New reports on innovation and federal investment

Cross-posted at the Breakthrough Institute Blog.

The last few weeks have been pretty cool, if your definition of cool, like mine, involves a bevy of new reading materials extolling the benefits of public investment in technology innovation. Dig:

• New report from the American Energy Innovation Council (already blogged about here and here), featuring the wisdom and research of Bill Gates, John Doerr, Jeff Immelt, and other titans of American industry. The report refutes the notion that deficits require paring back our investments in science and technology, and explicitly calls for increased federal funding for energy innovation as well as the creation of new public-private partnerships to bring clean energy technologies to commercial scale. 
• A World Resources Institute working paper called "Two Degrees of Innovation" by Letha Tawney, Francisco Almendra, Pablo Torres, and Lutz Weischer. The paper offers background of innovation systems, and suggests policy mechanisms that would fully realize the potential of the innovation engine in the pursuit of a clean energy economy. The report in particular examines the role of global value chains, innovation ecosystems, and policy support. Ms. Tawney and Mr. Torres blogged about the report here. 
• New report from the OECD called "Fostering Innovation for Green Growth." This new research expresses where the OECD expects innovation to come from (hint: less from a carbon price, more from energy and general scientific R&D). But as is becoming increasingly obvious to those studying the history, more is needed than public investment in R&D; technological innovation requires strategic policies to mature and commercialize emerging technologies, the mechanisms for which will often times be different across a portfolio of technologies. 
• One of the best reads out there on the history and primacy of innovation, "The Entrepreneurial State" is a new pamphlet out of Demos by Mariana Mazzucato. The guiding notion, thoroughly proven, is that states are not just vital in the fixing and regulating markets, but that governments actively foster and create them all the time. This has proven true in computing, biotechnology, aviation, nuclear energy, and now clean technology. 

This is all especially relevant as 1) American federal policy support for clean tech is heading for a crash and 2) the Solyndra story keeps heating the airwaves with critics crying "failure" and "scandal." As the AEIC report points out, the DOE loan guarantee program (the source of the Solyndra loan) is one of the smartest and most successful federal programs in support of clean energy. 

With austerity-mania sweeping the nation and federal clean energy programs about to collapse en masse, now is exactly the time to adopt a unified national energy strategy focused on innovation and strategic investment to bring clean tech to commercial scale unsubsidized. As Ms. Mazzucato puts it in "The Entrepreneurial State,"

In a policy environment where the frontiers of the state are now being deliberately rolled back, that process [of innovation] needs more than ever to be understood so that it can be successfully replicated. Otherwise we miss an opportunity to build greater prosperity in the future. 

Business Industry Titans Call for Major Federal Investments in Energy Innovation

By Alex Trembath and Devon Swezey. Originally published at the Breakthrough Institute. Cross-posted at Forbes and the Huffington Post. 

Yesterday, the American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC)--composed of industry titans like Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Bank of America Chairman Chad Holliday, and leading venture capitalist John Doerr--released a follow-up to their 2010 report "A Business Plan for America's Energy Future." The new report, "Catalyzing American Ingenuity: The Role of Government in Energy Innovation," doubles down on the Council's earlier calls for increased and sustained public investment in clean energy technology, and offers new ideas about how greater energy innovation investment can be paid for in a new era of fiscal austerity.

In the wake of the high-profile bankruptcy of California solar company Solyndra, government critics are attacking federal investment in clean energy innovation, arguing that such decisions should be left to the "free market." But in their new report, these business leaders and entrepreneurs argue that government investment in energy innovation is key to realizing a clean energy future.

In addition to Gates, Holliday, and Doerr, the AEIC boasts membership from former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns of Xerox, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, and Tim Solso, CEO of Cummins Inc. In the report, these executives highlight the tremendous impact that federal investment has had on technological innovation and economic growth throughout American history:

The federal government has played a central role in catalyzing and driving innovation and technology deployment throughout the history of the United States--often with strong results. This kind of support took a variety of forms. In the 19th century government scientists mapped out natural resource endowments and Army officers surveyed routes for railroads, including helping to plan and sometimes manage their construction. In the early and mid-20th century, programs such as rural electrification and massive public works projects, such as the construction of the Interstate Highway System, enhanced mobility and connectivity and directly or indirectly contributed to the development of new technologies and industries 

...government efforts to develop guidance systems for the military played a role in the development of digital computers and microchips. Navy support for aviation technology led directly to Boeing's 707 -- one of the first major commercial jetliners. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created a distributed network of computers called ARPANET, which laid the early foundation for the internet. The U.S. government played a direct and indispensable role in launching the commercial nuclear power industry.

Indeed, as the Breakthrough Institute has documented in "Where Good Technologies Come From," the federal government has made key investments in most of the technologies we take for granted, including the personal computer, the Internet, the jet engine, GPS, cell phones, the biotechnology industry, and countless blockbuster pharmaceutical advances. Today, as the AEIC report makes clear, such investment is urgently needed to catalyze breakthrough innovation in clean energy technologies in order to make them cheaper, more reliable, and therefore more widely adopted around the world.

Critics tend to ignore this history, claiming that innovation is the solely the domain of the private sector. Following Solyndra's bankruptcy, these critics have insisted that "the government should not play venture capitalist." AEIC member John Doerr, perhaps the nation's most well known venture capitalist, sees things differently. Doerr writes, "America must embrace risks in innovation and invest heavily in R&D to create a full pipeline of good ideas." Echoing what we wrote after Solynda closed its doors, the report recommends that federal energy innovation investment "focus more on overall program success than on individual project success and emphasize the value in calculated risks."

In addition to issuing a robust defense of federal investment in energy innovation, the AEIC report also presents smart suggestions for strengthening some energy technology programs and reforming others. They support the federal energy loan guarantee program (which is under increasing scrutiny after Solyndra's bankruptcy), and call for boosting the budget of ARPA-E, the government's innovative, high-risk energy research agency, to $1 billion annually from around $200 million today. They also support a new Clean Energy Deployment Administration to aid the commercialization of first-of-their-kind innovations and mobilize significant private-sector capital in scaling up advanced energy technologies.

The Council also urges reform of the inefficient process by which the government conducts national energy policy, warning that "uncertain annual appropriations, short-term tax credits, and one-time spending injections are all unsuited to creating the sustained, predictable funding stream needed to bolster the country's innovative infrastructure." Moreover, as Breakthrough wrote recently in the National Journal, many of the federal programs supporting clean energy industries are set to expire in the next few years, which will likely precipitate a crash in the industry.

In order to avoid the perpetual boom-bust cycle in clean energy, the US government must increase the kinds of energy innovation investments outlined in the AEIC report. These investments must be rationalized around driving innovation and cost declines to make clean energy cost-competitive without subsidy.

Given the tight fiscal environment, the Council recommends a number of revenue streams that could fund innovation investment without adding to the budget deficit, including revenues from domestic oil and gas production, redirecting existing energy subsidies for mature industries, or small fees on electricity usage.

Ultimately, however, these leading business executives make a forceful case that America's current "budget dilemma," as they call it, is no reason to delay in boosting funding for energy innovation. "Supporting innovation," they write, "is an investment, not a cost." Indeed, given the country's economic malaise, there is no better time to make growth-enhancing investments that could catalyze a new era of American economic leadership in a key global industry. Critics of government investment in energy innovation would do well to listen to these titans of industry, and to heed their recommendations. To read the full AEIC report, click here (PDF).

QOTD: AEIC on energy innovation

This from the a new report by the American Energy Innovation Council, comprised of Bill Gates, Jeff Immelt, John Doerr, Norm Augustine, Ursula Burns, Charles O. Holliday, and Tim Solso:

If the U.S. fails to invent new technologies and create new markets and new jobs that will drive the transformation and revitalization of the $5 trillion global energy industry, we will have lost an opportunity to lead in what is arguably the largest and most pervasive technology sector in the world. However, if the U.S. successfully innovates in clean energy, the country stands to reap enormous benefits. 

Download the report, "Catalyzing American Ingenuity: The Role of Government in Energy Innovation" (PDF).

UPDATE [2:30pm 9/14/2011]: This from an interview with John Doerr, one of the members of the American Energy Innovation Council (via VentureBeat):

“We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the lone entrepreneur in the garage creating an industry,” he said. “We have this myth that the IT industry got started on its own — no, there was federal funding, just like what we need for clean technology.”

Worth remembering that John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of the leading venture capital firms in the nation. Also relevant is an article by Mark Muro and Jonathan Rockwell of the Brookings Institution, published yesterday in the New Republic, that compared clean tech to the IT industry.

American Jobs Act

Much will be said in the coming days of President Obama's American Jobs Act, which in one form or another will very likely be the keystone policy of his re-election campaign. Whether via its victory of defeat, Obama will almost certainly campaign on its proposals and job creation ambitions.

As the National Journal's Amy Harder pointed out during the Presiden't speech, the word "energy" did not appear once in the 4000-word speech Obama gave to a joint session of Congress last week (although his slideshow did include a picture of high-speed rail). This is in contrast to this year's State of the Union, in which he omitted the words "climate change" but hit the energy innovation narrative pretty hard. Indeed, in February the President called for the elimination of federal oil subsidies to pay for a smarter, expanded clean tech policy strategy. Last week, he proposed eliminating those same subsidies in favor of extending tax credits for small businesses.

All was not lost on the energy front, however. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu pointed out on Friday, much of the investment enabled by Obama's proposed National Infrastructure Bank would be directed towards clean energy projects.

The national infrastructure bank would not only put Americans back to work, but continue to build off of the significant strides we’ve made in clean energy sector through our Recovery Act-funded Loan Program, which is set to expire on September 30th. In the past two years, the Loan Program has supported a robust, diverse portfolio of more than 40 projects that plan to employ more than 60,000 Americans and create tens of thousands of indirect jobs.

Here Secretary Chu invokes the DOE Loan Guarantee Program, recently criticized for its 2009 approval of a loan to California solar manufacturer Solyndra, which declared bankruptcy two weeks ago (laying off 1100 workers in the process). Perhaps Solyndra was the reason President Obama did not mention energy in his speech on job creation, but if the goal of a clean energy future is to be realized, policies and institutions with the financing capability of this National Infrastructure Bank will be essential.

Energy ≠ Power

Bay Area locals may recognize this ad, which I found on BART. I thought it was hilarious, though you may not unless you share my appreciation for energy/power errors in your sense of humor.

I've taken better pictures in my life. The caption reads: "Power from the sun: 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilowatts per second." This of course makes no sense, as a kilowatt is a unit of power, which is basically a rate of energy transfer (a watt is 1 Joule per second, and a Joule is a unit of energy).

It is true that a tremendous amount of solar power is intercepted by the Earth, but we need to incorporate context and the appropriate units into our illustrations. In terms of solar power hitting Earth's land mass, the rough number is about 7000 TW, or 7,000,000,000,000 kW. Where these folks got their 4x10¹⁴ kW per second [sic] figure from I have no idea--it's possibly expressing a kWs (kilowatt-second) estimation, a.k.a. the amount of energy produced by a 1-kW power source over 1 second. Or it could by kWh (kilowatt-hours). I have no idea, but either way they're mislabeling their units, probably in the name of including a VERY BIG NUMBER in their illustration.

Without proper units or context, numbers are meaningless. In this case, the number is a lie.

See blogger Lee.org for a similar take on this silly ad.

Solyndra's Failure No Reason to Abandon Federal Energy Innovation Plicy

This post was originally published at the Breakthrough Institute Blog, and was also picked up by the Forbes online business section.


By Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey, and Alex Trembath 

Wednesday's news that the California solar cell manufacturer and DOE loan guarantee recipient Solyndra will be declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy has government critics grumbling about clean tech boondoggles and failed government programs. But Solyndra's failure, while unfortunate, is hardly an indictment of federal energy technology policy. Failure is to be expected with emerging, innovative companies, whether they are financed by the government or the private sector. The success of the Department of Energy's Loan Guarantee Program (LGP) should thus be judged not by any one investment but by the performance of the entire portfolio.

Critics have seized on the news of Solyndra's bankruptcy to condemn the Department of Energy's Loan Guarantee Program, which provided a $535 million loan guarantee in 2009. The National Review's Greg Pollowitz writes that Solyndra's failure shows "why the government should not play venture capitalist." Yet the fact is that, when judged by its entire diverse portfolio of investments, the LGP has performed remarkably well. Indeed, with a capitalization of just $4 billion, DOE has committed or closed $37.8 billion in loan guarantees for 36 innovative clean energy projects. The Solyndra case represents less than 2% of total loan commitments made by DOE, and will be easily covered by a capitalization of eight to ten times larger than any ultimate losses expected following the bankruptcy proceedings.

The broad success story of the LGP shows why federal investment in clean energy is necessary to help early-stage clean energy technologies achieve scale and reach commercialization. The inherent uncertainty in investing in novel technologies, coupled with the high capital costs and long time horizons, prohibits most venture capital funds from investing in large-scale clean energy projects. Financing tools and direct investment from the federal government can help bridge this well-known "Commercialization Valley of Death," and the LGP is an effective way of doing that.

Instead of "picking winners and losers," as the program's critics allege, the program actually reduces risk for a suite of innovative clean energy technologies and allows venture capitalists and other private sector investors to invest in the best technology. Rather than picking winners, the LGP enables innovative companies to compete in the marketplace, allowing winners to emerge from competition. And while Solyndra is shutting its doors, companies like SunPower, First Solar, and Brightsource Energy, which also received loan guarantees and other support from the federal government, are industry leading success stories.

With perfect hindsight, it's all too easy to see why Solyndra proved to be a bad bet: the firm's central innovation, a thin film technology that avoided the use of silicon, proved to be far less important when refined silicon prices collapsed after Solyndra's founding; the remaining installation cost advantages provided by the company's cylindrical solar panels proved too small, and Solyndra was unable to capture the manufacturing cost reductions that have helped other U.S. thin film companies, like First Solar, thrive despite low silicon prices. Perhaps most importantly, intense pressure from heavily subsidized Chinese manufacturers is driving a surprisingly competitive solar market, forcing Solyndra to get costs down faster than the start-up firm could achieve.

It is possible that these fatal factors could have been avoided by better vetting from DOE, or that removed from the pressures of a fast-paced stimulus environment, DOE may not have made this bad bet. But to assert, as numerous conservative commentators have been quick to do, that Solyndra's failure is proof positive of the government's supposed inability to "pick winners" is patently absurd. After all, Solyndra received repeated rounds of investment to the tune of $1.1 billion from some of the private sector's biggest stars, including Richard Branson, the WalMart family, and leading venture capital firms like U.S. Venture Partners and RockPort Capital. Venture capitalists and the U.S. government both placed a bet, Solyndra's entrepreneurs took a shot, and unfortunately for all, they missed. Such is to be expected in the high-risk but high-reward world of early-stage technology ventures. In addition, the loan commitment places the government in a senior position in the result of a bankruptcy, ensuring that DOE will get paid out before the VCs and other investors.

Critics who think the government has no place in supporting technology innovation have a tenuous grasp of U.S. economic history. In fact, the government has a long and successful history in helping America's intrepid entrepreneurs succeed in new high-risk, high-reward technology sectors. As we wrote in "Where Good Technologies Come From," the government has played a key role, either as an early investor or a demanding customer, in the development of virtually every advanced technology we take for granted today, from aviation to biotechnology, to computers and the Internet, microchips, and now clean energy. Indeed, without a visionary government investing in key strategic industries, world-leading companies like Google, Genentech and Boeing would not exist.

The United States was able to be the world's technology leader in these fields because of its forward-looking investments, as well as a relative dearth of competition from economic rivals. In today's clean energy market, however, competition is fierce. U.S. companies compete with low-cost Chinese manufacturers who benefit from generous state subsidies and a robust and comprehensive set of policies to encourage solar manufacturing. Indeed, in 2010 the China Development Bank provided more than $30 billion in loans to Chinese solar manufacturers. China's large clean energy investments have helped reduce the price of solar cells by 42% in just the last nine months, which was one factor in Solyndra's inability to compete.

While the United States may not be able to afford the scale of support for clean energy that China can, it can compete by focusing on what it has always done best: innovation. In the solar industry, the long-term goal must be to drive innovation so that solar can be cost-competitive without subsidy. Fortunately, the Department of Energy recognizes this imperative and has embarked on a new effort--the SunShot initiative--geared toward dramatically lowering the cost of solar PV. The SunShot initiative focuses on bringing down costs by pursuing innovations in four particular areas, including solar cell technology, power electronics that optimize the performance of installations, improvements in manufacturing processes, and installation and system design.

The Sunshot initiative and other key technology innovation programs like the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), embody the kind of smart innovation policy that holds the promise of fundamentally transforming the economy and ushering in a new era of U.S. technology leadership.

In the face of intense competition in the clean energy sector, America faces two choices. We can abandon our entrepreneurs and innovators in this new strategic growth sector, or we can redouble our efforts to invest in energy innovation, support clean energy entrepreneurs and help American firms compete and ultimately prevail in the global clean energy race. If we walk away now, America will lose out on one of the greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century.

Solyndra Round-up

News that California solar company Solyndra will be declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy has sent waves through the energy blogosphere, not least because the company was an early recipient of a DOE loan guarantee and because President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu both touted Solyndra as a success story in US innovation policy.

• TIME Magazine's Dan Grunwald: Solyndra’s version did have certain advantages, particularly ease of installation. And according to the Energy Department, the company sold more than 1,000 installations in 20 countries, increasing its sales revenue 2,000% in three years. But they couldn’t keep up with the competition on cost.

• Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig at WaPo: GAO auditors fear that similar defaults could happen with other projects, possibly including the other four that it found weren’t properly vetted. The GAO last year uncovered the department’s rush to provide Solyndra its loan — less than 60 days after Chu was sworn in to the fledgling administration — without completing required reviews.

• Arno Harris at the Energy Collective: Bottom line, I'm sad to see Solyndra fail and feel immense sympathy for the 1,100 employees who are now out of work. But in the bigger picture, Solyndra's failure underscores just how successful the PV industry has been at cost reduction--and highlights the risks when governments try to pick winners and losers in highly competitive markets.

• Slate's Andrew Leonard: So what's really happened here is that half-hearted industrial policy lost out to the real deal. Because if Solyndra's failure is taken as proof that the U.S. government can't pick winners, doesn't that mean that China's success proves the exact opposite?

• Mike Traugher at Mercury News: Solyndra also reportedly received more than $1 billion in venture capital over the past five years from firms including Redpoint Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners. Other reported investors included Virgin Group entrepreneur Richard Branson and the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune.

UPDATE (9/6/2011 at 10:05am): 

• Michael Grunwald at TIME: The operation was successful, but the patient died. Politically, it’s probably an impossible case to make. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. 

• Bloomberg Analysis: Solyndra said it failed because it couldn’t compete with foreign manufacturers funded by their governments. Those factories produced an oversupply of panels at low prices and offered buyers lengthy payment terms. Demand for Solyndra’s panels also fell as European governments reduced incentives for buying solar energy, said W.G. Stover, chief financial officer, in a filing today. 

QOTD: Biden on Federal Tech Investment

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at yesterday's National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas (via National Journal):

Biden equated investing in clean energy as the economy struggles to investing in technology and crucial infrastructure during a war.

“Had we listened to those voices in 1774, private enterprise and the government would not have collaborated to build the rifles with interchangeable parts that we needed to win the Revolutionary War,” Biden said. “If President Lincoln had listened to those voices during the Civil War, he wouldn’t have paid private railroad companies $16,000 for every 40 miles of track on the Transcontinental Railroad they laid down. And if President Eisenhower listened to those voices in ’57, he would never have invested $25 million in a program called ARPA ... which eventually created the Internet.... President Obama and I are not going to listen to those voices, and I hope to God you aren’t, either.”

It's as if he pulled directly from the pages of "Where Good Technologies Come From," a report by my colleagues at the Breakthrough Institute.

National Journal: Surviving the Coming Clean Tech Crash

This post was co-authored by Jesse Jenkins and originally published at The National Journal in their discussion "How Can Washington Green America's Economy?" Cross-posted at the Breakthrough Institute Blog.

Before discussing the best way to green the economy, it’s important to note that the U.S. economy has been greening steadily over the past three years. Buoyed by the policies established and extended by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the largest federal investment in clean tech in American history, the clean energy industry has experienced precipitous growth, as documented by Mark Muro and colleagues at the Brookings Metro program in their recent "Sizing the Clean Economy" report.

Unfortunately, the path of progress may be coming to an end. Our research shows that over 70% of the federal policies and funding support for clean energy that has catalyzed the recent growth of the industry is expected to lapse in the next three years, or has already expired. And make no mistake—clean energy is an industry dependent on government subsidy: tax credits, depreciation and other subsidies compose one third or more of the total after-tax value of most solar, wind or other renewable energy projects, for example. So while ARRA provided a “down payment” on a green economy, as these public investments fade away, we are now more likely to witness a clean tech crash than a clean tech revolution.

As the current programs supporting clean energy, like the Production Tax Credit (PTC) and Section 1603 Treasury Grants, approach their expiration, there are a number of steps the federal government can and must take to avert an impending industry crash.

The first would be to get serious about the long-term energy innovation challenge. Until clean energy becomes cheap and cost competitive without subsidy, the pace of clean energy growth will remain constrained and the markets will face continual risk of industry busts if subsidy and policy support changes. We must treat energy innovation with the same priority we afford other national innovation quests, such as the Apollo or Manhattan Projects or the quest to cure cancer. We must invest far more -- eventually on the order of $15 billion annually -- and far more wisely -- restructuring America's energy innovation system and supporting effective new policy models such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), and new public-private regional innovation consortia.

Second, Congress can establish a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA). CEDA would act as a public investment bank whose mission is to help leverage private-sector investment to bring emerging, innovative clean technologies to commercial maturity. CEDA would bridge the commercialization “Valley of Death” and provide a viable and predictable development path for technologies from the laboratory to grid-scale deployment. The Congressional Budget Office calculates that the agency would cost just $1.1 billion over the next four years. While leveraging billions more in private sector investment, the public bank would return profits from investments and financial products to the fund, making CEDA self-sustaining over time.

Another needed policy change is to reform the current clean energy deployment subsidy regime for maturing energy technologies, which today is comprised of a hodgepodge of tax credits like the PTC and the Investment Tax Credit, depreciation benefits and grants that primarily incentivize firms to deploy more of the same, current-generation technology. Instead, we need a smarter new deployment mechanism that is disciplined and designed to drive technology innovation to decrease the unsubsidized cost of clean energy so that it can be competitive without perpetual subsidy. Such a policy could augment a national renewable or clean energy standard (RES/CES) with a set of technology tiers based on technology maturity, which would provide the incentive for utilities to adopt and deploy clean energy technologies across a range of maturities, and demand continual cost reductions from technology firms over time. One way to augment this smart deployment policy would be with a small price on carbon, wires fee on electricity, or oil import fee, which instead of returning a dividend to consumers would generate dedicated revenues for a federal energy R&D fund to help support the continual innovation needed to get clean tech costs down to parity with fossil competitors.

The fate of many ARRA policies remains uncertain, and the unpredictable political machinations of the “supercongress” and ongoing deficit debate in Washington bring yet more volatility to the clean tech policy debate. Nobody expects a second down payment on the green economy on the scale of the last several years. But as current subsidy support runs out, Washington must support the industry by investing more and differently in clean energy innovation to maintain America’s position in the global clean tech race and avoid an ongoing cycle of clean tech boom-and-bust in the future.

Why do Malthusians ignore the Sun?

[UPDATED 6/17 2:50pm] This article at the Energy Collective on "plastic trees" got me thinking about something that doesn't come up too often here at Energetics, though it should: geoengineering. From the article:

The idea employs biomimicry by deploying small-scale units of “trees” to soak up more CO2 than real trees, wherever you might need them. “You can remove CO2 anywhere you want, and it can deal with emissions from anywhere else on the planet,” said Allen Wright, a scientist at the Lenfest Center. “There’s no real major discovery or invention that has to happen that would prevent us from deploying that technology tomorrow.”

I was reminded of Nate Lewis' work at Caltech, where scientists are researching applications for artificial photosynthesis through DoE's Energy Innovation Hub program. This is to say nothing of cloud-seeding, stratospheric sulfur injections, space-based mirrors, or other tricks we might deploy in the future to regulate our climatic effects.

Basically, humans are testing out a diverse array of technologies that will allow us to tap into energetic fluxes with more precision and control than ever before. Instead of (more likely, in addition to) mitigating fossil fuel combustion, we could literally suck the carbon from the atmosphere. Instead of relying on autotrophic photosynthesis to convert solar energy into useful organic matter, we could produce technologies that do so much more efficiently.

In short, the sun is the answer to all our problems. Popular solutions like solar panels, scaled biomass and wind turbines already tap into and tinker around with solar fluxes. Long-sighted research like artificial photosynthesis and plastic trees aim to do the same thing.

Modern-day Malthusians like to play the apocalypse card, noting that the Earth is finite and that economic growth on a bounded planet cannot continue infinitely. They're right. But they're also assuming humans can't expand the boundaries. Humans currently use on the order of 15 TW of power, which is a lot, until you consider the 6000 TW of solar power that hit the Earth's surface (on average). Most of this is refracted back into outer space, with some IR radiation trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. If we generate all human power with solar energy, we'd go a long way towards increasing resource security and access. If we could increase solar energy generation by just one order of magnitude, we'd really have energy that's too cheap to meter.

Technology has for centuries extended humankind's prosperity and wealth (good examples being the internal combustion engine, artificial nitrogen fixation, telecom and biotech, and the Green Revolution). Malthusians are right in that we live on a planet with bounded natural resources, but they assume that the machines that convert our most abundant fuel source are the most efficient (i.e., that plants are the best way to convert solar energy into useful energy).

We have nowhere near the technological efficiencies, capabilities, or scale to achieve this right now. But as a thought experiment, it's possible from an engineering perspective to imagine a future in which we expand planetary boundaries by improving on nature's energy conversion mechanisms.

UPDATE: My colleague Jeff Kessler forwarded me two pretty awesome articles from UCSD that break down the math on, respectively, energy use growth and economic growth (the first being a historically decent proxy for the second). Those posts are available here and here.

If I may be so bold as to summarize them in a sentence: there are thermodynamic and resource limits to infinite growth in economies and energy use; maintaining pace for 200+ years will result in over-consumption and ecological catastrophe. I don't disagree that the Earth (more appropriately, the solar system) is a bounded system. However, I believe a combination of decoupling, population stabilization, energy generation portfolio diversification and solar concentration, and perhaps inter-planetary colonization (we're talking about centuries from now, remember) can combine to avert ecological over-drafting. In the mean time, we should not worry about these thermodynamic limits and aim for "steady-state" economic coasting, certainly not when we are nowhere near those limits at present and half the world's population lives on less than $2/day. Perhaps when we approach the thermodynamic limits discussed in the UCSD articles, we can begin to discuss the design of a steady state economy. But in the midst of economic crisis and widespread poverty, now is not the time.

Economic growth and technological innovation remain the answers to Malthusianism, if employed timely and appropriately.