Ted Nordhaus’s Posts

• The death of environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world 1

  Posted 4 years, 10 months ago

  This essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus was released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and it's been ruffling feathers ever since. Get the backstory here.

  Foreword

  By Peter Teague, Environment Program Director, Nathan Cummings Foundation

  As I write this, the fourth in a series of violent hurricanes has just bombarded the Caribbean and Florida. In Florida, more than 30 are dead and thousands are homeless. More than 2,000 Haitians are dead. And ninety percent of the homes in Grenada are destroyed.

  

  On the essay cover is… Read More

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Ted Nordhaus’s Recent Comments

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  Wish it were so

  Perhaps. But ask Joe how much public investment the big national enviro's he is defending have actually proposed. Ask him what legislation those groups are backing in Congress to establish the necessary public investment and to direct it toward the right investments. Ask him if any of the cap and trade legislation those groups are supporting would direct $30 billion, or even $15 billion annually toward those investments. Ask him what the plan of those groups is to safeguard those investments from pork barrel appropriation. That's where a serious public investment strategy begins, not with a few throw away lines at NRDC's or ED's websites. We see little evidence that the national enviro's are taking any of this very seriously. That's because they don't see it as particularly important.On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

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  correct

  yes that's correct. private sector is probably sufficient for efficiency, NG, and wind but not for PV, CCS, and not to make big gains in battery and other storage technologies.On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

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  We support investment in current tech now.

  I'm not sure how many times we have to say this. We believe that major investment in existing clean energy technologies is a necessity. In some cases, such as efficiency, cleaner conventional energy sources like natural gas, and perhaps even wind, a carbon price will be sufficient to dramatically increase use and deployment of those technologies. Doing so has the potential to drive US emissions down probably 20 to 30% over the next several decades. This is a good thing, we support it, and we believe we should enact policies to achieve that objective NOW. This will require both cap and trade  legislation or some other mechanism to establish a price for carbon and things like efficiency standards. But to drive emissions down much further, you need to bring solar, CCS, and other technologies which presently exist but are no where close in terms of cost and performance to scale very quickly. Carbon pricing, at least any carbon price that is likely to be established and sustained politically and economically, will not be sufficient to drive widespread deployment of these technologies. Yes, you do need a carbon price in place such that when you bring the price down far enough there is market pull to drive the widespread commercialization of those technologies. But a carbon price in and of itself will not be sufficient. That is the point that we have made over and over again in these posts so I don't know how many more times and ways we can figure out how to say it.On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

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  Criticism vs. Cynicism

  With the exception of CCS, which will require carbon prices well beyond what Congress is likely to establish (as noted in earlier posts, every cap and trade bill before the Congress, including Boxer/Sanders, has some form of safety valve built into it that will limit that actual price of carbon), every step you have listed above will result in modest, not deep reductions, in the neighborhood of 20 to 30%, not the 60 to 80% we need, and that's just in the US and other developed nations that establish such policies and only if they succeed wildly. It should be sobering to note that the EU, where most of these same policies have been established, along with a cap and trade system, has seen it's emissions go up since 2000, not down.   That's why all of the sources cited above call for major public investment now, not later and not as an afterthought or secondary priority. Why not acknowledge this reality Joe? And why don't you see doing so, and having a serious public technology policy as consistent with, indeed an asset to, any effort to establish needed regulatory policies? Because Bush and other conservatives have cynically suggested that the lack of low cost alternatives and the economic costs of pricing carbon at levels necessary to drive deep reductions are reasons not to cap carbon emissions? If as you say this has been the reason for delay and not say, the single minded obsession of environmentalists with defining their global warming and energy agenda around limiting pollution, then why would you not define your agenda such that it coopted those arguments rather than ignored them?

  I don't doubt that you have been advocating clean energy investment since before any of us were born Joe. But your posts make pretty clear that it is not a very high priority for you and a quick perusal of what the national environmental groups are actually advocating in Congress makes pretty clear that it is not a high priority for them either, no matter what they may say on their websites. Perhaps that is as it should be. But to suggest that any one with a divergent view who questions those priorities is essentially a global warming denier, or is trying to delay action to address global warming is outrageous and cynical. On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

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  Put Down the Talking Points Joe

  How many times can you cram the words Deniers, Delayers, Bush, Crichton, and Lomborg into a post, Joe? You'd do us all a favor if you'd put down the talking points and respond to the actual content of our post, which, through many thousands of words and four mostly unreadable posts you have failed to do. Mainstream energy science is pretty damned clear about the need for massive increases in public investment into clean energy research, development, and deployment. It is you, not we, whose views are outside the mainstream. It may be the case, as you have repeatedly asserted, with little evidence other than your own experience at DOE, that we "don't know what we're talking about." But if we don't know what we're talking about than neither do Stern, IPCC, or the many other reviews of the current state of energy technology and energy needs that we have repeatedly cited and you have repeatedly ignored in your attacks on us. Go ahead and make the case that those analyses are wrong. We are the last people to criticize heterodoxy.  But it is you not we who are coming out of left field on this. So please explain to us all why the energy experts and economists who we cite are wrong. You might even convince the good folks here that they are. But we'll thank you for not continuing to project your heterodoxy onto us.
  On Stabilizing the climate requires technology, public investment, and global economic development posted 2 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses