conflicted and corrupted nature of NRDC putting a green stamp on business as usual.

bernardo issel - http://www.NonprofitWatch.org - bernardo (at) NonprofitWatch.org

    I've been in touch with Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger for the past year as they've done their research into energy sciences and policy.  They have combined their extensive research, including consultations with many different experts, with important insights into the political nature of global warming and the problems that poses for environmental politics.  Their result is compelling.  

    Dave Hawkins's posting criticizing Shellenberger and Nordhaus's recent article contains a reasonable-sounding argument but one with false premises.  When one corrects those premises, the argument as a whole falls apart.  It is not Shellenberger and Nordhaus who are naïve or misinformed.  

    Hawkins's first mistaken premise is that the technologies we need already exist.  Certainly wind and photovoltaics have made huge strides in the last couple of decades, with declining prices and growing markets.  Both industries have posted double-digit annual growth for more than decade.  Indeed, prices for both technologies have gone up in the last year due to their success: demand is growing faster than production capacity.  But even all that success has left renewables with a small part of the electricity market, just 0.8% for wind in the United States at the end of 2006, and considerably less for PV.  Even Germany, a country with much stronger policies supporting wind and much higher prices for fossil fuels, only gets 7% of its electricity from wind.  (A great summary of wind is in the Department of Energy's Annual Report on the U.S. Wind Power Installation, Cost, and Performance Trends: 2006, available at http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/41435.pdf).  

    No doubt these technologies can continue to grow and their potential in terms of wind and solar resources is immense.  But their prices need to come down further.  More importantly, the industry needs dramatic innovation in energy storage to get wind and PV to be more than 15-20 % of the grid.  

    All of this takes lots of R&D money and R&D spending on renewables, private and public alike, is tiny compared to the challenges it faces.  Where is that money going to come from?  Much of this research is long-term and highly uncertain in its payoff.  Historically, governments have made those sorts of investments.  In industries where private firms make big investments in R&D, government is right there making them as well (think biotech and IT).  Indeed, in the area of renewable energy with the most technological ferment in the private sector, biofuels from environmentally benign sources, those firms are benefiting directly from government-supported R&D in molecular biology, a field in which the federal government has spent generously for decades, with current budgets in the tens of billions of dollars.  

    Hawkins's second premise is that consistent policies demanding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will create an incentive for firms to create the needed technologies.  The problem is that no such policies exist and no one knows how to create them.  There are two approaches (with many variations) to such regulations.  Traditional command and control regulations impose quantitative limits on how much greenhouse gas any emitter can put into the atmosphere.  Such regulations work only when the regulations directly affect a small number of players and the costs they impose don't become overly burdensome.  So the EPA can require catalytic converters on every car in the United States because they only have to monitor a half-dozen automobile manufacturers and force them to comply.  Greenhouse gas emissions are different.  To reduce them, you need to monitor and enforce, for example, not only the mileage that 300 million cars get (which depends in part on how people drive them) but also how many miles people drive.  That would be an administrative and political nightmare.  

    The alternative is market-based regulation, which means trade-able permits for large stationary emitters like power plants and higher (much higher) prices for fuels for cars, homes, office buildings, etc.  But this confronts the problem that Shellenberger and Nordhaus depict so clearly:  make the price high enough and governments will encounter political backlash.  

    No doubt the United States could and should do more to improve energy efficiency and internalize the environmental costs of energy into its market price.  But a look around the world suggests the limits of that approach absent an aggressive effort to develop better technology.  Dozens of countries have adopted and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, yet only three of them, Russia, Germany, and Britain, have any hope of complying with it, and only because the treaty choose the base year of 1990.  It turns out that 1990 was a peak year for greenhouse gas emissions for those three countries for reasons particular to each of them.  So mandating a reduction of emissions from a baseline of 1990, instead of 1997 when the treaty was negotiated, makes it relatively easy for those countries to comply, and even at that it will be nip and tuck for Germany and Britain to comply.  If the Kyoto negotiators had set the base year at 1997, no one would be in compliance.  

    Think about it.  Even a casual look around Europe shows countries with small cars, small houses, compact land use, high-quality mass transit, and very expensive energy thanks to steep taxes.  And yet, almost none of them will comply with Kyoto, which requires modest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions compared to the sorts of cuts the IPCC says the planet needs to avoid severe global warming.  I admire greatly what the Europeans do, but they don't have the solution to global warming either.  

    All this calls for a serious initiative in developing new and improved renewable energy technologies.  Certainly that is not enough, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus point out, and regulations have their place.  But we have been trying to solve global warming on the cheap and have failed environmentally and politically.  It's time to get serious about policies that can actually make a difference.  

I haven't read the piece under discussion, have only been following the discussion on this list. It is of course true that massive investment in R&D, cap and trade, and regulations other than cap and trade, are all part of the solutions.

Not all of the Socolow wedges, optimistically described at 7 needed to stabilize emissions over 50 years, but closer to 12 - 14 or more to achieve needed reductions over 43 years, can occur without technological breakthroughs, notably solar. Some, such as the stop deforestation/start afforestation wedge are likely to achieve less than planned. Since wind in most parts of the world uses inefficient natural gas backup, there should be a recalculation of wind + backup, to see how much reductions are achieved by switching to wind.

I have been struck at the differences between policy reports from academics and governments and UN groups all over the world and those coming from environmental groups such as NRDC. On the NRDC pages, I see that solar fuel is free and infinitely renewable, but of course the panels aren't. No mention that I saw is made of the expectation that solar will provide considerably less than 1% of world energy in 2030 unless technological breakthroughs occur. No mention that I saw is made of the need to provide inefficient natural gas as backup to wind, of the limits of wind - both because there is little wind in some areas, and because the wind doesn't blow when it is especially cold or hot.

I did see attacks on nuclear power that I never expected from a mainstream environmental organization, such as worries about radioactivity release from nuclear waste transport, worries that certainly do not come from reports from scientists. Alarming new worries about Yucca Mountain???? I doubt it.

Indeed, NRDC and other groups have recently been over-emphasizing the dangers to the public from mercury released by burning coal, perhaps at the expense of the other dangers of coal. I and everyone else agree that we need to stop with the coal already, but you confuse people as to why.

Electricity in 2050 worldwide, and probably in the US, is expected to come primarily from nuclear power and coal and gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS reduces GHG emissions 80 - 90%, but use more coal/natural gas, and more money, to do so). It is vital that we continue to heavily subsidize wind and solar, that we increase the subsidies, particularly of solar. Dramatically increased R&D is also crucial, both for efficiency and low-GHG sources of energy. Regulations are needed to change human behavior when we don't respond to price signals (eg, fuel-efficient cars, more insulation in new construction and retrofits, and CFL's).

It is important for environmental groups to provide a more realistic acknowledgment of the role nuclear power will play in our future, and stop with the anti-science attacks already.

It is my belief that one reason why Americans are relatively lackadaisical about climate change, and unwilling to make it a major priority when choosing legislators, is in part because changes are asked of us -- we will need to pay to mitigate climate change, we will need to restrict flying and driving over BAU. We need as well to change long-held beliefs, such as the purported dangers of nuclear power are important enough to avoid it.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street