American Power: The Case for an Energetic New Progressive Politics
Most progressives today are optimistic that, in 2008, Democrats will regain the White House and solidify their majority in Congress, largely on the basis of the country's anti-war sentiment alone. But down this path lies danger, for if Democrats fail to offer a vision for the future that is as large and positive as the war in Iraq is negative, we may take back the White House and Congress and fail to take back America.
A new politics should inspire Americans to grapple with certain existential questions: What kind of a country do we want? How can we achieve it? These questions implicitly contain a question about investment: how shall we invest our wealth and our labor?
With Iraq and the "war on terror," the conservative movement has defined American power as unilateral military force. Progressives have not yet offered a counter-argument and story about American greatness that is capable of challenging the (neo)conservative one.
A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future. First we dream -- and then we invent.
The time is ripe for progressives and environmentalists of all stripes to come together around American Power agenda for a major investment into clean energy. Not only is a large public investment crucial to bringing down the price of clean energy, an investment-centered agenda will serve the purpose of unifying Americans under a vision for energy independence and economic revitalization, one that will appeal to California and New England progressives and environmentalists and Midwestern Reagan Democrats alike.
Massive investments in clean energy offers a way of defining the source of American power around our capacity to dream better futures -- and invent our way out of crises. Oil-funded terrorism, global warming, economic insecurity -- these are challenges that America will overcome through our ingenuity and our capacity to reinvent ourselves every fifty years.
Given all this, it is more than a little ironic that one of the lobbies most standing in the way of this vision of investment-centered vision of American Power is the Washington, D.C.-based environmental establishment itself.
An Investment-Centered Approach
Our new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Limits, was born from an essay we wrote in 2004 about the politics of energy and global warming. Before we wrote that essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” the two of us had spent all of our professional careers, about thirty years between us, working for the country's largest environmental organizations and foundations, as well as many smaller grassroots ones. Like most of our colleagues, we tended to see global warming as a problem of pollution, whose solution would be found in pollution limits.
In 2003 we started to break away from the pollution and regulation framework. With a small group of others we created a proposal for a new Apollo project. We proposed a major investment in clean-energy jobs, research and development, infrastructure, and transit, with the goal of achieving energy independence. The political thinking was that this agenda would win over blue-collar and swing voters and Reagan Democrats in the presidential battleground states of the Midwest, and excite the high-tech creative class at the same time. And by putting serious public investment on the table--$300 billion over ten years--we hoped we could break through the logjam that had divided business, labor, and environmental groups for years.
But more than any short-term political calculation, Apollo, we hoped, would be the vehicle for telling a powerful new story about American greatness, invention, and moral purpose.
After we created the Apollo proposal, we did what new political coalitions on the left tend to do: round up endorsements from other groups. And while we succeeded in getting endorsements and letters of support for Apollo's principles from businesses, unions, and most of the large national environmental groups, we were baffled, and then angered, by what happened next.
Environmental lobbyists told us that while they supported Apollo's vision, they would do nothing to support it in concrete ways, either in Congress or during the 2004 elections. Those of us who had created Apollo had made the decision to focus on jobs and energy independence, because they were far higher priorities among voters than stopping global warming. In particular, we discovered that investment in clean-energy jobs, to get free of oil, was more popular with voters than talk of global warming, clean air, and regulation. But environmental leaders thought our nonenvironmental and nonregulatory focus was a vice, not a virtue.
Fearing that it would distract Democrats' attention away from stopping the George W. Bush administration's energy bill, which included billions in new subsidies for coal and oil, environmental leaders eventually asked us to keep Apollo legislation from being considered by Congress. Still the good soldiers, we did as we were asked, and Apollo was, briefly, withdrawn. But it hardly mattered: the Bush energy bill passed anyway.
Today, four years after we were told to withdraw legislation to invest $300 billion into a new Apollo project for clean energy, the demand for action on energy independence and global warming have only grown. And yet environmental leaders continue to deny the need for major new investments and insist that new pollution and efficiency regulations are all we need.
In September 2007, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute conducted a nationwide poll of likely voters on global warming and energy. What we found was that global warming continues to rank dead last as a concern for voters. The poll also tested public support for a variety of global warming policy prescriptions. The investment-centered “New Apollo” program received substantially more support than the regulation-centered alternatives (cap-and-trade and Sky Trust). After voters were told of the negative consequences of each program, Apollo was the only program to maintain majority support of the electorate.
The Politics of Limits
The consensus today among climate scientists is that U.S. emissions must be reduced 80 percent by 2050 if we are stabilize emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change. But current regulatory approaches will result in modest, not deep, reductions in carbon emissions. That's because there simply do not yet exist the low cost, low carbon technologies that could be quickly brought to scale to replace carbon intensive energy sources. It is true that some strategies for reducing emissions, such as efficiency and conservation, can be scaled up immediately. But disruptive technologies like solar and carbon capture and storage -- mass quantities of which will be required to deal with global warming -- are still far more expensive than coal and gas.
Environmentalists suggest that setting some pollution limits and a price for carbon will be enough to move gradually -- emissions reductions of just two percent per year -- to achieve 80 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But the price of carbon would have to be set at exorbitant levels for today's clean energy alternatives to become cost-competitive with coal, especially in China and the developing world, which will contribute 70 percent of new emissions between now and the middle of the century. And if action on global warming depends on voters and politicians accepting higher energy prices, there will -- as we have seen -- be very little action on global warming.
Recognizing that voters care more about the cost of energy than global warming, the policies under consideration in Congress would limit pollution so little that the price for carbon would be very low, around $7 to $10 per ton. At that price, firms required to reduce their emissions will invest in the least expensive emissions reductions possible, such as burning methane from landfills, purchasing forest land for carbon sequestration, shifting from coal to natural gas, or retrofitting power plants and buildings so they operate more efficiently. Private investment would not, for the most part, go to technologies like low-cost solar energy and carbon capture and storage, which are required to displace coal-based energy.
Meanwhile, China and India long ago rejected any approach to addressing climate change that would constrain their greenhouse gas emissions or their economic growth. For years, energy experts had expected that China would overtake the United States as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter by 2025. It turns out that China will gain that distinction by the end of this year. The governments and the people of China and India are increasingly concerned about global warming, to be sure, but they are far more motivated by economic development, and to the extent that the battle against global warming is fought in terms of ecological limits rather than economic possibility, there's little doubt which path these countries will take.
The only way the Chinese government will be able to substantially reduce its emissions is if the price of clean energy and carbon capture technologies come down enough to get within striking distance of the price of fossil fuels.
The dramatic and rapid breakthroughs in price and performance that we need will not be primarily driven by the private sector. Private firms will play an important role in bringing new technologies to market -- and carbon pricing will play an important role in making market conditions more amenable to clean energy technologies. However, private firms will not make the large, long-term investments in R&D and deployment, nor can they create the public infrastructure (e.g., new transmission lines bringing wind power from rural areas to cities) needed for the new energy economy.
Given all of this, it's odd that environmentalists ever viewed global warming as fundamentally similar problem to things like smog in L.A., acid rain, and the hole in the ozone, much less one that won't be hard to fix. Granted, both problems are consequences of human pollution. But whereas dealing with the ozone hole required a simple, inexpensive chemical substitute, global warming demands a totally different way of producing energy. We were able to fight smog without replacing oil. We dealt with acid rain without dismantling our power plants. And we will phase out ozone-depleting chemicals without affecting any of our energy sources. But to deal with global warming, we will need an almost entirely new energy infrastructure -- one that will first require the creation of an almost entirely new politics.
(Readers wishing to read a more extended version of this argument are invited to download two white papers from our web site, "Fast Clean Cheap" and "The Investment Consensus.")
American Power
In the dark depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt became a radical experimentalist, inventing various New Deal programs to overcome hunger and joblessness. During World War II, America defeated fascism as much through our ingenuity and manufacturing muscle as through our fighting GIs. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Defense Department made a series of large and strategic investments to create the Internet, and it guaranteed the market for microchips, thereby creating the conditions for the electronics and information revolutions.
Today we launch a new campaign called "American Power," one aimed at persuading Congress to generate the $30 billion annual investment we need to make clean energy as cheap as possible, as quickly as possible. American Power will provide a vital peacetime role for the military. Just as the Department of Defense guaranteed the nascent market for silicon microchips in the 1960s, bringing the price down from $1,000 to $20 per chip in just a few years, the Pentagon must today do the same with silicon solar panels.
There are no silver bullets when it comes to energy, but solar panels, like microchips, have their own kind of "Moore's Law": the price of solar comes down roughly 20 percent every time production capacity is doubled. Experts say that for a total cost of $50 to $200 billion, we could bring solar panels down to the price of natural gas or even goal. It might be the best $200 billion ever spent by the U.S. military.
Our new book, Break Through, is a call for a new positive politics, one that puts a vision of a better world -- not ecological apocalypse with its view of humankind's sins against nature -- at the center. At the very moment when we find ourselves facing new problems, new social and economic forces are emerging to confront them. Internet-empowered grassroots activists, high-tech entreprenuers, and the new creative class may become the force behind a new politics of possibility.
Policy-wise, we should make big investments into clean energy and take action to restrict greenhouse gases. But in our politics -- and our vision for the future -- we will be in a far stronger position if we put this energetic definition of American Power at the center.
Only time will tell whether Washington-based environmental groups will ever come around to this new, investment-centered agenda. The first test could arrive as early as next month. That's when Congress may take up global warming legislation. What matters most about the legislation under consideration is how much money it will raise for investments into clean energy.
But this isn't just about what we do over the next several months. It's about the politics we need for the next several decades. What's needed isn't so much a new policy or a new message but rather a new movement, one that embraces human power and ingenuity and public investment and puts these forces to work to creating a new energy economy and a more prosperous, secure world.
The good news is that, at the very moment when we find ourselves facing new problems, from global warming to the insecurity born from globalization, new social and economic forces are emerging to overcome them. High-tech businesses and creative "knowledge workers" may become a political force for big clean energy investments. And Democrats and progressives, looking for a positive vision every bit as big and bold as the war in Iraq is negative and awful, could put this new vision of American power to work for the good of the world.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, and founders of American Environics and the Breakthrough Institute.
Is replacement of fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear plants a viable use for your five hundred billion, or is that off the table? What if you abandon the regulation strategy and your massive spending results in little more than bloated pork projects in committee chairmen’s districts? Are not you placing the survival of the planet at risk?
October 8, 2007 12:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Progressives have not yet offered a counter-argument and story about American greatness that is capable of challenging the (neo)conservative one...The time is ripe for progressives and environmentalists of all stripes to come together around American Power agenda for a major investment into clean energy.
But many "progressives," or whatever you want to call them, have offered visions of energy independence. And I've heard many people state we need an "Apollo project" for energy, much like we did to get to the moon.
Along the same lines, I find it hard to believe that "environmentalists" have "viewed global warming as fundamentally similar problem to things like smog in L.A., acid rain, and the hole in the ozone, much less one that won't be hard to fix."
Who are these environmentalists out there that think global warming is simple to solve?
Really, I think what you're saying here is that certain other people don't exactly agree with your particular plan, no? The whole point of this comes down to you want to invest more money than other people, no?
It'd be great to have one of these "environmentalists" here in the Cafe for a post or two, because it sounds to me like there might be another side to this story.
Along another line, it's fine if you want to lash out at certain "environmentalists" (and, by the way, your repeated use of vague, general terms like that give your writing the feeling of a conspiracy theory, at least in my opinion...), but -- and maybe you do address this in the book -- you seem to fail to acknowledge the extent of the resistance the environmental movement has faced through the corporatization and privatization of environmental policy.
In other words, you might think your battle is against Democrats, or "environmentalists," but there sure as hell has been a concerted effort -- most notably by the Bush Administration over the last six years -- to not only propagandize global warming (by fixing the facts around environmental reports by putting white-out-wielding energy lobby shills into high positions of power in the Administration), but also by play ing the same "it's socialism!!!" game they've play in Health Care, to make people think the private sector can regulate itself out of the climate change predicament.
But it's really the propaganda that's the problem -- making people think global warming is a "debate," that the jury's still out on this one.
No wonder polling numbers are so low.
Anyway, the point is, it seems to me the real opposition in the area of climate change is the energy lobby. The people invited to the White House to set the country's energy policy, in secret. I find it hard to believe the environmental lobby is a larger obstacle.
The lack of acknowledgment of the opposition that's been setup to fight against any reform, any working out way out of oil dependence, is a real weak spot in your argument.
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
October 8, 2007 12:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
cscs: "It'd be great to have one of these "environmentalists" here in the Cafe for a post or two, because it sounds to me like there might be another side to this story." Thank you for that. There's sure a cartoon notion here, and whenever one encounters that, one has to ask what the vision or motive is. Clearly environmentalism hasn't proved unattractive to the public, so it hasn't died or fossilized into a special-interest group. And clearly environmentalists have pushed for energy independence, alternative energy sources, and patterns of life like mass transit that make the issue of how to power your car less relevant.
So what's going on? I suppose it's a market-based agenda, and that always takes special pleading. I'm all in favor of government investment, of incentives to private investment, and incentives to consumers to change. But it's beyond me why that has to be asserted so dogmatically that it makes regulation the villain. Regulation and direct government leadership can play a role in everything on the agenda, from auto mileage to building standards to wind/hydro management to mass transit. The idea seems to be that regulation is no longer relevant, since while the market failed to curb pollution, we've been there, done that. Sounds to me like an assertion of faith.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 8, 2007 12:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is there any reason to believe that $300 billion in spending over the next decade would produce enough by way of technological breakthroughs to make clean energy competitive with fossil fuels without substantial taxes on the latter? I certainly don't know of any economic analysis that would support that claim. Maybe $3-$6 trillion could it.
October 8, 2007 12:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
For anyone who's interested, Bill McKibben has written what seems to be a pretty fair and balanced review of N&S's "Breakthrough."
October 8, 2007 1:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think the question can be quantified, and it isn't even the right question. While improvements in some areas like batteries would make things easier, it is not technology that is lacking, but friendly market mechanics.
Since the entire electric demand could be met, in principle, with a solar array roughly ten miles on a side, it is not unreasonable to assume fossil fuels can be replaced everywhere they are used. The challenge is the transition, not the end stage.
An example is the secondary and tertiary boilers that can be installed in smokestacks. Factories are beginning to install these, since they pay off instantly through generated power. Where they most need to be applied is fuel-burning electric plants, particularly coal. But there is a disincentive in the expectation, on the operators' parts, that lower fuel costs will mean lower rates enforced by state commissions. Appropriate rate adjustments would mean everyone wins, with lower rates, higher profits, and less carbon for the product. The equivalent of four hundred new nuclear plants goes up the chimney right now.
Is that a Manhattan Project? It might be a Herculean negotiating challenge, but only that.
The transforming systems will be storage, rather than generating systems. With storage appropriate to the job, intermittent or inconvenient sources are more useful. For houses and commercial properties, bulky but long-lived flow batteries are the likely market. For cars, ultra-capacitors will likely handle fast recharges. We have not had a market demand for a variety of high-quality storage until now. It's why the choices are few, and the mechanics a bit shaky. By comparison, internal combustion has been in ubiquitous use for a century, and is fantastically mature and reliable.
Get the incentives right and we'll be on our way. Wait for the market to sort itself out and likely someone else will be a leader, and avoidable bad stuff will have occurred, likely more wars and terrorism, along with struggling economy.
A bottom-up market transformation will produce lots of small business along with large new-product businesses. Essentially every house and building in the country could use some labor-intensive installing and retrofitting.
October 8, 2007 1:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't hold your breath--the Progressive Caucus is only about one-third of the Democratic Caucus. The rest are tied to the status quo, the profitable corporations that pay the bills.
ecotourism
WeGoEco.com
October 8, 2007 1:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've become hung up on language lately. My wind up doll Senator who speaks only when programmed by the national party was using the "investment" word like a mantra over the weekend in regard to SCHIP. Wouldn't you think simply healing sick kids would a good enough reason?
So how many times did you guys need to use "investment" there?
I'm not too keen on the "power" word either. American Power seems a slogan sure to turn off (power pun there) the rest of globe.
And this American "greatness" word is another that all too often is linked with American bullying everyone else. The DLC is particularly enamored of the "greatness" word.
This is why I find it so hard to leave the "liberal" word and become a "progressive". "Progressive" these days tends to embrace a lot of conservative if not right-wing language.
I'd like to see the party embrace a vision of a better world too and make a real commitment to the vision. But can't we add a little getting along with others and working together as communities of people and communities of nations? Does everything have to be about making America the most in your face powerful nation on earth?
Because if does, I'll bet that selling that vision is much more likely to sell further wars to make America great by taking resources from everyone else by brute force.
Find some peaceful metaphors please.
October 8, 2007 1:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Shellenberger and Nordhaus' analysis is right on point: if global warming were recast as a non-environmental issue, it would rise to the level of the major political challenges of the day -- the Iraq war, the budget deficit, the challenge of nuclear weapons' proliferation, etc.
They are also absolutely correct that it is governments who need to jumpstart the clean energy revolution. My concern is that their suggested implementation of a carbon tax in the US will be too little too late. We are already seeing scientific reports that changes in the climate are taking on their own internal dynamics, with the warming providing its own feedbacks -- independent of the CO2 we put up into the atmosphere.
Any solution needs to be global in scope. Otherwise, anything the US does will be overwhelmed by the coming pulse of carbon from India, China, Mexico, Nigeria, etc. Moreover, a carbon tax will take several years to be implemented and several more to begin to make a real dent in our carbon consumption. We don't have that much time to avert very substantial disruptions.
That's why I have proposed a three-point global strategy which involves: 1) In industrial nations, redirecting the approximately $250 billion in subsidies away from coal and oil and to non-carbon energy sources to create a clean energy infrastructure in the North; 2) creating an international fund of about $300 billion a year for a decade to provide clean energy to developing countries (all of whom would love to go clean energy if it were affordable to them); and 3) instituting within the Kyoto framework a mandatory fossil fuel efficiency standard that rises by 5 percent a year. For the first few years, countries would meet the goal strictly through efficiencies. When they become too expensive, countries would meet their 5 percent per year goal by deploying more and more renewable sources, most of which are 100% efficient according to a fossil fuel standard. And that would create the mass markets and economies of scale that would bring down their prices and make them economically competitive with coal and oil. (For more details, see: "Toward a Real Kyoto Protocol at: http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=6320&method=full ) That would not only maximize the public funding approach, it would also be global in scope.
Break Through is a superb analysis. My only concern is that in navigating the dense and forbidding thicket of political and economic opposition, Shellenberger and Nordhaus place just a bit too much focus on the political challenge -- and, in the process, slightly underestimate the speed and magnitude of the changes taking place in the natural world.
This is a global emergency. Its solution could create millions of jobs, especially in developing countries. It could undermine the economic desperation that gives rise to so much anti-US sentiment. It could begin to turn dependent and impoverished countries into tradiing partners. And it could jump the renewable energy industry into being a central driving engine of growth of the global economy. Since such a program would transcend alliances and coalitions, it could bring together all the countries on the planet in a common global project -- even in today's profoundly fractured world.
Break Through's greatest contribution, to me, is to remove global warming from the ghetto of environmentalism -- and to place it among the most imminent and far-reaching of all the political challenges facing the world today.
And in this era of anti-government sentiment, it underscores the true value and real mission of governments acting in concerrt. This is a path toward peace -- peace among people and peace between people and nature. The alternative is a rapid descent into climate hell.
-- Ross Gelbspan (author, The Heat Is On, Boiling Point)
October 8, 2007 1:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks cscs for the link to the Bill McKibben review. It is well worth a read.
This does answer some of the criticisms of Nordhaus and Schellenberger's last piece that the didn't put forth an example of the kind of big idea they meant. Their main point is well taken, but they suffer as do so many from overstating their own argument, as McKibben points out. Their framework is good, but we need many approaches.
October 8, 2007 2:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Democrat, Republican, whatever, the party labels
and their signature brands of bullshit are
essentially interchangeable anymore, I think
that the key point, party politics aside, is
to emphasize the role of representative government, rather than have Uncle Sam be the Mother Of All Welfare Offices. I think gross
overspending has polluted our political process
to the point where a lot of people feel generally disenfranchised and alienated by
the whole thing. Even now, campaign finance is
once again becoming an issue, if it's all just
a race to the bottom and the biggest treasure
chest, then they may as well pack it up because
they'll have lost the majority of their audience
in the process. I'd like to see a day when our
local ballot contains more than just whether or
not to inflict more taxes on ourselves...
The country's 9 trillion in the red, poised to
go 10, and the way things are shaping up, Congress seems likely to be willing to sign off
on 11 trillion. What's the INTEREST on 9 trillion
dollars? Give me 1% of that...LOL
If all our Congress is going to do is become
The National Check-Kiting Institute, then what,
exactly, is the point of the voting process?
A feel-good exercise? A mass going-through-the-motions to try and convince ourselves and other
countries also that the People still have some
role in this runaway gravy train? What's REALLY
going on, here?
I think we need a balanced budget, I think we
need public accountability, public transparency,
and a lot less corporate interests trying
to stake out Capitol Hill. If they don't do that,
does it REALLY matter who gets elected anymore?
Reform doesn't have to hurt, but they do need to
get started...too many people running for office
so that they can get their turn to run the Magic
Government Doughnut Dispenser...
October 8, 2007 3:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
"If global warming were recast as a non-environmental issue, it would rise to the level of the major political challenges of the day -- the Iraq war, the budget deficit, the challenge of nuclear weapons' proliferation, etc." That seems backward to me. The tree-hugging liberal is a right-wing icon, but in practice popular support for regulating polluters is quite strong. One could argue that it's weak support, once push comes to shove on the idea that jobs are at stake. But it's not nonexistent, and then in shifting to economics one has to do even more overcome the idea that jobs are at stake.
Conversely, how worked up is the public about the deficit or nuclear proliferation? Does the public even have an opinion about SDI versus nuclear proliferation, unless you mean fear of Iran, and even there it's mostly a wingnut issue. And what issue exactly are we putting on the table that will resonate in the same way as it's implied these do? The Iraq war is a special case, but war always is, and slogans repackaging every other issue as a war on something or other have had a mixed reception.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 8, 2007 3:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
In my opinion, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are a bit tainted here because of their earlier posts about the Democrats needing some new and shiny big ideas. I think most people on this board agree that the traditional ideas of the Dems-- summed up generally as taking care of one another-- are still good ideas. I know there is also a lot of anti-Washington establishment, Dem or Republican.
All that said, I believe that we do ourselves a disservice to ignore the American ingenuity meme being pushed by these two. While I believe that we need both-- innovation and regulation-- I understand what they mean about the childishness of the big environmental Washington interests.
An example: I worked as a policy and budget person in the Babbitt Interior Department. We developed a very large initiative there that would have spent a big chunk ($900 M) of federal oil and gas royalties on a broad swath of conservation programs. We (the people at Interior) couldn't get our idea past the Clinton budget people who, God bless them, actually wanted a balanced budget. But there was a bill in Congress at the same time that was similar to our project. It was called CARA, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, and since Congress was not constrained by the idea of a balanced budget, it was moving along nicely.
Anyway, we were in a meeting with people from the Sierra Club. They didn't want to support CARA because they believed it provided an incentive for more oil drilling. As if ExxonMobile was going to decide whether or not to drill for oil in Alaska based upon the royalties and such going back to conservation. Just crazy. So our people worked with Congress behind the scenes (we were not supposed to advocate for anything other than the President's budget, but this stuff happens all the time) to make the language in the bill more clear for the "environmentalists." Well, in this meeting we were told point blank by the Sierra Club team that the bill did NOT provide an incentive for more oil drilling but that it still had a PERCEIVED tie to drilling and therefore, their members could not support it. We were dumbfounded and this just confirmed our belief that some people would rather raise money and scare people (on both sides of the aisle) than get stuff done. The failure of CARA in 1999 was due in no small part to the lack of willingness for the big environmental groups to do anything that evened looked like pro-business. Since that time, we've only gone backward on these issues. That $900 million sure would look good these days.
October 8, 2007 8:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dear Sirs --
When you write
"That's because there simply do not yet exist the low cost, low carbon technologies that could be quickly brought to scale to replace carbon intensive energy sources."
you are, quite simply, wrong. Nuclear power -- which you do not seem to know exists -- is a safe, proven technology that can be scaled up very quickly. The only arguments against it are purely political, deception and fear-mongering of the basest and most ignorant sort.
Your observations about the political process in the US may or may not be insightful or correct; but since you don't seem to know even the bare facts of your chosen subject I don't see why anyone should buy your book or otherwise spend a moment listening to you.
That is all.
October 8, 2007 8:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ted, Michael -
I've your book and, too, most everything else relating to global warming that hits the shelves at my local independent book store.
Per all the above posts — and particularly noting Ross Gelbspan's, wondering if you might offer a 3-4 sentence frame that encapsulates the optimistic, non-doom-&-gloom argument/meme you'd like to see our candidates espousing. Some of the contenders, like Barack Obama and Ron Paul, talk about a new politics that marries left, right, and center, and produces the kind of political consensus we're going to need to move forward on an issue like global warming.
Obama, today, delivered an energy speech that was thoughtful and provocative, and which aims in the uplifting direction your book says we need to go. But . . . will people or the press really listen, or care? What do you think he might have said more effectively?
I work on the "front lines" of global warming, monitoring penguin population changes in the Antarctic Peninsula, where its warming as fast, if not faster, than anywhere else on the planet. This issue is exceedingly personal. Over 24 years, I've witnessed fundamental changes first-hand — the Larsen Ice collapsing, Peninsula Adélie penguin populations plummeting by 50-60%, Admiralty Bay glacier receding. These changes are, in a fashion, messages we can't and shouldn't ignore.
We're going to have to be inspired to higher ground, yes. But inspirational political speeches, new technologies, and American optimism alone aren't going to help us achieve 90% reductions in CO2 emissions by mid-century.
Humankind thinks and functions almost exclusively in the present tense — the immediate “here and now," when we should be thinking, dealing, and acting in terms of generations and changed lifestyles. The climate crisis we're facing, laid out clearly in the IPPC's 4th Assessment, makes it clear that necessary decisions are at hand — not just a new political discourse and a "Marshall Plan" committing the public, industry, enviros, scientists, and governments to developing alternative energy technologies.
We also need leadership and we'll certainly need some regulation. Everything should be on the table. As the warming planet brings further calamities, some of us will adjust and have food, mates, and homes, while many others won’t. Multiply the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina in the US by hundreds if not thousands of times worldwide, and one sees the far horizon filling with political instabilities and the collapse of civilizations.
Like Ross and many others, my opinion is that we've got to play all our cards as best we can, as soon as we can, and take nothing off the table.
Ron
October 8, 2007 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a little put off at the obvious buzz words and Madison Ave. selling in this essay.
Missing also is a description of what this $30 billion a year will actually be spent on. Who ? What ? When ? Where ? Why ? Details please.
Although I am not a fan of nukes, I do think the risk of climate change impacts is much greater than the exposure due to competently stored nuclear waste. At the same time, I wonder if uranium ore supplies will make greatly expanding nuke plant capacity problematic. U-235 is every rare and very finite.
October 8, 2007 9:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nordhaus and Shellenberger are right on at least two counts:
1. Rather than talk about negative things, like conservation, carbon taxes, the apocalpyse of global warming, we need to frame the debate as one of opportunities: jobs, an easier lifestyle, investment, energy independence.
2. Corporations and free enterprise must necessarily be part of the solution, since the solution will require investment of vast amounts of money and the development of new technologies.
Here are some thoughts:
1. We are experiencing heavy air traffic delays at our airports. Instead of building more airports, why not expand our rail system? Rail travel is far more energy efficient, and far less stressful. Rail travel in most European countries is fast and convenient. Many areas of the country would benefit greatly from expanded passenger traffic service; but the Federal Government bails out the airlines, builds highways up the kazoo, and starves Amtrak. Why?
2. We are experiencing heavy traffic delays; some people are commuting up to 1 hour a day in their cars. How much does the commuting time cost our society? How much are we spending on widening highways, building parking structures; how much do we spend in insurance, accidents, injuries? Wouldn't it be smarter to redirect our investment to building light rail connections in our major cities? As hurricane Rita approached Houston, after Katrina, people jammed the highways trying to evacuate Houston. It looked like Saddam's Republican Guard withdrawing from Kuwait after their defeat in the Gulf war. The highways leading out of Houston had been widened, rather than building a light rail system.
3. The country is self-destructing on the automobile. We continue to clear cut farmland and open areas, forested areas, and replace it with McMansions, that use precious energy to heat and cool and are far away from jobs and basic services. We have very little oil; coal is dirty. Where is the energy going to come from? We have nothing to show for our $500b "investment" in Iraq. How many light rail systems could have been built with that money? How many jobs would it have produced? How much would it have cut our dependence on foreign oil?
I could go on forever, but I will spare my gentle readers. We all know that if we invested our resources in people and treasure wisely, rather than throw them away on counterproductive "resource" wars, we could begin making real progress in changing the way we live for the better, cutting our dependence on foreign oil, producing jobs, and developing our economy.
The politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, motivated by money and special interests as they are, are not doing a very good job of making this case to the general public. What is needed is an organization with enough economic clout, to make the case.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger should be applauded for their efforts to promote this view.
October 8, 2007 10:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
With Iraq and the "war on terror," the conservative movement has defined American power as unilateral military force. Progressives have not yet offered a counter-argument and story about American greatness that is capable of challenging the (neo)conservative one.
A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future. First we dream -- and then we invent.
While I agree that Americans tend to respond more to bold vision and emotionality than reason, the conservatives were able to dominate the public discourse for so long because of a calamitous event: September 11th. The nation united to make truly heroic efforts towards conservation and innovation during WWII less because of the call to "freedom" and more because of the threat of a flesh-and-blood enemy. Same is true for the race to the moon: This was about beating the Soviets, less about the feat.
I fear that our opportunity passed when in the days following 9/11, Bush called on the country to sacrifice by.... going shopping. The country was primed to rally around a vision of energy independence in the wake of that horrific and viscerally impactful event. If anything, the slow realization that the broad stroked picture of American military strength offered by the conservative moment has led us to darkness makes it all the more difficult for any leader to paint a truly compelling vision. No matter how articulately expressed, no matter how logical or practical, no matter how real the threat of climate change is to our future... this call may fall on deaf ears until the day that calamity is here on our shores again.
October 8, 2007 10:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
its actually frustrating to read this post and the comments it spawned and run into only one person who actually appears to link the development of a new energy infrastructure with the rebuilding of our transportation systems and - ostensibly by extension - our land use patterns.
moreover, something not stated by anyone is the vast sea of humanity that is living in abject poverty in global slums that could be a natural target for new decentralized low cost new energy that will not generate demand for coal.
its very possible to combine the REALITY of environmental limits with the rhetoric & politics of human ingenuity. keeping these two items as some sort of opposing methods makes this entire debate a silly little cartoon that avoids the reality of what needs to be done today as well as tomorrow.
October 8, 2007 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is probably significant that you use the word "story" in signifying the failure to remind or convince the US public of the sense in 50 years previous US foreign policy over the idiocy of present "preemptive" war. You use "story" two further times.
You seem to recommend the power of propagandist persuasion, political suavity over fact, science or logic.
I am well used to the mythologizing of US history, but it strikes me that there is considerable expression of wishful thinking about the present and future, rather than calculation, that underpins your proposal.
It is surely a measure of the glibness and self-interest of present politics, quite possibly the corruption endemic in the process, that the message and warnings so clearly promulgated by a clear majority of peer-reviewed science can be so easily ignored while you proffer unsubstantiated claims for vague research that will magically bring the solutions we need.
You seem to be proposing we can go on much as we have. This way likely lies disaster.
And if that is a message you find unappealing and unsellable, I feel very much the same about our preemptive war and 1% insanities.
October 8, 2007 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink