Comments lmeisel has made

  • Limits of Regulation

    Andrew -

    It's not that I don't think regulation can spur innovation, but I think the kind of innovation it can spur is quite limited, and it's much more effective at bringing nearly cost-competitive technologies - like wind - to market.

    Putting a price on carbon will, by design, direct private investment towards the least expensive methods of emissions reduction - not towards more expensive, but equally important, clean energy technologies such as solar energy and carbon capture and storage. Pricing carbon dioxide at $7-12 per ton will drive investments into efficiency and conservation, and will create incentives for energy providers to build gas-fired rather than coal-fired plants. These measures could result in modest emissions reductions.

    Reducing carbon emissions at the level we need to prevent catastrophic climate change would require setting a much higher price for C. For today's clean energy alternatives to become cost-competitive with coal, gas, and oil, the price of carbon dioxide would have to be set at exorbitant levels: $37-$74 per ton to make CCS economically viable, and $217 per ton for solar PV cost-competitive.

    Even in Europe, with a high price for C, they're still building new coal plants. I think that politically, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get a price for C high enough to spur the kind of big innovations we need, so I think direct government investment should be doing the bulk of the work.

    Sounds like we agree that govt RD&D is crucual - is there a certain yearly figure you'd like to see?

    Thanks!
    LindsayOn How much will it really cost to address climate change? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 11 Responses

  • the need for massive RD&D

    Andrew-

    DuPont created a low-cost substitute that made it easy for governments to enact Montreal. If there had been no low-cost substitute, we can't be sure
    what would have happened. Maybe governments would have acted anyway, or maybe they would have done what governments are doing today on climate, signing treaties and doing nothing of significance to reduce emissions.

    Governments would like to reduce their emissions, but doing so will not be inexpensive like Montreal. Sure, efficiency and conservation pay for themselves, but there have long been non-financial obstacles to them that won't go away with a price on carbon. Wind is relatively cheap, and could get ramped up, and you might get a single Princeton stabilization wedge. But you need somewhere between 15 and 40 more wedges of that size, and getting them will cost money. This is the reason that we need a massive research,
    development and deployment effort to make that effort be as inexpensive as possible so that it happens as quickly as possible while maintaining rather than slowing economic growth, which voters and governments have made perfectly clear that they aren't willing to deliberately slow down with
    higher energy prices.On How much will it really cost to address climate change? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 11 Responses

  • Montreal is the Wrong Model

    The Montreal protocol was successful because inexpensive alternatives to ozone-depleting chemicals had already been invented when it went into effect. In fact, an earlier attempt at a global agreement failed several years earlier because the alternative chemicals were not yet available, and the cost of action was viewed by governments as too high. It was not until Dupont demonstrated that it could, at comparable cost, produce HCFCs, a chemical alternative to CFCs that did not deplete the ozone layer, that an international agreement to protect the ozone was achieved.

    Advocates of cap-and-trade believe that technology innovation follows regulation, but history shows the reverse is just as often the case. On How much will it really cost to address climate change? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 11 Responses

  • All the Technology we Need

    A large portion of the environmental movement does seem to believe that we have all the technology we need to deal with climate change. Al Gore has repeatedly said just that, and he continues to do so on his newly launched We Campaign:

    "The technological and policy solutions for the climate crisis already exist."

    "This is the clean energy economy we can adopt with today's technologies, resources, know-how..."

    Nearly everyone has adopted the rhetoric of praising clean energy, but few environmental leaders have the policy agenda to back it up. The Breakthrough Institute is calling for at least $30 billion a year in technology R&D -- not because we want to delay action on climate change, but because nothing less than this will address the monumental scale of the problem.

    The Piekle et al peice was indeed a "bombshell" because it revealed the huge technology gap we still have to cross. On RPJr.'s latest achievement in getting huge news coverage for saying very little posted 1 year, 8 months ago 3 Responses