This ties indirectly to my own blog with Fuller's GRUNCH of Giants:

http://www.bfi.org/?q=node/406

The reason is that Fuller lays out the lag between an invention and its implementation. He estimated 50 years from the date of his patents to their potential integration into society. Some of this has already occurred. Shower misters, the kind that reduce water use and have the knob that halts water flow between washing and rinsing, has been available. As is the automatic paper towel dispensers that only allow certain sizes to be produced at a time. This may seem silly, but it is part of his overall idea of tensegrity.

The problem is that most of us think like Hume. We really don't see past our home, our choices, and our lives. For us plebes, this has been sufficient. For the GRUNCH, the so-called "Masters of the Universe," this kind of thinking is unacceptable. Yet it not only persists, but in the hands of "thinkers" like Ayn Rand, has become an actual cult of self-interest.

Our nation is in an ideal position to unilaterally implement hard choices that promote generational sustainability. Most of the burden is on our shoulders to lay down armaments, alter trade practices, and restructure our society on a more green model. The guns and butter consumption model is an evolutionary dead end. It helps create an atmosphere of division where globalism has proven that we are all in this together.

But I can't help but feel that the United States will simply wield its hegemonic clout to force other nations to adopt changes that will only weaken their ability to compete. And that is reckless and suicidal. It will only lead to more asymmetrical unwinnable warfare with nations that will go to any length to preserve their sovereign identity and resources.

It seems to me that "fairness" as a governing principle of climate change policy is exceedingly pernicious. It has served mainly to justify foot dragging by the worst carbon polluters on the grounds that some other nations aren't doing their share - and while the squabbling continues, atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase, the earth warms, sea levels rise, and the incidence of extreme floods and droughts continues to climb.

I suppose that if one wanted to invoke fairness, it would be reasonable to ask how fair it is for a nation to continue pouring excess CO2 into the atmosphere so as to threaten the lives and welfare of billions of humans in future generations, not to mention hundreds of billions of other living animals and plants that share the planet with us, simply because someone else is also doing it.

In fact, if one wishes to discuss climate change in terms of moral imperatives - what nations should do, the answer is simple. Every nation should do far more to reduce carbon emissions than it has any intention of doing. The U.S. remains the worst offender, and those of us who are U.S. residents would most effectively focus our efforts here, but China, India, Indonesia, and other developing nations can't legitimately invoke fairness to shirk their own obligations.

Ultimately, international climate change agreements will reflect morality to a lesser extent than self interest, but it will be important to remind all nations that it is in everyone's long term self interest to avert a climate disaster. Unfortunately, the long view is not always the dominant force in decision-making - a point Garrett Hardin brought to the worlds's attention with his seminal 1968 paper in Science - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The framing is wrong, Obey. This "field" has been my primary focus for 20 years now. And the whole "cost" framing is that established by large, existing, organizations... and by those of us who wish to be taken "seriously." They speak of "cost," but when you dive into the details, you'll see benefits, starting now - not in some far off future - which outweigh the costs.

I pretty much gave up talking about this stuff at TPM, partly because of some individual shouters who made it impossible to have a sensible discussion, but also because too many readers carry around the seemingly "serious" attitude that the world is doomed, that we face "hard" decisions, huge sacrifices, on and on. Finding myself in a place where I'm vastly more optimistic than my peers is an odd place for me. It makes me look "unserious." The consensus is simply that sacrifice, cost, potential doom and cataclysm is the future. It isn't. Or rather... NEEDN'T be.

I'll try a few points. The fundamental tools required to carry out the clean energy revolution we need to vastly reduce overall GHG emissions are already in hand. More and better tools will come, but they're not - fundamentally - needed. We have enough to take us over the line already.

1. At bottom, there is efficiency. Everyone in the industry agrees that... it saves money. That is, it is not a "cost" - it's a profit. I've done this work for 20 years, set up programs to retrofit hundreds of thousands of buildings, and it... works. It's not perfect, it's not magic, it takes time and money and skill and effort, but 20%-40% is absolutely, without doubt, there for the taking. But we don't hear much on this from our quasi-intellectuals who'd rather debate how soon Mad Max hits.

2. Next up, we have the new renewable energy sources. I've worked on the contracts for hundreds of MW's of wind-power, and seen the bids/structures for thousands of MW's more. You can produce electricity from wind for 4-6 cents in the US Great Plains. People like to bellow about transmission or the intermittency of wind and so on, but transmission is easily resolved, all we need is an approvals and planning process. Period. As for intermittency, all we need is... storage. Which will lead us to cars and electric vehicles and plug-in electrics and a massive win/win, but it's easier for commenters to shout about how wind can't solve all our problems and how obviously the collapse of western civilization is coming.

I don't know why, but it bores me to argue it anymore, so I don't bother. They don't know anything about dispersion of wind farms, and how we can utilize gas plants, and regional transmission interconnections and smart grids and vehicle-to-grid techniques... they just want to scream that we're all dying and it'll take huge sacrifices and somehow maybe it thrills them to think about living in a post-apocalyptic world. (And obviously, beyond this we have solar. Which is coming every year, every month, every day. Steady improvements. It's only a question of time, and certainly within a decade, we're there.)

What people need to understand when I mention this stuff is that wind and solar WILL NOT BE A NET COST. When you look at all these studies of the future economic costs, the assumptions plugged in on technological progress and learning curves are almost always farcical - set at 0% improvements instead of 15%-20% per doubling - simply because they always "have" to be "conservative." Well, they're not being conservative. Technically, the right word is that they're being... WRONG. But the powers that be say, that's what you have to do to publish and get large-scale "serious" buy-in.

You see, the large organizations want us all to believe that this shift - to clean energy or low carbon - will "cost." WHY do they want us to believe this? So they can get large-scale subsidy from the state or regulators etc. Like utilities fattening up the projected costs of wind... and of grid connections... and of recharging stations for our new electric vehicles. e.g. I sit in a province where recharging stations were installed by the hundreds of thousands, for BLOCK HEATERS. They're not tricky, not difficult, about as hard as running an extension cord to your garage. And they're dirt cheap. But let a utility design them, brand them, gloss them up, and they end up charging City governments $2000-$5000 EACH to install. Same with grid extensions. Grid investments happen every year, billions of dollars. And almost always, costed off against a whole series of system-wide improvements that flow as you upgrade each piece. But when a utility can say, "We need this grid extension for WIND... and YOU want it, not us... and we ALL KNOW it costs more.... so subsidize us a few billion, eh?" - they do it. This shit is happening in every Western jurisdiction I know. The joke for me is getting to see the original studies, noting where some poor bastard engineer ADMITS the benefits, which are then deleted from the summaries, and the report demanding more money for the COSTLY wind power goes forward, and everyone knows this is a way to get more net cash flowing into the utility/energy sub-system.

3. I'd write more about heat pumps and plug-in hybrids, but it's more interesting to note the astonishing deep pessimism on the Left about these things. I was in a factory which makes air-to-air heat pumps for under $5000. They'll take care of your heating needs, full stop, if you live in Northern Tier states or Europe. A 3/4 reduction in energy needs, by plunking down a glorified A/C unit on your lawn. Made in America. Patented American technology. HOW MUCH DO YOU HEAR ABOUT THEM??

On plug-in's, lots of press, but only one article in 1000 gets at the heart of this revolution. That they are GET OFF OIL MACHINES. You energize them from electricity, which can be made from 101 sources, and DOMESTICALLY in almost every nation. And lo and behold they work most happily and synergistically with renewables. Because their battery gives you the storage capacity you need to feed more wind and solar into the system. Obey, I spent this afternoon with our engineer who is presently running 12 of these vehicles. They are total hack retrofit jobs - "chop shops" in our shorthand. These plug-in's are just excess batteries, dumped - unprotected and unmanaged - in a trunk. The car's software is then TRICKED, that's all, into drawing on this excess energy. The retrofits cost $10,000 to do. And we're getting 120 mpg. Not bad.

Imagine a proper, from the ground up, plug-in design. They will get 150-230 mpg (GM claims 230 mpg in city driving), and the cost will fall, year on year, from $10k to ~$4k. And our financial institutions (public or private) will soon take the excess battery cost off your hands, and simply charge you a bit extra on your electricity bill. The "cell phone" model, they call it. Your car costs the same as always, except it gets 150 mpg, you refill on gas 80% less often, and you plug it in and pay a bit more than normal electricity costs to recharge it. But overall COST? Less than in your old car. LESS.

So, efficiency gets us 20%-40%. Renewables another 30%-50%. We just shifted the car over onto electricity. So what have we got left for emissions? That's basically game set match, we're over onto clean energy, we have the tools and know what to do and have a very clear sense of what the costs are. As for China? They have firms with HUNDREDS of engineers working on nothing but batteries and the electrification of the automobile. Warren Buffett just bought 10% of BYD. Who just brought the first PHEV to market.

We talk like a dumb, old, dead and dying culture now. We have little or no techno-sass in how we approach this. Interesting to me to see the cultural deathwish at play here. All about costs, and distributing costs, and who's gonna bear it, and the Chinese.... God. Whereas the Green Economy impulse is just so much weaker. It took a decade just to break some of the concepts and terminology ("green collar job") back into the public realm. See the 1997 entry under "notable uses" here.

That was a cool lil document, "The British Spring," BTW, with some cool people at Demos. A free pdf available there, and Van Jones can eat my dust. ;-) Anyway. It was an positive attitude and people like that which got Blair engaged with the environment, and eventually, led to him driving Kyoto up the charts. It was the SAME emphasis on the positive which led to Ken Livingstone (and his Deputy, Nicky Gavron) turning London into a place helping to pull the global green wagon forward, starting with the congestion charge etc. And which Manitoba and Toronto and others have taken. See perhaps this list from Business Week- numbers 1, 9, 12.

The real issues are how long we're gonna let the existing industrial structure play us out... who's gonna pour in the subsidies, and how large and for how long... how badly we're gonna let our cultural idiocies drag us back... and... whether the whole game, through an economic-cultural-political collapse, actually drags us down into hell when we had NO objective reason to be there.

Which would, for me, be the most embarrassing outcome. To have the tools in hand, and to have pissed the time away, and the world ends. Whoops. Reminds me of that Monty Python scene, where the Grim Reaper comes to the door, and tells the hostess her salmon mousse has poisoned everyone. And they're all embarrassed.

Python. Historians of the Age. And with that, a hi ho and goodnight, Mighty Obey!

Shit, just lost a long reply, Obey. Shorter version.

Yes, efficiency means we can raise RATES, but BILLS don't necessarily have to follow.

Yes, I'm arguing the costs of some renewable techs is now in the zone where we do not have to raise the costs of fossil fuels further.

But there's huge amounts of gaming and positioning going on. Proponent companies arguing for subsidies, utilities arguing there are costs they have to bear, see? A coalition of interests from BOTH sides arguing that the state has to contribute to the electricity sector.

But let me just ask this, Obey. When economists and such do studies on free trade or tax cuts, they lay out the scale of the opportunity. And they assume the companies will go after it like mad beasts, cutting costs, expanding plants, bringing in new techs, etc. It's active, often dynamic.

But when they study "environmental" stuff, suddenly, everything becomes static, nobody changes or adapts or cuts costs. They assume "worst cases." Which is FINE, for some purposes. What I'm saying is, BEWARE, because BOTH sides may have an incentive to back these highest cost studies.

On your latter point, I agree 100%. The POLITICAL and CULTURAL and INSTITUTIONAL apparatus of the US is failing, utterly. It's just not able to pull leading edge projects together the way an up and coming society would. Like the Volt. Massive advantages in a world and era-changing technology, and it's fettered and misdesigned and fucked up so it'll be 40% worse than it needs to be, and yet somehow, the US can't rally it's skills to fix it. That car should be a national priority. But it can't even get the battery size right. Drives me nuts. But that's the stuff of a later post. Cheers Obey. (And apologies for the long rants around on the horse thing. Was just goofing.)