“It becomes a bit more clear that we may have set ourselves down the wrong path when we framed the challenge of mitigating greenhouse gases in terms of ‘reducing emissions’. Characterizing the policy challenge in this way leads people in rich countries to focus on things like changing light bulbs and driving less thirsty cars – all good things, to be sure – but which can hardly make a dent in the overall challenge of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations.”

In which case it seems obvious that we ought to change the frame so as to bring the scale of the solutions into better alignment with the need. It’s true that there will be considerable resistance to such a paradigm shift, but pretending one isn’t needed is simply wishful thinking. Such thinking leads to this sort of techno-silliness.

Information products are cell phones, TV’s, computers, anything with integrated circuits and all those silicon chips. The last 30 to 40 years we’ve had huge amount of innovation and new products that are related to information. Information after all is just digital systems, 1’s and 0’s and it didn’t matter how big or little the 1 or 0 are, they could just make those products smaller and use less power. Information increases for the most part with Moore’s Law which says something like transistor density doubles every 18 months. 40 years of doubling every 18 months should bring us a lot of innovations and it did.

What’s been the innovation of mass products? Not so much. Mass products would be houses, 2×4’s, roads, aircraft carriers, cars, silverware, books, copper pipes, etc. There has been some decrease in cost of some of these things, but for houses for example, the costs have actually gone up. Given increases in productivity, we can afford more of each of these things, but nothing like doubling every 18 months.

What about energy products? That would of course be the coal, oil and gas generators, ICE’s, photovoltaic, wind turbines, etc. Here’s where those people who think that the principle need to reduce greenhouse gases is research make their mistake. They think that innovations in energy are like innovations in information products. And why not. Photovoltaic are made from silicon and so are integrated circuits. How much different can everything else be? That’s just it, it is different, and those things that are non-carbon and low-carbon are more like mass products and not like information products.

If we spent 20 billion a year on research on building houses, would they be cheaper? How about aircraft carriers? Cars? Roads? Copper pipes? Certainly research would do some to reduce costs. But the main elements on each are still going to be there and the research is going to be much more like mass products than information products.

I remember a conversation I had with a professor in 1984 on this subject. He had worked at solar one and was up to date with what was going on with energy which made him fun and interesting to talk with. In the early 80’s there were all kinds of predictions that the technology would do for power photovoltaic what it did for integrated circuits. It was turning out that it wasn’t happening and researchers realized they were different products.

What is the thing we need to influence the non-carbon, low-carbon and carbon energy? A price for carbon. Maybe other incentives to not use carbon energy. But we can’t use examples of innovations from information systems as examples of what can happen in energy systems. They aren’t the same. Research can help, but it’ll take real economic incentives for people to use less carbon sources and more non and low carbon for their energy.

http://money.cnn.com/ 2008/ 04/ 21/ news/ companies/ ge_immelt_energy/ index.htm?postversion=2008042115

Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, said Monday much of the technology to make energy generation cleaner and more efficient is available now. The challenge, however, is deploying it and making it cheaper.

“A lot of the technology is already there,” Immelt told a crowd of electric utility executives at an industry meeting sponsored by the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group. “This is a business model issue, not a technical issue. Our job is to make them cheaper.”

The Board will be stunned that he missed the ‘brakethru’ entirely. Pfffft

“Roger Pielke, Jr.,
I believe Michael Hoexter arrived here around the same time you did.”