wars, smart government investments in broad-based economic growth must be the keystone of a three-part strategy to truly balance the federal budget. Take energy as a case in point, where investments now to catalyze competitive clean energy technologies and industries will pay big economic dividends down the line.
With rising anxiety about mounting federal deficits, President Obama declared a freeze on all non-defense discretionary spending in his latest budget proposal. Heavy on symbolism and light on impact, the Administration's proposal attacks all of the areas of the government least responsible for the inexorable increase in federal deficits, while potentially starving key parts of the discretionary budget critical to America's economic prosperity.
Let's be clear: ballooning deficits do pose a real long-term threat to the United States' economic security. Under current forecasts, the accumulated deficit could total $20 trillion by 2020. That could hobble Uncle Sam with interest payments on the federal debt nearly as large as the projected total for all domestic discretionary spending. Efforts clearly must be taken to avoid such an unsustainable - and risky - financial future.
That said, curbing domestic spending is the wrong route to trim the deficit. The President's spending freeze applies to only a small fraction of the federal budget, while exempting both the mounting costs of two wars and the ever-rising bill for the nation's entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Jesse Jenkins joined ABC's Diane Sawyer on "The Conversation" via Skype today, to discuss clean technology competitiveness in the United States. In the interview, Jenkins emphasized the findings of the Breakthrough Institute/ITIF report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," explaining to Ms. Sawyer that a national strategy for clean tech competitiveness -- something China, Japan, and South Korea all have -- is the primary limiting factor for the U.S. in its effort to keep pace with rising clean tech tigers, as well as the E.U.
In a letter to President Obama, clean tech entrepreneurs, investors, and stakeholders joined Sen. Jeff Bingaman in calling for the creation of a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) to support deployment, create clean energy jobs, and boost long-term U.S. economic competitiveness
A new Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) is critical to "position the U.S. as the global leader in the development and deployment of clean energy technologies for years to come," according to a letter written by the country's leading clean tech entrepreneurs, investors, and stakeholders.
Thirteen leading clean tech companies, including Google, GE, and Kleiner Perkins, wrote to President Obama last week urging him to expedite the creation of a Clean Energy Deployment Administration along the parameters outlined by the Senate's American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 (ACELA).
A new report by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden's (D-OR) office shows that the U.S. is rapidly losing international market share in clean energy technologies. In a Senate hearing last week, Wyden questioned Energy Secretary Steven Chu about falling U.S. competitiveness but the exchange ended with Wyden noting that it was "not clear what the strategy is" to stem the erosion of U.S. market share. As the Wyden report shows, a real clean tech competitiveness strategy, the kind we outline in "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," could not be more urgent.
U.S. clean tech manufacturers are losing global market share to their international competitors. What is the federal government going to do about it?
That was the question posed last week to Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Chu was speaking on the central role that energy research and development holds in any successful effort to mitigate climate change.
During questioning, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) quotes an earlier statement by Secretary Chu, calling it "the challenge of our time":
"The only question is which countries will invent, manufacture, and export clean technologies, and which countries will become dependent on foreign products?"
Unfortunately, the United States is headed in the wrong direction. According to Senator Wyden, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, "80% of clean energy investments are going to take place outside the United States, even though global trade in environmental goods has doubled just in the last few years."
The Challenge of Our Time: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked about the U.S. government strategy to boost U.S. clean tech competitiveness, but wound up with more questions than answers.
A recently published report by Senator Wyden's office shows that global exports of environmental goods (the majority of which are associated with clean energy technologies) more than doubled to $215 billion from 2004 to 2008. While U.S. exports have certainly benefited from the major expansion in worldwide demand for clean tech products, it has steadily lost international market share as other nations move more aggressively to capture competitive advantages in the burgeoning clean energy sector.
In the United States, clean tech imports have grown faster than exports, and U.S. exports have not kept up with global demand or international competitors, leading to an erosion of market share for U.S. products. By contrast, other nations, particularly China, have dramatically boosted their exports over the five-year period with China experiencing the greatest value growth in clean tech exports of any nation in the world.
Key figures from the report include:
The United States is the largest import market of environmental goods (EG) as well as the fastest growing import market from 2004-2008 in terms of product value.
In the last five years, the U.S trade deficit in renewable energy products increased by 1,400% to nearly $5.7 billion.
The United States faces declining export market shares in virtually every regional market, while China has substantially increased its market share in every regional market, over the last five years.
Simplicity and transparency are the strengths of the new CLEAR Act, a climate bill recently introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
In Part 1 of our analysis of the new Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, we demonstrated how the bill fails to make the investments needed to jumpstart a competitive American clean energy economy and fund the technology innovation and deployment needed to affordably secure deep cuts in U.S. carbon emissions. In Part 2, we focus on several important structural advantages of CLEAR that open the door to a more transparent debate about the costs and benefits of climate action in Congress.
Simplicity and transparency are the strengths of the CLEAR Act, a climate bill recently introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
In contrast to competing climate proposals, which weigh in at several hundred pages in length, CLEAR contains just under 40 pages of text. Some of this brevity is achieved by punting on the development of a clean technology investment and competitiveness strategy (see more in Part 3, forthcoming), but much of the bill's simplicity comes from avoiding many of the complex and opaque measures in competing bills, creating new opportunities for transparent and open debate of climate action that may prove critical to securing real political consensus.
CLEAR does not allow offsets, is transparent about emissions reductions carbon cap will drive
Fossil fuel importers and producers regulated under CLEAR are not permitted to use emissions offsets to prove compliance with the bill's emissions cap. Unlike otherclimate bills, CLEAR keeps emissions reductions in non-capped sectors strictly separate from efforts to transform the U.S. energy system through the bill's carbon cap.
This enables a transparent debate over how quickly the U.S. energy sector can (or must) transition away from fossil fuels towards cleaner alternatives (and there will surely be much debate on that subject). Avoiding offsets also ensures that emissions reduction efforts in other sectors, including agriculture and forestry, are pursued in conjunction with, rather than instead of, the critical transformation of the energy system.
CLEAR's transparent cap on energy-related CO2 emissions is thus much better than competing climate bills at providing the kind of certainty that energy sector players need to plan investments in technology and infrastructure.
Declaring "Good Riddance to Copenhagen," Newsweek's Sharon Begley writes: "The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of." Is this another cogent call for a new Climate Realpolitik?
That sound you'll hear in 2010 is a can being kicked down the road. Again. In the wake of the failure of the international negotiations in Copenhagen to reach a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, you'll hear a lot of talk about how the world has two good chances in the new year to achieve what it failed to do at Copenhagen. Don't believe it. ...
The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of.
That's because developed countries are no more likely to work out their differences with developing countries before those 2010 meetings than they did before Copenhagen. Must China, India, and Brazil agree to legally binding, verifiable cuts in their carbon-dioxide emissions? How much will rich countries ante up to help poorer ones segue to noncarbon renewable-energy sources and adapt to rising seas, droughts, dwindling water supplies, and crop failures? Will countries have to accept international monitoring of their emissions, which drives China crazy? Rather than repeating the Copenhagen charade in 2010, then, it's time for creative destruction.
Accept that the 192 nations roped together by the U.N. will not agree on a meaningful climate treaty next year either. Drop the pretense that every country matters equally. Instead, set up bilateral talks and a "club" of the countries that do matter: a mere dozen account for almost all greenhouse emissions.
Sounds like another cogent call for a new Climate Realpolitik actually capable of bending the course of global emissions downwards and putting the world on a clean development path.
In a late night press conference at the close of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, President Obama declared that a "meaningful deal" had been reached with major emitting nations moments before boarding Air Force One and returning to the United States. While the final structure of "the Copenhagen Accord" is still in question, the content and reverberations of President Obama's speech today leave little doubt that the UNFCCC process, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Whether it continues to shamble on like a zombie through sheer force of inertia is yet to be determined.
In a late night press conference at the close of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, President Obama declared that a "meaningful deal" had been reached with major emitting nations moments before boarding Air Force One and returning to the United States. While the final structure of "the Copenhagen Accord" is still in question, the content and reverberations of President Obama's speech today leave little doubt that the UNFCCC process, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Whether it continues to shamble on like a zombie through sheer force of inertia is yet to be determined...
Breaking free from the auspices of the UN's 190+ nation negotiating framework, major emitters, including the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, appear poised to move forward with or without the rest of the UNFCCC nations.
According to a flurry of tweets and reports from observers on the ground in Copenhagen, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese chairman of the "G77," a large group of developing nations, is crying bloody murder, declaring that the deal "locks countries into a cycle of poverty forever" and saying "Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush." The EU is grudgingly signing on to the accord "as better than no accord." And protestors, led by increasingly radical activist Bill McKibben, are gathering outside the Bella Center hoisting images of President Obama and crying "shame on you."
"The President has wrecked the UN (and the planet)," declared a press release from McKibben's 350.org.
A new climate bill, introduced Friday by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), would invest only a tiny fraction of the bill's revenues to catalyze clean energy technology innovation while implementing an emissions cap that requires CO2 emissions to fall roughly 5% below 2012 levels.
A new climate bill, introduced Friday by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), would invest only a tiny fraction of the bill's revenues to catalyze clean energy technology innovation while implementing an emissions cap that requires CO2 emissions to fall roughly 5% below 2012 levels.
[Note: post updated 12/17/09 with a correction and additional information]
At least $15 billion must be invested annually to boost federal R&D budgets and jumpstart clean energy innovation to improve the price and performance of clean technologies, according to a wide consensus of energy experts, along with additional investments in clean energy demonstration, deployment, manufacturing and infrastructure.
In contrast, the Cantwell-Collins bill would initially direct just $2.5-8 billion annually to support U.S. clean energy technologies and industries, the Breakthrough Institute estimates based on the bill's supporting documents.
The Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal, or CLEAR Act proposes to limit U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases through a simplified cap and trade system that auctions permits to polluters and rebates the majority of revenues directly to households through monthly, per capita dividend checks.
The legislation targets a 20 percent, economy-wide cut in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, relative to a 2005 benchmark.
To achieve this target, the bill sets an upstream cap on importers and producers of fossil fuels that would require CO2 emissions to fall just over 5 percent relative to 2012 levels. If the most recent EIA projections of depressed emissions levels due to the economic recession prove accurate, those cuts could be in the range of 9% below the 2005 benchmark. [Note: post updated with correction on 12/17/09; rate at which emissions cap declines was misreported in prior version.]
That falls short of the bill's 20% by 2020 target and the CLEAR Act's emissions cap covers CO2 only, which is responsible for roughly 85 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases when each gas is weighted by their impact on global warming.
To fill this gap, the legislation directs the President to achieve additional emissions reductions in non-capped sectors of the U.S. economy by directly funding programs to encourage land-use changes that sequester carbon in forestry and agriculture or reduce emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane. The bill sets aside a portion of the cap and auction revenues in a trust fund that prioritizes spending on these additional reductions, but precise uses of that fund is subject to Congressional appropriations.
While it offers several structural advantages over competingcap and trade proposals (discussed in Part 2, forthcoming), CLEAR is principally focused on pollution reduction and does not implement a clean economy strategy sufficient to keep the U.S. competitive in the global clean energy race (see forthcoming Part 3).
In next week's New Yorker magazine, journalist Evan Osnos describes the critical role that the Chinese government has played in energy research and innovation. The government's "crash program for clean energy," in part modeled on earlier U.S. government research programs, has helped it catch up to the rest of the world in clean energy technology, and has even enabled it to exert technological leadership in some clean tech industries.
Posted by Devon Swezey on December 14, 2009 at 3:15 PM
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