What money can buy
There's not much doubt that for far less than what the United States has spent in and on Iraq, scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs already could have taken critical steps toward creating a high-growth and low-carbon emitting economy for America, ending our dependence on oil, gas, and coal. We wouldn't have gotten to the desired state yet, but we would be much farther on the way. The Manhattan Project and the Race to the Moon are good analogies. If we throw a lot of money at a huge technology problem in five years, with a long-term commitment to more funding over the next 15 or 20 years, we can accomplish a huge amount in a hurry, given the vast scientific resources of the United States. Of course, if we had taken or now take such steps, we could expect later to return the investment many times over by exporting the crucial non-carbon technologies to the rest of the world, especially to those countries that lack access to oil, gas, and coal.
Some MSM commentators beat up politicians for not passing taxes on gasoline at the pump, but such taxes would have little impact on R&D into non-carbon energy technologies for many years, would hardly alter transportation practices, and at least under the current budget policy would paradoxically help fund the military occupation of the oil and gas fields of Iraq. Not just taxing, but spending is critical to developing the new non-carbon energy inventions that the world needs. No other country has the combination of wealth and incentive possessed by the United States.
It's not all about the money, of course, but the money dimension of addressing climate change is huge. According to Science magazine, 2/9/07, "The U.S. energy industry is a factor of 10 below the average R&D intensity of American business." By contrast, the EU and some European countries funded wind research through a mix of out-of-pocket R&D spending, subsidies and tax incentives in the 90s. As a result, wind capacity has sailed, pun intended, upwards and now equals the energy output of 50 coal-fired power stations. Renewables, the classification for all non-carbon based energy, account for $20 billion in revenue in the EU and employs 300,000.
The missallocation of American public money has had the negative corollary that Congress now follows the pay-go rule. This is unfortunate. While we ought not throw away the taxpayers' monies or transfer public funds willy-nilly into private pockets, it is undoubtedly critical to spend a great deal of money over at least 20 years, and starting right away, to seek the breakthroughs necessary to build a high standard of living on a renewable energy base.
As a society we have also misallocated private funds. Economists would have us believe that higher taxes on gasoline or even call carbon will send the necessary signals that eventually will cause the dead head of the market to encourage greater spending on non-carbon energy. I'm sure it's true. But eventually is too long. Private spending should be encouraged quickly and directly by much more immediate action. More on that topic later.
The telling point in your post is the factor of 1/10 for R&D.
Why are other sectors spending 10 times more? Competition is missing in the energy sector, I'd guess. Until recently it was "utilities", a good blue chip but a yawn for excitement. What new products, new markets could there be?
Well, duh, now we see what new products and markets exist. There is some risk of giving long-term advantages to a few companies, as happened with the railroads after the Transcontinental was built, but knowing that in advance will help.
February 19, 2007 6:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's the problem with the Manhattan Project analogy: both that project and the moon landing project had just one customer, the US government, who was willing to pay any price for these goods. With energy there are, quite literally, billions of customers and they are NOT willing to pay any price. Alternatives to fossil fuels already exist: we don't need cutting edge research to create these technologies. The problem is that these tcehnologies all cost more (in some cases a lot more) than fossil fuels, and it's not clear to me that any sort of high-tech research, in and of itself, can change that equation. Until the price differential is overcome new energy technologies are not going to repolace fossil fuels.
February 19, 2007 7:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
The analogies seem imperfect here. The Manhattan project: we think it can be done, and it'll take a serious, concerted government project to get it done before the Nazis can. The man on the Moon: we're almost sure it can be done, but only an agency like NASA can do it, and it'll need enormous resources and commitment to get it done before the Russians, if that's your idea of a good time.
Now energy. Finding a magic bullet that will render existing existing energy sources obsolete and allow people to drive as much as they like, abandon mass transit projects, make inefficient buildings, etc.: not all that likely or possibly even in violation of the laws of physics, not all that great a goal anyhow, and unclear who should do it. Alternative energies, etc.: already in use and the only problem is getting people to change.
Is the idea to have a prize for the pharmaceutical that will change human conduct? I agree we have to use government and the power of the purse to change our oil dependence, but this mix of free market silliness and scifi fantasy is not contributing.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
February 19, 2007 7:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
We need to do two things:
1. A "Manhattan Project" effort to harness nuclear fusion.
2. A realization that we are consuming too much of the world's resources and change this.
The world spending of fusion is about $3 billion per year. To put this in perspective we, in the US, just spent $12 billion on Valentine's Day. I suggest a project with a worldwide budget of about $300 billion per year. There have been some interesting non-plasma effects which produce fusion on a table top. Several hundred such projects could be funded with my suggested level of support. We only need one to succeed.
The US is 4% of the world's population and consumes 40% of the resources. This can't continue. Nor will the developing world ever be able to reach a standard of living of even a fraction of our current level. We need to scale back to a sustainable level. One who has been trying to get this point across for 40 years in Herman Daly. Here's a sample of his writings:
Sustainable Development
I discuss how our economy would have to change if it were to give up the growth model that we currently use. Continual growth in a finite world is impossible. Capitalism depends upon growth and unlimited raw materials - something needs to change. Here's my short discussion of the implications:
Planning for a No-Growth Society
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
February 19, 2007 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Quite. There is an undercurrent in some discussions of energy--that there is a replacement for fossil energy. This is a fallacy, since the discovery of fossil fuels was an anomaly in terms of how humans and all life finds and uses energy.
Prior to the development of fossil fuels, we found energy where convenient, and applied it to work appropriate to the type of energy. This is the proper model, and it argues for encouraging a wide variety of generating techniques and a distribution or storage. So national efforts must be "directed" against an undirected development.
An example--one of the better battery designs is the flow battery, with no materialwastage and easy engineering, but it is bulky. So this would be good for fixed isntallations, like businesses and homes, or mass-insensitive systes like trains and ships. A much lighter but higher-density battery is lithium-ion, but it is expensive. Worthwhile, though, for cars and portable devices.
As to the contrast between low-cost fossil fuel systems and pricey items like PV, the cost of the former is only low because the energy is already packaged for use. Like powerful medicine, this concentrated form should be reserved for special, temporary needs (a cold or hot spell). Since there are hidden costs in fossil fuels, particularly national-security and pollution, if we can bring those costs into the equation the differential decreases.
It is tricky to do that, and Reed points to the slow response time. Tax incentives in the other direction hasten the shift, but it's really only a matter of amortizing. Given that we will end up spending the major fraction of a trillion dollars for the Iraq war, that sum would buy about 40,000 square kilometers of existing PV design, and would replace all our electric power generation capacity. (I assume a volume discount; total area equivalent is a bit arbitrary.) Obviously even a small part of that would be worthwhile.
If there is a Manhattan model that is useful it would be to force an increase in production capacity for manufacturing PV, currently a bottleneck.
February 19, 2007 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Continual growth in a finite world is impossible
This is not true. What we call "wealth" (the "stuff" that grows in an economy) is a composite of two things: matter (which is indeed finite and conserved in our world) and knowledge (which is not finite or conserved and which in fact tends to grow with time). For this reason wealth can increase as long as knowledge is increasing. However we do need to move away from an economy where growth occurs because we are using an increasing amount of the world's material resources and toward a model where growth occurs because knowledge is increasing. In some areas this is already happening (see: information technology) but in too many areas it has not yet begun.
February 19, 2007 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think what you are referring to is commonly called "social capital". You can include it in wealth if you want to expand the traditional definition if you wish, but you can't purchase anything with it. You can use your knowledge indirectly to sell your services, but this isn't really different in principal from selling your brawn.
Others have been trying to come up with alternative measures for the success of a society. One that is getting more attention is happiness. Here's a typical paper from a bank of all places:
Measures of well-being
Economist Robert H. Frank has also written about this from an economic point of view in "Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess."
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
February 19, 2007 10:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
what's pv exactly?
February 19, 2007 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Photovoltaic semiconductors, which generate electricity from light (usually sunlight). There are other sunlight-based electrical generation technologies, but this is most proven.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
February 19, 2007 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
[duplicate]
February 19, 2007 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
thanks howard.
February 19, 2007 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like the denizens of Massachussetts, who never even say the whole word, but just use "Mass", I got tired of (clumsily) typing out "photovoltaic", and "solar panels" is only one letter shorter, or same if we include the space.
February 19, 2007 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, include the space, by all means. Whether or not power satellites ever make sense is another matter, but a beanstalk just might work.
I'm not sure you should be allowed too close to Massachusetts, for fear you might try to convert Mass into Energy.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
February 19, 2007 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
I couldn't find the name spelled out anywhere in Mass.--turnpike police building said "Mass.", road signs said "Mass.", and there are all those Catholics, too.
I don't have the energy to convert, and I would just subvert the Mass.
February 19, 2007 5:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
It was, "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Wealth". Wasn't it??
February 19, 2007 11:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me add something I didn't really say about the idea of incentives when it comes to science. While I wrote about the need to focus on the energy policy we really need, meaning on politics, it also seems to misunderstand how research works.
There is, of course, pure research, which will get done pretty much regardless, as long as we don't crush financially the education system as Republicans are wont to do; but that's not a matter of, say, making an even bigger prize than the Nobel for figuring out things. There is also cutting-edge research with applications, such as cures for disease or applications of genetic theory, such as RNA inhibition now. These have the advantage that pure researchers will want to go into the field for the glamor, while also drug companies will help fund. I always thought that the marches for cures to breast cancer were kind of feel-good exercises that, perhaps, had the negative of co-opting the old language of political protest, making the latter more difficult. To put it simply, marching won't cure breast cancer because all parties, scientists, government, the health-care industry, pharma, and the public, already want it.
There's truly applied work, such as improving the design of or delivery of energy from windmills, making cars use more mpg, etc. This tends to depend on whether there's a market, but it's best solved by incentives, such as gas taxes, real political solutions, not a big prize for wishing oil away.
That leaves only those other cases where there are unusual obstacles requiring reorienting priorities. We've mentioned the Manhattan Project and the space race, but those were solved by funding government agencies, not special incentives, and they again don't apply here. Finally, there are times when people really do shy away from work, as when early political protests probably did help others take AIDS seriously, but again Reed's solution doesn't apply here, and it was a very special case, aka prejudice.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
February 20, 2007 6:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good point about unusual obstacles, and one immediately comes to mind. Scientific journals, even a wide-circulation medical one such as the New England Journal of Medicine or increasingly specialized ones such as Diabetes Care or the Journal of Lipid Research are not generally available online, for several reasons. Subscriptions are quite expensive, starting at $125 a year and up; far up.
Immediate online availability, without great expense, of research papers would accelerate progress. Indeed, the cost of access to research journals inhibits efforts in developing countries.
The problem is more complex than it initially looks. First, there is a need to have paper copies available, for people without good Internet access, for archival library browsing, etc.
Second, even though many of the articles are US-government funded so the reports are in the public domain, part of the journal subscription fee goes to manage the peer review process. Peer review is the key mechanism to ensure quality and accuracy. To do this, the editor(s) of a journal must always be recruiting reviewers, anonymizing (usually) a submitted paper, making initial editorial comments (the "editor", as opposed to assistants, is usually a scientist in the field), collecting comments from the reviewers, perhaps asking the author to make modifications based on reviewer comments, making the final decision on whether the paper should be published, and then putting it into the final physical form.
If NIH and other funding agencies simply told researchers to put their papers online once they were written, that would bypass peer review. Even with online publishing, that review function has to be there. It needs to be independent, as opposed to GWB Administration censorship of politically inconvenient research data. I suspect, if the publishing process were to be subsidized to move online, it would be best to fund from multiple foundations. Alternatively, funds might go through a more independent group such as the National Academy of Sciences, or through the National Science Foundation or NIH (for medical things) if all involved professionals made it clear that political interference would immediately be made public. Any legislation to create government funding might also be worded to avoid interference.
This is a problem the research community would like to solve, but it's a funding and procedural problem, although not a hugely expensive one.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
February 20, 2007 7:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, Howard, solar thermal methods are cheaper than solar PV right now. I don't have the figures in front of me right now but can post them later.
February 20, 2007 7:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Didn't mean to suggest there aren't more efficient but newer methods. Isn't there a scaling problem with solar thermal? That is, the present technology would work well in a desert power plant, but PV still is the preferred method for small things such as a light-powered calculator or radio, and perhaps a traffic light controller or other infrastructure device? Has solar thermal been space-rated to power satellite?
No challenges implied; this isn't my specialty. You and Tom may be able to teach me something.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
February 20, 2007 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
To emphasize the little calculation I did, if US demand is currently right around a terawatt, and we could reasonably expect 100 megawatts from a square kilometer, the entire US electric demand could be met at a cost of (roughly) a trillion dollars. Since it would take something like 20 years to manufacture this quantity,and since the price would drop, likely, in the process, we would spend something like $50 billion/yr.
Chump change in our current budget.
Most cities could satisfy their entire demand with only their rooftop area. Given Chicago's electric rates just went up 30 percent, why continue to pay rent when we can own the power?
Here's a smart move by Australia: They hope to ban incandescent bulbs.
The only thing standing in the way of totally renewable energy is money up front, not technology.
February 20, 2007 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right, PV is best for small things. Thermal comes in big plants and big arrays. We are looking at siting thermal arrays on 7,000 acre plots in the desert here.
Cost per KW:
solar pv $ .30
solar thermal $ .12
wind $ .05
natural gas $ .05
February 20, 2007 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a bill in the California legislature to ban incandescent bulbs
February 20, 2007 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmm...if we can harness political hot air, and ban the election of dim bulbs, the future holds promise.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
February 20, 2007 3:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Howard! You need to make this into a bumper sticker! I'll buy 10!
Jan Knaus
February 20, 2007 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Apropos of uranium enrichment, very few workers at the WWII Oak Ridge plant knew exactly what they were producing. There was, however, a widespread rumor that they were producing the front ends of horses, to be shipped to DC for integration with the locally produced matching component.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
February 20, 2007 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink