In the two decades since he first wrote about global warming, Bill McKibben has become the most visible environmental activist in the United States, pioneering new methods of social protest, and redefining the way environmental groups practice politics. Today he is at the center of the US climate movement.

Earlier this week, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times announced that the "climate skeptics have won." His comments echo those of former Nasa scientist James Hansen who told an audience in Edinburgh last year that the skeptics "have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources." The action needed in response to this situation was spelt out by Lord Stern – the eponymous author of the well-known 2007 report on the economics of climate change – who once called skeptics "forces of darkness" who had to be "driven back."

The world is on track to consume two to three times the amount of primary energy it does today by century's end, driven largely by urbanization and energy demand growth in China, India, and other developing countries. Energy efficiency will only go so far in dampening global energy demand growth, as the billions on the planet without abundant access to energy begin to benefit from the same energy services that industrialized nations do. In order to convey how indispensable nuclear is, The Breakthrough Institute has compiled a list of the most urgent questions on the future of nuclear power.

The energy and climate challenge of the 21^st century is easy enough to describe. For a world of 9 or 10 billion people to live at the per capita wealth and (highly efficient) energy consumption equivalent of present-day Germany, we will need three to four times as much energy as we consume today. If carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are to stop increasing, then nearly all of that future energy consumption must come from technologies that produce zero emissions.

Germany’s solar program will generate electricity at quadruple the cost of one of the most expensive nuclear power plants in the world, according to a new Breakthrough Institute analysis, raising serious questions about a renewable energy strategy widely heralded as a global model.

After clear warnings from scientists more than 20 years ago, the issues of human-caused climate change and fossil-fuel-dominated energy should be on the way into the environmental history books. Sadly, they’re not, which is why we need a new global movement of nuclear support.

A bit like the CFC/ozone dilemma, we should by now be enjoying disputes about just how the success came about, and focusing attention on more challenging sources of emissions.

After the European Parliament voted down a proposal to prop up its flagship emissions trading scheme (ETS), most observers finally admitted what has been obvious for a while: the program is contributing little to accelerating the decarbonization of the European economy. However, a few eternal but confused optimists see the program as working just fine. Here are a few thoughts in response to that bit of pushback.

Over the last few decades, humans achieved one of the most remarkable victories for social justice in the history of the species. The percentage of people who live in extreme poverty — under $1.25 per day — was halved between 1990 and 2010. Average life expectancy globally rose from 56 to 68 years since 1970. And hundreds of millions of desperately poor people went from burning dung and wood for fuel (whose smoke takes two million souls a year) to using electricity, allowing them to enjoy refrigerators, washing machines, and smoke-free stoves.

Do the math: simply repeating 2011’s renewable installations for three additional years, through 2014, would thus displace Germany’s entire pre-Fukushima nuclear output.

Or so claims Amory Lovins in a new piece about renewable energy in Germany. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the level of nuclear power in Germany will recognize this claim is utter nonsense within about two seconds. However, since Lovins appears incapable, or unwilling, to do the basic arithmetic, let’s do it here. A couple minutes on Google can find a summary of German solar and wind installations in 2011:

All of the evidence in Gilding’s piece is pulled together to support his premise of imminent renewable revolution as part of global mobilization against climate change, while any and all countervailing evidence is blinkered out. He references the headline from a Bloomberg article regarding new renewables in Australia now being cheaper than coal. This headline’s claim and the work underpinning it was demolished in a critique by me and Tristan Edis of Climate Spectator, both of us (but the latter in particular) being supporters of renewables having a role in the changes to come. But Gilding took the Bloomberg piece at face value, along with everything else. His article managed to talk about winning the climate crisis seemingly on the back of wind and solar. There was no mention of biomass, energy storage or, you guessed it, nuclear power. So I picked up Gilding’s book with trepidation to check his treatment of nuclear power in Chapter 12. It began promisingly:

I’m simply advocating a careful rational discussion about the opportunities open to us, and an intelligent debate about the alternatives, in the context that a failure to change will have consequences.

Gas is leaking from pipes beneath New York City and Bill McKibben has confidently informed us that this is simply more evidence that the climate benefits of shale gas are much worse than many claim. Unfortunately the only real message from the article is that Bill McKibben is rather selective about evidence when it comes to fracking and that his apparent willingness to “do the math” on climate change does not transfer over very well to the rather important question of where we get our energy from.

The International Energy Agency grossly overestimates how much energy efficiency can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to scholars cited by the agency’s own “World Energy Outlook,” bringing into question its claim that such measures can account for almost three-quarters of all emissions reductions by 2020.

Experts expressed concern that governments relying on IEA data for global warming mitigation efforts would overinvest in efficiency and under-invest in low- and zero-carbon energy technologies.

Nuclear power is often promoted as a low-carbon source that mitigates fossil fuel emissions and the resulting health damage and deaths caused by air pollution. But is it possible to provide estimates and actually quantify these effects?

A new paper from NASA’s Goddard Institute authored by Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen in the journal Environmental Science and Technology purports to do just that. Hansen is well known as one of the founders of modern global warming science. The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear. They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale. In addition the study finds that the proposed expansion of natural gas would not be as effective in saving lives and preventing carbon emissions. In general the paper provides optimistic reasons for the responsible and widespread use of nuclear technologies in the near future. It also drives home the point that nuclear energy has prevented many more deaths than what it has caused.

Climate activists amassed an impressive army to march on Washington against the Keystone XL pipeline and the dirty oil it would bring from Canada to U.S. refineries and world energy markets. In this fight, however, a relatively small volume of carbon-dioxide emissions is at stake -- the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that those from Keystone amount to a mere 0.2 percent of the “carbon budget” that scientists say we need to shrink in order to avoid catastrophic warming.

We’re losing the race against global warming. Worldwide coal production increased about eight times faster than solar- and wind-power generation last year. China added more new coal plants in 2011 than are running in Texas and Ohio, even as it leads the world in wind-power capacity. Meanwhile, the United States is only modestly cutting carbon emissions by transitioning from coal to natural gas, which is still a carbon-rich fuel.

The federal government played a crucial and often unexpected role in the decades-long technological innovations that led to the shale gas revolution, according to a new report from the staff of the American Energy Innovation Council, the latest independent investigation into the public sector origins of the North American gas glut first uncovered by the Breakthrough Institute.

The report shows how government funding and institutional support amounted to billions of dollars over three decades and a complex structure of policies that combined government and industry resources to solve a critical technological challenge: tapping a vast underground bounty of energy recently considered inaccessible. The conclusions further challenge the longstanding myth that the shale gas boom was brought about through private sector innovation alone and offer important lessons for energy innovation more broadly. 

In a refreshing break from the polarizing debates of recent years, President Obama’s science and technology advisors have released a new set of recommendations on climate policy that are indicative of a growing consensus around pragmatic, commonsense actions that may offer great prospects for implementing effective policies.

The recommendations mark a sharp departure from many of the divisive and politically toxic proposals that often characterize climate policy discussions and a repudiation of the most divisive approaches, such as found in the misguided campaign against Keystone XL.

My recent post about the costs of Germany’s policy of subsidizing solar energy inspired predictable attacks by true believers in a future powered by solar energy. I was criticized for citing the German magazine Spiegel, a center-right popular magazine. Well, I cited Spiegel for certain facts, and if you don’t believe Spiegel, perhaps you will believe the reputable environmentalist writer Mark Lynas, whose sources are German government statistics. (And if you think Lynas is discredited because he supports GMOs and nuclear energy, even as he thinks global warming is real and dangerous, then you cannot be reasoned with.)

In response to our last blog post about how celebrity fracktivists have reversed the longstanding support of national environmental organizations for a coal-to-gas switch, the Environmental Defense Fund's climate and energy communications director Keith Gaby wrote us to say we had taken Fred Krupp's position on gas out of context.

Over the past few years I've given the New York Times’s Justin Gillis a (deserved) hard time for some of his reporting. I'm now happy to given him some well-earned praise on the occasion of his first monthly column at the Times on climate change. Gillis wisely chose to write his first column on energy innovation, with a focus on nuclear power and China:

We have to supply power and transportation to an eventual population of 10 billion people who deserve decent lives, and we have to do it while limiting the emissions that threaten our collective future. 
 

A new film by award-winning director Robert Stone vividly captures a burgeoning movement of pro-nuclear environmentalists, and, in the words of Slate critic Tim Wu, “makes the utterly convincing case that anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist or takes climate change seriously should favor more nuclear power.”

During the Cold War, the radical anti-capitalist left (a group quite distinct from mainstream capitalism-taming liberals) was perpetually searching for a country that would prove by example the viability of socialism, defined as government ownership of all industry and major enterprises. The socialists in the West who had not already soured on the Soviet Union mostly turned against it by the mid-1950s, following revelations about Stalin’s atrocities. From that point until the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, the dwindling numbers of true believers claimed to find a successful socialist experiment in one country after another:  Mao’s China, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, even, for a time among, some Western militants in the early 1970s, North Korea. They didn’t deny that these countries had certain, ahem, problems—police-state repression and mass exoduses by fleeing citizens, among other minor defects. But they wanted to believe that, whatever its faults, the utopia du jour proved that you could successfully run a modern economy along the lines of Marxist-Leninist theory.

Over the last year, celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Robert Redford, Mark Ruffalo, Mario Batali, Scarlett Johansson, Alec Baldwin, and Matt Damon have spoken out against the expansion of natural gas drilling. “Fracking kills,” says Ono, who has a country home in New York. “It threatens the air we breathe,” says Redford. 

Shale gas is the "killer app" in the fight against coal, Breakthrough chairman and cofounder Ted Nordhaus argued in a recent debate with Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp. The goal of climate policy must be to advance a zero-carbon revolution. Krupp called for more regulations and carbon pricing as well as opposition to expanded gas production.

The wild artistic license of movies like Gasland notwithstanding, the common feeling in the media and, therefore, among the public, is that fracking is causing significant environmental damage (Energy Justice). However, it seems that fracking may be getting a bum rap, at least from the standpoint of toxic emissions.

Natural gas has been rapidly replacing coal power in recent years, driving down U.S. emissions faster than in any country in the world. But to some renewable energy advocates who have long prophesied that solar and wind are on the cusp of replacing coal, such a reality can't possibly be happening.

Such appears to be the case with the Rhodium Group, which claimed recently that non-hydro renewables like solar, wind and biomass are responsible for 58% of recent US decarbonization, compared to only 38% for natural gas.

How does Rhodium claim that solar and wind had a greater impact than gas, even though the EIA shows that gas increased last year ten times more than wind, and nearly one hundred times more than solar? By using improper assumptions, and inventing a bizarrely indirect way of measuring what matters.

Coal electricity declined by 12.5 percent in 2012, mostly driven by the switch to natural gas, which increased by almost the exact same amount (217 terrawatt-hours) as coal declined (216 TWh), according to new annual numbers released by the US Energy Information Administration.

In the early 1920s, when my grandparents were just small children, only about 40% of Americans had access to electricity. Over the course of a generation that number reached close to 100%. Today, inexpensive, reliable and plentiful access to electricity is something that most people in OECD countries take for granted. I was reminded about this when I attended the recent annual meeting of the Colorado Rural Electric Association, a group that decidedly does not take electricity for granted. The meeting was opened by appealing to core shared values: “The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house."

Many of my friends are science-loving liberals. Many of them are also environmentalists. But most of them are against nuclear energy, and this is where I disagree with them. Over the years I have had several conservations with these friends about nuclear power and most of their objections seem to boil down to a handful of arguments that are well-meaning but often ignore some basic facts. So here’s a purely personal, short list of reasons which in my opinion drive a lot of liberal objections to nuclear power. These are by no means exhaustive, but it just seems to me that there are some simple answers at least to a few questions raised by well-meaning liberals regarding nuclear energy, and it’s worth delving into them.

In selling their vision of a world running on efficiency and renewables, Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute have ignored a substantial body of research demonstrating the importance of rebound effects. A new analysis from the Breakthrough Institute shows how the growing expert consensus that energy efficiency rebound is real and significant substantially undercuts RMI’s projected gains from efficiency measures and makes their proposals of limited relevance as far as climate policy is concerned.

Two years ago, some thought that the nuclear energy had been leveled. But the industry today is picking up steam by getting construction licenses to build four new units and by getting government funding to develop smaller nuclear reactors that are less expensive and which may be less problematic when it comes to winning regulatory approval.

A very big report came out last month with very little fanfare.  It concluded what we in nuclear science have been saying for decades – radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) are no big deal. The linear no-threshold dose hypothesis (LNT) does not apply to doses less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv), which is the region encompassing background levels around the world, and is the region of most importance to nuclear energy, most medical procedures and most areas affected by accidents like Fukushima.

Carbon dioxide emissions need to be reduced far more and far faster than previously thought if a global temperature rise is to be kept under 2 °C, according to a report in Environmental Research Letters. The researchers say that scaling up existing technology won’t be good enough to meet the goals. Instead, we need new technological breakthroughs.

With Tuesday's State of the Union address, liberals are wondering how President Barack Obama will set the tone for major progressive priorities in his second term. By giving climate change a prominent mention in his second inaugural address last month, Obama has raised expectations of delivering on a green agenda over the next four years. Nevertheless, many environmentalists remain deeply disappointed over the failure of cap-and-trade legislation and the president’s hedging on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. They are as skeptical that he has the conviction to lead a fight against climate as they are of his willingness to battle intransigent Republicans in Congress.

I recently had the pleasure of reading Al Gore’s latest volume, The Future. This not particularly tightly written book has among other things a section on biotechnology that shows that Gore’s attachment to science is somewhat fleeting. Of particular interest to me is a comment Gore makes about nuclear power.

In the climate change section entitled “False Solutions,” Gore expresses some skepticism on nuclear power, and writes the following:

There is still a distinct possibility that the research and development of a new generation of smaller and hopefully safer reactors may yet play a significant role in the world’s energy future. We should know by 2030.

Michael Shellenberger, president and cofounder of the Breakthrough Institute, made the case for a new environmentalism on the Colbert Report last week.

The new environmentalism is defined by its embrace of technology as essential to human progress and overcoming environmental challenges such as climate change.

“That’s why we wrote this book — it’s called Love Your Monsters. It comes from this idea that we should treat our technologies like our children, like our creations,” Shellenberger explained. “When they fail us — when they disappoint us — you don’t abandon them, you improve them. You make them better.”

The following is a speech delivered at the Energy Innovation Conference in Washington, DC, on January 29, 2013.

About once a month we at the Breakthrough Institute get an email or, as often, a carefully hand-typed letter, from someone who politely if sternly informs us that they have invented the solution to all of the world's energy needs. This incredible technology, they explain, has none of the problems that plague other energy technologies. It's so cheap as to be almost free. It emits zero pollution. It's safe. And it's totally reliable.

Unfortunately, they explain, the investors they've shown their design to just don't get it. They are writing in the hopes that we might get it — seeing as we’re committed to paradigm shifts and all — and help them to secure modest up-front financing required to demonstrate this miracle for all of the world to see.

When it comes to nuclear energy, Dr. Burton Richter is Mr. Credible. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for discovering a new sub-atomic particle, Richter has advised presidents and policymakers for almost 40 years. Richter has been a Breakthrough Senior Fellow since 2011, and is technical adviser to the forthcoming documentary, "Pandora's Promise," about pro-nuclear environmentalists.

Breakthrough interviewed Richter recently to get his opinion on next generation nuclear reactors, and why so many of them are being developed abroad and not by the Department of Energy in the United States. "The DOE is too screwed up to go into a partnership and do this in the US," the blunt Richter told us, referring to the Bill Gates-backed nuclear design pursued in China by Terrapower. 

Dr. Steven Sorrell trained as an electrical engineer and spent four years developing signal processing systemes in industrial R&D laboratories before gaining a MSc in Science & Technology Policy in 1991. Since joining the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at University of Sussex, Dr. Sorrell  has undertaken a range of academic and consultancy research in the area of energy and climate policy. He is currently deputy director of the Sussex Energy Group (SEG) at SPRU, co-manager of the Technology and Policy Assessment function of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and Honorary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College. Breakthrough Institute staff sat down with Dr. Sorrell to discuss one of his research interests, energy efficiency rebound.

The "Godfather" of rebound, Harry Saunders is widely known as an international expert on energy efficiency and consumption and has also published articles in the fields of evolutionary biology and legal theory. Following Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes' work on energy consumption and behavior, Saunders coined the "Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate" which broadly states that increased energy efficiency leads to increased energy consumption. Most recently, Saunders surveyed and analyzed thirty sectors of the United States economy for historical evidence of rebound. We sat down with Harry to discuss his take on energy efficiency rebound.

Dr. Karen Turner is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Her main research interests include economy-environment modelling, regional economics, input-output analysis and regional computable general equilibrium modelling. Breakthrough Institute staff sat down with Dr. Turner to discuss one of her research interests, energy efficiency rebound.

Dr. Joyashree Roy is currently the Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University, Kolkata in India. She initiated and also coordinates the Global Change Programme at Jadavpur University which focuses on selected aspects of Climate Change research and beyond. Breakthrough Institute staff sat down with Dr. Roy to discuss one of her research interests, energy efficiency rebound.

My conclusion so far is that unfortunately Germany’s ‘renewables revolution’ is at best making no difference to the country’s carbon emissions, and at worst pushing them marginally upwards. Thus, tens (or even hundreds, depending on who you believe) of billions of euros are being spent on expensive solar PV and wind installations for no climatic benefit whatsoever.

Although I have been unable to find clear figures for the changing CO2 intensity of German electricity (if anyone has them, please post in the comments below), nuclear’s fall of 1.7% almost exactly equals the rise in renewables of 1.6% between 2011 and 2012. This means that the dramatic and admirable increase in renewable generation in Germany is simply a story of low-carbon baseload from nuclear being replaced by low-carbon intermittent supply from wind and solar (which, incidentally, also raises system costs by making the grid harder to manage due to intermittency).

A few years ago, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology was seen as the best way to clean up coal and cut carbon emissions. And Europe was seen as the expected leader in the field. But instead, reports the science journal Nature, Europe has fallen behind North America in the race to create systems that separate carbon dioxide from exhaust gases.

And what’s worse, Europe is increasingly turning to coal, the most polluting of all sources of electricity. In some European countries, reports The Economist, the amount of coal-generated electricity is rising by up to 50% a year, at annualized rates. Ironically, some experts say CCS is the only way to eliminate coal emissions.

The gap between the cultures of technology and academic economics was on display at the 2013 meeting of the American Economic Association in San Diego last Friday and Saturday. On Saturday, January 5, Rice University’s Kenneth Barry Medlock moderated a panel entitled “The Future of Energy: Markets, Technology and Policy” that featured Jim Sweeney of Stanford, Dale Jorgenson of Harvard, and Adam Sieminski of the US Energy Information Administration.

Jim Sweeney’s presentation was on “The Future Role of Energy Efficiency and Technology” but he focused on the narrow topic of using incentives or behavioral “nudges” to get people to conserve electricity. He demonstrated that decades of attempts to get people to change their behavior to conserve more electricity had shown meager results—mainly because the savings are such a negligible amount of personal disposable income—but called for renewed efforts anyway.

The New Year will not mark a clean slate. Congress and the president will re-convene their hostilities. And while the impasse will prevent legislative action to fix the level greenhouse gas emissions, the president is nevertheless preparing a more insidious attack on climate change.

Re-election to the White House is giving President Obama the oomph he needs to tackle the effects of global warming — a topic that has been legislatively off-limits. To achieve his objectives, Obama is remaining persistent and is pursuing a high-tech, clean-tech economy in conjunction with his administration’s recently enacted environmental regulations.

“Addressing climate change is urgent,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland, Calif. “Energy transitions take a long time and we need to get started.”

The last year has been an exciting one for the Breakthrough Institute. We grew to 30 Senior Fellows and 50 Breakthrough Generation Fellows, hired new staff and hosted our second annual Breakthrough Dialogue. We launched our revamped digital home at The Breakthrough. And we continued to make the case for the critical importance of innovation to environmental quality and economic growth, shaping public debates over the future of clean energy, the planetary boundaries paradigm, shale gas, carbon taxes, nuclear energy, and much more.

The theory of climate justice tells us that the gap between rich and poor and the looming threat of catastrophic climate change are not simply unfortunate circumstances that demand our attention and action, but rather the result of active efforts on the part of rich nations, wealthy elites, and powerful corporations to profit on the backs of the global poor and the environment. But demands for climate justice too often ignore basic practicalities of energy, poverty, and climate change, directing our gaze away from the issues that really matter to the future prospects of both the global poor and the planet and toward issues that don’t.

A growing movement of “modernist greens,” made up of cutting edge scientists and thinkers, innovative activists and policy experts, has reimagined environmentalism over the past decade and is today actively creating a powerful new ecological politics for the twenty-first century.

These efforts, profiled expertly by former Audubon editor Keith Kloor last week in Slate, are fashioning a “radical departure from the nature-centric framework that has long dominated environmental politics and policy.”

Imagine the United States sending low-calorie food aid to Ethiopia in response to the global obesity epidemic. Absurd, right? Even if global waistline trends are worrisome, Ethiopians didn't create the problem. Such a policy would be futile since it would have no noticeable impact on the global aggregate.

Worse, while obesity may be a very real concern, Ethiopians are understandably more focused on undernourishment. The United States should aim instead to increase caloric intake in that part of the world. To punish those we should be helping when we can't even tackle the obesity problem at home makes the policy not only misguided, but also morally dubious.

Sadly, that is pretty much what the United States does on energy. In response to rising global carbon dioxide emissions, the U.S. government put restrictions on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency that is a principal tool for promoting investment in poor countries. A recent rule, added in response to a lawsuit brought by Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, imposes blind caps on the total CO2 emissions in OPIC's portfolio, which ends up barring the agency from nearly all non-renewable electricity projects.

Does renewable energy need to be backed up by fossil fuels? The answer is yes, at least until large scale methods of energy storage are invented. However, the question is one that I would argue is uninformative. A more relevant question is: Can renewable energy supply electricity when demand is at its highest?

[A quick note: the following arguments only hold in countries with similar electricity demand patterns. In particular they may not apply to countries with summer peaks in electricity demand.]

There are two key things that vary in an electricity grid: electricity demand and electricity supply. Fundamentally an electricity grid always needs to be able to match demand. Most high latitude countries are like the UK, with maximum seasonal demand in the middle of winter, as shown in the graph below, taken from UK govt. statistics.

The ongoing displacement of coal by natural gas in the US electric generating sector was neatly illustrated in two recent articles. The Washington Post examined it from the perspective of utilities faced with expensive decisions about which fuel to bet on for the future, while the Wall St. Journal looked at the resource and tax implications of this trend for states. The intensity of competition between coal and gas would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, when the price and energy security advantages of the former seemed insurmountable. The shale gas revolution continues to upend conventional wisdom on energy.

It's worth recalling that coal was once a widely-distributed fuel, powering homes, businesses, trains and factories, as well as power plants. Most of its decentralized applications yielded to competition from the post-World War II oil boom, resulting in a nearly 40% decline in US coal demand between 1945 and 1960, on a BTU basis.  Coal got its second wind in response to the energy crises of the 1970s, when its promise of more than a century's worth of secure, low-cost supply trumped concerns about the environmental impacts of its extraction and consumption. From 1972 to 2000 coal, together with nuclear power, displaced roughly two-thirds of the petroleum used in US power generation. That freed up oil for other, more valuable uses and solidified coal's energy security benefits in the minds of the public and policy makers. In the process, coal's share of generation expanded from 44% to 53%.

Much has changed in the last few years. From 2007 to 2011 a weak US economy and the rapid expansion of natural gas and oil production from unconventional sources shrank net US petroleum imports by nearly 30%, while increasing the country's effective energy independence — domestic production of all energy sources as a fraction of total consumption — from 70% to 80%. That lessens the salience of energy security, for which the gas and renewable energy sources perceived to be competing with coal can claim comparable benefits, along with domestic job creation. And the gas supplies that constitute the main competition for coal are, in contrast to earlier gas booms, backed by resources with useful lives that could rival those of the nation's coal deposits.

Clean energy is at a crossroads. Thanks to public investments in the United States, Germany, China, and elsewhere, solar, wind, and battery technologies have improved significantly and become cheaper over the last five years. Yet renewables are still not as cheap as fossil fuels. Moreover, many of these investments, including wind's crucial production tax credit, are at risk of expiration or have already lapsed. Meanwhile, innovations in the production of natural gas are displacing coal, generating billions of dollars in consumer energy savings, and becoming the energy leader that few foresaw.

What then is the future of clean energy? Congress remains deeply divided over renewables, but President Obama has defended his clean tech investments and says energy innovation remains a high priority. Senate Energy Committee Chairs Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) have expressed optimism that they can reach bipartisan agreement on new energy legislation. And natural gas and nuclear energy — two long-standing clean energy outliers — have received renewed attention due to possible inclusion in a clean energy standard. Never before has a clear-eyed assessment of emergent clean energy technologies been more important.

The Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation are excited to invite you to join us for Energy Innovation 2013, our third annual conference taking place the morning of January 29, 2013, at the JW Marriott down the street from the White House.

We hear a lot about energy research and development. Perhaps that's because it's the one sort of policy that Republicans and Democrats generally agree on. But there's a different kind of research that I'd like to see get a lot more attention and funding. I'm talking about research into what various kinds of energy policies actually *do* to shape the technical possibilities open to humanity.

In my time researching energy, most of the people who actually care about where we get our energy from have committed to an energy source, be it oil, gas, traditional nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, or thorium. Then, they go looking for policies that would benefit their technology. I've also run into a lot of people who believe in inexorable laws of change in energy, whether that's decarbonization or the inevitable rise of natural gas or nuclear power. And I've run into a lot of energy experts who believe in a fairly simple relationship between research money going in and technologies coming out.

Unfortunately, none of these three groups of people is likely to produce very good energy policy. To put it in more mainstream terms, we've got a lot of energy pundits and very few energy Nate Silvers, who put reality (i.e. good data) ahead of ideology and intuition. Don't get me wrong: everyone in energy loves them some data, but few people are interested in using it the way Silver does.

The argument that increased urban density has very significant climate benefits has been well made by Edward Glaeser, David Owen and others. The US writer Alex Steffen has joined the ranks of those with books out arguing for promoting density, with the view that we simply cannot reduce emissions enough through low carbon energy alone. Urban density will do the trick. He appears to believe that cities can reduce energy use by 90%, but only seems to provide hand waving explanations of how this is possible.

However, a statement he made in a recent interview to The Atlantic is reflective of a common problem with solutions to climate change: the unwillingness to do basic arithmetic. He says:

For example if you have a more distributed energy system, you can have the energy system in one neighborhood go down, and energy systems in other neighborhoods remain unaffected. By distributing things, you make it possible for disaster to strike, and not have everything go down if something fails.

Now, presumably Steffen doesn’t have neighborhoods being powered by small modular reactors or gas plants with CCS in mind. So, he must somehow believe that neighborhoods can be powered entirely by local renewables, with perhaps some yet to be invented storage technology providing back up. A fundamental problem is that his vision of high urban density and localized energy production are in conflict.

Consider New York City. This city certainly fits the category of high urban density. However, think about what would happen if New York tried to power itself entirely from renewables within city limits: constant blackouts. This is a simple consequence of its high population density and the laws of physics. An author such as Steffen who claims to have thought deeply about climate change, urbanization and energy really ought to be aware of this. So, why can New York not power itself from local renewables?

Access to energy is one of the big global issues that has hovered around the fringes of international policy discussions such as the Millennium Development Goals or climate policy, but which has been getting more attention in recent years. In my frequent lectures on climate policy I point out to people that 1.3 billion people worldwide lack any access to electricity and an 2.6 billion more cook with wood, charcoal, tree leaves, crop residues and animal waste (an additional 400 million cook with coal).

Germany appears intent on doing three things faster than almost any developed country: expanding renewable power, closing nuclear power plants, and building new coal power plants. The first two are much praised by those who drink the Energiewende Kool Aid, while the third is often treated as some kind of myth by the same people. Germany’s Environment Minister however recognizes it is not a myth, but appears to believe in magic instead.

Two weeks before the Nov. 6 election, industry groups backing Republican Mitt Romney distributed a new report asserting that robust oil and gas drilling will support 3 million jobs and raise $111 billion in tax revenue by the end of the decade. Amid renewed economic anxiety because of weak company earnings, the report argued that oil and gas are a waiting answer to some of the nation’s worst problems.

Ordinarily such a report wouldn’t attract much attention given its funders–the American Petroleum Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce and chemical and natural gas associations known for their Republican leanings. Yet it commanded the top of the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 23. The Associated Press featured data from the report in a big-picture look at the oil and gas trend. And on Oct. 24, The New York Times quoted the report’s senior adviser in an examination of the boom in the context of the presidential election.

Why the unusual splash? Look no further than the writer of the Journal article and the senior adviser in the New York Times piece–Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS and probably the world’s sole celebrity oil expert.

ISTANBUL—New energy trends are bolstering the United States and China, giving their industries a sharp competitive edge over Europe’s and Japan’s in the next quarter-century, according to a major new study by the International Energy Agency. However, IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, suggested that Europe can arrest its long competitive slide if it reverses a thus-far halting approach to the development of shale gas and oil.

Birol, addressing a conference organized by the Atlantic Council in Istanbul, spoke Friday as part of a week-long rollout of the IEA’s much-watched annual energy outlook. On Nov. 12, the IEA began the launch by forecasting that the US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer in 2017 and hold that position through the early 2020s before slipping back to second or third place. The US is already the world’s largest natural gas producer.

The US leap in hydrocarbon production stems from the surprising success of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale gas and oil in places like North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The story has been different in Europe, which also possesses potentially rich shale formations but has experienced environmental resistance to developing it. France and Germany have banned fracking, and Germany is considering doing so. Permitting has been slow in some other European countries, said Chevron’s Ian MacDonald. Europe, as with some US communities and states, has adopted the cautious approach because of the potential for poisoned drinking water and other concerns.

This week, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Brookings Institution, the International Monetary Fund, and Resources for the Future co-hosted a daylong conference on designing a U.S. carbon tax. The event came on the heels of closed-door discussions of the topic at AEI and “a cascade of carbon-tax advocacy in recent days from the chattering classes and a slate of academic work over the summer,” as the Wall Street Journal noted, lending credence to the newspaper’s article title: “Carbon Tax Idea Gains Wonkish Energy.” Nevertheless, talk of a U.S. carbon tax – while a positive step forward – is not enough to address climate change if such a tax is not structured to support innovation. Ultimately, much of the enthusiasm over the idea of a carbon tax can be attributed to the misconception that it is a sort of climate change-silver bullet, as driven by neoclassical economic thinking.

According to the neoclassical economic doctrine, as detailed in the ITIF paper Economic Doctrines and Approaches to Climate Change Policy, the economy is a “large market of goods and services that is generally in equilibrium and usually best left to itself.” Climate change is viewed by doctrine adherents as a rare market failure, but one that can be addressed by simply implementing a market signal to control for the negative externality of greenhouse gas emissions. The paper thus concludes, “Neoclassical economists believe that setting a price on carbon—through a carbon tax or cap and trade—is the principal and often sole policy response needed to address climate change.” Case in point: Paul Krugman’s observation in his New York Times column that “If you seriously believe in markets, you should believe that given the right incentives — namely, putting a price on emissions, through either a tax or a tradable permit scheme — the economy will find lots of ways to emit less.”

Nevertheless, a Brookings paper released last week by Mark Muro and Jonathan Rothwell throws yet another bucket of cold water on the idea that a carbon tax is a “one and done” climate change solution:

Numerous scholars have demonstrated that, while the scale of the needed carbon emissions reductions is extremely large, price-based systems by themselves are not likely to induce sufficient technology change to deliver the needed reductions, particularly given the “lock-in” of cheap, readily available dirty technologies and the modest pollution prices that are tolerable to politicians…A major problem with all carbon pricing solutions is the fact that the private sector will not (for recognized reasons) invest adequately on its own in low-carbon solutions and technology change – even in the presence of carbon pricing.

As the debate over climate policy picks up again in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and President Obama’s reelection, policymakers should prioritize efforts that will accelerate the adoption of zero-carbon technologies, especially the only proven baseload source available: next generation nuclear.

Whereas traditional nuclear reactors from the 1950s were designed in secret, advanced models are being researched, designed, and financed by innovative international collaborations. Take GE-Hitachi's PRISM, a joint American-Japanese venture to construct a power plant in the United Kingdom capable of processing plutonium. Or the recent announcement that South Korea's national electric utility, KEPCO, had been awarded a contract to build the first nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates, using Australian-mined uranium for fuel.

An expanding international community recognizes the importance of developing advanced nuclear reactor designs to meet energy needs and address global warming. Thirteen countries have joined the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), for instance, a cooperative endeavor to encourage governments and industry to support advanced nuclear energy concepts. Member countries, which include the United States, Japan, Russia, and China, have agreed to expand R&D funding for advanced nuclear projects that meet stringent sustainability, economic, safety and nonproliferation goals.

The energy debate is shifting. With wind, nuclear and CCS (carbon capture and storage) trade associations in the United Kingdom issuing their first-ever joint statement, the political tectonic plates of climate change have begun subtly to move.

But it is a risky strategy. Many of those who defend wind power from attacks by Nimbies and rightwing Tories are ardent opponents of nuclear power, for example.

The three trade associations clearly risk losing core supporters by this temporary pooling of lobbying resources.

But the fact they are taking this risk is a sign that all three see vastly greater danger in the current attacks in the media and the Conservative Party against the entire decarbonization agenda.

Twenty five years ago, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was introduced for signature by nations around the world. Since that time, the treaty has become arguably the most successful international environmental success story in history. It may also be the one which historians and policy analysts have argued about the most in an effort to draw lessons relevant to the climate debate.

Conventional wisdom holds that action on ozone depletion followed the following sequence: science was made certain, then the public expressed a desire for action, an international protocol was negotiated and this political action led to the invention of technological substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons.

Actually, each chain in this sequence is not well supported by the historical record.

There are almost audible sighs of relief in parts of the Whitehall establishment at today's news that Japanese firm Hitachi is set to buy the Horizon nuclear power project from German firms E.ON and RWE – a slender lifeline to the UK's stalling "nuclear renaissance." At the same time, others in Whitehall – including a worrying number of Conservative ministers – are driving for a new dash for gas and casting doubt on renewable energy.

Ironically, those who are keenest on gas and nuclear tend to also promote the argument that governments should not seek to "pick winners" in energy policy. According to this world view, technology choices should be left to the market – and the key to tackling climate change is sole, or very strong, reliance on a carbon price set by either taxation or an emissions trading scheme. Such views are gaining traction in debates on the UK energy bill and EU renewable energy targets.

So the title of a new WWF report, On Picking Winners: the need for targeted support for renewable energy, is deliberately provocative. The report is written by Rob Gross of Imperial College, one of the UK's leading authorities on energy policy. Gross concludes that the argument

In 1981, George Mitchell, an independent Texas natural gas entrepreneur, realized that his shallow gas wells in the Barnett were running dry. He had millions of sunk investment in equipment and was looking for a way to generate more return on it. Mitchell was then a relatively small player in an industry that by its own reckoning was in decline. Conventional gas reserves were limited and were getting increasingly played out.

When the major networks declared last night that President Obama had carried Ohio and had thus clinched the White House, the analyses concluded that it centered on the auto bailout, not the coal industry.

As it turns out, the president didn’t need to carry Ohio to win a second term, having secured enough of the battleground states to give him a comfortable margin of victory. But the state still represents a cross-section of voters that any candidate would love to have in their column. To that end, President Obama focused on the revival of the auto industry that is integral to the region while Mitt Romney pounded Obama for his administration’s “war on coal.”

The president, obviously, made the more persuasive case. CNN reports that allowing General Motors and Chrysler to fail would have cost the federal treasury about $28 billion in lost tax revenues and in unemployment assistance over a two-year time frame. Instead of 400,000 lost jobs, 113,000 such positions were recovered-- all consisting of real people who voted.

Extreme weather has become the new normal. Despite another year of unprecedented drought in Midwestern states, historic wildfires and devastating storms such as Hurricane Sandy, there hasn’t been a groundswell of support for climate-change policy from Middle Americans. The problem is not that Middle America is indifferent to the well-being of the planet or more frequent natural disasters; the problem is that most climate and environmental advocates are indifferent to the needs of Middle America.

Many environmentalists argue that the best way to address climate change is for Americans to change their lifestyles and make sacrifices for the good of the planet. Americans are told they must consume less, waste less and spend more to buy clean energy. While David Brooks’s “Bourgeois Bohemians” may be able to retrofit their homes with solar panels and drive Chevy Volts, most of us can’t.

The recession has Americans prioritizing the economy over the environment. Gallup noted in March that since 2009 Americans have favored economic growth over environmental protection, after nearly 30 years of public opinion showing the opposite.

Yet the same month, a survey revealed that 72 percent of Americans think addressing climate change should be a priority. In other words, most Americans want action against climate change, but they are hesitant to support policies that force them to make lifestyle changes.

This doesn’t stack up well against the climate policies that most environmentalists overwhelmingly support. Had Congress passed cap-and-trade legislation in 2009, energy prices would have increased as much as 20 percent in some states, according to an analysis by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon. A national Clean Energy Standard would raise electricity prices by up to 30 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration. And the myriad regulations and mandates implemented at the state and federal levels to support clean technologies mean higher energy costs, while today’s clean-energy subsidies mean higher taxes or straining an already stretched federal budget.

In the aftermath of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, many commentators are arguing that global warming is causing increasingly severe weather events in the Northeastern United States. I am not qualified to judge assertions about the link between global warming (the accurate phrase I prefer to the weaselly euphemism “climate change”) and worsening weather in the Bos-Wash corridor where I live. For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that it is correct. It does not follow that the most cost-effective response to climate change along the Atlantic seaboard is mitigation alone, rather than a mix of adaptation and mitigation, or even adaptation alone.

The economist Robert Frank; the sociologist Theda Skocpol; the blogger Ezra Klein; and my Brookings colleagues Warwick McKibben, Adele Morris, and Peter Wilcoxen have all in the last few months proposed enacting a carbon tax for purposes of averting “Taxmageddon” and discouraging carbon pollution.  For its part the MIT Global Change Institute has laid out how such a tax might work in practice.  And likewise, Rep Jim McDermott (D-WA) has introduced legislation, while former Rep. Bob Inglis has proposed replacing today’s slew of clean energy subsidies with a carbon fee.

This is all welcome.  Yet, it leaves something out: It neglects to think deeply enough about the use of the revenues and the need to make direct investments—soon—in clean energy technology development and deployment.

Asia’s two main economies appear to be winding down their moratoria on nuclear power.  The latest is China, which says it is starting to build nuclear reactors again, 19 months after the Fukushima disaster in Japan triggered a nuclear power pullback around the world. By 2015, China will have 40 GW of nuclear power capacity, or 10 GW less than planned prior to Fukushima. The resumption fits into China’s aim of developing the world’s largest non-fossil-fuel energy sector.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, “Why Your Car Isn't Electric,” Maggie Koerth-Baker works through why consumers prefer gas cars over electric vehicles (EVs). She finds that Americans aren’t flocking to EVs because they have a fundamentally different idea of what a car should be. Consumers want vehicles that perform (and cost) like the gas cars they’ve grown accustomed to over the last century. Until EVs meet these performance and cost expectations, consumers will continue to purchase gas cars. Yet, to-date America’s dominant climate and energy policy approaches fail to aggressively address these barriers, instead focusing on deploying today’s uncompetitive EVs. Electrifying America’s transportation fleet requires throwing away these tried-and-failed approaches and instead focusing on innovating better and cheaper electric cars.

Congress has yet to come up with a plan for handling the threatening consequences of sequestration, or the blunt, automatic across-the-board budget cuts enacted by law by the Budget Control Act of 2011, a consequence of Congress’s failure to agree on a bipartisan deficit reduction plan. As a result, the first installment of cuts goes into effect January 1st of 2013 which, according to the Energy Innovation Tracker, will have significant impacts on clean energy innovation that will severely handicap America’s already underfunded clean energy innovation ecosystem.

Under the Budget Control Act of 2011, the sequester calls for the reduction of the federal debt by $2.4 trillion over a ten year period; $1.2 trillion of the savings are slated to come from discretionary spending, which funds the federal government’s education, science, technology and research programs, among others. A report recently released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Eroding our Foundation: Sequestration, R&D, Innovation and U.S. Economic Growth, verifies concerns over the future of U.S. competitiveness if Congress fails to come up with a viable debt reduction alternative. The report concludes that because R&D is critical to economic growth, reduction in R&D investments – which under sequestration would be cut by roughly 8 percent from FY2011 levels and held at this level until 2021 – would result in GSP losses of between $203 billion and $860 billion between 2013 and 2021. The report states, “We agree that deficit reduction is clearly a necessary task. However, as growth is a key component to achieving that task, the evidence presented clearly shows that cutting R&D expenditures will in fact negate efforts to reduce the deficit.”

Using ITIF’s analysis in coordination with the Energy Innovation Tracker budget database, we can assess how these cuts would specifically impact clean energy innovation programs across the federal budget. To estimate future trends under sequestration, ITIF’s report assumes R&D intensity remains constant in the future – meaning the proportion of R&D investments to total investments remains constant through 2021.

Brad Plumer at the Washington Post wrote this week that coal power generation in the U.S. is in sharp decline — but market forces, not environmental regulation, are driving the recent trend according to analysis in a new Brattle Group report. The primary reason is natural gas prices. RFF research generally bears this out — and indicates that it should lead to lower electricity prices and lower carbon emissions. There is one important difference: the Brattle report is primarily about how much coal generation is permanently retired, while this post on RFF’s work is mostly about dispatch — that is, how much different plants actually run and generate electricity. But the overall story is similar.

Governor Mitt Romney doubled-down on his criticisms of President Barack Obama’s energy policies in last night’s town hall debate, saying the president has stood in the way of the private sector’s full exploitation of America’s fossil fuel resources.

“Look, I want to make sure we use our oil, our coal, our gas, our nuclear, our renewables,” Romney said in a testy exchange. “But what we don't need is to have the president keeping us from taking advantage of oil, coal and gas. This has not been Mr. Oil or Mr. Gas or Mr. Coal.”

The Republican presidential hopeful and his conservative allies have repeatedly attacked Obama for investing in green energy and backing strong environmental regulations for oil, gas, and coal – all while taking credit for the growth of domestic fossil fuel production over the past four years.

Japan has proposed to phase out nuclear power by 2040 in reaction to last year's Fukushima Daiichi incident, drawing cheers from many environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists. Japan's turn from nuclear, however, means the country will use more fossil fuels, resulting in greater amounts of harmful emissions and all the costs to public health and the environment such a path entails.

Many Prius drivers take pride in their reduced carbon footprint, as satirized in a 2006 South Park episode. But a new study shows that lower oil consumption in the United States, Europe, and Japan will allow developing countries to increase their oil use.

If you think fracking is a deal-breaker, then you have not thought much about “flaring.” Both controversies could undo the shale gas industry, although the burning off of natural gas found alongside oil discoveries is something that oil drillers and green groups alike would prefer to minimize. But how?

Shale gas derived from sedimentary rocks deep underground needs to be captured, piped and processed before it is consumed. That requires the development of an infrastructure, or the pipelines necessary to carry the fuel to the utilities that would burn it to make electricity. Beside piping it, the energy companies are considering liquefying the gas and creating LNG that would be globally shipped.

In the absence of either option, the gas is flared, meaning it literally goes up in smoke — in the form of all types of types emissions. That inflames not just the environmentalists who are concerned about greenhouse gases but also investors who furthermore say that such fuels are valuable assets that must be monetized.

At a TED talk earlier this year, the oil and gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens dismissed President Barack Obama's claim in his State of the Union address that the technological innovations that resulted in today's glut of natural gas depended on 30 years of federal investment. "I witnessed my first frack job in 1953," Pickens told the crowd, "I hear the President say the DOE [the Department of Energy] invented it 30 years ago and I don't know what he's talking about."

Since then, the claim has become a conservative talking point. "We have the hydraulic fracturing and natural gas revolution because of private entrepreneurs," claimed a gas expert from the libertarian-minded Institute for Energy Research in National Journal, "not because of the federal government or federal programs."

But now, after an in-depth investigation, the Associated Press has come to the opposite conclusion: the federal role was crucial.

The AP report adds new details to the story first uncovered by the Breakthrough Institute last year in its investigation of the history of the gas revolution. AP found that DOE researchers helped gas explorers process drilling data on early supercomputers. The critical 3-D underground mapping technologies were developed to track Russian submarines during the Cold War. And the pioneering company, Mitchell Energy, received extensive federal help, according to AP, and "didn't even cover the cost of fracking on shale tests until the 36th well was drilled."

As for the fracking Pickens witnessed in the 1950s, it was of limestone, not shale. Explorers in the fifties were drilling past shale to get to limestone because it was not until much later that federally-funded research proved just how much gas was trapped in shales. Successfully fracking shales proved to be an utterly different challenge from fracking limestone.

Presidential politics these days is about improving economic production and job creation. And while the focus lately is on which half of the country is more entitled to the federal pie, the attention should shift in part to the unyielding trends that now permeate the climate change debate.

As recent data shows, cutting the level of heat-trapping emissions and enhancing economic productivity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the emergence of the shale gas revolution has not only reduced carbon dioxide levels to their lowest levels in 20 years but it is also coinciding with the reduced use of coal. In other words, natural market forces are negating what many say is “man-made” global warming.

Over the past few months there has been increased talk in Washington of taxing carbon emissions. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) has introduced legislation, while former Rep. Bob Inglis has proposed replacing today's subsidies with a carbon tax.

The view among most economists is that a tax would be more efficient at reducing emissions than subsidizing clean energy. Over the years, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, an advisor to George W. Bush and now Mitt Romney, along with President Ronald Reagan's economic advisers, Martin Feldstein and Arthur Laffer, have all endorsed carbon taxes, along with environmental economists, like Harvard's Robert Stavins.

Breakthrough Institute is on the record supporting a low carbon tax (here and here), subsidy reform, and increased federal spending on energy innovation. We were thus interested in calculating how much of a price incentive a carbon tax would offer for the deployment of solar, wind, nuclear, and natural gas, the leading low-carbon technologies.

What we found surprised us. A $20 per ton carbon tax would offer just one-half to one-fifth the incentive of today's zero carbon subsidies — but at nearly 10 times the cost. (Our full analysis can be read here, and an Energy and Environment story on the study follows below.)

Carbon taxes like the ones being proposed by current and former member of Congress are unlikely to increase the deployment of zero-carbon energy technologies and would only modestly increase the incentive for utilities to shift from coal to gas, a new Breakthrough Institute analysis finds. Absent continued Congressional authorization of existing low-carbon energy subsidies, the price incentive for the deployment of zero-carbon energy sources would decline by between 50 to 80 percent.

Not long after a tsunami washed over Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plants in March 2011, causing a partial meltdown, it appeared to many that humankind's half-century experiment with nuclear power might be in permanent jeopardy. Although nuclear energy provides 15 percent of the world's electricity, all without spewing greenhouse gas emissions, many countries seemed ready to forgo nuclear for deadlier but less viscerally frightening power sources. And sadly, while U.S. political leaders, including those at the just-concluded Democratic National Convention, are quick to trumpet their embrace of natural-gas drilling, the word "nuclear" is scarcely ever mentioned.

Political hopeful Joseph Kennedy III has endorsed the nation’s first offshore wind project in a courageous move signaling a generational break with his elders. Cape Wind has faced years of opposition from the late Senator Ted Kennedy and prominent environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr., who claimed the windmills would threaten the natural beauty of Nantucket Sound. But in a display of integrity and vision, the 31-year-old congressional candidate said he viewed the decision as one of the “hard choices” required by the clean energy transition.

In a speech Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick admonished viewers across the country that “it’s time for Democrats to stiffen our backbone and stand up for what we believe.”  His remarks were aimed at mobilizing Democrats to rally in defense of President Obama’s achievements, particularly passage of health care reform. 

Replacing large-scale fossil fuel energy production with zero-carbon sources will come with a big price tag. Yet compared with the other available options -- especially wind and solar -- nuclear is our best bet. High capital costs are simply a reminder that we can’t have something for nothing, least of all major new infrastructure. The ability to generate zero-carbon baseload power for decades to come is a public good worthy of limited government support.

I recently had the great pleasure of attending this year's Breakthrough Dialogue at Cavallo Point, an event at which the Breakthrough Institute brought together kindred spirits of disparate views to hash out some of the many issues that that Institute takes an interest in. On the basis of this Economist special report I was invited to talk about nuclear power, but in the many fruitful interstices of the meeting found myself talking about geoengineering quite a lot, because this is the sort of crowd where that sort of discussion makes sense, and because I am working on a book on the subject.

The federal production tax credit for wind energy (PTC) should be extended -- and reformed. The debate over the fate of the PTC, whether to extend in its current form or allow it to expire outright on December 31 of this year, is not without nuance. Opponents of the credit argue that energy sources should be cost competitive without subsidy -- a reasonable concern. Proponents of extension argue, also correctly, that all major sources of energy generation have received significant federal support for development and deployment. Reorienting the credit to prioritize innovation and cost declines caters to both camps, by extending the credit and making it smarter.

Plutonium is the nuclear nightmare. A by-product of conventional power-station reactors, it is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons and leaves behind a million-year radioactive waste legacy. But a new generation of "fast" reactors can burn plutonium, turning a health and security risk into cheap, low-carbon energy. It sounds too good to be true. Are the techno-optimists right -- or should the conventional environmental revulsion at all things nuclear still hold?

The fracking debate is producing a lot of natural gas and a growing amount of hot air about whether fracking is a good thing or a bad thing. Most of these opinions have less to do with the facts than with how those facts are framed, and what frame of mind people are in as they form those opinions. Fracking is yet another example of the subjective, instinctive, affective way human cognition deals with risks, and it offers sobering lessons about the limits on our ability to reason about complex modern issues like this.

Ford and Dow Automotive Systems recently announced that they would collaborate to develop low-cost carbon fiber to bring this niche product to wide commercial application. Carbon fiber, which has been used in racecars, sporting goods, and the aerospace industry for decades, may be the "holy grail of weight reduction" for cars and trucks. Its high strength-to-weight ratio could make vehicles lighter and more efficient while strengthening crash protection. And although Ford and Dow's agreement might seem like another run-of-the-mill corporate partnership, its roots lie in years of robust public investments and vital public-private partnerships.

New estimates predict global production of nuclear energy will see significant gains in coming decades, as dampened enthusiasm for the atom in the wake of last year's nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi appears to be only temporary. East Asia will lead the expansion, as China has resumed construction on new plants and appears intent on pursuing more advanced domestically produced reactor models. Meanwhile, momentum builds for next generation nuclear technologies in the United States.

U.S. emissions have plummeted 7.7 percent since 2006, thanks to the rapid switch from coal to cheaper and cleaner natural gas. Where did all this cheap gas come from? A concerted, public-private effort dating back to the mid-1970s to cheaply extract gas from shale. There is a clear lesson for those concerned about global warming: seek public-private investments in technological innovation to make clean energy cheap.

The media is abuzz with the first study attempting to quantify expected cancer deaths which may result from Fukushima. Written by Ten Hoeve and Mark Jacobson from Stanford University, the paper 'Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident' is published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science (free PDF copy).

Despite highly touted climate policies, European utilities are rushing to capitalize on the cheapest and dirtiest source of electric power in the continent: coal. A combination of low carbon permit prices under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and increased coal imports from the United States has made coal the most profitable fuel for power generation. Meanwhile, the ongoing American shale gas boom -- powered in part by decades of federal investments in shale drilling technologies -- is accelerating the closure of US coal-fired power plants.

According to Bloomberg, demand for coal grew 3.3 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2006. Coal's resurgence is as big a surprise to European environmentalists as the shale revolution is to their US counterparts -- natural gas remains relatively expensive in Europe, and the emissions penalty levied by the ETS has dropped so low in recent months that coal has become much more competitive than gas for European utilities.