A carbon price can play a role, but it will not be near enough.
Share
Among policy makers, environmentalists, and the general public, the syllogism goes that if you care about climate change, then you support a carbon price. Environmental groups devote their time and resources to achieving a price for carbon, either in the form of a direct carbon tax, or through cap-and-trade legislation. Investing in emerging technologies is seen as prudent complementary policy at best, and an unnecessary distraction at worst.
Continue reading "The End of Carbon Price Orthodoxy" »
Welcome to the age of the sound blast.
Share
Obama's YouTube videos -- the ten most watched being an average 15 minutes in length -- have been viewed 33 million times. Have we gone from the age of the sound bit to the "sound blast" thanks to the Internet? The founders of the media technology conference, Personal Democracy Forum, point to an important shift in political media.
-----
Continue reading "YouTube's Political Revolution" »
You want breakthroughs on the frontiers of science? Provide long-term support for the people, experiments and infrastructure vital to the enterprise.
Share
The latest news from the stem cell world is quite promising. Setting aside the hype and politics, normal science (where allowed by law) has been proceeding along a trajectory intended to develop cellular treatments for disease. The latest report in Science details remarkable progress in methods for developing cell therapies that treat disease without causing immune rejection. While some critics have already disparaged the report as "only a mouse study," this latest work represents another important step in the field.
Continue reading "On Scientific Progress and Politics" »
Why isn't adaptation to global warming part of the climate change political agenda? The Los Angeles Times weighs in.
Share
Breakthrough Senior Fellow, Roger Pielke, Jr., has a new post up examining the LA Times Alan Zarembo's look at what people are doing to slowly come around to a new way of thinking about weather, climate change and the damage that new and stronger hurricanes can mean for coastal development.
What are we doing to adapt?
Continue reading "Adapting to a Changing Earth:" »
Why Gore should not endorse a candidate.
Share
Matthew Nisbet has a great post on his blog, Framing Science, about why Gore should stay out of election politics. He acknowledges that despite heroic a heroic effort, Gore hasn't been able to reach Republicans, who rank global warming dead last among 22 issues as a political priority.
Why Gore Should Not Endorse
Speculation mounts as to whether Gore will endorse either Obama or Clinton in the Democratic Primary race. My suggestion would be that he stay out of election politics in 2008, except to try to raise the profile of climate change in a non-partisan way.
As I describe in this column and in several public radio interviews, public opinion is little changed today from the time of the release of Inconvenient Truth, despite the massive publicity success of the film and the sharp increase in news coverage of climate change. The reason is that Gore's success has been a double edged sword. Attention to the film was driven by his partisan celebrity, a great marketing campaign, and his terrific ability to explain the science. But the readily available partisan heuristic of a former Democratic presidential candidate reborn to take up the issue of climate change also ended up being a liability in reaching the roughly half of Americans who do not have a favorable opinion of Gore, including the great majority of Republicans.
As a result, as I describe in the column, over the past three years, across polls, Democrats have grown slightly more accepting of the science, more concerned about the problem, and more willing to make the issue a political priority. Republicans, in contrast, basically remain unchanged, with the great majority rejecting the science, and when asked, rating climate change dead last among 22 issues as a political priority.
So if Gore's goal is to try to reach the broad American public on climate change, and that includes Republicans, he needs to move into a post-partisan stage of his career. He needs to avoid actions or messages that only serve to remind the public of his once strong Democrat label. So far he has done a great job of staying under the radar with the Democratic nomination process, and in my mind, this is the right course of action.
Gore should wait until the nomination is settled, and then work during the general election in a bi-partisan way to raise the profile of climate change as a campaign issue that all Americans should be equally concerned about.
"We should be thinking about ourselves as global capital managers."
Share
Breakthrough Senior Fellow Dalton Conley is University Professor of the Social Sciences and Chair of Sociology at New York University. His research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity within and across generations. In this vein, he studies sibling differences in socioeconomic success; racial inequalities; the salience of physical appearance to economic status; the measurement of class; and how health and biology affect (and are affected by) social position.
Continue reading "Everyone an Investor: An Interview with Dalton Conley" »
In other words, It finds some change in the couch...
Share
On Thursday, March 13 2008, the Department of Energy announced 11 grants totaling $14 million dollars to various research projects aimed at driving down the high-cost of solar energy equipment.
In their words:
The[se] solar projects have the potential to significantly reduce the cost of electricity produced by PV products from current levels of $0.18-$0.23 per Kilowatt hour (kWh) to $0.05 - $0.10 per kWh by 2015 - a price that is competitive in markets nationwide. [We think it'll take more like $50 billion, by the way]
Each university will work closely with an industry partner to ensure the projects retain a commercialization focus and that results are quickly transitioned into market ready-products and manufacturing processes...
Continue reading "Department of Energy grants $14 million dollars to Solar" »
The environment is a non-issue for most Americans.
Share
A Gallup national survey this month asked Americans what they thought was the most important problem facing the country. Global warming did not make the list of responses.
At the height of media attention for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," Pew asked Americans to rank a list of issues in order of importance; global warming ranked low in 2006 and even lower in 2007. But when the question is open-ended, as it was in this Gallup poll, so few responded "global warming" that it was statistically insignificant.
The environment is a non-issue for most Americans, and fear of global warming won't motivate voters in a time when the declining economy is on everyone's minds. This recent Gallup poll comes as no surprise -- and it reinforces the idea that continuing to pit the environment against the economy is a losing battle. If we want to win action on global warming, we are going to have to appeal to the issues that people are already concerned about.
"Leaving a technology on the shelf, unlike a fine wine, will not make it better."
Share
by Andrew Jager
Part two of a two-part series
(Part one published Tuesday, March 18)
MIXING WATER AND OIL
Though Brazil has become self-sufficient in energy terms, sugarcane-based ethanol has not been the only factor. Petrobras, state-sponsored oil giant, has also increased oil production rather dramatically. As recently as 1991, Brazil produced an average of 670,000 barrels of oil per day . By 2006, that number had jumped to nearly 1.8 million barrels per day
Significantly, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva has stated that Brazil would not "pull back even more millimeter" from its biofuel programs despite recent discoveries of massive offshore crude oil reserves . This is, of course, good news for supporters of biofuels. However, it must be noted that at the same time Lula said that "Brazil would obviously participate in OPEC ." Clearly, Brazil intends to become a petroleum exporter. However the story does not end there. One must keep in mind that Brazil's demand for energy has been steadily increasing, and is likely to do so for many years. Add to this Brazil's reliance on hydroelectric power generation, and the fact that electricity has occasionally been scarce in recent years, and it seems likely that Brazil will not only export oil, but consume more domestically as well.
Continue reading "Sugar and Oil: Learning the Right Lessons from Brazil " »
The former vice president has been many things over his political career, and one of those permutations is worth revisiting.
Share
Ever since unveiling "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore has become a symbol for the fight against climate change. The image of him standing on his pedestal, Earth in peril looming large in the background, has etched itself permanently on our minds. Gore's film raised environmentalists' whisper-warnings to shouts coming from the mouths of elites. Given his immense contribution of elevating the importance of the climate challenge, it's easy to forget that Gore had a political career that predated his current one as environmentalist advocate.
Continue reading "The Many Sides of Al Gore" »
"Leaving a technology on the shelf, unlike a fine wine, will not make it better."
Share
by Andrew Jager
Part one of a two-part series
At times it seems I'm surrounded by things Brazilian: Bossa Nova is pumped out of speakers at clothing stores; caipirinhas are on the menu at the local bar, and there's a Brazilian film playing at the cinema up the street. Even environmental writers and energy pundits talk about Brazil's success in substituting ethanol - a biofuel derived from sugarcane in Brazil and corn in the United States - for gasoline and freeing the country from its previous dependence on imported oil. But the odds are that in a few short years cars in the U.S. will be more likely to fill up on Brazilian gasoline than ethanol.
If environmentalists are serious about embracing biofuels as an alternative to gasoline, they must be equally serious about building policy that emulates Brazil's successes, as well as efficiently addresses the problematic elements of ethanol as fuel.
Continue reading "Sugar and Oil: Learning the Right Lessons from Brazil" »
"Our goal is to take a natural process that takes 100,000 years and compress it into 30 minutes."
Share
It's not very often that a middle school science project results in a technology that could help avert a climate crisis. But when eighth-grader Claire Lackner wanted to prove that carbon dioxide could be cheaply captured from the air, something clicked for her father, Klaus Lackner, a scientist at Columbia University. Since then Lackner has succeeded in scaling up that science project to a level that might might allow humankind to pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
Last year he unveiled the world's first successful demonstration of air capture technology. His device, which he calls an "air extractor," can sop up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere like a sponge. Unlike carbon capture and sequestration devices, which act on the emissions of the power plant into which they are built, Lackner's air extractors can be placed anywhere, and act on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as a whole.
--------
Continue reading "From Synthetic Trees to Carbon Sponges: an interview with Scientist Klaus Lackner" »
Just when I was expecting Helm to propose a better alternative, his argument took a turn for the melodramatic.
Share
One of the things we're trying to get people to see here at the Breakthrough Institute is that Kyoto isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, it is probably ecologically irrelevant. Despite self-congratulatory claims otherwise, most nations in the EU have seen their emissions rise, not fall, under the protocols. We think it's misguided, convoluted, and a regulatory nightmare -- so we were, at first, pleased to see an opinion piece from Dieter Helm in the Wall Street Journal yesterday pointing out these failings.
Continue reading "Where's Your Better Plan?" »
The Swedish-Spitzer solution seems morally just: the law punishes the supposed perpetrator not the victim. But it raises an important question: will prostitutes be better off with Johns like Spitzer in jail or prison?
Share
The irony at the center of the Spitzer sex scandal is that Attorney General Elliot Spitzer made possible legislation on prostitution that will almost certainly result in a more severe penalty for soon-to-be-ex Governor Elliot Spitzer.
The progressive legislation pushed by Spitzer alongside advocates for women and prostitutes followed the Swedish model, which punishes the male Johns, not the prostitutes. The theory seems humane: most prostitutes are victims of sexual abuse. And most typically enter the profession at age 13 or 14. One psychologist cited by Nick Kristof in the Times today finds that nearly 90 percent of prostitutes want out; two-thirds suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.
This dynamic was at work in the Spitzer case. The young woman he was caught with, the Times reports, came from a "broken home," was abused, and reported having been homeless and had drug problems. Spitzer, by contrast, is a multi-millionaire who, the wire transcripts seem to show, may have hurt or put other prostitutes in danger.
The Swedish-Spitzer solution seems morally just: the law punishes the supposed perpetrator not the victim. Whether or not you agree that all Johns are perpetrators and all prostitutes victims, the law raises an important question: will prostitutes be better off with Johns like Spitzer in jail?
Continue reading "Will Prostitutes Be Better Off With Johns like Spitzer in Prison?" »
EU to "overshoot" its emissions reductions targets? Read between the lines.
Share
It has become an article of faith among environmental leaders -- most especially the architects of present efforts in the U.S. Congress to pass domestic cap and trade legislation -- that the European Union has set the standard among wealthy nations for Kyoto compliance. When it comes to taking action to reduce carbon emissions, the E.U., and particularly the emissions trading system that it established in 2005, is held up as a model that the U.S. and other developed nations ought to emulate. E.U. leaders have done nothing to deter this impression. Indeed, a recent report released late last year by the European Environment Agency boasted that the fifteen advanced developed economies in the European Union, known as the EU-15, will meet - and perhaps even over-shoot! -- its 2012 Kyoto target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels. Now, "the serious business of Kyoto begins for real," proclaimed EEA Executive Director Jacqueline McGlade.
Continue reading "The Myth of Emissions Reductions in Europe" »
"The largest supply side reduction of greenhouse gases ever proposed in the U.S."
Share
Barbara Hill is Executive Director of the grassroots organization Clean Power Now, which is fighting for the first offshore wind energy plant in the U.S. Her organization is championing the construction of Cape Wind, a proposed 130-turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound. "Break Through" featured the contentious saga of the project's development, a story of elite NIMBYism against grassroots clean energy organizing.
The Minerals Management Service recently concluded that Cape Wind would have no major ecological impact to the surrounding area -- an important milestone in the permitting process, and the beginning of a 60-day comment period on the project. To voice your support for Cape Wind, visit the Clean Power Now website and submit a comment before the March 20 deadline.
-----
Continue reading "Our Next Moonshot: an Interview with Activist Barbara Hill" »
"Unless there's a subsidy involved, it doesn't seem like a very attractive technology."
Share
The front page of today's New York Times business section ran a heartening article about the burgeoning solar thermal industry in our own American Southwest. With two new plants up and running on the Las Vegas strip, and ten more in the works for Arizona, California, and Nevada, this lesser-known solar technology deserves the spotlight.
Continue reading "Solar Thermal in the Southwest" »
Re-imagined tech brings electricity to the world's poorest
Share
When we talk about Breakthrough technologies, most of us think of large-scale research communities where all the scientists dress in white clean-suits. The IKEA version of the future comes to mind. But in between Arthur C. Clarke and Phillip K. Dick, there is the middle ground of real-world development.
Shawn Frayne is a 28 year-old inventor from Mountain View, California. Working in Haiti, he saw a need for bringing easy, cheap renewable electricity to villagers for $2 - $5 in materials costs.
The large-scale wind farms we currently lobby for would not have worked here for a number of reasons; so, instead, he put nature to work.
The "Wind Belt", a winner of the 2007 Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics, was the result.
Continue reading "The Answer is Blowin' in the Wind-and cheaply, too!" »
"Instead of battles over morals or politics, we battle over science"
Share
The following is an interview with Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, Jr. Roger has done pioneering work on proper role of scientists and experts in society. He is an expert on the societal impacts of natural hazards, particularly hurricanes and floods, and a strong advocate of adaptation as a vital part of climate change policy. He is a guest contributer to the Breakthrough blog, and writes his own blog, Prometheus.
-----
Continue reading "The Cloth of Science: an Interview with Roger Pielke, Jr." »
Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming the modern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter.
Share
Reporter Michael Specter has an interesting piece in the New Yorker about confusing morality and science in the emissions challenge. He touches upon the silly frenzy over "food miles," and the moral dilemma of whether to worry more about deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, or inefficient light bulbs here at home.
He quotes Herman Kahn, as early as 1978, making a very prescient observation about environmentalism's failure to explore human ingenuity as a way out of ecological crises:
The trouble with you environmentalists is that you see a problem coming and you slam your foot on the brakes and try and steer away from the chasm. The problem is that it often doesn't work. Maybe the thing to do is jam your foot on the pedal and see if you can just jump across.
Gore makes it look easy to address the emissions reduction challenge, when in fact, it is far, far more difficult.
Share
AFP reported over the weekend that Al Gore wants to see more discussion of the challenge of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in the U.S. presidential race. Thus, it was surprising to see Mr. Gore mischaracterize the policy challenge in two fundamental ways, making it look easy to address the emissions reduction challenge, when in fact, it is far, far more difficult. Gore is quoted as saying of the challenge:
"We have the technology. If we just had one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq war we could be well on our way to solving this challenge."
This is misleading for two reasons.
1. We don't have the technology. I will be posting more on this in coming weeks.
2. The Iraq war, regardless of over what time period its substantial costs are accounted for (e.g., see this Congressional CRS report (PDF), made available by FAS), costs less than $2 billion per week.
To suggest that we could be "well on our way" to "solving this challenge" with a mere $2 billion of investment is to fundamentally misrepresent what it will take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The actual investment required is orders of magnitude higher.
The first step in confronting a large challenge to to accurately understand its magnitude. Al Gore's comments are simply wrong.
|
