QOTD: Public investment

Not explicitly energy-related, but this from Ethan Pollack speaks to the fallacy of federal legislators in accounting for federal investment (via Ezra Klein):

Cutting a dollar from the deficit by not repairing a road keeps you from passing one dollar of debt on to a future generation. But you are passing on a crumbling road. If you look at that using an accounting perspective that includes assets and liabilities, then by making a cut in the budget by not repairing a road, you’re not necessarily saving that money.

Local knowledge and energy poverty

Cross-posted at the Breakthrough Generation Blog.

I just attended a presentation by Marlene Grundstrom, who works with the Stockholm Environment Institute on energy access and energy poverty.

Often left out of both discussions of climate change and global poverty, lack of access to clean, affordable energy turns out to be a key driver of both, and a considerable source of suffering and mortality in less-developed countries. To illustrate this, Ms. Grundstrom noted that indoor smoke inhalation kills more people every year (around 1.4 million people) than malaria does. Also, while the mortality incidence from AIDS and malaria are projected to decrease in coming years, deaths from indoor smoke inhalation are expected to rise.

One of her main points was that projects to expand energy access are more successful when they rely on local institutions and local knowledge. When a community has ownership over a project and can continue implementing it even after the donor or aid organization departs, the project has a higher chance of achieving its goals.

Ms. Grundstrom noted a case where women in Ethiopia rejected clean cookstoves in favor of traditional coal-burning stoves, because food cooked with clean cookstoves tasted differently. Here we see local knowledge as the dominant force in dealing with energy poverty, as opposed to thermodynamic or epidemiological concerns.

This idea reminded me of a couple things. One was the Catholic Social Teaching Principle of Subsidiarity. As Pope John Paul II summarized in his celebration of the centennial of Rerum Novarum,

A community of a higher order should not interfere with the life of a community of a lower order, taking over its functions.

Catholic Social Teaching in general recognizes the role that state and national governments have to play in providing public goods (infrastructure, access to resources, health care, etc.), but also notes that where possible, a community should own and operate the institutions and laws that govern its collective destiny.

I was also reminded of the work of Dan Kammen, a professor of mine at UC Berkeley and current Chief Technical Specialist of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency at the World Bank, whose work on "mundane science" (PDF) jumped to mind.

In energy and development research, it appears as a disproportionate focus on advanced combustion systems, commercial fuels, and large centralized power facilities, even though more than 3 billion people rely on wood, charcoal, and other biomass fuels for the bulk of their energy needs.

Kammen's chief point is that the engineering focus on "cutting edge" research tends to overwhelm any efforts at addressing energy poverty, where solutions may be less envelope-pushing but just as, if not more, socially relevant. The bias against mundane science, as he calls it, is an impediment to real humanitarian and development action.

Why do I cite these two ideas? Because energy access does seem to receive a disproportionately small amount of attention in energy/climate discussion (see: this blog). However, it really is both a cause and a symptom of problems people are already hard at work dealing with around the world (addressing poverty/development in general and developing clean fuels and renewable technologies). One can imagine and observe other motivating principles from different sciences and faiths. Scientific, humanitarian, economic, and religious motivations can all point towards the goal of reducing energy poverty and expanding access to clean energy.

1.5 billion people worldwide lack any access to electricity*, and therefore rely on traditional biomass and dung for the primary energy source. A movement to drive down the cost of clean energy, so that industrial nations can replace their incumbent carbon infrastructure with renewables, is inextricably linked to closing the global energy gap and expanding energy access to the world's poor. Delivering the energy poor the means to control their own destiny through expanded access to clean and affordable electricity must be an explicit element in efforts towards decarbonization.

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*According to the UN, "electricity access" means 40Wh/day (4 hours of access to a 40W light bulb per day), which tells me that that 1.5 billion figure actually understates the problem.

Climate Pragmatism Coverage

"Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience, and No Regrets," a new report* from the Hartwell Group, was released this morning. The report is based on the idea that the old paradigms for dealing with climate change -- global accords, abatement timetables, carbon pricing -- have either come up short or failed completely. Thus, a new pragmatic strategy must take hold, and the authors of "Climate Pragmatism" believe the have identified such a strategy. A pragmatic approach to dealing with the causes and effects of global climate change will rely on three general policy goals:

1. Energy Innovation
2. Climate Resilience
3. No-regrets Pollution Reduction

These three elements, often thought of as ancillary goals of what might be considered the more ambitious and sweeping paradigms that failed in the past, can add up to meaningful action on climate change, so say the authors**.

The report, available for only a few hours as of this posting, has already generated considerable coverage.

• Bryan Walsh at TIME Magazine: "What's needed in this long hot season is an oblique approach to climate change, one that sidesteps the roadblocks by taking advantage of popular, no-regrets actions that are worth doing even if global warming wasn't real. It's not as simple or as elegant as one global deal — but it might actually work."
• Teryn Norris at Americans for Energy Leadership: "Climate Pragmatism is an important and welcome contribution to the debate and will surely spark much-needed rethinking among energy and climate policy advocates."
• Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations: "I have nothing against doing the things that the Climate Pragmatism authors recommend. It may even be true that society can’t do much more. But if that’s the case, we need to admit the full implications, so that we can start preparing to deal with the consequences."
• Walter Frick at the New England Clean Energy Council: "Yes, some policies will always be heavier lifts than others. But embracing pragmatism for the long-term means not only evaluating the “realm of the possible” in the short-term, but working to shape it over time."
• Marc Gunther via his blog: "I’m not persuaded that we should talk less about the climate–because we really haven’t began to have an honest debate about global warming...It leads me to wonder whether the authors of this report have the problem exactly backward."

Will update as further coverage comes in...

Click here [PDF] to read the whole report.
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*Full disclosure: I am currently employed as a policy fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, one of the publishers of "Climate Pragmatism."
**The full list of authors can be found here.

Quote of the Day

"Minimal energy would be that required to provide food, water, shelter, and access to medical care. Civilizations require more. People need to be educated; funds are needed for arts, humanities, sciences, and for recreation and entertainment. Life should be joyful, and music, dance, and the graphic arts don't come energy-free. If people have such limited energy available that they can only focus on teh bare necessities of life, they don't ahve time to think about who to vote for, how to organize and run a political campaign, go to town meetings, and so on--the things that we take for granted but are necessary for a democracy. Thus it also may be that democracies benefit from, or even require, more than the minimal energy required for the barest human survival."

- Daniel B. Botkin, Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence (2010)

Krugman Still Doesn't Get It

By Alex Trembath and Devon Swezey. Originally published at the Breakthrough Institute Blog.

Yesterday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman published a blog post repeating his insistence that a carbon price is the key (if not the only) incentive needed to unleash "the magic of the marketplace" and drive innovation in clean energy technology. It was reminiscent of the conventional wisdom of the climate community over the past decade, and reflective of Mr. Krugman's own typically neoclassical views on the economics of climate change. Unfortunately, Mr. Krugman (and most climate policy advocates) continues to get the story wrong on clean energy innovation.

In the spring of 2010, Krugman wrote a widely-read piece in the New York Times Magazine called "Building a Green Economy," which pondered why, if anti-environmentalists are so adamant in their free-market faith, do they not support a price on carbon dioxide emissions. A carbon price, in Krugman's estimation, would serve as a signal to the market, driving innovation in cleaner technologies to the point where they achieved price parity with fossil fuels.

Since publishing his original article, cap-and-trade has crashed and burned. The prospect of pricing carbon emissions in the United States is effectively zero for the foreseeable future, but Mr. Krugman is still pushing a carbon price as the key to unlocking a clean energy future. On his blog, he noted the successful innovation in fossil-burning energy technology over the past century, and suggested that the only thing standing in the way of renewables achieving the same innovation path is the lack of a carbon price.

"The point is that renewable energy like wind and solar has not gone through a comparable process of improvement -- yet -- because the incentives haven't been there. But once we get to the point where a carbon price makes these commercially viable, there's every reason to expect huge improvement over time through, yes, the magic of the marketplace."

But Mr. Krugman neglects the substantial obstacles to a large-scale shift to renewable energy technologies, stemming from technical challenges related to intermittency of electricity generation, energy storage, and materials constraints. Contrary to what Krugman implies in his article, fundamental scientific breakthroughs are required to fully replace our fossil fuel infrastructure with clean energy technologies, a view shared by Nobel physicist and current Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

To his credit, Krugman acknowledges the need for new innovation in clean energy technology, a view that would place him outside of the mainstream climate advocate's mantra that "we have all the technology we need and lack only political will." Yet in expressing his zeal for a carbon price, Krugman ignores the actual history of technological innovation. As research from the Breakthrough Institute has shown, the emergence of key technologies has much more often been the product of directed and sustained government investment than the result of price signals. Breakthrough's report, "Where Good Technologies Come From," demonstrates that most game-changing technological developments--from interchangeable parts to railroads to jet engines to microchips to the iPhone, GPS and the Internet--resulted from direct federal investments in research, procurement, and deployment, often in active partnership with private industry.

Krugman falls victim to an ignorance of technological history and the relative roles for technological "push" policies, like research and development, and demand "pull" policies, like a carbon price. As Robert Atkinson and Matt Hourihan of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explain in their report on carbon pricing, "truly disruptive innovation comes, not from price-based demand-pull, but from focused (and occasionally, not-so-focused) technology supply-push, in the form of research-driven technological development."

Indeed, if our goal is driving innovation in maturing clean energy technologies, a carbon price is not even the most effective demand-pull mechanism in our policy toolbox. To be sure, pricing carbon can increase demand for clean energy technologies, but it is not optimized to drive innovation in energy technologies. Krugman writes that aviation technology steadily improved through "experience and practical innovation," and that clean energy must do the same. But innovation in aviation and jet engines did not happen because the price of sea travel (the main substitute) increased. Rather, military procurement created a demanding customer relationship that constantly pushed the private sector to innovate and improve technology for military application.

Despite his enduring affection for a price on carbon emissions, there is no indication that Mr. Krugman's sensibilities would prevent him from embracing an energy agenda founded on government research and investment. Indeed, Krugman's New York Times colleague David Leonhardt has embraced a technology-first energy innovation agenda, recognizing that a carbon price will be more politically difficult and less effective in the absence of cheaper, more reliable clean energy technologies.

As the Breakthrough Institute has consistently advocated, there are multiple policies and institutions with great potential to drive investment and innovation in clean energy technology. Some, like the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, are already in existence (if underfunded). Others, like a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA), are not. Overcoming the challenges presented by market lock-in of fossil energy infrastructure, engineering challenges of clean energy technology, and climate change demands a broad suite of policies, of which a carbon price is only a small (and not even the most important) part.

Mr. Krugman is no technologist, by his own admission. In yesterday's blog post, he referred to the engineering of wind technology as "not my field of expertise, to say the least." But if a political economist as influential as Krugman is to continue weighing in on the energy technology challenge, it would be appropriate for him to develop a literacy in the history of technological innovation. Ever the champion of publicly funded health care, Krugman should have great affection for the government policies and institutions that can more effectively build a green economy.

After the failure of the carbon-price-centric American Power Act last summer, and with austerity measures increasingly dominating federal policy, the prospects for a carbon tax in the United States remain very low. Without one, the case for an energy innovation agenda not only remains, it has grown stronger.

Alex Trembath is a Breakthrough Generation Fellow and Devon Swezey is Project Director at the Breakthrough Institute.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

Despite my recent obsession with Google+ coverage and Bay Area BART protests, I found time this week for energy news as well.

• My colleagues and I are researching the coming clean tech crash, as subsidies and tax incentives for renewable energy technology expire. As Devon Swezey recently wrote in Forbes, "The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable."

• Australia, against all odds, has passed a carbon pricing scheme. Leigh Ewbank of Beyond Zero Emissions digs into the new policy, noting that a the CO2 price will require auxiliary policies to drive real innovation and deployment of clean energy technology.

• A new report (PDF) from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explains why ARPA-E is such a vital resource and should be fully-funded. "Cutting ARPA-E's budget would thwart future successes. A smaller budget would mean fewer projects, a more narrow range of risky projects, more hesitation to explore uncharted ares, and fewer opportunities to attract private sector investment."

• Tomorrow (July 13) the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution is hosting (and webcasting) an event called "Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment." The event signals the release of a new report on green jobs and a new database. Follow along on Twitter (#cleanecon) tomorrow morning.

• I enjoyed this piece on energy storage technology at The Energy Collective. "The enthusiasm for grid-connected energy storage is well-founded. The inability to store electric energy on the grid is, in many respects, the technological limitation that defined the design of our national power grid in the early 20th Century and that continues to account for its basic architecture today. The ability to generate electricity, to store it economically in large quantities, and to use it at a later time, would be the most disruptive technology to emerge on the power grid in the past 100 years."
  

March of the Elites: Why Grassroots Organizing Can't Save the Climate

Originally published at Breakthrough Generation.

The campaign to avert cataclysmic climate change soldiers on. Despite an aggressive global economic crisis that unequivocally stole some wind from the sails of climate action, the movement lingers, organizing marches and rallies for the coming climate revolution. But action on the climate-energy front will not occur at the grassroots level. Instead, advocates should focus on identifying the appropriate elites, whose influence and inclinations offer a potential pathway to progress on energy and climate change.

The notion of eschewing grassroots organizing is unfamiliar to "causie" political movements, especially progressive ones. Progressive politics looks back with pride and conviction on its accomplishments in union organizing, suffrage and civil rights, and contemporary environmental victories like the creation of the EPA and the passing of the Clean Water and Air Acts. These achievements relied on building a critical mass of devoted and vocal support whose growing magnitude would reliably overwhelm public opinion and entrenched political opposition.

The movement to save the climate is unlikely to win with these tactics. In attempting to change the fact that the public doesn't care about climate change, the movement routinely forgets one important thing: the public doesn't care about climate change. Opinion polls indicate subsiding public concern over the future effects of climate change. A recent (and highly controversial) report by Matt Nisbett suggests that collective action and lobbying for the 2010 climate bill outgunned opponents from Big Coal and Big Oil, and the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act didn't even get a vote in the Senate. Gallup shows that the public concern about the environment ranks last in a field of fifteen different national issues, a metric that the economy unsurprisingly dominates. Even if more and more people were coming around to the opinion that climate change is a real and dangerous phenomenon (which they aren't), that increasing swath of the population still wouldn't care too much about it.

And the truth is, the public doesn't need to care that much about it. Energy and climate policy is primarily institutional, technical, and scientific. It is much less socio-cultural. This makes sense, too: energy is a largely invisible and homogeneous commodity that competes on price alone. The public will use energy in the most cost-effective way possible, so the most logistically simple way to mitigate climate change is to make clean energy cheaper than carbon fuels. This goal will be achieved by policymakers, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

The solution to the climate-energy crisis is akin to the Manhattan and Apollo Projects and the creation of the Internet. None of these made use of mass public support or mobilization--indeed, the Manhattan Project was done in secret. Yet all were technical challenges with a national mission, accomplished by elites and contracted largely by the federal government, and with gargantuan social effects. No grand infrastructure projects are sexy products of some outpouring of public demand, yet the creation of the Interstate Highway System was perhaps one of the most significant achievements in the story of American commerce. These projects were accomplished by elite American patriots. Somewhere out in the masses of my generation, a team of elites is waiting to meet each other and make clean energy cheap and ubiquitous.

The people standing around that team of elites, far greater in number, are not powerless. Effective climate policy will not be an all-out favoring of technocracy over democracy, but grassroots advocates need to understand the difference. Timetables and targets are even weaker technical plans than they are political strategies. A growing and vocal contingent in the developed world, dedicated to fixing the climate problem, means very little when 90% of new energy demand will come developing economies over the next century. Lifestyle choices--like consuming less, cycling to work, and switching out that 100-watt bulb--are infinitesimal compared to the challenge of decarbonizing fourteen terawatts of power. There are policies that can accomplish these ends: boosting research and development, driving technological innovation, subsidizing early-stage deployment, and empowering the next generation of scientists and engineers through education. But the grassroots section in this relay-campaign pretty much ends at advocacy, left to watch as elites carry the baton across the finish line.

The campaign to mitigate carbon emissions and revolutionize our global energy infrastructure will not be accomplished by the masses. It will not be accomplished by marches and emotive global demonstrations, even less so by eco-terrorism and violent disobedience. We will see this challenge defeated instead by a select group of elites: technicians and practitioners, experts and politicians. That's not a bad thing. As Aaron Sorkin says, elite is not a bad word; it's an aspirational one. How fortunate we would be if we could identify that team of patriots and elites who could lead us to a clean energy future.

The false choice in climate organizing

Hm...

This question of how far to take the fight to stop global warming has haunted activists for years. But now that more conventional solutions, such as a global treaty to cut greenhouse-gas pollution, are dead, the issue is more pressing than ever. As the crisis grows, the temptation to turn up the volume with more dramatic and attention-grabbing protests will only increase. Climate activists often speculate about who will emerge as the Martin Luther King of the climate movement. But it may be equally relevant to ask who will emerge as the Malcolm X.

This from a brief piece in Rolling Stone that mentions, and never explicitly admonishes, "a little guerrilla warfare against Big Oil and Big Coal." Jeff Goodell, the author, goes on to present a false choice when it comes to climate politics. They can either be tame, a la 350.org's Day of Action and the 'march on Washington' variety, or they can be more subversive, a little less civilly disobedient. Goodell seems to admire the efforts taken by activists lately, who "cut through fences and get smacked around by cops in riot gear."

Why I must choose between two ineffective strategies--one legal, the other not-so-much--is beyond me. More on this soon, but the campaign to "change the composition of the atmosphere" (as Bill McKibben puts it) will not be accomplished by grassroots organizing and/or semi-violent protest. Instead, it will be accomplished by an elite team of policymakers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, who approach the technical challenges of climate change and decarbonization and effect technical solutions.

UPDATE (7/5): Mr. Goodell graciously responded to this post in a short exchange on Twitter, in which he asserted I had misread his piece. There is not a false choice between "tame" and "subversive" climate politics, Mr. Goodell clarified; rather, there is room for both. I wouldn't say I misread his piece so much as I perhaps didn't make myself perfectly clear in responding to it. I agree, climate activists do not have to choose one camp or the other. A strategy to promote action on climate change can embrace both the tame and the subversive, much like the XL pipeline protest organized by Bill McKibben and James Hansen, which aims for civility yet warns its participants they might spend a night in prison over (Mr. Goodell uses this same example).

My point is that neither tameness nor subversion are effective pathways to successful action on climate change and decarbonization, because they frame the challenge entirely wrong. Action on climate change will not be accomplished by grassroots organizing, as was action on civil rights or earlier environmental issues. Rather, it will be addressed by elites, whose expert understanding of the technical challenges of climate change are matched by a strong government mission to re-industrialize the energy sector. See my latest post for more.

Google can see the future

Google, whose energy initiatives and investments have always impressed me, yesterday released an energy innovation analysis that uses a model they built with McKinsey to forecast global power production mixes by different energy technologies in 2030. The analysis is available in a report [PDF] and interactive website that allows users to consider different potential energy mixes. Their technology pathways depend largely on breakthroughs and policies, the various combinations of which result in varying degrees of clean energy deployed in the future (#NoDuh).

Teryn Norris at Americans for Energy Leadership lauded the analysis and Google's willingness to bring energy innovation to the spotlight.

[The] implication is loud and clear: U.S. policy should seek to unleash clean energy technology innovation as rapidly as possible...Google’s report is a much-welcomed addition to the debate that opens up a whole new lens for evaluating various energy policy proposals, and it offers a message that clean energy and climate advocates across the board would be wise to take seriously.

Walter Frick at the New England Clean Energy Council has another take on Google's release, emphasizing that policy is an absolutely essential addition to technological breakthroughs.

Technology has an extremely important role to play. But policy that incents the development and deployment of clean energy and discourages the use and further deployment of fossil energy is also essential.

It is very encouraging to see a major player like Google getting front and center in the global energy innovation effort.

The upcoming brawl over energy subsidies

While Republicans hold the national debt increase hostage, Congress is deciding what to cut and what to gut (expansion or creation of new programs is largely off the table). Energy subsidies are already falling under the knife. Mark Muro at Brookings figures that if we're going to they're going after energy subsidies anyway, now is the time for real reform.

Defenders of oil and gas industry tax breaks are clearly finding it harder to maintain support for tax and other provisions for a mature, highly profitable industry whose incumbency essentially locks in U.S. economic vulnerability and energy dependency and inhibits the emergence of alternative energy sourcing . . . At the same time, though, legitimate questions are being raised about the nature and purpose of the major renewable energy subsidies and incentives.