What do Michael Crichton, Bjorn Lomborg, Frank Luntz, George W. Bush (and his climate/energy advisors) have in common with Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus? They all believe that (1) new "breakthrough" technologies are needed to solve the global warming problem and (2) investing in such technology is far more important than regulating carbon.
In fairness to President Bush -- he doesn't really believe those two things (as evidenced by the fact that he has actually cut funding for key carbon-reducing technologies), he just says them because conservative strategist Frank Luntz says it's the best way to sound like you care about global warming without doing anything about it.
The "breakthrough technology" message is certainly the cleverest one the deniers and delayers have invented -- who wouldn't rather have a techno-fix than higher energy prices? That's why Lomborg endorses it so much in his book, Cool It -- but it is certainly wrong and dangerously so, as I argue at length in my book.
Why two people who say they care about the environment -- Shellenberger & Nordhaus (S&N) -- embrace it, I don't understand. I won't waste time reading their new instant bestseller, unhelpfully titled Break Through, and you shouldn't either (Roger Pielke, Jr., and Gregg Easterbrook endorse it -- 'nuff said). I've read more than enough misinformation from them in their landmark essay,"The Death of Environmentalism," and recent articles in The New Republic (subs. req'd) and Gristmill (here and here).
S&N simply don't know what they're talking about. Worse, their message plays right into the hands of those who counsel delay. For that reason, I will spend some time debunking them. Here is the most dangerous S&N falsehood, from TNR:
Over the last ten years, a consensus has emerged among energy policy experts -- one no less important than the consensus among climate scientists that carbon emissions are warming the earth. What's needed, they say, are disruptive clean-energy technologies that achieve non-incremental breakthroughs in both price and performance.
Uh, no. Energy policy is my field, and I have talked to virtually all of the leading energy policy experts over the past few years. A few believe as S&N do (mostly academics), but the majority do not -- especially those who are actual energy practitioners or who have taken the time to educate themselves on climate science. Yes, they all want much higher funding for clean energy R&D. Who doesn't (other than the phantom "pain-and-sacrifice-loving" environmentalists only S&N seem to have met)?
But energy practioners know that meaningful breakthroughs rarely, if ever, happen in energy (a key point I will return to in subsequent posts). I can say that with high confidence, since I ran the federal office responsible for doing the vast majority of the research into new carbon-free technologies.
And those who have studied climate science understand that we simply have run out of time to pin much hope on breakthroughs that may never come, no matter how much money we spend on R&D. Developed country carbon emissions need to peak in the next decade (and developing country emissions soon thereafter), or we will ruin the planet for the next 50 generations no matter what technologies they have at their disposal. Put another way, if we can't stop catastrophic global warming with technologies that exist now or are already in the pipeline, we aren't going to stop catastrophic global warming.
S&N's go-slow approach to climate, as first advanced in "The Death of Environmentalism," should have died once it became clear that climate change is happening much faster than scientists feared, and that if we don't act now with all the technology we have available, we risk crossing tipping points whereby amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks would overwhelm any positive carbon-reducing benefits for new technology.
S&N write in Gristmill:
Public investment will be far more important than pollution limits in driving technological innovation and reducing the real price of clean energy. This point seems to be controversial only among environmentalists.
No. Pollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really matters -- reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and driving clean technologies into the marketplace. Until carbon has a significant price, coal will remain the dominant low-cost energy supply -- and key low-carbon strategies, like carbon capture and storage, will never be achieved. And for the record, I am not an environmentalist. I personally don't know a single energy person who believes what S&N claims is not controversial.
Indeed, private investment is far more important than public investment in reducing the real price of clean energy -- especially for the far more important task of reducing the total costs of clean energy for consumers. That's because private investment is so much larger than public investment -- if it can be harnessed through intelligent regulations. Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to see my old office at the DOE have its budget increased dramatically. I just don't think that a massive increase in public investment is even among the top three things I would do if I were running U.S. climate policy, a point I will elaborate on in Part II.
S&N may not consider it worrisome that they are touting the exact same strategy on climate as Michael Crichton, Bjorn Lomborg, Frank Luntz, and George W. Bush and his climate/energy advisors -- but I would rather be on the other side of whatever those folks are pushing.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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mkayser Posted 1:26 am
03 Oct 2007
S&N is claiming that non-incremental abatement is impossible
Clinton Global Initiative is planning to innovate on long-term financing to incentivize renewable development and production today. (Because the savings are mostly long term. So you want to translate that into a revenue stream that turns quickly positive.)
Suppose S&N are really right that the technology isn't there. Then if we pass a cap-and-trade bill of around 80% GHG reduction, it will be impossible to fulfill in the time frame. So the carbon price will approach infinity.
Given those odds, if that's really true, why can't we combine that situation with innovative long-term financing and give companies all the incentive in the world to achieve R&D breakthroughs?
It may be that it's just not how things are done, so we couldn't count on it. But maybe it's at least plausible.
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 1:41 am
03 Oct 2007
Why aren't our elected officials pushing solutions like this?
Ped Shed Blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:46 am
03 Oct 2007
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sunflower Posted 2:03 am
03 Oct 2007
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Mark Powell Posted 3:04 am
03 Oct 2007
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Karen Street Posted 3:10 am
03 Oct 2007
I haven't read the original S&N piece, but have been following the discussions.
It will take major public investment in R&D to improve technology, particularly solar, which at current rates of improvement -- deployment and technology -- is likely to provide far less than 1% of the world's energy by 2030. Much of the money will come from private sources, but pretty much everyone in policy agrees that the public till should open a little further. I hope that you don't disagree with this point?
Both significantly increased public investment and cap and trade are necessary.
It bothers me that while UN and EU and other policy analyses assume that a combination of nuclear power plus coal and natural gas with carbon capture and storage (both more expensive and more GHG emitting than nuclear power) will provide a majority of the world's electricity in 2050, or worse, coal and natural gas without CCS, the environmentalist discussion tends to focus on wind and solar, oh my. I support wind and solar, I support incredible subsidies for deployment and R&D for wind and solar, particularly solar. But geez, people who get their info from Grist and NRDC seem to have a distorted sense of how important these energy sources will be.
For example, 90% collector efficiency, 80% system efficiency? Collectors in cost-does-not-matter applications (rockets) do not achieve that level of efficiency.
Jon, a trillion dollars in solar and wind won't go as far as you think. Climate change is expensive, but we need to spend the money a little more effectively than just giving away a trillion here, a trillion there. Also, re public transit, which I use because I don't own a car and I almost never use cars and never fly -- we need to finance it. But we also need to redesign cities to make driving even more inconvenient/public transit more convenient (you'd think that we would have achieved this, but people seem to have a great tolerance for traffic jams). And enough of the middle and upper class have to use it to change A) the subsidy/passenger and GHG emissions/passenger, and B) the way that public transit is seen by the middle and upper classes.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:23 am
03 Oct 2007
As far as whether one trillion dollars per year (or some portion of that ) would get you enough solar and wind to make a serious dent in coal use, well, as they say, that certainly needs some research, and it should be a topic of discussion, but it certainly would get us much closer. I don't think we need to hold our breath waiting for the market to get around to the determination that solar panels, for instance, make a lot of sense (or zero-emission buildings in general). If they are a few cents per kwh more than coal, so what? They're obviously much better, so just do it.
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sunflower Posted 3:23 am
03 Oct 2007
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Sam Wells Posted 3:29 am
03 Oct 2007
Face it, folks, there is no technology that can reduce CO2 after you set something on fire. In fact for years, we invented catalysts and all kinds of contraptions to turn pollution such as CO into CO2. To even say there was or could be a technology to remove CO2 and destroy it is voodoo science at its worse.
Oh, you can make less CO2 or store some in other ways, such as underground, but that's not reducing CO2. The fact it, we need to replace burning of fossil fuels with KNOWN technologies. It is very a very simple concept.
So the technology argument doesn't work ... let's face it, you're going to have some unhappy campers in the fossil fuel industry, which is where the policy and politics come together.
Onward through the fog
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:25 am
03 Oct 2007
The Human Race is in a Texas Hold 'em game with mother nature.
The Technologists who are waiting for breakthroughs are like players holding K-8, they see 7-9-J on the board; straight draw; and are encouraging people to "think Queen". If they get Q on 4th Street, then they have to tell people to think 10...but we'll get to 5th street later...
The Enviros assume they will always be dealt 2-9, the worst hand possible by the Dealer (who represents Global Industrialism)...they want to leave the table because Poker is "not sustainable" but they keep playing and try to convince people to use a special "Green Deck" -- it's the same cards, but its green, and green is lucky...or something.
The Industrialists are holding pocket A-A. The flop has A-A-K on the board. They are hoping for another A on the turn and one on the river. They are greedy bastards who ignore reality.
John Bailo
Sutext:
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trock Posted 4:33 am
03 Oct 2007
It's about Paradigm thinking. Paradigm thinking is our thougth patterns, things we think about without considering alternatives.
I think there is one important thought pattern with the carbon-noncarbon fuel question.
That is tax money for government services should come from sales, property, income, social security taxes and others and not from taxing fossil fuels.
We tax 4 trillion dollars from Federal, State, and Local taxes in a 13 trillion dollar economy. Almost none of this comes directly form cabon and fossil fuels itself. And yet, fossil fuels is the polluting and depleatable resource. As an example, farmland, who's owner pays property taxes, will be here 50, 100, 500 and a million years from now. But the fossil fuels used to plant and harvest crops will be gone in a few decades. Yet we tax the thing that will be here forever instead of taxing the depleatable resource so as to conserve it for future generations.
The problem is the idea of not taxing fossil fuels and only taxing property, sales, income, social security and other, is such a strong paradigm, we can't make the change. Let's change the taxes that states have on sales taxes and more that to a fossil fuel sales tax. Don't pay it at the sales tax at the restautant or store product, but on the fossil fuel burned. We should do a tax trade.
The mistake S&N makes is that they think nothing can change, even our thinking. Well, they are wrong. Things can change, expecially our thinking. And it is the thing that has to change. Are there forces against it? Sure. But changing our thinking is the most important thing in the world.
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fermiparadox Posted 7:36 am
03 Oct 2007
The interview can be downloaded from here. Maybe I should listen again.
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bearrain Posted 9:59 am
03 Oct 2007
Someone please explain what Romm means with this statement. I see in none of S&N's work an argument for a go-slow approach. I see in S&N's work a compelling argument for massively increasing and SPEEDING UP our investments in alternatives. Romm's critique smacks of someone whose ox has been gored; his supposed "debunking" confirms everything that S&N have been saying about our current environmental leaders. If anyone is holding up meaningful progress in addressing global warming, it is the Romms of the progressive movement.
Romm: do you or do you not support massive increases in investment in alternatives?
Do you support the buy down of alternative technologies through investment of the US government, just like the Dept of Defense did with both computer chips and the internet?
What proportion of major environmental groups funds,time and effort should be invested in LIMITS BASED SOLUTIONS and how much should be invested in INVESTMENT AND GROWTH BASED SOLUTIONS. Better yet, how much time and effort is the Center for American Progress spending on investment based initiatives, and how much is it spending on selling another Cap and Trade scheme. Further more, why has the Democratic-controlled Congress been so completely and totally lame in regards to the Apollo Project and other ambitious attempts to create non-limits based solutions to America's critical issues? That's the mystery here, and S&N are providing us some real answers. Answers, by the way, that point at the Romm's and Pope's of the environmental movement.
One additionl point: while there is certainly a role for a techological "reality check," the problems that S&N are trying to solve are the issues inherent in the environmental movement that prevents it from re-prioritizing growth and investments over limits.
Perhaps you could address these substantive issues before you begin the ad hominems.
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Colin Wright Posted 12:59 pm
03 Oct 2007
I appreciate your depth of knowledge on climate change, but I am glad you are not "running U.S. climate policy."
I think you miss the essential point of S&N. That is, that the public will not accept easily the high energy prices that a price on carbon will bring. You ridicule a couple of sloppy sentences that are easy targets. But you seem to have no vision of your own (other than more of the same corporate-friendly government policy).
As well, you display little knowledge of energy depletion. Here a quote from Richard Heinberg that hints at what I'm getting at:
Addressing the economic, social, and political problems ensuing from the various looming peaks will require enormous collective effort. If it to be successful, that effort must be coordinated, presumably by government, and enlisting people in that effort will require educating and motivating them in numbers and at a speed that has not been seen since World War II. Part of that motivation must come from a positive vision of a future worth striving toward.
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:49 pm
03 Oct 2007
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/view/ ...
Now how far did that get us?
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lorna salzman Posted 4:57 am
15 Oct 2007
excuse for energy legislation in congress - 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050, we give citizens the signal that we DO have time to bring new technologies on line to avert catastrophe. This is a LETHAL LIE. We don't have the time. The scientists know it. Why aren't we getting our house in order and pushing for the radical reductions we know are needed in the coming decade? What are we afraid of? Being called un-American? Being called commies?
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