Environmentalism's existential moment
Shellenberger & Nordhaus respond to critics 23
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Posted 1:52 PM on 27 Sep 2007
by David Roberts -
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David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.
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sunflower Posted 6:39 am
27 Sep 2007
Comparisons with roof-top pv, the most expensive and least efficient type of solar energy is disingenuous.
Energy R&D is not expensive. It is just simple engineering. We do need public forums for an exchange of ideas and publications with peer review. Restoring Carter era budgets would be a good first step.
Keep it simple. We are all neglected customers.
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schreinervideo Posted 8:58 am
27 Sep 2007
http://schreinervideo.blogspot.com
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:07 am
27 Sep 2007
The other strange aspect of the piece is that they do not seem to advocate massive investments in things like public transit, although there is a nod in the direction of investing in solar panels to get the price down. I don't understand why only r&d is a legitimate governmental investment, except that maybe they are waiting for technological breakthroughs.
That said, I still think that they have provided an important public service by bringing up the idea of investment, as opposed to just regulation. Whether they do it in just the right way is not as important as trying to make the concept of public investment just as normal an instrument of environmental transformation as the idea of regulation.
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Sean Casten Posted 9:28 am
27 Sep 2007
But after that, their arguments fall apart as they make the same mistake that every other theoretician makes: they assume the economy is optimal. All dollars are rationally allocated. No waste in the system. Certainly no barriers to those who wish to deploy more profitable approaches. Make those simplifying assumptions and less carbon must equal less fuel must equal lower standard of living.
Too bad the logic is bogus. The biggest carbon emitter is the electric sector, where all costs are pass throughs, a lack of competition prevents efficient capital allocation, cost-plus rate making incentivizes waste and monopoly regulations erect massive barriers to those who have a better idea. Fix that (through regulatory reform, no less) and you get carbon reduction AND increase in standard of living.
Shellenberger & Nordhaus make the usual errors in their assumptions, and so they never get to this point. But it basically means you can throw out all the conclusions upon which that faulty house of cards is based.
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Jesse Jenkins Posted 10:26 am
27 Sep 2007
You and your Breakthrough Institute cohorts keep taking this combative/adversarial tone towards the folks who should be your allies - environmentalists and clean energy/global warming activists (who may or may not consider themselves the same people) - and you come off as anti-regulation.
But when you look at your more nuanced position, I don't think you really are saying that you're anti-cap and trade or anti-carbon tax or anti-regulation.
You write: "Our proposal, to state it once again, is that Congress pass legislation that either auctions permits or taxes carbon enough to a) establish a price for carbon sufficient to result in inexpensive emissions reductions, b) generate at least $30 billion a year for clean energy investments, and c) creating market conditions for the widespread adoption of these new technologies."
So when you boil it down, you just consider regulation an incomplete piece of the full puzzle, and the funny thing is, I don't think you'll get any argument from those who you are supposedly trying to argue with (the "establishment" environmentalists, clean energy advocates, and global warming activists); you'll certainly get no argument from me!
You write talk about "the environmental community's regulation-only agenda," but where does such an agenda really exist? Which environmental groups are really putting all their eggs in the regulation basket? Which enviro groups would oppose massive investments in a clean energy future?
The reality is, they'd be hard to find.
Why do you think there's been so much focus on auctioning the emissions allowances under a cap and trade proposal? Why do you think we've been most enviro groups have been opposed to the mediocre-to-just-plain-crappy proposals of Lieberman-Warner and Bingaman? Why do you think enviro groups have been championing the best aspects of the House and Senate energy packages as a first start towards shifting our public investment from dirty to clean energy sources?
Enviros and GW activists aren't fighting you on this! Industry is. "Government-is-the-problem" conservatives are.
Yet you present your arguments in such a controversial way that you make it out as if you were in some kind of controversial fight with enviros. You're not!
That may be a great way to get attention for your articles and books, but it's not a great way to build alliances with the kind of folks who you should be building alliances with, the kind of folks who are in actuality already on your side!
So perhaps we as a movement need to strategically emphasize the public investment part (and it's benefits) over the regulation part (we do!). This is a very valid strategic critique and one that I thank you for elevating to the fore of discussions.
But we all seem to be in agreement that neither regulation or investment will work on its own, and the two - cap-and-auction and public investment - are mutually supportive and necessary components of a true solution to the climate crisis. Playing one off against the other seems like a really counter-productive way to advance climate solutions, as does hyping up supposed rifts within the movement that don't really exist in the way you describe them.
I doubt you'd find too many environmentalists who'd argue with the following (nor would you seem to argue with any of this):
Putting a price on carbon is necessary to send the correct market signals and to spur private sector innovation. But this innovation can be accelerated by public-sector research and investment, as it should be. We've got to make the transition to a carbon neutral, prosperous America as quickly as possible, and that requires public investment in our common future.
It breaks down like this, in my opinion:
1) We need to put a price on carbon emissions to harness the innovation and power of markets to find solutions to the climate crisis and ensure we reduce global warming pollution to a safe level.
2) The atmosphere is a common good, owned by all Americans, not just polluters. We should therefore force polluters to pay for the privilege to emit global warming pollution, raising money in the process.
3) Putting a price on carbon is necessary as is forcing polluters to pay for their mess, but doing so will raise energy prices. The good news is, it will also raise a lot of money that can be pumped into making sure average Americans end up better off than before. We can do this in two ways:
a) we can pump much of that money into accelerating the transformation of our energy economy to a sustainable, low-carbon system. We can provide incentives to lower the costs of clean energy technologies, provide R&D and fund public-private partnerships to accelerate the deployment of the next generation of clean energy technologies and support the innovation fueled by the carbon regulation itself.
b) we can use some of the money to reform our tax structure so that it is more progressive and leaves more money in the pockets of average Americans. These reforms will more than offset the increases (if any) in your energy bill (remember that increased efficiency can offset the effects of increased energy prices too) so in the end, the average American will be better off under a cap and auction system than you were before.
That's the recipe for a carbon-neutral, prosperous America in my mind, and it doesn't seem like I'd get much argument from enviros or from you two.
So in closing, where's all the controversy?
Jesse Jenkins
_____________________
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Colin Wright Posted 10:49 am
27 Sep 2007
Given that even the IEA is predicting peak oil by 2012, it stands to reason that oil is going to go way up, on average. A windfall profits tax could start to channel some of the high gas prices to fund the transformation. If oil costs say $40/barrel to bring it to market, why should consumers be paying upwards of $100/barrel to Exxon-Mobil and its investors? (We could guarantee them perhaps $20/barrel profit.)Perhaps the threat of nationalization or gas-rationing will bring these behemoths to the table to see that a windfall profits tax is the best chance they have of staying alive in an era of energy depletion.
Incidentally, DR recently alerted us to a company that claims concentrated solar power (and thermal storage) could provide 98% of the nation's electricity for 10 cents/kwhr. True or untrue, we cannot be far away from the technology we need. The main obstacle, in my view, will be the carbon lobby.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:17 pm
27 Sep 2007
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Colin Wright Posted 4:45 pm
27 Sep 2007
cargo cult. That is, we are mysteriously given amazing things by the Market God (ipods, Mazerati's,..). We don't know where they came from, but we like them. We invent uses for them even if don't solve any needs in our lives (Game Boys, flat screen TV's...).
Now we pray that one day the market will deliver to us some fantastically cheap and clean enegy device. We even make offerings (subsidies, cap-and-trade allowances) to the very companies that bring us coal and oil in the hope of pleasing them. We just have to be patient.
The old-fashioned idea that people could collectively solve a problem directly seems to have gone down the memory hole.
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lorna salzman Posted 3:55 am
28 Sep 2007
Lorna Salzman
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Aklemm Posted 5:04 am
28 Sep 2007
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:14 am
28 Sep 2007
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 5:41 am
28 Sep 2007
Thanks for jumping in on this important topic. I hope you will continue to sink your teeth into this one -- the upcoming global warming legislation is crucial to America's future. We have to be as clear-eyed about what it will do and what it won't do as we are about the science of global warming.
First let me acknowledge points of agreement. We all agree that carbon should be priced. The question is how much can a carbon price in the U.S. do to reduce emissions?
Our analysis shows that even a relatively low carbon price will do very important work in moving from coal to natural gas, increasing efficiency, and motivating conservation -- in the United States. If executed perfectly well, it might reduce emissions 20 percent over the next couple of decades (emissions reduction calculations are very, very tricky, and I am thus happy to go over these calculations in a future post for anyone who is interested).
There are some who say the great thing about a price on carbon is that it avoids "picking winners and losers." That's a disingenuous claim. Setting a particular price on carbon very clearly does pick winners and losers. The winners are efficiency, conservation, and some kinds of sequestration (e.g., burning methane off of landfills).
All markets are constructed through regulation (the RMI quote above is a great one).
What a modest price on carbon (~$10 - 20/ton of Co2) won't do is quickly bring down the price of clean energy technologies.
Why does that matter? Because if we do not bring down the real price of clean energy technologies as quickly as possible, China and the rest of the world (us included) will bring on-line a whole new coal-based infrastructure that threatens to swamp any amount of action in the U.S.
China is not going to set a price for carbon, and thus raise its energy costs, without a good economic reason to do so. It won't blindly follow the U.S., as many environmentalists allege. And even if China establishes a modest carbon price in the future, it won't establish one nearly high enough to quickly move to solar and other clean energy technologies, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities for its coal plants (few to none of which are CCS ready).
One scenario we support is simply buying down the price of solar. How could this be done? In the same way we brought down the price of microchips in the 60s. Microchips used to be expensive, now they're cheap.
The DoD could purchase 10 - 20 billion dollars worth of PV -- through a competitive, transparent bidding process -- each year for 10 - 20 years. One calculation shows that it would cost $50 - 212 billion to make solar as cheap as conventional energy sources. Again, these are tricky calculations, but solar is a great case study because its price declines ~20 percent for every doubling of capacity.
There is no silver energy bullet, and this can't happen through regulation alone. Even in California, which passed the Million Solar Home law, I was told by a solar industry executive in July that because of red tape, only 20 homes are being installed with solar systems each day, when that number needs to be 200 per day to be on track. Andy Revkin at the Times pointed out that in order for solar to constitute one-seventh of the emissions reductions we need, there will need to be a whopping 200 million solar homes. And that isn't going to happen as long as solar is 5 - 10 times more expensive than coal and natural gas.
You've suggested that we've exaggerated the difference between our investment-centered approach and the environmental lobby's regulation-centered approach. But anyone who looks at the policy agenda of the leading environmental groups who determine global warming strategy in Washington will find that there is no strategy to buy down the price of solar. Nor is there any major investment strategy whatsoever. Don't confuse green rhetoric with policy reality -- you have to look at the legislation being pushed in Congress.
That said, there is today an exciting political opening. Senator Lieberman has indicated he wants to auction permits. What will the money raised go to? It's not yet clear. We estimate that what's needed is at least $30 billion in pork-free public investment capital to buy down the price of clean energy (and invest in other areas, like new transmission lines to transport wind power from rural areas to cities).
Could the Lieberman-Warner legislation do this? Absolutely. Is the environmental lobby united behind a strategy to make it happen? Unfortunately not.
At least not yet. The good news is that there's still time. The trouble that advocates are having building support for global warming legislation in Congress might be overcome if there were a big and bold strategy for creating jobs and establishing American economic leadership in the fastest growing markets in the world. Public investment is the key to doing this.
The truth is, it's up to the (largely post-boomer) generation of environmentalists and non-environmentalists to lobby environmental leaders, lobby Congress, and blog about the necessity of a large clean energy investment.
The best part about it all is that you don't really have to care all that much about global warming to support a big investment strategy for clean energy. Maybe you just care about energy independence. Maybe you just care about economic competitiveness. The large percentages of Americans who say they support cap and trade on global warming declines dramatically when voters learn that setting a price on carbon means raising the price of coal and oil. The solution is to put investment, jobs, and economic possibility -- not pollution limits and higher energy costs -- at the center of the debate.
If global warming legislation passes that does not raise and allocate at least $30 billion/year for clean energy investment, then we'll have to find some way to get that money from somewhere else. That public investment capital to bring down the real price of clean energy is more urgent, in our view, than a price on carbon.
In any event, it's great to have the conversation, and we'll look forward to your posts on our book, Break Through.
Best regards,
Michael
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John Fish Kurmann Posted 12:57 pm
28 Sep 2007
I'm clearly in the minority here, but I largely agree with your post (as I did with "The Death of Environmentalism"--the sooner we pull the plug, the better our chances of saving the world). But one factor you don't seem to be taking into account (at least in this post) is that North American natural gas production has peaked and gone into decline and significantly increasing imports of liquefied natural gas is problematic for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it would increase the U.S.'s reliance on energy imported from unstable and mostly-hostile parts of the world. I don't see any way we will have a supply of natural gas sufficient to fuel an increase in the number of natural-gas fired electricity plants; in fact, I think we are likely not going to have the supply necessary to fuel all the current plants in the foreseeable future. Production limits and rising prices are the reason why utilities have turned back to coal for electricity generation after decades of opting for natural gas to reduce air pollutants and acid rain.
So, if I'm right and we won't be able to use natural gas as a less-carbon dense transition fuel while we build an infrastructure for a truly carbon-neutral and sustainable energy system, how does this effect your strategy?
The world is sacred, and I am part of it.
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:47 pm
28 Sep 2007
Neocons will deny idea that government can be helpful even as Antartica turns into a summer resort, but for N and S, the problem is, how to stay in the political center while advocating something left-of-center? Their answer seems to be to funnel investment through the only institution that the Right and Center have agreed to since WWII, the Pentagon (talk about pork-barrel, which N and S state they want to avoid, but anyway)...They also prioritize research and development, which is another kind of government investment (as is, to a certain extent, education) that is also considered legitimate within the post-WWII political environment.
However, I don't think they can have their cake and eat it to. I find myself in the bizarre position of perhaps being their biggest defender here at Gristmill, even though I totally disagree with their advocacy of the Pentagon, because I think that their larger point -- which certainly doesn't depend on the Pentagon or an R&D only policy -- is so very important: that with this huge crisis we are facing, direct investment by the government is a very important means at our disposal, and one that the general public is very open to. And whether N&S like it or not, their position challenges, not just environmentalist orthodoxy, but more importantly, conservative economic and political orthodoxy as well.
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hugopottisch Posted 9:52 am
29 Sep 2007
There is an existential question at the heart of the debate over global warming: can green groups transform themselves into institutions motivated by a vision of prosperity and possibility? Or will they remain grounded in the politics of pollution and limits?
I agree that we have to consider spending and not only taxing. In this respect I do not agree that public R&D is as much needed as in former decades where the motivation was a Cold War enemy?
Rather one should consider more market transparency. One could argue that public spending in streets for cars indirectly subsidizes gasoline. That however would not help manifest an uptake electric cars?
The utility industries also scream for more transparency. Retail prices are often very different than production costs. Solar can be produced locally and economically during peak times and therefore does not stretch the grid as much as remotely produced energy?
Livestock is the worst single climate polluter on the planet and yet the US is pouring almost $20 billion per year of tax payer money into mostly factory farms. There is no transparency yet - no matrix of application and customer segment?
Further - it might well be that the US government comes to the conclusion that it is even better to subsidize solar than to invest in public or private R&D.
Sunflower's angry first comment was right. We underestimate how far many green technologies have traveled. This Microsoft Research lecture is among the best on the net.
Before pouring money into R&D - we should determine how far we have already come. Analise the German example a bit deeper before risking political instability with nuclear?
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 1:19 pm
30 Sep 2007
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
You wrote:
And whether N&S like it or not, their position challenges, not just environmentalist orthodoxy, but more importantly, conservative economic and political orthodoxy as well.
As a matter of fact we spend much of our new book, Break Through, challenging conservative orthodoxies even while we challenge environmentalist ones.
What's been so interesting about the reaction from David Hawkins at NRDC and many other environmentalists writing on Grist, is that they espouse market fundamentalism as much as anyone. The market fundamentalist's fallacy is that all we need to do is set a price for carbon and we will be well on our way to reducing U.S. emissions 80 percent and global emissions 50 percent by 2050.
They offer nothing in terms of an economic or political argument that considers what carbon would have to be priced at to make clean energy cost-competitive. Nor do they consider what must be done for China to reduce its emissions. Instead, they recite textbook descriptions of how behavior follows price.
So far, nobody has refuted the extended case we made in Environmentalism's Existential Moment that regulation alone can't get us from here to there for technical, political, and economic reasons.
As for the Defense Department -- I appreciate your concerns. But at the end of the day, I'd rather have our military back home in the U.S. purchasing and installing solar panels than fighting a lost war in Iraq.
We wouldn't be having this conversation through our personal computers and the Internet had the DoD not bought down the price of microchips.
That the U.S. military has done some heinous things -- why would that disqualify it from investing in the new energy sciences? The Pentagon is not a static, singular institution. It is neither all good nor all bad. Yes, it has made some bad contracting choices, like the B-2 bomber and the Osprey. But it has also made some excellent ones, like microchips and the Internet.
We should harness the military's strengths and assets to achieve positive goals, like making solar panels as cheap as coal -- or at least as cheap as natural gas.
Again, thanks for your comments.
Michael
P.S. In a bit of nice timing, the San Francisco Chronicle today ran a very good piece about how Silicon Valley -- including Intel and Google -- wouldn't exist were it not for the DoD.
The early chip industry, like the two waves of innovation before, initially depended on military expenditures, Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, writes in his book "A History of Modern Computing."
Only this time, it was the Cold War that opened the government's checkbook.
The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, prodded the United States to modernize its missile and space program. The newfangled silicon chips were considered vital - albeit costly - components, and Ceruzzi writes that NASA and the Defense Department bought so many "that the price dropped from $1,000 a chip to between $20 and $30."
Falling chip prices fueled development of new electronics for corporate customers and eventually individual consumers. Reliance on military purchases lessened, though defense dollars remained important in spurring research. Thus, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin later dreamed up Google, a defense research grant helped support their work. And when Stanford computer scientists won a robotic car race in 2005, the prize came from the Defense Department.
By the 1970s, therefore, Silicon Valley was poised to capitalize on new civilian technologies like PCs, as exemplified by Apple Computer.
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Michael Shellenberger Posted 1:23 pm
30 Sep 2007
You may be right about natural gas, though I would add that such predictions are exceedingly difficult. But I'm not sure I understand your point. Our argument is that no matter what happens with the price and availability of coal, oil, and gas, we need to make very large investments on the order of $30 billion annually to deploy, procure, and invent new clean energy technologies. Obviously, our goal is to get the price of clean energy down as quickly as possible so that it is at least in spitting distance of the price of coal.
Best,
Michael
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John Fish Kurmann Posted 3:25 pm
30 Sep 2007
My point was to ask whether it affects your plan if there is an insufficient supply of natural gas (NG) to increase NG-fired electricity generation, as suggested in your essay. How much does it affect your plan if not only is there insufficient NG to increase NG-fired electricity generation but insufficient NG to maintain the current levels of NG-fired electricity generation and NG use as a transportation fuel?
It's a sincere question, which perhaps would be answered by reading your book--but I haven't done that yet. Any energy plan that doesn't take into account near-term supply constraints can't be taken all that seriously, in my opinion, so I'm trying to determine if you've taken these possible constraints into account.
My personal suspicion is that constraints on both oil and NG supplies due to peaking oil production worldwide and past-peak North American NG production are going to force us to emphasize reducing consumption by changing the way we live over the transition to renewable technologies, but we shall see how things play out.
The world is sacred, and I am part of it.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:20 am
01 Oct 2007
First, I agree that the environmental movement seems stuck on the mainstream, market-based solutions that have been ascendant in the last 25 years. As you'll see in my next post, I go quite in the opposite direction! But I very much appreciate your arguments, as I hope I make clear, because I think that the ideas of a positive vision and public investment are essential to fighting global warming, and many other problems besides.
Now to the Pentagon -- and maybe a more extended discussion is called for -- but let me lay out a few general ideas here.
First, the military is filled with millions of hard-working men and women, and most of them want what's best for their country. But like any organization, they also want what's best for their institution, and though they may not agree, it is up to those of us outside the military to argue about the pluses and minuses.
Your argument is basically a spin-off argument, that is, that the military has produced important technological innovations in the process of pursuing its basic function (and the history of silicon valley is important, although much more complex than giving the pentagon the central role). But the Pentagon's basic function is, to be very direct about it, to destroy. I have a Ph.D. in international relations, so I know that this capacity is important, but it has repercussions in the larger economy. I worked for many years with an industrial engineer, the late Professor Seymour Melman, who wrote many books concerning the effects of military and military production on the wider economy.
To be as brief as possible, he argued that the military economy distorts and depletes the civilian economy. It isn't just that the money could be used elsewhere. since you are interested in avoiding pork barrel projects, you should be aware of the extreme pork barrel that goes into pentagon contracts, but also, the cost-plus nature of pentagon contracts -- that is, the contractors are guaranteed a profit -- has the predictable result that the work is generally overpriced, way too complex, a nightmare to maintain, and maybe worst of all, the engineers involved in the process adopt these attitudes.
So what would happen with solar? Depending on how it's done, it would possibly, or maybe even probably, be a contracting nightmare -- and I'm not even talking about outright fraud as we've seen in Iraq. If the military was too involved in the process, the solar panels developed would be so complex and expensive that they would be useless for the civilian economy.
In addition to that, the spin-offs like computer technology were of great intrest to the military because it directly effected the military's ability to destroy. Solar? maybe they could be used to power military bases, but that leads me to a more positive response -- if the main acquisition was for bases, why not just have the Federal (and local) governments buy solar (and other technologies) to make all governmental buildings zero-emission by a certain date?
The advantage of this approach would be that you would get a multiplicity of choices because different governments would choose different technologies, you would get something somewhat similar to a market, but without the big gorilla (not to diss gorillas) of the military sitting there dictating a one-best technology that would be a political decision (which military company should we reward, and in who's district). This is a wide topic, but the general point is that the civilian side of the government would be perfectly capable of doing a better job than the Pentagon, with a greater level of demand to spur economies of scale, than the military. As for research, the defense advanced resesearch projects agency (darpa) also has a rather complex history, but there is no reason that the national science foundation, or something similar set up for the express purpose of doing research, would not do a better job, because they would have the direct goal of generating renewable energy, not defending the nation.
There is also a political consideration -- basing policy proposals on the military involvement would make hash of forging a progressive coalition, in my opinion, but also, it would make it difficult to pare down -- more would be better, in my opinion -- the military budget to use for solar, etc. Now, I imagine you might think this is political suicide, and I want to assure any rightwingers (or mainstream types) reading this post that Michael has absolutely nothing to do with my opinions. Making a coalition with people who think the military should be prominent is dicey, at best -- although again I can understand the attempt, but I think there are better ways to do it.
I can't recall the source, but apparently there is some super-strategic office in the Pentagon, and the Dr. Strangelove there has written about global warming, but his approach seems to be, How can the Pentagon use this to its advantage? In other words, there will be instability, that means trouble, that means we will need a big military to deal with it. I would hate for a sincere attempt to deal with global warming turn into a greenwashing by the Pentagon just to try and get a bigger budget. There are better ways.
So there's my attempt-to-be-brief answer concerning the usefullness of broadening the governmental role from the Pentagon to the rest of the government, to put a positive spin on it.
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Jonathan M Feldman Posted 1:43 am
01 Oct 2007
Let us start with the idea of "opportunity costs."
These have to include the actual use of weapons systems, not just the domestic or national spill overs from military technologies weighed against their diversionary impacts on the domestic economy.
For every weapons system developed and used, the costs of the actual use, e.g. bombing Iraq or Afghanistan, killing civilians and infrastructure, has to be weighted economically. This usually does NOT happen. It did not happen among most economists making the macroeconomic benefits argument whom I met at a conference on defense economics I attended a few years ago in Paris.
Next, we have to measure not just the positive gains of military technologies against the positive losses, but we also have to consider the reasons why spin offs do NOT happen. In my academic articles I have shown that the power of military interests within the firm, can block the extent of spin offs because the military interests and their development criteria (and criteria for what should be developed and their claim on resources within the firm) are favored at the expense of civilian interests and innovators.
I will now quote from my article in this summer's Social Text special issue on militarism:
"Military Keynesianism has been used to keep the U.S. economy stimulated, but any 'macroeconomic gains' have been accompanied by harsh economic costs. While the military economy may promote innovation in key sectors, there is no guarantee that manufacturing (and eventually engineering and design) jobs created by such innovations will remain in the United States.44 For example, while military procurement contributed to the development and growth of the U.S. aerospace sector, it is far from clear that military subsidy of the sector guarantees domestic growth and U.S. jobs. The increasing limit to military contributions to the aerospace market is graphically demonstrated by the following startling statistic: 'in the future 70 percent of Boeing's new 787 will be manufactured offshore primarily in China and Japan.'45"
For footnotes, go to the original article.
Those hoping to use the military to support environmental technologies will be supporting military claims to resources and the military parts of defense firms against the civilian firms and civilian parts of firms trying to develop environmental technologies.
It is possible to convert or diversify defense firms to support civilian environmental technologies. To do so, requires civilian industrial policies that shrink and eliminate the military parts of production.
Are their military to civilian spill overs? Yes, of course there are. Is a policy of using military firms and technology in and of itself the best way to support environmental technology development? No. Most successful diversification and military development of civilian technology or technology with civilian applications depends on partnership with civilian firms as my research has shown.
There are some exceptions to this pattern, e.g. when the military develops a technology before there is a civilian equivalent (see Feldman, 1998 below). Yet, in this case, without civilian oversight, power and control the larger project would not have been successful. In the case of computers, we have a huge government subsidy that could have easily been directed to civilian firms. Past a certain stage, computer technology has been dominated by civilian firms anyway, e.g. Microsoft.
The idea that we should entrust the military industrial complex to develop environmental technologies would be a huge mistake. The military industrial complex has had trouble even developing weapons systems. Imagine the problems that they would have developing environmental technologies, if the process began and ended with their power, authority and expertise.
REFERENCES (Articles by Jonathan M. Feldman, Selective List)
BOOK CHAPTERS
"Industrial Conversion: A Linchpin for Disarmament and Development." Chapter 12 in Dimensions of Peace and Security: A Reader, Gustaaf Geeraerts, Natalie Pauwels and Eric Remacle, eds. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006.
"The Conversion of Defense Engineers' Skills: Explaining Success and Failure Through Customer-Based Learning, Teaming and Managerial Integration." Chapter 18 in The Defense Industry in the Post-Cold War Era: Corporate Strategy and Public Policy Perspectives, Gerald I. Susman and Sean O'Keefe, eds. Oxford: Elsevier Science, 1998.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
"From Warfare State to `Shadow State': Militarism, Economic Depletion and Reconstruction," Social Text, 91, Volume 25, Number 22, Summer, 2007.
Co-authored, "Medium-Sized firms and the Limits to Growth: A Case Study in the Evolution of a Spin-Off Firm," , European Planning Studies, Volume 8, Number 5, 2000.
"Extending Disarmament Through Economic Democracy," Peace Review, "Workplace Democracy," Summer Issue, May, Volume 12, Number 2, 2000.
"Civilian diversification, learning, and institutional change: growth through knowledge and power," Environment and Planning A, Volume 31, Number 10, October, 1999.
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hugopottisch Posted 4:00 am
01 Oct 2007
They inspired the following questions?
How much would oil and gas independence be worth to the cause of national security (and hence the DoS) alone? And what are the risks of promoting nuclear energy as a world-wide solution in this context?
I know that we can rather survive a dirty bomb in DC or NY than an ecological disaster... but there must be a price tag attached to those risks as well which should be passed on to solar, wind, geothermal solutions (and away from nuclear)?
How much is risk mitigation of Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, etc conflicts worth to us? The DoS/Pentagon/CIA should publish their current quantifications sooner rather than later in the climate change and nuclear context?
I hope that contrary to John's fear that the defense government "wants more enemies and risks" in order to protect their "jobs" - many actually want to prevent social costs. The same argument can be made for the pharma industry (which wants to keep us sick and ill and in need of their products) but that is not how the world works.
As long as humans are mammals they will fall ill and will need treatment. The same for violence and need for policing and defense of some form. Many defense employees understand this - they know that their jobs are more secured doing something that the public perceives as productive (eg also defending them from natural disasters at home and not some oil protecting adventure around the globe?)
Again:
DoS/Pentagon/CIA: give us your honest assessment of the security risks of global spread of nuclear applications. Please attempt to quantify it in economic terms ($) as well.
DoS/Pentagon/CIA: give us your honest assessment of the economic benefits ($) of resource independence (from eg Middle East, South America).
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solar greg Posted 8:00 am
02 Oct 2007
$30 billion is $100 per person per year. Nothing to sneeze at. If it is given as a loan to pay in 15 years, the payments will be lower than the savings on fuel or electricity obtained. Maybe 25 years for today's PV. With a bigger market the price will come down.
Don't give it away, that doesn't work. After all it is our money they are spending.
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richard schumacher Posted 11:35 pm
02 Oct 2007
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