http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2008/ apr/ 29/ climatechange.carbonemissions

Why do US emissions keep rising while Sweden’s are half what they were 20 years ago? I would suggest the real difference is nothing to do with technology and everything to do with having an educated and politically responsible population, who don’t put making a fast buck at the top of their priority list.

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/swe.htm

And it’s not a breakthrough–the technology exists and we just need to decide to do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel

http://climateprogress.org/ 2008/ 04/ 17/ leaving-no-small-stone-unturned/ #comments

When you can mine the average continental crust at 12 ppm of thorium and come out with a significant advantage on energy-returned-on-energy-invested (EROEI), then I think it’s safe to go ahead and say that this is an unlimited resource.

The first auto with an internal combustion engine was manufactured in 1888. Only 20 years later Henry Ford introduced assembly line production of the Model T Ford. Model T sales steadily skyrocketed, from 69,762 in 1911, 170,211 in 1912, 202,667 in 1913, 308,162 in 1914, and 501,462 in 1915. By 1928 my 16 year old father, who lived in the mountain village of Jellico, Tennessee had been driving a car for 2 years.

In 1941 the first attempt to build a reactor failed. The next year a successful reactor was built in Chicago. In 1943 a second reactor was built. By 1945 three more reactors had been built at Hanford, Washington, and were producing plutonium for the first atomic bomb. In addition by the end of 1945 reactors of radically different design had been constructed at Los Alamos and at Chalk RIver in Canada. By 1950 dozens of reactors had been built world wide. In 1954, the twelve years after the first successful reactor was built, a reactor was powering a submarine. Serial production of naval reactor power plants began almost immediately, and by 1962, twenty years after the first successful reactor, most submarines built by the navy were reactor powered.

In 1901 Marconi demonstrated that long range radio transmission was possible. Within 5 years radio broadcast featuring singing had been made. In 1910 a performance of the Metropolitan Oper was broadcast in New York City. By 1915 weather and crop information were being broadcast in many parts of the United States. In 1919 the Radio Corporation of America is formed, and quickly became a fixture on the American scene.

In 1922 hundreds of radio stations were licensed. By the mid 1920’s my teenage father was building his own crystal radio set to listen to radio broadcast that could be heard in the mountain village of Jellico, Tennessee. In the history of radio, we have a 20 rather than a 40 year timeframe between the first practical demonstration of long range broadcast technology, and the general

The history of the airplane demonstrates an even quicker penetration by a new technology. The first powered flight occurred in 1903. During World War I (1914-1918), tens of thousands of aircraft were built. My father had already seen an airplane land in Jellico before that war began.

Clearly then the notion that no new technology can be implemented in under 42 years is absurd, and would if accepted straddle us with technological backwardness.

Even current reactor technology, which extracts only about 1% of the available energy, could supply all the world’s electricity for centuries using uranium from seawater - that’s how powerful fission is.

The two biggest sources of greenhouse gasses are electricity production and vehicles. We can eliminate the first one entirely with nuclear power - how many wedges would that be?

Wind power won’t get us very far - it’s only practical as an auxiliary to a larger, reliable source of power that can back it up. Solar power is not going to supply any significant grid power for the forseeable future. “Biofuels” (they should really be called Thanatofuels) actually increase greenhouse gasses more than fossil fuels do.

A better use for solar or wind power might be to displace the large energy consumption that is going to come in the future from desalination. Nuclear power can do that, too, of course, but it should be first dedicated to replacing electrical power (which has to be steady).

Things like clean water and fuel synthesis don’t require an energy source that is minute-to-minute stable, and they don’t necessarily involve the large energy losses involved in producing and distributing electricity. Such technologies would also be more attractive to poorer nations which desperately need both grid electricity and water - they can’t build nuclear reactors fast enough to both.

Why aren’t we developing solar and wind technology for the purposes to which it is suited? A square mile solar thermal installation could supply roughly 100,000 people with water at American usage rates. In India, with better insolation and less lawn-watering, it would be much higher, maybe enough to be economical with a little help. Windmills could pump desalinated seawater inland for irrigation instead of providing unstable and expensive electricity, or they could power reverse osmosis pumps. Solar or wind power could potentially be used to produce chemical fuels as well, and undoubtedly there are many other uses that don’t require constant power.

Personally I doubt that 450 ppm CO2 is achievable, but no one really knows what we need to achieve. Maybe the point of no return has already been passed, and feedback from the release of oceanic and soil carbon will doom us all. Maybe global warming is a hoax (I wish) and all we’ll get for our efforts will be cleaner air. The only thing we can do is try our best and hope, and our best means using every resource we have to the greatest extent possible, in the most efficient way.

Nuclear power can do anything that wind or solar can do, but for now it should be dedicated primarily to where it will help the most - displacing coal- and gas-fired electricity. It will be a long time before that’s accomplished, and in the meantime there’s more than enough for solar and wind to do without turning them to ill-suited purposes.

or to put the post idea another way, as jaime lerner said in the keynote of this-just-past’s ecocity world summit,

sometimes i have been asked, over many discussions about “innovation,” and for me, it’s very simple.

innovation… is starting.

because, you know, it’s hard to have all the answers, before.

Robert — Excellent point.

another reason los angelenos use A/C is their air is unbreathable when the wind dies down so the heat sits. come summer, they have to keep their windows closed, now, but that air quality will improve drastically as fossil emissions go down.

nothing is hard about this, except the absence of foresight amongst the lawyers and engineers now in office.

However, saying that “Typically it has taken 25 years after commercial
introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of
the global market” at this point in time is a little like saying
“Typically it takes 25 years before nuclear arms reach 1% of worldwide
missile stockpiles” five years before launching the Manhattan Project,
or saying “Typically it takes 25 years to produce a manned lunar
lander” 5 years before launching the Apollo Project. Isn’t the whole
point of a New Apollo Project
for energy that we’re going to do away with “business as usual”
and “typical” approaches to energy R&D? Why should we assume that the
typical pace of commercialization and scalability for energy
technologies - an industry with historically very poor investment in
R&D - would continue if energy R&D became an international priority?

Charles Barton makes a pretty good case in his comment above that even
absent a concerted R&D push, we shouldn’t discount the rapidly
scalable potential of disruptive new technologies. I most heartily
agree that there’s no reason to wait on new technology developments
before rapidly deploying currently available technologies, but that
brings me to my next point…

You are consistently setting up a false dichotomy between R&D and
deployment. President Bush may promote that same dichotomy himself,
but the Breakthrough Institute does not.

Breakthrough’s policy paper, Fast Clean Cheap argues for at least a $30 billion/year
public investment in research, development and deployment, and
I think we’d agree that deployment deserves the largest share of that
funds.

I know you don’t like the way we use the word “breakthrough,” but when
we’re talking about it, we’re not just talking about creating entirely
new technologies, we’re also talking about driving technologies down
that price curve through deployment, and trying to accelerate
“dramatic price and performance improvements” or “breakthroughs”, as
Fast, Clean, Cheap calls for, as well as public investments in
enabling infrastructure and other efforts to directly “break through”
deployment barriers (for example, investment in a new national
transmission “superhighway” for long-distance electricity transmission
to enable large-scale development of Great Plains wind or Southwest
solar resources (including the CSP you appropriately tout as a major
player in the push to get to/below 450 ppm).

Given the scale of the challenge, (14-16+ “stabilization wedges” at
least, right?), why would we not want to invest in both R&D
(making many relatively small, high-risk, high-reward bets on new and
emerging technologies) and directly invest tens of billions to
accelerate the commercialization and deployment of existing
technologies, driving them down the price curve? In short, why does
deployment have to “completely trump R&D?” I didn’t know we were
playing a game of Hearts here and that one or the other had to win out
entirely. I don’t think anyone at Breakthrough is saying forget
deployment and focus on R&D alone, in fact we’re saying quite the
opposite: both-and please!

What Breakthrough is trying to point out is that relying on carbon
price signals and private investment alone is unlikely to
result in the rapid development and deployment of the clean energy
technologies necessary to get to/below 450 ppm. There are far too
many other hurdles to deployment beyond just pricing to “break
through”, and even if pricing was the only concern, large public
investment would clearly accelerate private investment and the
deployment of these clean energy solutions. That’s something you don’t
seem to disagree with either, arguing above for a $10+ billion/year
dollar push for direct investment in deployment efforts. You say that
$10 billion/year doesn’t include tax incentives, so what would it look
like in your view?

Breakthrough advocates government procurement programs like the ones
that helped commercialize microchips and pave the way for the
internet, infrastructure investments like the ones that helped pave
the way for the automobile’s ascendence in America, direct public-
private demonstration and deployment investments and more. And yes,
we argue for a substantial increase in US (and international) energy
R&D efforts. Putting aside questions about how many “wedges” we need,
why wouldn’t we want a few more low carbon “tools” in our tool box, or
clean energy arrows in our quiver? At worst, these investments are a
great insurance policy. At best, they help accelerate the transition
to a clean energy future.

(We also point out that a policy agenda framed around accelerating the
transition to clean energy technologies is much more political
appealing than one centered around reducing pollution - even if the
policy mechanisms look similar - but that’s more a point of strategy,
not technology…)

If the problem is as big as we seem to agree it is, what’s wrong with
throwing the kitchen sink at it? RDandD please!

Cheers,

Jesse Jenkins - Associate Fellowship Director, Breakthrough
Institute

http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ science/ nature/ 7371645.stm

entitled “Nuclear’s CO2 cost ‘will climb’”

My naive take on this is “much ado about very little”.

Going to thorium and the LFTR will make these calculations obsolete:

http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/ 2006/ 10/ co2-emissions-of-liquid-fluoride.html

For those interested in a “Wedges” style approach to reducing emissions you might like to look at the “Wedges” report done by the Victorian Government (Australia) using current or soon to be current technologies/approaches.

http://www.climatechange.vic.gov.au/summit/Resources.html

It is specifically aimed at the Victorian context where brown coal (ignite) power accounts for close to 90% of generation and hence the push for CCS.

I also tend to agree with Joe that we need to act now with the tech we’ve got rather than hoping for some solution to come down from on high in the future. If we *do* find something - all the better…

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/

normal good R&D portfolio management, as practiced by companies and governments capable of long-term thinking, and who understand technology diffusion and inertia of huge installed bases.

One classification (different people use different labels, and in some places, combine R2+D1, or D1+D2, or R1+D1+D2; I’ve never managed R1, have done the rest.]
Pure Research (R1)
Applied Research (R2)
Exploratory Development (D1)
Advanced Development (D2)
Development (D3)
Deployment & scaleup, cost reductions, etc. (D4)

Joe seems to advocate reasonable policies:

a) Spending a big chunk of $$ on deployment of what works already, knowing that volume & experience will help costs come down, and of course, in this case, there are plenty of efficiencies around that are zero-cost, although they may require upfront capital.

b) Meanwhile, spend some money on lots of little Research projects, select ones that have promise and take them further. This is usually called “progressive commitment”, i.e., you normally have lots of little R projects, and fewer, but bigger D projects, and then most of the money gets spent in deployment. VC’s love to fund things that are ready to Deploy, and they’re OK with things that take some Development. They don’t fund R, at l ast not on purpose.

Between 1973 and 1983, I worked for Bell labs, an organization whose record for breakthroughs was pretty good, and which employed 25,000 people, mostly R&D, of which real R was only about 7%. Of course, that was very small compared to the 100s of thousands of people involved in manufacturing, deployment, and support. [The Bell System had more than 1M employees at one point, and really did think in terms of decades, which many businesses do not. The telephone network had some similarities with the power grid. Tiny efficiencies mattered. I recall a guy getting an award for saving a tiny fraction of the amount of gold needed for electrical contacts … but that was $Ms/year savings.]

But we always said:
“never schedule breakthoughs”.

Given the scale (in the old Bell System days), we had to install things that worked, not counting on what our R folks might invent. We knew they’d invent interesting things, but we also knew it might be 20 years before we could really use them, and some things (like bubble memories) worked, but never well enough to win. Some things were deemed interesting, but really niche, when first done … like lasers, or solar cells. I know of two $B projects where they charged into fullscale Development too early, and wasted most of that money.

I’ll happily listen to people advocating massive R&D for energy, IF:
1) They explain the starting portfolio, including what stage each of the proposed projects is at, any known barriers, scaleup issues, costs, etc. [Obviously more is known on some project that’s further along.]
2) They explain the R&D portfolio management strategy and who’s going to run it.
3) And they do this convincingly.

This energy stuff is *harder* than what we did at BTL, since
Laws of Thermodynamics != Moore’s Law.

I believe we should in particular create feed in tariffs for renewables that can function as fossil generation replacements, like CSP with storage, geothermal, sustainable biomass, small and medium hydro. Kind of like a bounty for private companies and utilities to get busy on climate solutions. In the US more than anywhere else, we can lead the way in this category because of our natural resources and (still) relative wealth.

Mike: Can you give a specific example of a feed in tariff at work? I do not fully grasp the concept.

A well-structured feed in tariff (there have been poorly designed ones as well), is a set of premium wholesale electric rates for each class of renewable generator which are guaranteed for 10 or 20 years to enable the plant builders to recover their investment plus a reasonable profit. The guaranteed nature of the tariff reduces the finance costs for building the plant. The German tariff and the Spanish tariff laws are structured slightly differently but I think the Spanish one might be more applicable here in the US. Another way to think of a feed in tariff is it is an open power purchase agreement guaranteed by law for qualifying generators. The qualifications should be written to meet the needs of grid reliability but also to accelerate the penetration of renewables on the grid, which is the whole purpose of the law.

For instance for CSP baseload, I believe that the first generation of generators would require a guarantee of a per/kWh price of somewhere in the mid-teens (per some informal conversations) for a period of 20 years to be built (if these generators were in the sunnier areas of the US Southwest). These might go into the ground in 2011. The next generation of generators, perhaps in 2014, would start at a lower rate, maybe $0.12/kWh. The ratepayers would only see fractional increases in their bills, as these wholesale rates are mixed in with the entire rate pool.

Jay Inslee has proposed a national mechanism for feed in tariffs which he calls “Clean Energy Buyback”. If we in the US had a national law, the premiums paid by ratepayers for renewables would be mixed in with all electric rates.

Feed in tariffs are an efficient mechanism to achieve the deployment of clean technologies because they are performance based…no one gets paid unless they generate electricity. On the other hand, they made it easier for individuals, cooperatives and companies to get financing to install or build renewable generators.

This has been done for years in Germany and some other European countries.

This is akin to *net metering*, in which a system gets credit for electricity it generates, but cannot get a check for the excess over what it uses. That is useful, but of course, incents people to try to put in only “just enough” even if they have room for more.

Time-of-use meters allows time-of-day and seasonal charing differences.

Renewable Portfolio Standards require uilities to supply some fraction of their electricity vai renewable sources.

As usual, the rules vary all over the place among states, and I know the ones in California the best.

CA has R.P.S., has done net metering for a while, and just passed its first attempt at F.I.T.s in January, although the program is more geared for larger installations - I think, so far, homeowners are more likely to stick with existing net metering.

For more detail, see EERE article and article in cleantech.

However, at least as important is the CA PUC’s use of financial incentives to utilities for efficiency, not just producing more megawatts. This leads utilities to act very differently, once they get over their old mindset as can be see in you look at PGE, big utility in NorCal. Rummage through the PG&E website a bit and see - for instance, they run giveaway/rebate programs on CFLs.

I’ve heard their CEO Peter Darbee talk, as well as Janice Berman, their Sr. Director for Customer Energy Efficiency. (Both struck me as very sharp and articulate executives.)

They are serious -this is not webpage fluff - but he notes that utility mindsets don’t change unless the rules change. In PG&E’s case, he said that replacing 28 of 35 senior executives helped.

PG&E sends a team out to do energy audits, give rebates on CFLs, etc, etc… but for some reason,
they don’t seem to sit around hoping that some massive R&D program will solve all the problems in a few decades.

etc., etc., page 88 ff, it does not appear that there is an agreed-upon design, much less a fully operating demonstartion plant yet.

In case it helps, my questions come from your webpage only and the only purpose is clarification of your position (which in my mind is unclear based upon what I’ve read). They are unrelated to the discussion in these pages or outside sources.

Your stated goal, both on your webpage and Michael’s response is to “Bring the real price of clean energy down as quickly as possible.” Does “down” mean below the cost of dirty energy?

I believe you believe that this policy is necessary, but I would like you to answer whether you believe this policy is sufficient? If it is not sufficient, what other policies are necessary? Your last paragraph in your response above seems to suggest that R&D investment in cheap energy is sufficient, but I would like to be more sure that this is what you intend (much confusion has resulting from reading too much into tea leaves in this discussion). Let’s remove the uncertainty if possible.

How many years do you think the investment program on your webpage will take to make new clean energy cheaper than new dirty energy? (Not a firm number, just an educated estimate.)

What do you think the world should do about GHG between now and then? What level of GHG do you think Earth will experience in this timeframe?

Is the investment program on your webpage also targeted at reducing the cost of new clean energy to less than cost of old (paid-off) dirty energy? If so, how long is this likely to take? If not, does BI have a proposal to shut down existing dirty energy plants, since you suggest carbon pricing is unlikely? If we don’t shut down existing dirty energy plants, how do we prevent reaching disastrous GHG levels in the atmosphere?

When you suggest above investing 50 to 80 billion per year “to scale up the new energy technologies”, do you mean having the Federal government fund deployment of these technologies, or do you mean research and development? If a mixture, how much for deployment do you think is appropriate, and how much for R&D?

Earl got there first, but can you also read my April 30, 10:42pm post and:

a) Is there someplace else in BI to look to answer the sorts of questions I was asking?

b) Do my questions make sense? Are you the right BI person to ask, or is someone else more appropriate? I’m happy to try to understand what you’re really pushing for, and how.

c) When *you* say R&D, what do you mean? [I described what I meant, but people sometimes mean different things when they say it.]

‘ve looked at Fast, Clean and Cheap (a trio of which I’m fond), but I’m still unclear on what BI really means. I found it, but the link you posted was wrong - You might want to repost.

d) Personally, I would be quite happy to increase funding for the various categories of R&D that I described, but it is *impossible* to assess whether or not a specific big-spending proposal makes sense without seeing a lot more detail on where the money goes and how the effort is structured.

The whole purpose of the Breakthrough Institute’s position and its inconsistencies, are a function of the political fear that you cannot ask people to pay more for cleaner energy for a decade or two, so that we will have more choices in the future. We must invent our way out of the current bind not deploy our way out of it with what I would call mid-priced energy solutions(though they cover there butts here by adding the “D” to the end). Advanced Renewable Tariffs (the second or third generation of the feed in tariff) or “Clean Energy Buyback” as Jay Inslee calls them are one of the methods of putting the money exactly at the point of deployment and doing so in a way that is very efficient and performance based. The money is not spent on glamorous research projects but on deploying existing and emerging technologies that will generate power this year, next year, or the year after.

Breakthrough is not alone in not confronting the consequences of the Cheap Energy Contract. Many advocates of renewable energy or other alternatives rush very quickly to claim how cheap their solution is. My point is that it will not be cheap for a while but it is worthwhile to start on the road as soon as possible. Starting on the road of deploying current and emerging technologies will make it cheaper down the line.

In rummaging around, I did find some more concrete proposals, from BI Senior Fellow Marin Hoffert, in a talk called:
“Energy from Space: The Case for R&D”

http://www.marshall.org/experts.php?id=178

Is this the general thrust of the R&D that you want?

Certainly, magnetically-levitated catapults, beam-powered rockets and (within 40-50 years) a space elevator, to put up PV satellites, are interesting, as is the last slide on history of US Federal R&D funding.

I’m familiar with the George C. Marshall Institute’s efforts on climate change. Can I assume you are, as well?

Multiplying, for California the average annual bill was $1017, and nationally it was $1215. Thus one can have higher rates and still have lower bills if you’ve got efficiency as part of your program.

Efficiency is the most overlooked solution.

Earl, you make a great point about efficiency! It is a huge lever here that can help insulate us from the higher upfront per-unit costs of what Michael calls “mid-priced energy solutions.” We need to explore effective policies to drive as much efficiency as possible.

Michael, it may be possible to break the “Cheap Energy Contract” to some degree here in the developed world. But how do you propose we ensure China, India and other developing nations forgo the “Cheap Energy Contract” that ensure American industrialization and prosperity for the past two centuries?

OK, longer answers to come…

The Liquid Fluoride Thorium design is further along (and, IMO, more promising) than other Gen IV technologies. There are four key components to the design:

The most unconventional part of the reactor (a liquid-fueled core using U233) has in fact been demonstrated successfully, and proven to be operable and stable.

The generation of fissile U233 from Thorium has also been successfully demonstrated.

Power extraction can easily use existing technology if more advanced methods (direct contact heat exchangers) are not developed.

On-line processing of fuel does not require any new techniques - it’s just a series of well-understood chemical separations.

The LFTR is ready for advanced development, and probably no further from deployability than solar thermal - but without the disadvantages of solar.

A lack of /agreement/ among proponents of different nuclear systems does not necessarily show that none of those systems are ready for advanced development, anymore than the existence of different kinds of solar cells proves that none of them are worth developing.

A multitude of independent tests indicated that the early 1940’s had CO2 concentrations above 410 ppm. Since this is in direct conflict with the IPCC report, this pre-1957 scientific data has been ignored. How convenient.

That being said, a simultaneous campaign of both aggressive efficiency and aggressive decarbonization of the grid is going to yield over a period of a couple decades a net increase in the percentage of our GDP being devoted to either payments for energy or payments for new capital goods. These capital goods/energy conversion devices will cost money.

So, yes, efficiency is going to make decarbonization cheaper but I don’t want to promise people that it won’t cost more to build a lot of new infrastructure both at the point of use and at the point of generation. Also for some energy users and economic sectors, efficiency gains are going to be easier than for others, so those sectors will feel differentially the impact of higher energy costs, either from rising fossil fuel prices or from the implementation of new decarbonized and hopefully sustainable technologies.

What I object to, fundamentally, is the promise made to the energy consuming public, implicitly or explicitly, that it is going to be all uniformly easy on the wallet to face what appears to be humanity’s biggest challenge to date. Breakthrough Institute seems to have premised their program on just that promise, thereby hanging their hats on low probability solutions like technological breakthroughs rather than higher probability deployment at middle to high prices and then generate efficiencies of scale and the occasional breakthrough through learning in the field.

I’m not against breakthroughs, but I think they just don’t happen that often nor do they necessarily have the targeted effect on energy pricing and “clean-ness” that we are looking for. A breakthrough is therefore a low probability strategy.

Why not take on the problem in stages? First produce products for the developed world and then they will become cheap enough to deploy in other places. It happened that way with mobile phones. Why not with clean energy?

This is maybe not the ideal solution but it is a practical one and we can start on this path right now. So, two cheers for mid-priced energy!!

http://www.sfgate.com/ cgi-bin/ article.cgi?f=/ c/ a/ 2008/ 05/ 01/ BUUC10EHQM.DTL&hw=memristor&sn=001&sc=1000

Note that in the article that
a) the potential deployment timeline is uncertain and most likely more than a decade
b) the usefulness of products with memristors is uncertain (versus competing products)

Furthermore we have a huge commercial and academic research apparatus already built for nanotechnology and microelectronics, so the memristor enters the R&D pipeline at a highly favorable place. No one, as far as I know, is “against” the memristor.

By contrast, there are a number of fundamental competing ideas about which energy conversion devices are most valuable or important that will divide research and development efforts.

Letting the future of a favorable climate hang on technological breakthroughs is therefore not particularly wise.

You write:

Your stated goal, both on your webpage and Michael’s response is to “Bring the real price of clean energy down as quickly as possible.” Does “down” mean below the cost of dirty energy?

Yes, that means bring real, installed costs of clean energy down below the cost of dirty energy. We believe this is the only way we can ensure developing countries adopting a low-carbon development path. If the alternative is slow or no development, you’ll have a hard time convincing China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and the rest of the developing world not to turn to coal and other fossil fuels to power their development. The United States and Western Europe may be willing to accept “artificially” high energy prices - i.e. prices raised by internalizing carbon costs through tax/regulatory codes - but I’m not confident China, India or any other developing country will be. Short answer: yes, our ultimate goal, if we want to leave as much coal in the ground as possible, is to make coal irrelevant. The only way to do that is to ultimately develop cheaper, scalable alternatives.

I believe you believe that this policy is necessary, but I would like you to answer whether you believe this policy is sufficient? If it is not sufficient, what other policies are necessary?

Making clean energy cheaper than dirty energy isn’t a policy. It’s a policy goal. Really, the policy goal is creating and spurring the deployment of scalable, affordable energy sources that can power development across the planet while reducing global greenhouse gas emissions rapidly towards zero. That’s the objective. You’ll note that I’m not sure that’s an explicit objective of most US cap-and-trade policies.

-Yes, you want to price carbon. This is necessary to send the right price signals to private capital, correct market failures, and most importantly, raise the tens to hundreds of billions annually necessary to fuel a clean energy revolution. Use whatever policy works (carbon taxes, cap-and-auction, I’m agnostic) to get the highest price on carbon that is politically possible and sustainable over the long term.
-Re-invest most of the revenue generated by this carbon price into clean energy RD&D (with greater monetary emphasis down that chain, R

I’m not sure where you got that from. My last line was “what’s wrong with throwing the kitchen sink at it [global warming]? RD&D please!” The whole comment advocated a variety of policies designed to achieve a policy objective of driving down the costs and accelerating the deployment of scalable clean energy technologies. No, R&D is not sufficient, and I don’t think we’ve ever said it was.

How many years do you think the investment program on your webpage will take to make new clean energy cheaper than new dirty energy? (Not a firm number, just an educated estimate.)

It will depend on the technology. And on what happens to the costs of dirty energy sources (coal even is on the rise, as are clearly natural gas and oil). I’m not sure I can answer that question too precisely without doing a bit more research, but it’d better be by 2050, or we’re pretty well hosed as a global society. The point is that without achieving this policy objective, cap and trade will be at best, politically challenging to sustain in the United States, as deeper reduction targets drive up energy costs further, and internationally useless, as developing nations forego increased energy prices through carbon pricing in order to sustain economic development and pull billions more out of poverty (a goal we can hardly begrudge them). That argues that we should specifically design our policies to achieve this goal, as quickly as possible. Current policy proposals don’t seem to be oriented towards that objective. That worries me, and I think it should worry you

What do you think the world should do about GHG between now and then? What level of GHG do you think Earth will experience in this timeframe?

The United States and the developing world should do what I outlined above, in short: 1) price carbon and raise revenue, 2) invest revenue in driving down costs and rapidly deploying clean energy solutions. 3) engage the international community with an eye towards rapid technology transfer and diffusion as a base of an international climate agreement (ideally in “exchange” for emissions limits in developing countries).

We’re not saying don’t do anything until clean energy prices are cheaper than coal! That’s President Bush’s line! We’re saying that making clean energy cheaper than coal must be the explicit policy objective of a successful US climate policy, and it’s currently not. We’ve got to get started today in achieving that objective (yesterday really!) and that will mean deploying everything we’ve got at our disposal today while striving to bring down the costs of mature and emerging technologies, and invest in a broad R&D strategy to develop as many more tools in our toolbox as we can get.

Is the investment program on your webpage also targeted at reducing the cost of new clean energy to less than cost of old (paid-off) dirty energy? If so, how long is this likely to take? If not, does BI have a proposal to shut down existing dirty energy plants, since you suggest carbon pricing is unlikely? If we don’t shut down existing dirty energy plants, how do we prevent reaching disastrous GHG levels in the atmosphere?

We strongly favor replacing dirty energy in the U.S. and other developed economies with clean energy sources, efficiency, or CCS. But we emphatically don’t think that effort to simply shut down coal plants without a well-thought out alternative will work because there is too high of a risk of energy price spikes that generate public animosity and make the kind of sustained effort to reduce emissions over the course of the next few decades politically challenging, if not impossible. In other words, “shutting down coal plants” is a tactic not a strategy, and we will imperil the long-term strategy if we don’t focus centrally on replacing dirty paid off energy plants with clean energy sources that create good jobs, increase America’s energy security, advance our economic competitiveness, and bring down the price of clean energy. Of course we need to shut down existing coal plants. The question is how we go about doing it, and what will replace them. What’s your answer? What’s your answer in China?

When you suggest above investing 50 to 80 billion per year “to scale up the new energy technologies”, do you mean having the Federal government fund deployment of these technologies, or do you mean research and development? If a mixture, how much for deployment do you think is appropriate, and how much for R&D?

As I said in the initial comment, both-and! RD&D. And infrastructure investment. And direct subsidies (although that’s really a deployment policy). The exact mixture is something we are still researching and exploring. As I said above, the general formula is that R

p.s. Michael: We’re not “letting the future of a favorable climate hang on technological breakthroughs.” We need to get started yesterday in deploying every available tool as quickly as is politically possible (while working to advance what is politically possible!). We’re simply concerned that the scale of the challenge and the corresponding “technology gap” makes technological breakthroughs (in price and performance of existing, emerging and new technologies) essential. If the climate challenge demands we make that bet, we’d better place our chips down now, on as many of those roulette squares as possible.