More than ever we need an Apollo Program to develop Green Energy, and the sooner Obama develops and implements policies to make it so, the better.
By Marty Hoffert
It's hard to believe that we have to pay Detroit with massive government bailout money to get them to innovate the kind of green, high tech cars that could save their own companies. But that's the case. Tom Friedman opined recently that Steve Jobs might make a good CEO for General Motors -- Apple being a poster child for an entrepreneurial company whose business model is based on continued high-tech innovation.
Long enough have US auto companies locked in the paradigm of large SUVs and trucks subsidized by multinational oil companies and sheikdoms. Rather than go to the government, the automakers should seek financial help from the oil companies they have enriched for years. Only fair that US car makers, who profited by addicting us to petroleum gas-guzzlers (don't tell me it was consumer demand when they manipulated demand by advertising those sexy Hummers) and now face bankruptcy, should ask Big Oil for a bailout. What's $30 billion to Exxon-Mobil?
Oh, you say: There's national interest at stake in breaking our oil addiction, most of which is in Persian gulf states -- that's "our oil" under their deserts -- not to mention avoiding inundation of coastal areas, tropical disease vectors and destructive weather events from global warming. Every knowledgeable petroleum geologist knows the "drill, baby, drill" mantra is a crock. The market will take care of it all, say mainstream economists advising the outgoing US administration.
But I, as an engineer, say: Where is Schumpeter's "creative destruction" from innovative alternate energy businesses making the needed carbon-neutral energy revolution now, when we need it desperately? The private versus government investment issue is complex, hinging critically on the "Valley of Death" for high tech investment: Too long, more than the three to five years during which venture capitalists need profit; too short, less than the twenty or thirty years out perceived as non-threatening to existing energy companies supported by governments R & D, like the $20 billion pledged worldwide for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in southern France.
With our economy in free fall, socialism for big business is now respectable. But I'm unsure how much innovation is required by a Congressional auto-maker bailout package. I suspect none. But it should be, with options and paths explicitly on the table for discussion. This would require policy makers to reverse their intellectual laziness, so far, to consider and understand the objective math, science and engineering aspects of climate/energy: What are the "Cold Equations of Global Warming ?" That market economics employed for climate/energy policy analysis so far is closer to astrology than predictive science is underscored by economists' failure -- 95% of them. at least -- to predict the collapse of sub-prime mortgages, financial derivatives, etc. They seem also to have no way of reconciling the goals of a higher quality of life aspired to by people in developing nations and maintaining a life-sustaining biosphere, other than faith-based cornucopian philosophy: Manna, somehow, will fall from heaven. Some social scientists espouse the "convergence" theory: that rich countries should become poorer in GDP (albeit spiritually richer as measured by some "happiness index"), as poor countries' GDP increases. Good luck with that.
The poet William Wordsworth proved most prescient of today, two hundred years later, in his sonnet, "The World is Too Much With Us," published in 1798, just as the Industrial Revolution was gearing up in England:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Time to hit the reset button on getting and spending. And to think critically about what we make, and how we make it, even if it requires a short course in Recycling & Industrial Ecology. As Freud put it, the reality principle, as you mature, must eventually beat the pleasure principle, even if that drives you crazy. Neurosis is only one of the costs we pay for civilization. Despite the aspirations and claims of some of my social science colleagues, we can't run our planet of six billion humans plus without high energy technology; but "green" high tech, consilient with the biosphere's life support systems.
A new climatically stable and environmentally stable energy system for the planet is our only hope -- failure only being an option if we're prepared to regress to a pastoral lifestyle with maybe 1/10th or less the global population -- and in the interim pursue a survivalist strategy similar to that idealized by Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski -- the "Unibomber." This guy could have easily sent a fatal letter bomb to me, a pro technology college professor unready to live with a few hand tools in a cottage the size of my garden shed.
I confess: I'm a technology optimist; but less hopeful about changing human behavior hard-wired by evolutionary biology. I will fight, kicking and screaming, against a return to a Hobbsian world where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." We have remade that world, almost as gods, with science and technology. I know the price has been high. To survive, we must now understand how massively the system is stressed and deal with it accordingly. No platitudes.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates that based on current projections (and current technology) humankind will be using two planets worth of natural resources by 2050. By midcentury too, to avoid global warming sufficient to trigger irreversible melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, we will have had to effectively phase out CO2 emissions, implying a massive technology change away from our present fossil fuel system. Obama's target of 80% CO2 emission cuts relative to now of CO2 by midcentury is consistent with this. This is particularly challenging because we're now marching in the opposite direction, back to coal, with China, India and the US building the equivalent of a new 1000 megawatt conventional coal-fired electric plant every week, enough to overwhelm Kyoto emission reduction targets by 2012 -- if they even happen, which looks increasingly unlikely.
The more one understands the climate/energy problem, the more one senses its urgency. That's why Al Gore, who came within a hairsbreath of the US Presidency, and Jim Hansen, a brilliant former climate science colleague at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (now its director), propose a moratorium on conventional new coal plants, and a full court press on developing alternate energy. I agree with them, as do many knowledgeable climate/energy research scientists. The only approach in sight to accomplish the changes we need in time is a massive shift in energy technology.
More than ever do we need an Apollo Program to develop Green Energy, and the sooner Obama develops and implements policies to make it so, the better -- whether through ARPA-E, an Energy Task force in the West Wing like FDR's War Production Board, conversion of U.S. manufacturing plants to build wind turbines, solar panel & battery production on the scale of FDR's war production in WW II, construction of green thorium power plants, smart electrical grids adapted to distributed renewable energy, carbon capture and storage from coal gasification plants or even from the atmosphere itself, aviation biofuels from algae, space-based solar power, plugin hybrid cars, electric cars, even hydrogen cars and aircraft, energy efficient & energy self-sufficient building, green communities with distributed renewable power generation, and many, many other ideas.
We need more than money. Money we need, but it's probably the least of our challenges. We need to organize the effort and get government and the private sector to work together as FDR did on the Home Front during WW II. Obama has said in a "Sixty Minutes" inteview that the collapsing economy should not prevent his proposed $15 billion a year initiative in alternate energy. We support this strongly. But he's going to need all the help he can get from the technical community.
We're waiting for the call.
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Martin I. Hoffert is Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University. He is the lead author of the landmark 2002 article in Science, "Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability," which concluded that global warming is a energy technology problem, not a regulation problem. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and was elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute.
I agree, money is only part of the solution. Entrepreneurship is required, with the willingness to adopt a real innovative approach. It is not easy, as it requires to take risks, accept that some projects will fail, but also that some others will succeed. This is how innovation works, how an industry can learn and transform itself. I'm sometimes worried that everyone is so focused on guaranteed results when tackling global warming. We also need to give a try to potential new solutions. Hers is more on the subject: http://bruchansky.name/2008/10/13/making-innovation-work-for-our-planet/
Posted by: christophe at December 12, 2008 10:08 PM