FROM: climateprogress.org (Gristy article ;-)
Over the last ten years, a consensus has emerged among energy policy experts–one no less important than the consensus among climate scientists that carbon emissions are warming the earth. What's needed, they say, are disruptive clean-energy technologies that achieve non-incremental breakthroughs in both price and performance.
But the energy practioners know that meaningful breakthroughs rarely if ever happen in energy (a key point I will return to in subsequent posts). I can say that with very high confidence since I ran the federal office responsible for doing the vast majority of the research into new carbon-free technologies ... those who have studied climate science understand that we simply have run out of time to pin much hope on breakthroughs that may never come no matter how much money we spend on R&D. Developed country carbon emissions need to peak in the next decade (and developing country emissions soon thereafter) or we will ruin the planet for the next 50 generations no matter what technologies they have at their disposal. Put another way, if we can't stop catastrophic global warming with technologies that exist now or are already in the pipeline, we aren't going to stop catastrophic global warming.
N&S's go slow approach to climate, as first advanced in "The Death of Environmentalism," should have died once it became clear that climate change is happening much faster than scientists feared and that if we don't act now with all the technology we have available, we risk crossing tipping points whereby amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks would overwhelm any positive carbon-reducing benefits for new technology.
N&S write in Grist:
Public investment will be far more important than pollution limits in driving technological innovation and reducing the real price of clean energy. This point seems to be controversial only among environmentalists. (emphasis in original)
Indeed, private investment is far more important than public investment in reducing the real price of clean energy — especially for the far more important task of reducing the total costs to consumers of clean energy. That's because private investment is so much larger than public investment — if it can be harnessed through intelligent regulations. Don't get me wrong — I'd love to see my old office at the DOE have its budget increased dramatically — I just don't think that a massive increase in public investment is even among the top three things I would do if I were running U.S. climate policy, a point I will elaborate on in Part II.