Break on through to the greener side

June 24, 2009 6:44 AM

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus want to change the way countries think about global warming. Instead of treating carbon as a pollutant, and legislating our way out of a climate crisis, they suggest a "challenge" approach to the problem—igniting a creative fire under companies and even the federal government to create new and cheaper solutions instead of more loophole-filled legislation.

"When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?" he asks the interns. "And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never."

And, they have a posse:

"The president has adopted their language, their message, the story they helped to develop," Teague says. "The next stage in the development of all of this is for the actual reality of the policy to reflect the glowing, wonderful, positive, visionary rhetoric."

What remains to be seen is if the federal government has the stomach (or the budget) for the massive research endeavor their approach would require. The example engineering and research program advanced as a model by Shellenberger and Nordhaus is the US moon landing, with a 1969 price tag of over $25 billion. In today's dollars, that's a lot of bailouts.

posted by littlerobothead (17 comments total)

Igniting fires to stop CO2 emissions is just crazy enough to workkill us all!

"When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?" he asks the interns. "And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never."

Making older ones more expensive? Can't think of any. Making older ones more expensive relative to new ones? All the time.
posted by DU at 6:56 AM on June 24

They came to town with a simple plea: The government needs to spend more money — not less — to develop radical new energy technologies, and to help bring those to market.

Genius. How long did it take them to come up with this idea? It will revolutionise the way we have been thinking about the issue of renewable energy and is in no way a simplistic precis of what the sector has been trying to achieve for over 2 decades.

"The president has adopted their language, their message, the story they helped to develop," Teague says. "The next stage in the development of all of this is for the actual reality of the policy to reflect the glowing, wonderful, positive, visionary rhetoric."

Their language? Wait till he adopts their boundless self-regard, then we can really go places.
posted by biffa at 7:16 AM on June 24 [3 favorites]

igniting a creative fire under companies and even the federal government to create new and cheaper solutions instead of more loophole-filled legislation.

Save investing my own massive fortune, there's really no way of motivating companies outside of legislation. In fact, that's precisely what cap and trade is designed to do: by moving non-market externalities like pollution into the market, it provides companies a financial incentive to buy solutions to their carbon footprint (they can sell their carbon credits for cash), which provides other companies incentive to invent those solution.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 7:16 AM on June 24

Yay, lets not do anything now. Lets do research for twenty more years.
posted by octothorpe at 7:19 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]

Strategies for not treating carbon as a pollutant (extra credit: Michelle Bachmann)
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 7:20 AM on June 24

"So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It's very simple: It's that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide."

Want to watch me solve world hunger? It's very simple...

I read more hoping to find out what the details were but the article only has wordier versions of "throw money at it and cross your fingers". I'm a bit mystified at this - I was under the impression that the tech needed wasn't there, not that the financial motivations for clean cheap worldwide energy weren't sufficient.
posted by anti social order at 7:33 AM on June 24

The tech needed IS there, we just need to get over our One Source To Power Them All mentality. Diversity of energy sources is a good thing and now it is a necessary thing. A combination of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, bio and conservation would make an enormous dent. Some efficiency improvements (such as electric cars, public trans and so forth) would be another huge leap.

We don't need a Manhattan Project, we just need to get off our asses and get serious.
posted by DU at 7:37 AM on June 24 [4 favorites]

We need to stop the damn cows farting. But on the contrary, Congress is taking steps to protect America's supply of cow farts for the foreseeable future.
posted by Phanx at 7:55 AM on June 24

This reads a lot like industry FUD. "We at Shell/BP/Exxon are investing in cheaper solar energy for the future (so don't make us do anything more)"
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:57 AM on June 24

Actually, I take that back. Getting off our asses and getting serious is the Manhattan Project we need. Massive education campaigns, infrastructure building and rollouts/phaseouts. I wish FDR were still alive.
posted by DU at 8:01 AM on June 24

I heard these guys on NPR and while their approach comes off as facile, compare it against what is actually happening.

We are trying to make older energy technologies more expensive: see cap-and-trade. Last I heard, those bills were 1,200 pages long — plenty of room for loopholes so we can have Business As Usual. Our funding for new energy technologies is pathetic.

While this is all very obvious to people on MeFi, it doesn't appear all that obvious to Congress. Laugh all you want at a five person team whose mission statement might well be "Pointing Out The Obvious," but our Congresscritters might actually need that get their attention.
posted by adipocere at 9:45 AM on June 24

The tech needed IS there, we just need to get over our One Source To Power Them All mentality. Diversity of energy sources is a good thing and now it is a necessary thing. A combination of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, bio and conservation would make an enormous dent. Some efficiency improvements (such as electric cars, public trans and so forth) would be another huge leap.

Some of the tech needed is there, some is still in development, all of it will get further ahead by us spending more money on it. It won't get better (ie cheaper/more efficient) on its own because the compeititon is too well established and has too many advantages, (like getting to cause climate change without paying the price). The solution to this is more money but not just more money, we also need to legistlate and regulate to established energy sources don't get a free ride, so that we're not totally focussed on centralised electricity generation and gas for heating, and we need to educate so we get buy in from all the people who we need to want renewables, both politically and in their houses.

My objection above is not to the idea of more funding but to the low content of what the people in the FPP are offering in the context of what has been going on for decades.
posted by biffa at 9:48 AM on June 24

Potential wind power is 23 times current US electricity use - "A trio of researchers have calculated the sort of yields we might see if the world took advantage of all the wind power available to it. It's a bit of a thought experiment, but the numbers are still impressive: 40 times the current global electric use."

Nuclear power: Going fast - "a fourth-generation nuclear power station which runs on the nuclear waste generated by all the previous generations of nuclear power stations... The amount of fuel which already exists for such reactors would be enough to power the world for millennia"
posted by kliuless at 10:50 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]

"When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?" he asks the interns. "And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never."

When was the last time humans faced a worldwide threat to the whole planet, caused by ourselves? I would guess it was Nuclear Weapons and we seem to have put lots of regulation in place on their use and development. So far, we've managed to avoid killing hundreds of millions people and causing a nuclear winter.

"a fourth-generation nuclear power station which runs on the nuclear waste generated by all the previous generations of nuclear power stations... The amount of fuel which already exists for such reactors would be enough to power the world for millennia"

If you think about how much people hate Yucca mountain and all the nuclear waste that would need to be shipped all over the country, how would they feel about waste being transported from one plant to the next? The main problem with Nuclear energy is the attitudes towards it, which probably is left-over from the cold war fear of nuclear weapons.

I know the argument against Nukes is that they are too expensive, but does that factor in the externality of CO₂ emission? Of course waste disposal would also need to be factored in.

I would like to see more nukes, though. Even though windmills don't produce CO₂ they are not the prettiest things in the world. I'm not sure I want them all covering the landscape everywhere.

Solar panels are also good.
posted by delmoi at 11:09 AM on June 24

Instead of treating carbon as a pollutant, and legislating our way out of a climate crisis, they suggest a "challenge" approach to the problem—igniting a creative fire under companies and even the federal government to create new and cheaper solutions instead of more loophole-filled legislation.

Oh, so the Bush plan of making pollution controls optional. How's that working out for Texas?
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:39 PM on June 24

""When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?" he asks the interns"

It's never needed doing before. All our current energy options are here because of regular market forces; making things better & cheaper.

And what do these guys propose? The opposite of making older energy sources more expensive is making newer sources cheaper. Well, duh. That's what the market is for, and the market is busy doing exactly that - except that our current energy sources are still cheap. Therefore, they have to be made more expensive in order to incentivize the research, development, and production of newer, cheaper energy sources. We could just wait and let the markets do all the prioritizing for us, but the imminent threat of global warming isn't waiting for that to happen.

In other words, we are currently doing exactly what needs to be done. It could be done faster if it were better funded, but by definition, that would be more expensive. And money doesn't grow on trees, no matter how fucking dire our needs are.
posted by Xoebe at 4:35 PM on June 24

Who owns these guys?
posted by wobh at 5:42 AM on June 25