On thinking ahead

This lack of federal R&D funding is scary

Add this to your list of ways Washington is failing to do anything serious about the energy crisis: for the second consecutive year, federal funding for R&D in science and engineering has failed to even keep pace with inflation, according to the National Science Foundation. This while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, Congress drags its feet on deployment incentives, and our international competitiveness continues to decline in terms of providing opportunities to young talent in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and research. As an article posted yesterday on LocalTechWire puts it:

As the threat of globalization and the rise of China and India cut further into the U.S. lead in so many aspects of knowledge, is this really the time to fund bridges to nowhere at the expense of science, technology, engineering and math?

…While our leaders in Congress fiddled away on earmarks, R&D took a hit. (You can’t blame all this on the Bush administration; which party has controlled Congress for the past two years? This is a bipartisan challenge.)

Breakthrough has already laid out a case for scaling up funding in a serious and sustained way in energy-related fields at our nation’s higher education institutions, which you can check out in an op-ed published last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. I am personally more convinced by the day that funding for education and energy R&D at universities and national labs is the best investment we can make in our nation’s future growth and competitiveness, and also an absolutely crucial part of a transition to clean energy.

But there is a worrisome pattern here in the energy debate of systematically undervaluing long-term payoffs in favor of short-term gratification (see: offshore drilling). The legislature is probably structurally myopic, and so maybe we’ll have to wait until November and a new administration. Til then, I’ll keep assembling my evidence in favor of long-term thinking.

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Carl Pope Breaks With Traditional Climate Agenda

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said on a “Politics of Green” panel discussion this week in Denver that climate policy aimed at increasing energy bills is critically flawed:

“I actually think if we deal with global warming in a way which raises people’s energy bills, we will have blown it.“

You can watch it here.

Pope’s comment was a major shift away from the traditional approach on climate legislation taken by environmentalists. For years, the dominant climate strategy has been to educate Americans on the climate crisis, persuade the public to accept higher fossil fuel prices, and pass federal legislation to set a mandatory cap on carbon and allow the price to rise as high as necessary to achieve deep emissions reductions.

Pope’s comment represents a larger awakening among environmentalists to the realities of energy and global warming politics. The events of this summer – including the third failure of federal cap and trade legislation, eroding support in Congress, rapidly escalating oil prices, and a political beat-down of Democrats by Republicans on new oil drilling – have served as a watershed for the climate movement. In a nutshell, one thing above all else has become clear: climate policy aimed at significantly increasing energy costs will fail. Period.

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And all for the want of a tax credit renewal

A post by Charles Cooper over at c-net brought up an interesting perspective on Congress’ continuing failure to renew clean energy tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of this year:

…[Venture capitalist Josh Green of Mohr Davidow Ventures] suggested that the absence of an investment tax credit may have relatively little impact on businesses in the short to medium term. That’s because the rapidly expanding solar markets in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East will not be affected by the controversy over the ITC and will still create plenty of customers for solar manufacturers.

Whether or not this prediction is borne out, there’s no question that in the long term the US market for renewable energy technologies is going to feel the pain if we put a brake on the momentum that’s building right now. Cooper notes that renewal of the ITC (part of the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act, which includes a number of production and other renewable energy tax incentives for businesses and individuals) is in all likelihood going to get held hostage to the presidential election this fall, with Senate Republicans wary of supporting any energy measure for which the Dems could take credit (the bill has already passed in the House).

At any rate – even if solar manufacturers can ride it out in the near term, I’m not sure the same can be said for all of those would-be “green-collar” workers. Clean energy jobs seem to be the one bright spot in the rather grim employment market these days, and really impressive work is being done at the local and state levels to help develop a new green workforce, but all of this could get held up by the federal deadlock.

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Tribes Building New Coal Plants

“As the nation searches for new sources of energy, tribes are at a crossroads,” Climate Wire reported today. “They hold 30 percent of the nation’s coal reserves and have an abundant supply of oil and natural gas, but also face a growing climate change movement determined to stop development of fossil fuels and spur renewable energy.”

Last week, the Crow Nation announced plans to build a coal-to-liquids plant in Montana that may provide fuel for the Air Force. That followed news of a potential coal-fired power plant on Navajo Nation land in New Mexico.

Now, as many as six coal projects, including some that would produce liquid fuel, are “under consideration” in Montana either on reservations or in nearby locations that could make use of tribal labor and resources, according to Chantel McCormick, an energy development officer for the state. Her remarks echoed a Bush administration official who said Tuesday that several tribes had “expressed interest” recently in building plants that convert coal to diesel or jet fuel.

“With an upswing in energy prices, tribes are looking at their resources more and hearing from industry wanting to work on reservation land,” said Robert Middleton, director of the Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development at the Interior Department.”

Groups like Energy Action Coalition have long argued (EAC statement of environmental justice principles) that tribes are some of the greatest victims to climate change, oil drilling, and coal mining. As the article reports:

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Gang of Ten Could Upset Energy Debate

Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Blog

For the past two weeks, Democrats have been losing the energy debate — badly. Poll after poll showed Democrats losing major ground in the fight over new oil drilling, and some declared that energy could be a turning point in the run-up to November. At the Breakthrough Institute, we ran a series of responses: here, here, here, and here.

But a “New Energy Reform Act” proposal from the “Gang of 10″ — a group of five Democrats and five Republicans in the Senate — is starting to gain serious traction and could upset the debate.

The proposal has three basic components: 1) Tens of billions of dollars in federal investments to support the transition to advanced non-petroleum fuels, vehicles, and infrastructure; 2) Extension of renewable energy tax credits and incentives; and 3) Expanded offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and southern Atlantic states, while preserving ANWR and the West Coast.

The proposal represents a bi-partisan approach that could sweep aside Republican dominance of the energy debate, gain significant bi-partisan support after the August recess (likely to rally more support than the insistent and inflexible “Drill Here, Drill Now” sloganeering), and secure passage through Congress. It combines limited offshore drilling with major investments in new advanced alternative vehicle technology and the critical extension of renewable energy tax credits — and its $84 billion in funding would come from repealing tax breaks on oil and gas companies and increasing their licensing fees.

The reactions so far have indicated that most see this as a saving grace for Democrats and climate advocates. Here’s a short roundup:

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What’s going on underground in the Village these days

Just a quick post to give a high-five to my alma mater, NYU, which broke ground today on a new cogeneration plant, due to be completed in the summer of 2009. The CHP plant is going to reduce regulated pollutants by 75% and triple the University’s capacity to provide power, allowing it to remove buildings from the very overburdened local grid. And the whole thing will be underground, with an open public space at street level (at West 4th & Mercer). Very groovy.

Building an underground cogeneration plant in the middle of the Village in about twelve months is no small feat. Hats off to NYU President John Sexton, to the NYU Sustainability Task Force and everyone in the NYU community working on greening the campus, and to Mayor Bloomberg and the people behind PlaNYC who are challenging the city to think long-term about our energy and our environment. Now we just need a football team (I’m joking).

You can read NYU’s press release here.

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War Games…Plus Carbon, Minus Matthew Broderick

Last week, the Center for a New American Security staged a “war game” on climate change. They gathered together climate scientists and experts in security, environmental policy from around the world, and assigned them to one of four teams — the United States, the European Union, China, and India. Each team was charged with negotiating the best global response to climate change for their team.

The game kicked-off with a fictitious news briefing about the state of the world in 2015, the year the talks were supposed to take place. But despite a 2012 follow up to the Kyoto Protoco requiring deep emissions cuts by mid-century, the outlook wasn’t good: droughts, heavy rains, floods, and other extreme weather events were on the rise, and there was a major global refugee problem. What’s more, “very few” signatories to the 2012 agreement were on track to meeting their emissions reductions targets.

After days of dramatic negotiating, and arguments so impassioned that participants had to remind themselves that it was just a game, it ended with…more emissions reductions agreements. The U.S. and the E.U. agreed to 30 percent reductions by 2025, India agreed to some limits with restrictions, and China agreed to nothing.

Everyone seemed to agree that the results of the talks were underwhelming, and fell short of the transformative global agreement many had been hoping for. It seems pretty silly to end up with a solution of emissions reductions targets when the talks started from a point of failing targets. The line of thinking here is that the world simply needs to make more ambitious reduction goals and work harder to meet them, even though no country has demonstrated that it can actually meet these goals.

The organizers said that the exercise wasn’t necessarily intended to produce a role-model agreement, but to explore “new solutions for dealing with climate change.” But with all this talk of targets and timetables, where were the new solutions? U.N. Secretary General John Podesta proposed the creation of a new international fund for clean technology, but his idea and others were left on the table.

Tellingly, after failing to meet its real world targets under Kyoto, E.U. team members were pushing for something more tangible than aspirational targets. Via Nature‘s liveblogging:

If the purpose of a war game is to reveal and explore alternate futures, then perhaps we have a winner here. Indeed, the year is 2015 and we now find ourselves in a world in which the United States is pushing for strong binding emissions limits on the rest of the world. By contrast, Europe appears to be pushing a more vague approach that focuses on tools, or “instruments,” including a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, that might be necessary if the existing (largely aspirational) targets are to be met.

Check out the response from the US team: “Do you have any specific targets?”

“Deciding targets without providing the instruments doesn’t do us a lot of service,” countered European delegate Reinhard Buetikofer (leader of the German Green Party). “We felt that since we have targets now, the real challenge is to provide the instruments.”

I could only scratch my head. Have the United States and Europe traded places politically in 2015? I asked UN Secretary General John Podesta (again, of Bill Clinton/Center for American Progress fame) if it was my imagination. He laughed. “The EU may have learned from bitter experience that when they take on these commitments, they are out in front of the parade and nobody is following.”

Buetikofer was a bit more cautious in his assessment of the situation. He pointed out that Europe, in 2015, is closer to meeting its targets than anybody else, and he questioned the value of new targets given the ongoing failure to meet previous targets.

The Nature blogger is lightly critical of the E.U. team, pointing out the apparent irony in its role reversal with the real-world United States’ reluctance to accept binding emissions targets. The blogger seems disdainful of Buetikofer for his feeble suggestion that the world needs better “tools” to confront the climate crisis, rather than stricter targets. But with Kyoto ratifying nations in the real world already failing to meet their targets, future negotiators would do well to take seriously Kyoto’s disillusioned former champions.

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Now, to Refine the Energy Solution

There’s a simple relationship between energy and civilization: more energy means more activity, growth, and prosperity. The defining challenge of our era is to think responsibly about how we use energy, as we strive to meet the demands of developing nations, struggle with a failing economy, and mitigate climate change.

Part of the problem is that we’ve taken energy for granted. Energy fuels everything we do. But we’ve outgrown our youthful years of abundant oil, as a nation and as a planet. Richard Smalley estimated in 2004 that if the world population were to stabilize at 10 billion people, they would demand 60 terawatts of energy in order to live prosperous, secure lives—more than four times what we currently use. At the same time, the oil that drove America’s progress is becoming less and less viable as an energy source. It is becoming increasingly clear that the most sophisticated and effective option is not to simply throw more energy, any energy, at the problem(s). So what now?

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