What Will Drive the Energy ‘Innovation Revolution’?

By Andrew C. Revkin

President Bush took a different approach to easing the energy gap today, ending a presidential moratorium on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf of the United States. Yet again, it seems the political imperatives surrounding high energy prices are trumping building climate concerns and the inevitable need for a shift away from fossil fuels.]

Joe Romm, the former Energy Department official who now blogs on climate and works for the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan/liberal/progressive (depending on who’s choosing the adjective) research group in Washington, has again taken issue with something I’ve written, partly because I left out a link to supporting sources for my statement that the world could face a tripled demand for energy by midcentury.

I’ve posted a link with my response (and supporting link) on his blog, and add a few more links and voices below — all of which illustrate that the world faces a glaring energy gap, presuming its leaders take their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions even a tiny bit seriously. I’ve focused a lot of late on the decline in government-supported basic energy research and development (here and everywhere else outside of Japan), even as many experts say a big increase is both vital and affordable.

Among those who have called for a government-driven “innovation revolution” including a doubling of federal energy research is John Podesta, Mr. Romm’s boss at the Center for American Progress.

Here’s what I wrote back to Mr. Romm on Climateprogress.org (he’s followed up there, as well):

Here’s the keystone line from one of a series of papers on this energy gap by Hoffert et al (Science, 2002), John Holdren (pdf), and others: “Mid-century primary power requirements that are free of carbon dioxide emissions could be several times what we now derive from fossil fuels (~10 [to the 13th power] watts), even with improvements in energy efficiency.”

The details are in the Science paper. And when I talk about “energy options,” unlike you, I include the developing world — where kids hike an hour in Guinea to do their homework in an airport parking lot.

I do agree with you, Joe, that — over all — the main impediment to progress on energy (with climate benefits coming as well) is social and political, not technological. But the lack of options is real, whether on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa or in countries seeking primary power sources that don’t come with vastly increased CO2 emissions (or a slippery grid to move intermittent power around).

Whether humanity’s energy thirst in 2050 is at the high end of “several times what we now derive from fossil fuels” or the low end (merely twice as much energy) is almost immaterial. Almost all the experts I’ve talked to in 20 years of exploring the entwined climate and energy challenges agree that satisfying global energy demand while limiting human influence on climate will require revolutionary advances in both policy and technology. Mr. Romm is among those who agree this is not an either/or debate.

The debate is over emphasis. Mr. Romm and many environmental campaigners and energy entrepreneurs say that markets, laws, public campaigns and leadership can prompt the technological transformation, and that government research money has mainly been a distraction and a delaying device promoted by industries or political operatives wedded to fossil fuels. Whatever the merits of that debate, there sure are a lot of seasoned experts in energy technology and economics (Daniel Nocera at M.I.T., Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia) who insist that climate stability will not happen without a huge increase in direct spending for R.&D. along with everything else.

In the end, there are two means of speeding the move away from climate-warming energy choices, as Daniel Schrag of Harvard has explained here before: boosting the public will to act (and accept the costs of the energy-technology transition) or eliminating the cost difference between polluting and nonpolluting energy choices. The latter can happen by making clean-energy technologies cheaper and/or by making climate-warming technologies more expensive (through a tax or cap).

Below in the comment string I’ll be adding more expert views on the role of basic research in propelling the energy transformation that governments, on paper at least, have pledged to pursue in the next two generations. Of course I want your view there, too. A big increase in research would be part of what I have characterized as “the energy quest” — from the wall outlet to the laboratory to the classroom to the boardroom — that many experts say would be needed to have a planet-wide overhaul of a fossil-based energy system that has taken two centuries to build.

Discounting the research imperative, these experts say, discounts the reality that even if the world’s most polluting countries somehow magically adhere to the nonbinding climate pledges made last week, that is only the first step toward limiting risks from what could well be (if worst-case projections hold) centuries of shifting climate patterns and retreating coasts.

Source : http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/what-will-drive-the-energy-innovation-revolution/