In honor of Earth Day, two new posts by Breakthrough writers argue that it's time to move from nature protection to technology innovation.
Two new posts for Earth Day argue that we need to move from nature protection to tech innovation. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are in Slate and Mother Jones arguing that the focus on technology transfer as part of a global climate agreement is a distraction: clean tech IP has already been rapidly transferred to China -- soon it will be transferred back here.
And Breakthrough's Director of Climate and Energy Policy, Jesse Jenkins, dings America's political 'elites', including cap and trade author Rep. Ed Markey, for frequently suggesting, in the face of all this, that "clean energy jobs cannot be exported." Like American IP, U.S. clean tech jobs in manufacturing and innovation are already flowing overseas -- or being created there in the first place.
In Ted and Michaels book, Break Through, they explained how greater material wealth in the 1960's prompted materially satisfied Americans to focus on post-material concerns - air and water quality, preservation, etc. This new mindset is what made the Cuyahoga river fire imagery so impactful and is what ultimately gave birth to the first pollution-centric Earth Day.
But the posts we highlight together indicate that it is time to move past this traditional conception of Earth Day and into the Innovation Century.
Pollution controls worked well for smaller problems but the climate challenge we face is far larger, vastly more complicated, and exceedingly more expensive, requiring direct, widespread focus on clean energy technology innovation if we intend to make a dent in our carbon emissions. That's the reason why Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. criticized New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for "deemphasiz[ing] the need for technological innovation," in the effort to decarbonize the global energy supply.
Technology innovation is not only critical for high emitting developed nations, but it is the key to what Andy Revkin has called the "Energy Quest" - the challenge of continuing to develop without serious climate impacts in the future, while ensuring that the nearly two billion people living in energy poverty today have access to clean, cheap, abundant energy.
That's what a day dedicated to the future of Earth should really be about.
Reminds me of Bill McKibben's 'Deeper Shade of Green':
"We're now starting to realize this failure was almost inevitable. Environmentalism's method of handling global warming is flawed."
(http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0608/voices.html)
Posted by: Alex Trembath at April 21, 2010 11:53 AM