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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Public investments have paid off - and garnered massive private investments to grow the sector. Clean tech was one of the few sectors to add jobs during the Great Recession, and significant gains were made in the cost and performance of clean energy technologies, especially in wind and solar generation."

Over the last five years, the world's largest nations collectively engaged in a massive policy experiment: what happens when governments triple the historic rate of public investment in clean energy?

In the U.S., taxpayers will have spent $150 billion between 2009 and 2014, three times more than we did between 2002 and 2007, according to a comprehensive new report, Beyond Boom and Bust, coauthored by Breakthrough Institute with scholars from World Resources Institute and the Brookings Institution.

On February 17, the Breakthrough Institute released a new, comprehensive survey of the literature and evidence concerning the rebound effects triggered by many energy efficiency improvements. 



"Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" explains why energy efficiency measures that truly 'pay for themselves' will lower the cost of energy services – heating, transportation, industrial processes, etc. – driving a rebound in energy demand that can erode a significant portion of the expected energy savings and climate benefits of these measures.