How To Spark An Energy Quest  

Andrew Revkin has a column in The New York Times on the need to rapidly adopt clean energy technology - "How to Spark an Energy Quest".

A world with 6.7 billion people, a third of whom cook on dung or firewood and the rest depending on fossil fuels, needs far more energy options than it currently has, almost everyone agrees.

But consensus dissolves when it comes to the question of how best to identify, develop and spur the diffusion of new energy choices that don’t come with climate or security risks. The main focus for years has been on a climate bill or climate treaty that would cap emissions and cut the cost with trading of pollution credits so the cuts could be made by companies or countries that could do the job most cheaply. The cap would encourage conservation, drive innovation, and raise some money for basic research.

A significant chorus of economists and technology experts has insisted, however, that with or without a binding restriction on emissions, an epic energy quest is needed — and not being pursued.

I have a piece in the Week in Review section on what these experts say is a gaping technology gap that cannot be filled by raising the price of polluting. They fear the focus on passing legislation or trying to negotiate a new climate treaty to cut emissions is distracting from the need to pursue an aggressive, sustained, variegated portfolio of energy research, mainly financed by government.

Their critics say their stance, however well intentioned, will produce the real delays, given how much can be done now simply by cutting energy waste with tools already on the shelf — ranging from strengthening efficiency standards to eliminating billions of dollars in persistent fossil-fuel subsidies that continue to make coal and oil much cheaper than they really are when all their hidden costs are revealed.

My impression is that the tugging between the two camps masks a lot of agreement on the need, really, to pursue all of the above. It’s just that the people involved in the discourse are most familiar with, or comfortable with, particular philosophies (regulatory, exploratory, top down, bottom up).

There clearly is a vast array of low-hanging fruit ready to be harvested — much at a profit — by cutting the energy used in buildings, transportation, appliances and the like, as the McKinsey Global Institute has repeatedly pointed out.

Here’s [a comment] to prime the pump, from Paul Hawken:

I just read the piece, “A Shift in the Debate Over Global Warming,” which focused on technological innovation with respect to climate change. Many people are talking about a Manhattan project on the supply side, but I have been saying, for some time, that we cannot get there from here unless we also have a Manhattan project on the demand side.

A lot of capital and focus is on the supply side for myriad and obvious reasons. But demand is the fastest way to create “new” energy. In the US, for every 100 units of energy that we put into our economic system, more than 98 units are wasted accordng to the National Academy of Engineering. Detroit is sitting on more oil than Iraq if it converted to hyperlight, hypersafe, carbon-fiber cars. It would be so much less expensive to invest in America than desert oil.

Demand reduction makes new renewable sources of energy, which may be more expensive in relation to carbon-based energy, more affordable because overall energy costs would be going down, not up. Demand is not as sexy as giant wind turbine platforms being towed out to sea or strung up on steel kites into the upper atmosphere, but demand side effciences are faster, less costly, and more effective.

The charged and complex debate over how to slow down global warming has become a lot more complicated. Most of the focus in the past few years has centered on imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies.

Leaders of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change - the scientists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year with former Vice President Al Gore - have emphasized that market-based approach. All three presidential candidates are behind it. And it has framed international talks over a new climate treaty and debate within the United States over climate legislation.

But now, with recent data showing an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency, a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated the case bluntly in a recent article in Scientific American: "Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people."

What is needed, Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A commitment approaching the scale of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.

And time is critical, they say, as China, India and other developing nations march headlong into the modern world of cars and electric consumption on their way to becoming the dominant producer of greenhouse gases for decades to come. Indeed, China is building, on average, one large coal-burning power plant a week.

In an article in the journal Nature last week, researchers concerned with the economics, politics, and science of climate also argued that technology policy, not emissions policy, must dominate.

"There is no question about whether technological innovation is necessary - it is," said the authors, Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado; Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Christopher Green, an economist at McGill University. "The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation?"

Proponents of treaties and legislation that would cap emissions do not disagree with this call to arms for new, low-carbon technologies. But they say the cap approach should not be ignored, either.

One of them is Joseph Romm, a blogger on climate and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit group pushing for federal legislation to restrict greenhouse gases. "Of course we need aggressive investments in R&D - I for one have been arguing that for two decades," Romm wrote in a post to his blog, climateprogress.org. "But if we don't start aggressively deploying the technologies we have now for the next quarter century, then all the new technologies in the world won't avert catastrophe."

Another expert who has emphasized the importance of capping emissions, Adil Najam of Boston University, said he hoped this emerging debate would not distract from doing whatever is possible now to curb emissions. "You can do a tremendous lot with available technology," said Najam, one of the authors of the intergovernmental panel's report on policy options. "It is true that this will not be enough to lick the problem, but it will be a very significant and probably necessary difference."

But Pielke and his co-authors say that a recent rise in emissions - particularly in fast-growing emerging powers - points to the need for government to push aggressively for technological advances instead of waiting for the market to force reductions in emissions.

Sachs pointed to several promising technologies - capturing and burying carbon dioxide, plug-in hybrid cars and solar-thermal electric plants. "Each will require a combination of factors to succeed: more applied scientific research, important regulatory changes, appropriate infrastructure, public acceptance and early high-cost investments," he said. "A failure on one or more of these points could kill the technologies."

In short, what is needed, he said, is a "major overhaul of energy technology" financed by "large-scale public funding of research, development and demonstration projects."