Comments on WattHead - Energy News and Commentary: Attention Nordhaus and Shellenberger: Time to Call...

Excellent discussion ... on many levels.

It...

2007-10-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

Excellent discussion ... on many levels.

It is frustrating to see statements that 'environmentalists don't talk about' or 'don't concern themselves with' investment.

Energize America (www.ea2020.org) certainly does ... and, well, most of the people involved with that would probably count themselves as environmentalists ...

Tim,

This is a bit of a cross post from Gr...

2007-10-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Tim,

This is a bit of a cross post from Grist, where I responded to Jon's concern about the involvement of the military:

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.

In case, Tim, (or anyone else) you would like to r...

2007-09-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

In case, Tim, (or anyone else) you would like to read another comment I made about this,you can look here

Jesse and Michael,
This is an excellent discuss...

2007-09-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

Jesse and Michael,
This is an excellent discussion and my thoughts are many but until my letter carrier brings me my copy of Break Through, my remarks will be relatively limited in scope (and after reading what Jon Rynn just posted, quite relevant to the discussion).

American public opinion research has consistently shown that since the 1970s very few Americans are "unsympathetic" to the environment. Claiming that you are against the environment is tantamount to saying that you are against puppies and kitties. Sure, there are the 2-3% of Americans who harbor a deep-seated hatred for the vile little creatures, but the vast majority of people are in favor of puppies and kitties. The point I am trying to make is that it does little good to argue about who is an environmentalist or whether environmentalism is dead because the category has lost conceptual utility.

How did this happen? I suggest that the reason the American environmental movement had its defining successes in the 60s and 70s was because Nixon saw that it was politically expedient to do so. Nixon sought to assuage any portion of the politically active young people's movement(i.e. anti-war, civil rights, feminist, etc.)that he could, and enacting environmental policy was the low hanging fruit.

For the environmental movement, the(un)intended consequence of the new openings in the political and legal opportunity structures was that the movement was criticized for sleeping with the enemy, becoming institutionalized and even (gasp) co-opted. This is hardly a new revelation, but it does shed light on why the environmental lobby has moved towards a regulation-centered approach, as Shellenberger rightly proposes. The mainstream environmental movement prefers to operate within the confines of the regulatory web because that's where they were put nearly 40 years ago by the Republicans. And since then, Americans have codified the legal focus of environmentalism because many have found it much easier to be legal than to be political.

Unfortunately, being political often means making trade-offs in order to build alliances. And no-one understands this better than Mr. Shellenberger, who suggests we need to back Lieberman's plan to tax carbon while ignoring the fact that the Senator wants to bomb Iran. And not only that, but Shellenberger also suggests that we should funnel more money through the Dept of Defense to spark the solar revolution we have been awaiting for some thirty years. Now THAT is some coalition-building!

These are the trade-offs we must contend with -- and they are not particularly appetizing. Environmentalism wasn't dead, it was only resting!

Jessie --

I apologize if I'm dragging my co...

2007-09-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

Jessie --

I apologize if I'm dragging my comments over from Gristmill, but there are two points in particular that I wanted to ask you about:

1) In terms of public investment, I've been perplexed that environmental groups seem to ignore the necessity for public transit, which will have to be done by governments -- it's not something the market can deal with (although certainly private companies can make the vehicles). So when environmental groups mention investment, they don't seem to discuss any things that can be concretely invested in -- such as public transit. It turns into a very vague couple of words, such as "energy options". So therefore it seems that, relative to the thought put into regulatory solutions, investment seems to be ignored.

2) Nobody seems to have noticed that N and S advocate using the Pentagon to funnel their r&d funds. I've commented on this a few times at Gristmill, but besides my general revulsion at the thought of increasing military funding, it would seem that advocating such a position would completely alienate a large section of the progressive public; it seems more designed to appeal to the Right. Which may be why they are so confrontational; I can't tell if they are trying to grab a Democratic Leadership Council type alleged "middle ground" (it's actually way to the right of the center, which they should know because of their polling expertise).

So, I was wondering what you thought. Thanks.

Jesse-

It's not so much that many climate a...

2007-09-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

Jesse-

It's not so much that many climate activists "oppose" public investments and technological innovation efforts (except for carbon capture and storage and nuclear), they just don't prioritize it enough even though clean energy technology is arguably the most important (and politically/economically pragmatic) solution to the climate problem. We're all for a Sky-Trust approach (and many of our friends are working on Sky-Trust), but we're concerned that A) any money generated will be subject to the pork-barrel, special interest politics of DC and leaves us in a precarious situation with investment (especially when what's needed is around $30 billion annually); and B) Sky-Trust is dependent on raising energy prices, which may be much less politically feasible than an outright public investment-innovation approach and may result in all the funds being redistributed for compensation.

Dear Jesse,

Thanks for jumping in on this i...

2007-09-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Jesse,

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 could reduce emissions roughly 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).

What a modest price on carbon (~$10 - 20/ton of Co2) won't do is quickly bring down the price of clean energy technologies, for reasons we explained our in our recent post, "Environmentalism's Existential Moment."

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/27/12312/0380

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 Democrats 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.

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 at the center.

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

Comments on WattHead - Energy News and Commentary: Attention Nordhaus and Shellenberger: Time to Call...

Excellent discussion ... on many levels.It...

Tim, This is a bit of a cross post from Gr...

In case, Tim, (or anyone else) you would like to r...

Jesse and Michael,This is an excellent discuss...

Jessie --I apologize if I'm dragging my co...